On October 12, 1964, a woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer was brutally shot and killed while walking along the C&O Canal Trail near the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C. The police charged a black man named Ray Crump, Jr., with the crime. Since the murder took place in the nation’s capital, the trial was in a federal district court.
Meyer had been married for 13 years to a high CIA official named Cord Meyer. In 1958, they divorced.
Crump vehemently professed his innocence of the crime. Convinced of his innocence, a renowned Washington, D.C., criminal-defense attorney named Dovey Roundtree agreed to represent him for free.
At Crump’s trial, the federal prosecutor summoned a man named Ben Bradlee to the witness stand as the prosecution’s first witness. At the time, Bradlee was serving as the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek. He would later go on to become executive editor of the Washington Post. Bradlee’s wife was Mary Meyer’s sister.
After Bradlee took the witness stand, the prosecutor, Alfred Hantman, asked him the following question: “Now besides the usual articles of Mrs. Meyer’s avocation, did you find there any other articles of her personal property?” Bradlee replied, “There was a pocketbook there,” adding that it contained “keys, a wallet, cosmetics, and pencils.”
It was lie, or, more precisely, it was what is called a “half-truth,” which is actually worse than a lie because it uses the truth as a way to deceive. What Bradlee failed to reveal in response to the prosecutor’s question was a secret that he was determined to protect: that he had also found the personal diary of Mary Meyer.
Unbeknownst to the prosecutor or to Crump’s defense attorney was that on the night of the murder, Bradlee had gone to Meyer’s home to retrieve her diary. When he arrived there, he encountered a man named James Jesus Angleton burglarizing the home in his own attempt to retrieve Meyer’s diary.
Angleton was head of counter-intelligence for the CIA. His wife and Meyer had been good friends. Bradlee found the diary and turned it over to Angleton, who then proceeded to destroy it.
Both Bradlee and Angleton had to have known that they were obstructing justice and destroying evidence in a criminal case. They both had a legal and a moral duty to immediately turn that diary over to the police. After all, the diary could very well have contained clues as to who the real murderer was.
Suppose, for example, that Meyer had seen someone following her and had put that information and the description of the stalker into her diary. That would have been important information that the police could have followed up on.
As it turned out, Meyer had been having a secret affair with President John F. Kennedy in the months prior to his assassination. By all accounts it was an extremely intimate affair, one in which Kennedy appears to have actually fallen in love with Meyer, who had been a longtime peace activist. Given that Kennedy had thrown down the gauntlet before the U.S. national-security establishment with his famous Peace Speech at American University in June 1963 in which he declared an end to the Cold War, it is entirely possible, even likely, that Kennedy was talking to Meyer about the vicious war in which he was engaged with the U.S. national-security establishment. Meyer might well have included Kennedy’s sentiments in her diary.
In fact, Meyer alluded to this possibility in a telephone call after the Kennedy assassination to LSD guru Timothy Leary, with whom she was friends, in which she sobbingly and fearfully stated, “They couldn’t control him any more. He was changing too fast… They’ve covered everything up.”
As Peter Janney detailed in Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, an excellent book that I highly recommend, Mary’s murder had all the characteristics of a highly professional hit job along with a very sophisticated frame-up of an innocent man.
By the time the secrets surrounding the discovery and the destruction of Meyer’s diary were disclosed, the statute of limitations had presumably run on such crimes as obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence, perjury, and conspiracies to commit these crimes.
Prosecutor Hantman later stated that he had been “totally unaware of who Mary Meyer was or what her connections were,” and that having that knowledge “could have changed everything.”
D.C. Police Detective Bernie Crooke later stated, “I’d have been very upset at the time if I’d known that the deceased’s diary had been destroyed.”
Wikipedia states, “In her 2009 autobiography, Justice Older than the Law (reissued in 2019 as Mighty Justice), defense counsel Dovey Roundtree expressed shock at learning of the diary’s significance from Bradlee’s book. ‘How differently my line of cross-examination would have run had I been aware, on July 20, 1965, of the story Mr. Bradlee told thirty years later in his autobiography… James Angleton’s awareness of the diary’s existence and his interest in finding it, reading it, and destroying it – all of that unsettled me deeply when I read Mr. Bradlee’s 1995 account, as did his insistence that the diary was a private document… Had I been aware of it, I would have felt compelled to pursue it.’”
On July 29, 1965, the jury found Ray Crump, Jr., not guilty.
In a deathbed interview in February 2001, Cord Meyer was asked who he believed had murdered his ex-wife. Recanting an earlier statement that he had made in a 1980 book he had written that pointed to a “sexually motivated assault by a single individual,” Meyer responded, “The same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy.”
March 6, 2021
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At first glance, bioethics might seem like just another branch of ethical philosophy where academics endlessly debate other academics about how many angels dance on the head of a pin in far-out, science fiction like scenarios. What many do not know, however, is that the seemingly benign academic study of bioethics has its roots in the dark history of eugenics. With that knowledge, the dangers inherent in entrusting some of the most important discussions about the life, death and health of humanity in the hands of a select few become even more apparent.
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Bioethics is the study of the moral issues arising from medicine, biology and the life sciences.
At first glance, bioethics might seem like just another branch of ethical philosophy where academics endlessly debate other academics about how many angels dance on the head of a pin in far-out, science fiction like scenarios.
PAUL ROOT WOLPE: Imagine what’s going to happen when we have a memory pill. First of all, you don’t have to raise your hand but let’s be honest: who here’s going to take it?
SOURCE: Memory Enhancing Drugs: Subject of “Arms” Race?
MICHAEL SANDEL: I’ve read of a sport—it’s a variant of polo that is I think played in Afghanistan if I’m not mistaken—where the people ride on horses. Is it horses or camels? I don’t know which. And they use a—it’s a dead goat or something—to, I don’t know, whack the polo ball or whatever it is. Now it’s a dead—I think it’s a goat. Maybe someone knows who studies sociology about this. So it’s not that the goat is experiencing pain. It’s dead already. And yet there is something grim about that practice, wouldn’t you agree? And yet it’s not that the interests of that goat are somehow not being considered. Let’s assume it was killed painlessly before the match began.
SOURCE: The Ethical Use of Biotechnology: Debating the Science of Perfecting Humans
MOLLY CROCKETT: What if I told you that a pill could change your judgement of what is right and what is wrong. Or what if I told you that your sense of justice could depend on what you had for breakfast this morning. You’re probably thinking by now this sounds like science fiction, right?
SOURCE: TEDxZurich – Molly Crockett – Drugs and morals
But the bioethicists cannot be dismissed so lightly. Their ideas are being used by governments to assert control over people’s bodies and to enforce that control in increasingly nightmarish ways.
ARCHELLE GEORGIOU: Lithium is a medication that in prescription doses treats mood disorders in people with bipolar disorder or manic-depressive illness. And what these researchers found in Japan is that lithium is present in trace amounts in the normal water supply in some communities and in those communities they have a lower suicide rate. And so they’re really investigating whether trace amounts of lithium can just change the mood in a community enough to really in a positive way without having the bad effects of lithium to really affect the mood and decrease the suicide rate very interesting concept.
SOURCE: Lithium May Be Added To Our Water Supply
GATES: You’re raising tuitions at the University of California as rapidly as they [sic] can and so the access that used to be available to the middle class or whatever is just rapidly going away. That’s a trade-off society’s making because of very, very high medical costs and a lack of willingness to say, you know, “Is spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient—would it be better not to lay off those 10 teachers and to make that trade off in medical cost?” But that’s called the “death panel” and you’re not supposed to have that discussion.
SOURCE: Bill Gates: End-of-Life Care vs. Saving Teachers’ Jobs
Even a short time ago, talk about medicating the public through the water supply or enacting death panels for the elderly still seemed outlandish. But now that the world is being plunged into hysteria over the threat of pandemics and overburdened health care systems, these previously unspeakable topics are increasingly becoming part of the public debate.
What many do not know, however, is that the seemingly benign academic study of bioethics has its roots in the dark history of eugenics. With that knowledge, the dangers inherent in entrusting some of the most important discussions about the life, death and health of humanity in the hands of a select few become even more apparent.
This is a study of Bioethics and the New Eugenics.
You are tuned in to The Corbett Report.
On November 10, 2020, Joe Biden announced the members of a coronavirus task force that would advise his transition team on setting COVID-19-related policies for the Biden administration. That task force included Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
JOE BIDEN: So that’s why today I’ve named the COVID-19 Transition Advisory Board comprised of distinguished public health experts to help our transition team translate the Biden-Harris COVID-19 plan into action. A blueprint that we can put in place as soon as Kamala and I are sworn into office on January 20th, 2021.
SOURCE: President-elect Biden Delivers Remarks on Coronavirus Pandemic
ANCHOR: We’ve learned that a doctor from our area is on the president-elect’s task force. Eyewitness News reporter Howard Monroe picks up the story.
THOMAS FARLEY: I know he’s a very bright, capable guy and i think that’s a great choice to represent doctors in general in addressing this epidemic.
HOWARD MONROE: Philadelphia health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley this morning on Eyewitness News. He praised president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team for picking Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel to join his coronavirus task force. He is the chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
SOURCE: UPenn Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel To Serve On President-Elect Biden’s Coronavirus Task Force
That announcement meant very little to the general public, who likely only know Emanuel as a talking head on tv panel discussions or as the brother of former Obama chief of staff and ex-mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. But for those who have followed Ezekiel Emanuel’s career as a bioethicist and his history of advocating controversial reforms of the American health care system, his appointment was an ominous sign of things to come.
He has argued that the Hippocratic Oath is obsolete and that it leads to doctors believing that they should do everything they can for their patients rather than letting them die to focus on higher priorities. He has argued that people should choose to die at age 75 to spare society the burden of looking after them in old age. As a health policy advisor to the Obama administration he helped craft the Affordable Care Act, which fellow Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber admitted was only passed thanks to the stupidity of the American public.
JONATHAN GRUBER: OK? Just like the people—transparency—lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really critical to getting the thing to pass.
SOURCE: 3 Jonathan Gruber Videos: Americans “Too Stupid to Understand” Obamacare
During the course of the deliberations over Obamacare, the issue of “death panels” arose. Although the term “death panel” was immediately lampooned by government apologists in the media, the essence of the argument was one that Emanuel has long advocated: appointing a body or council to ration health care, effectively condemning those deemed unworthy of medical attention to death.
ROB MASS: When I first heard about you it was in the context of an article you wrote right around the time that the Affordable Care Act was under consideration. And the article was entitled “Principles for the Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions.” I don’t know how many of you remember there was a lot of talk at the time about [how] this new Obamacare was going to create death panels. And he wrote an article which I thought should have been required reading for the entire country about how rationing medical care—you think that that’s going to start with with the Affordable Care Act? Medical care is rationed all the time and it must be rationed. Explain that.
EZEKIEL EMANUEL: So there are two kinds of “rationing,” you might say. One is absolute scarcity leading to rationing and that’s when we don’t simply don’t have enough of something and you have to choose between people. We do that with organs for transplantation. We don’t have enough. Some people will get it, other people won’t and, tragically, people will die. Similarly if we ever have a flu pandemic—not if but when we have a flu pandemic—we’re not going to have enough vaccine, we’re not going to have enough respirators, we’re not going to have enough hospital beds. We’re just going to have to choose between people.
SOURCE: Dr. Zeke Emanuel: Oncologist and Bioethicist
When the debate is framed as an impersonal imposition of economic restraint over the deployment of scarce resources, it is easy to forget the real nature of the idea that Emanuel is advocating. Excluded from these softball interviews is the implicit question of who gets to decide who is worthy of medical attention. Emanuel’s various proposals over the years, and those of his fellow bioethicists, have usually supposed that some government-appointed but somehow “independent” board of bioethicists, economists and other technocrats, should be entrusted with these life-and-death decisions.
If this idea seems familiar, it’s because it has a long and dark history that harkens back to the eugenicists who argued that only the “fittest” should be allowed to breed, and anyone deemed “unfit” by the government-appointed boards—presided over by the eugenicists—should be sterilized, or, in extreme cases, put to death.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: [. . .] But there are an extraordinary number of people whom I want to kill. Not in any unkind or personal spirit, but it must be evident to all of you — you must all know half a dozen people, at least—who are no use in this world. Who are more trouble than they are worth. And I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board, just as he might come before the income tax commissioner, and, say, every five years, or every seven years, just put him there, and say: “Sir, or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence?”
SOURCE: George Bernard Shaw talking about capital punishment
This is the exact same talk of “Life Unworthy of Life” that was employed in Nazi Germany as justification for their Aktion T4 program, which resulted in over 70,000 children, senior citizens and psychiatric patients being murdered by the Nazi regime.
In 2009, author and researcher Anton Chaitkin confronted Ezekiel Emanuel about this genocidal idea.
MODERATOR: So we’ll do the same format. It’ll be three minutes and then time for questions. We’ll start with Mr. Chaitkin.
ANTON CHAITKIN: [My name is] Anton Chaitkin. I’m a historian and the history editor for Executive Intelligence Review.
President Obama has put in place a reform apparatus reviving the euthanasia of Hitler Germany in 1939 that began the genocide there. The apparatus here is to deny medical care to elderly, chronically ill and poor people and thus save, as the president says, two to three trillion dollars by taking lives considered “not worthy to be lived” as the Nazi doctors said.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and other avowed cost-cutters on this panel also lead a propaganda movement for euthanasia headquartered at the Hastings Center, of which Dr. Emanuel is a fellow. They shape public opinion and the medical profession to accept a death culture, such as the Washington state law passed in November to let physicians help kill patients whose medical care is now rapidly being withdrawn in the universal health disaster. Dr. Emmanuel’s movement for bioethics and euthanasia and this council’s purpose directly continue the eugenics movement that organized Hitler’s killing of patients and then other costly and supposedly “unworthy” people.
Dr. Emanuel wrote last October 12 that a crisis, war and financial collapse would get the frightened public to accept the program. Hitler told Dr. Brandt in 1935 that the euthanasia program would have to wait until the war began to get the public to go along. Dr. Emanuel wrote last year that the hippocratic oath should be junked; doctors should no longer just serve the needs of the patient. Hoche and Binding, the German eugenicists, exactly said the same thing to start the killing.
You on the council are drawing up the procedures to be used to deny care which will kill millions if it goes ahead in the present world crash. You think perhaps the backing of powerful men, financiers, will shield you from accountability, but you are now in the spotlight.
Disband this council and reverse the whole course of this nazi revival now.
SOURCE: Obama’s Genocidal Death Panel Warned by Tony Chaitkin
It should come as no surprise, then, that Emanuel emerged last year as the lead author of a New England Journal of Medicine article advocating for rationing COVID-19 care that was later adopted by the Canadian Medical Association. The paper, “Fair Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in the Time of Covid-19,” was written by Emanuel and a team of prominent bioethicists and discusses “the need to ration medical equipment and interventions” during a pandemic emergency.
Their recommendations include removing treatment from patients who are elderly and/or less likely to survive, as these people divert scarce medical resources from younger patients or from those with more promising prognoses. Although the authors refrain from using the term, the necessity of setting up a “death panel” to determine who should or should not receive treatment is implicit in the proposal itself.
In normal times, this would have been just another scholarly discussion of a theoretical situation. But these are not normal times. As Canadian researcher and medical writer Rosemary Frei documented at the time, the declared COVID crisis meant the paper quickly went from abstract proposal to concrete reality.
JAMES CORBETT: Let’s get back to that question about hospital care rationing, which is such an important part of this story. And it’s one of those things that when you read it at a surface level at first glance sounds reasonable enough, but the more that you look into it I think it becomes more horrifying.
And you quote, for example, specifically a March 23rd paper, “Fair Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in the Time of Covid-19,” which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, which calls for “maximizing the number of patients that survived treatment with a reasonable life expectancy.” Which, again, I would say sounds reasonable at first glance. Yes, of course we want to maximize the number of patients that survive. What’s wrong with that?
So what can you tell us about this paper and the precedent that it’s setting here.
ROSEMARY FREI: Well it’s all of a sudden changing the rules in terms of saying, “Well, the most important thing is that it’s the older people get a lower place in terms of triaging.”
And I point out in my article, also, that Canadians have a lot of experience with SARS because we had that—there were a significant number of deaths in Ontario because of it. And there were people from Toronto who had direct experience with SARS—which of course is (ostensibly, at least) a cousin with the novel coronavirus—who wrote triaging guidelines, or at least an ethical framework for how to triage during a pandemic—this was in 2006—they didn’t mention age at all. And here we are 14 years later, every single set of guidelines, including this really important New England Journal of Medicine paper say, “Well, age is an important criterion.” And this is what’s interesting.
So this paper is really important because—and also the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is the official organ, I would say, of the American Medical Association says the same thing: it’s age. So they’re all stepping in line and then the Canadian Medical Association said, “Oh, we don’t have time to put our own guidelines together so we’ll just use this one from the New England Journal of Medicine.” To me, that’s astonishing.
When I was a medical writer and journalist, I did some work helping various—one particular organization: the Canadian Thoracic Society, which does, you know, chest infections and stuff. I helped them put together guidelines. There’s a whole big set of organizations for every single specialty for creating guidelines. Yet, “Oh!
We don’t have time to put together this—” And also, I mean Canada had a lot of experience with SARS, so we had a lot of this background. Yet, “Oh, we can’t do so it!” So they gave totally—they, quote, they said we have to go with the recommendations from the New England Journal of Medicine.
SOURCE: How the High Death Rate in Care Homes Was Created on Purpose
That bioethicists like Emanuel are writing papers that are changing the rules for rationing health care in the midst of a generated crisis should hardly be surprising for someone whose brother infamously remarked that you should never let a good crisis go to waste.
RAHM EMANUEL: You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
SOURCE: Rahm Emanuel on the Opportunities of Crisis
But from a broader perspective, it is not at all surprising that the concept of “death panels” has been effectively smuggled in through the back door by the bioethicists.
In fact, when you start documenting the history of bioethics, you discover that this is exactly what this field of study is meant to do: Frame the debate about hot button issues so that eugenicist ideals and values can be mainstreamed in society and enacted in law. From abortion to euthanasia, there isn’t a debate in the medical field that wasn’t preceded by some bioethicist or bioethics institute preparing the public for a massive change in mores, values and laws.
That research into the history of bioethics leads one to the doorstep of the Hastings Center, a nonprofit research center that, according to its website, “was important in establishing the field of bioethics.” The founding director of the Hastings Center, Theodosius Dobzhansky, was a chairman of the American Eugenics Society from 1969 to 1975. Meanwhile, Hastings cofounder Daniel Callahan—who has admitted to relying on Rockefeller Population Council and UN Population Fund money in the early days of the center’s work—served as a director of the American Eugenics Society (rebranded as The Society for the Study of Social Biology) from 1987 to 1992.
As previous Corbett Report guest Anton Chaitkin has extensively documented, there is a line of historical continuity connecting the promotion of eugenics in America by the Rockefeller family in the early 20th century to the creation of the Hastings Center in the late 20th century. The Center, Chaitkin points out, was fostered by the Rockefeller-founded Population Council as a front for pushing the eugenics agenda—including abortion, euthanasia and the creation of death panels—under the guise of “bioethics.”
CHAITKIN: Eugenics practices that we saw and discussions and preparations for eugenics, which were going on in the United States in the early 1920s and earlier going back to the late 19th century—those discussions were carried over—and the same discussions and preparations in England—were carried over into Nazi Germany. After the war—after World War II—people who had participated in these movements wanted to keep the eugenics idea alive and with the backing of particularly the Rockefeller Foundation—which had backed Nazi eugenics before World War II in Europe—they set up a population control movement that overlapped with the Eugenics Society and with eugenics ideas. And out of that combination of eugenics and population control was born the institutes and programs which are today at the heart of what’s called “bioethics,” where you decide—so, supposedly decide—ethical questions in a medical practice based on supposedly limited resources.
So it’s a completely phony and morally disgusting field in general. It’s ill-born at the root of it and it’s a practice which has never confronted—in the medical community and in the academic community that has this as part of its, you know, its practice—they’ve never confronted the basis for the existence of this “bioethics.”
SOURCE: Anton Chaitkin on the Eugenics / Euthanasia Agenda
The history of bioethics connects the Rockefeller funding behind the first wave of American eugenics, the Rockefeller funding behind the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and the Nazi-era German eugenics program, and the Rockefeller funding behind the Population Council, the Hastings Center and other centres for post-war “crypto-eugenics” research. As a result, it is perhaps not surprising to find that many of the most well-known and most controversial bioethicists working today are associated with the Hastings Center.
Take Ezekiel Emanuel himself. In addition to being a senior fellow at the John Podesta-founded Center for American Progress—which was accused in a 2013 expose from The Nation of maintaining “a revolving door” with the Obama administration and running a pay-for-play operation for various industry lobbyists—Emanuel is also a Hastings Center fellow. In fact, Emanuel’s career as a bioethicist was kickstarted by a November 1996 article in The Hastings Center Report, which—after praising Daniel Callahan’s attempts to inject a debate about the goals of medicine into the discussion of health care—highlighted a point on which both liberals and communitarians can agree: “services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed.” For “an obvious example” of this principle in action, Emanuel then cites “not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”
Just last year, The Hastings Center hosted an online discussion about “What Values Should Guide Us” when considering COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in the United States, during which Emanuel opined that big tech was not doing enough to share data about users’ movements with governments and researchers:
EMANUEL: I have to say I’ve actually found Big Tech totally unhelpful so far in this. It’s hard for me to see that they’ve done something really, really helpful in this regard when it comes to COVID-19. They have lots of capacity. Believe me: Facebook already knows who you interact with on a regular basis; how close you’ve gotten to them; when you leave your house; which stores you go into. Google does the same. And they have not used this data. Maybe they’re afraid that people are going to be all upset, but they haven’t even been willing to give it to someone else to use in an effective manner. And I think either they’re going to become irrelevant in this process or they’re going to have to step up and actually be contributory to solving this problem.
SOURCE: Re-Opening the Nation: What Values Should Guide Us?
Or take Hastings Center fellow and University of Wisconsin-Madison bioethics professor Norman Fost, who, in addition to questioning whether it is “important that organ donors be dead” in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, made the case for involuntary sterilization—the hallmark of the now universally denounced American eugenics program—at a 2013 panel discussion on “Challenging Cases in Clinical Ethics.”
NORMAN FOST: On the sterilization thing, if his sexual behavior can be attenuated so that he’s not a risk of impregnating anybody that would be the best thing. But I don’t think we should rule out sterilization as being in his interest also, as well as potential victims of his sexual assault.
I think sterilization has a bad reputation in America because of the eugenic sterilization of a hundred thousand or more people with developmental disabilities, most of them inappropriate. But the overreaction to that . . . and Wisconsin leads the way at overreacting to that. We have a Supreme Court decision that says you can never sterilize a minor until the legislature gives us permission to do it and they never will and that’s not in the interest of a lot of kids with developmental disabilities for whom procreation would be a disaster—that is pregnancy or inflicting a pregnancy.
So if it’s the case that this fella is never going to be capable of being a parent . . . and I can’t tell quite that from the limited history here and it may not be the case—but I just want to say that the country’s overreaction to sterilization—like it’s wrong, it’s always terrible to involuntarily sterilized somebody—is not true and it ought to be at least on the table as something that might be in his interest.
SOURCE: A Conversation About Challenging Cases in Clinical Ethics
But these discussions are not limited to the ranks of the Hastings Center.
Take Joseph Fletcher. Dubbed a pioneer in the field of biomedical ethics by both his critics and his apologists, Fletcher was the first professor of medical ethics at the University of Virginia and co-founded the Program in Biology and Society there. In addition to his position as president of the Euthanasia Society of America and his work helping to establish the Planned Parenthood Federation, Fletcher was also a member of the American Eugenics Society. In a 1968 article in defense of killing babies with Down’s syndrome “or other kind[s] of idiot[s],” Fletcher wrote:
“The sanctity (what makes it precious) is not in life itself, intrinsically; it is only extrinsic and bonum per accident, ex casu – according to the situation. Compared to some things, the taking of life is a small evil and compared to some things, the loss of life is a small evil. Death is not always an enemy; it can sometimes be a friend and servant.”
Or take Peter Singer. If there is any bioethicist in the world today whose name is known to the general public it is Peter Singer, famed for his animal liberation advocacy. Less well known to the public, however, are his arguments in favor of infanticide, including the notion that there is no relevant difference between abortion and the killing of “severely disabled infants,” positions which have driven his critics to call him “Son of Fletcher.”
Although Singer is extremely careful to frame his argument for infanticide using the least controversial positions when speaking to the public. . . .
PETER SINGER: . . . So we said, “Look, the difficult decision is whether you want this infant to live or not.” That should be a decision for the parents and doctors to make on the basis of the fullest possible information about what the condition is. But once you’ve made that decision it should be permissible to make sure that the baby dies swiftly and humanely, if that’s your decision. If your decision is that it’s better that the child should not live, it should be possible to ensure that the child dies swiftly and humanely.
And so that’s what we proposed. Now, that’s been picked up by a variety of opponents, both pro-life movement people and people in the militant disability movement—which incidentally didn’t really exist at the time we first wrote about this issue. And they’ve taken us as, you know, the stalking horse—the bogeyman, if you like—because we’re up front in saying that we think this is how we should treat these infants.
SOURCE: The Case for Allowing Euthanasia of Severely Handicapped Infants
. . . his actual writings contain much bolder assertions that would be sure to shock the sensibilities of the average person if they were plainly stated. In Practical Ethics, for example, intended as a text for an introductory ethics course, Singer dispenses with arguments about severe handicaps and birth defects and talks more broadly about whether it is fundamentally immoral to kill a newborn baby, noting that “a newborn baby is not an autonomous being, capable of making choices, and so to kill a newborn baby cannot violate the principle of respect for autonomy.”
After conceding that “It would, of course, be difficult to say at what age children begin to see themselves as distinct entities existing over time”—noting that “Even when we talk with two or three year old children it is usually very difficult to elicit any coherent conception of death”—we could provide an “ample safety margin” for such concerns by deciding that “a full legal right to life comes into force not at birth, but only a short time after birth—perhaps a month.”
Singer is by no means alone in his profession in discussing this subject. In fact, he’s just part of a long line of bioethicists musing about exactly where to draw the line when discussing infanticide.
Take Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, two bioethicists working in Australia who published a paper titled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” in The Journal of Medical Ethics in 2012. In that paper, they explicitly defend the practice of infanticide on moral grounds, claiming that “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus,” and thus “the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn.” Lest they be mistaken for forwarding the same old argument on killing severely handicapped newborn babies that bioethicists have been making for decades, the two are careful to add that their proposal includes “cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.”
Unlike so many other academic papers on this subject, however, this one was picked up and widely circulated in the popular press, with even establishment media outlets like The Guardian insisting that “Infanticide is repellent. Feeling that way doesn’t make you Glenn Beck.”
Seemingly taken aback by the strong negative reaction to a scholarly article about the moral permissibility of killing babies, the authors of the article responded by accusing the general public of being too ignorant to understand the complex arguments made in the highly academic field of bioethics:
When we decided to write this article about after-birth abortion we had no idea that our paper would raise such a heated debate.
“Why not? You should have known!” people keep on repeating everywhere on the web. The answer is very simple: the article was supposed to be read by other fellow bioethicists who were already familiar with this topic and our arguments. Indeed, as Professor Savulescu explains in his editorial, this debate has been going on for 40 years.
Whatever else may be said about the researchers’ response, this was not a dishonest defense of their work. Julian Savulescu, the editor of The Journal of Medical Ethics that published the article, did point out in his own defense of the publication that the scholarly debate about when it is permissible to kill babies goes back to at least the 1960s, when Francis Crick—the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and an avowed eugenicist who proposed that governments should prevent the poor and undesirable from breeding by requiring government-issued licenses for the privilege of having a baby—proposed that children should only be allowed to live if, after birth, they are found to have met certain genetic criteria.
Indeed, the pages of the medical ethics journals are filled with just such debates. From Dan Brock’s article on “Voluntary Active Euthanasia,” published in The Hastings Center Report in 1992, to John Hardwig’s 1997 article in the pages of The Hastings Center Report asking “Is There A Duty to Die?” to Hastings Center Deputy Director Nancy Berlinger’s 2008 pronouncement that “Allowing parents to practice conscientious objection by opting out of vaccinating their children is troubling in several ways,” these ethics professors toiling in a hitherto unknown and unremarked corner of academia are having a greater and greater effect in steering the policies that literally mean the difference between life and death for people around the world.
In his prescient 1988 article on “The Return of Eugenics,” Richard J. Neuhaus observed:
Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptionable. Those who pause too long to ponder troubling questions along the way are likely to be told that “the profession has already passed that point.” In truth, the profession is usually huffing and puffing to catch up with what is already being done without its moral blessing.
Indeed, bioethicists are not, generally speaking, trained doctors, researchers or medical workers. As academics, they are forced to take the word of doctors and researchers at face value. But which doctors? Whose research? Inevitably, it will be that of the WHO, the AMA and other organizations whose work—as even those within its ranks admit—is not solely dictated by medical need, but by the arbitrary whims of the organizations’ billionaire backers.
We are feeling the effects of this now, when these bioethics professors are held up as gurus who can not only provide medical advice, but actually lecture the public on which medical interventions they are morally obligated to undergo regardless of their own feelings about bodily autonomy.
*CLIP (0m35s-1m27s)
SOURCE: Emanuel: Wearing a mask should be as necessary as wearing a seatbelt
JULIAN SAVULESCU: It’s important to recognize that mandatory vaccination would not be anything new. There are many mandatory policies, other coercive policies—taxes are a form of coercion. Seatbelts were originally voluntary and they were made mandatory because they both reduce the risk of death to the wearer by 50% and also to other occupants in the car. But importantly some people do die of seat belt injuries, but the benefits vastly outweigh the risks.
Some countries in the world already have mandatory vaccination policies. In Australia the “no jab, no pay” policy involves withholding child care benefits if the child isn’t vaccinated. In Italy there are fines. And in the US children can’t attend school unless they’re vaccinated. All of these policies have increased vaccination rates and have been implementable.
SOURCE: “Mandatory COVID-19 vaccination: the arguments for and against”: Julian Savulescu & Sam Vanderslott
KERRY BOWMAN: Some form of vaccination passport is almost inevitable. With travel it’s virtually a given. And you look at countries like Israel is now introducing the green card. And all this is going on the assumption that people that have been vaccinated are not going to be able to spread the viruses easily, meaning they can’t transmit it and it’s kind of looking like my read on the science is it’s looking like that is the case with most of the vaccines. So that would be the question.
Now some people say we absolutely can’t do it, like, it’s just not fair in a democratic society because there’s people that refuse—don’t want vaccines—and there’s people that can’t have vaccines. But here’s the other side of the argument: Is it really fair to the Canadians that have been locked down for a year when they are vaccinated—they’re no longer a risk to other people—is it really fair to continue to limit their freedom?
So you’ve kind of got those two sides of it colliding.
SOURCE: ‘Vaccination passports’ a near certainty says bio-ethicist | COVID-19 in Canada
From its inception, the field of bioethics has taken its moral cue from the card-carrying eugenicists who founded its core institutions. For these academicians of the eugenics philosophy, the key moral questions raised by modern medical advances are always utilitarian in nature: What is the value that forced vaccination or compulsory sterilization brings to a community? Will putting lithium in the water supply lead to a happier society? Does a family’s relief at killing their newborn baby outweigh that baby’s momentary discomfort as it is murdered?
Implicit in this line of thinking are all of the embedded assumptions about what defines “value” and “happiness” and “relief” and how these abstract ideas are measured and compared. The fundamental utilitarian assumption that the individual’s worth can or should be measured against some arbitrarily defined collective good, meanwhile, is rarely (if ever) considered.
The average person, however—largely unaware that these types of questions are even being asked (let alone answered) by bioethics professors in obscure academic journals—may literally perish for their lack of knowledge about these discussions.
All things being equal, these types of ideas would likely be treated as they always have been: as a meaningless parlor game played by ivory tower academics with no power to enforce their crazy ideas. All things, however, are not equal.
Perhaps taking a page from the notebook of his brother, Rahm, about the utility of crisis in effecting societal change, Ezekiel Emanuel declared in 2011 that “we will get health-care reform only when there is a war, a depression or some other major civil unrest.” He didn’t add “pandemic” to that list of excuses, but he didn’t have to. As the events of the past year have borne out, the public are more than willing to consider the previously unthinkable now that they have been told that there is a crisis taking place.
Forced vaccination. Immunity passports. The erection of a biosecurity state. For the first time, the eugenics-infused philosophers of bioethics are on the verge of gaining real power. And the public is still largely unaware of the discussions that these academics have been engaged in for decades.
At the very least, Bill Gates can relax now: We can finally have the discussion on death panels.
March 6, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, Video |
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Tel Aviv adheres to a policy of ‘nuclear ambiguity’, meaning that it neither confirms nor denies possessing nuclear weapons. At the same time, the country reserves itself the right to bomb, sabotage or otherwise act to stop activities of any Middle Eastern power it believes could lead to the development of a nuclear weapon.
Israel’s suspected nuclear arsenal poses a threat to the Middle East and the world, and Tehran is concerned by the country’s apparent preferential treatment with the International Atomic Energy Agency despite its status as a non-signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s ambassador to international organizations in Vienna, has said.
“Since all [countries] in the Middle East region, except the Israeli regime, are parties to the NPT and have undertaken to accept the Agency’s comprehensive safeguards, development of a clandestine nuclear weapons programme by this regime poses a continuing serious threat not only to the security and stability of the region and the world, but also to the effectiveness and efficiency of the NPT and the Agency’s safeguards regime,” Gharibabadi said, speaking at the meeting of the IAEA border of governors meeting this week.
The diplomat suggested that despite Israel’s censure at the United Nations and the IAEA over its suspected non-proliferation violations, the country has refused to accede to the NPT, or to place its nuclear facilities and activities under the IAEA’s safeguards regime.
“Ironically, Israel is now even enjoying a more preferential treatment as compared with that of the Nuclear Weapons States, since they are members of the NPT and have several obligations specifically under Articles 1 and VI of the Treaty,” Gharibabadi argued. The articles he mentioned relate to the non-transfer of nuclear weapons technologies, and to good-faith talks on the cessation of the nuclear arms race and disarmament.
“It is a clear contradiction that Israel as a non-member to the NPT is enjoying the full rights and privileges due to its membership to the IAEA, while at the same time, it considers itself free from any responsibility, and participates in all deliberations of the Agency related to members of the NPT,” the diplomat said.
It is “an irony” that the IAEA has focused its attentions on Iran and other members of the NPT while making “the chronic strategic mistake” of “overlook[ing] Israel’s nuclear materials and activities in the volatile region of the Middle East,” Gharibabadi suggested, suggesting that this “very serious shortcoming” needs to be addressed.
Otherwise, he asked, “what is the advantage of being both a NPT member and fully implementing the Agency’s safeguards?”
Israel has repeatedly called on the international community to take action against Iran’s nuclear programme and its alleged secret military component. Tel Aviv has also threatened that it would not rule out unilateral military actions to halt this alleged weapons programme. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed for the better part of the last decade that Iran is on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons, with the timeframe involved claimed to be either “weeks” or “months.”
Israeli threats of action against Iran come amid multiple reports citing satellite intelligence suggesting that Tel Aviv itself is engaged in major construction activity at the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, the top secret installation thought to have given birth to Israel’s first atomic bomb in the 1960s.
Israel does not confirm nor deny possessing nuclear weapons. Estimates on the size of its nuclear arsenal range from 80 to 400 warheads, with these weapons believed to be deliverable via a number of medium and long-range ground-based missiles, aircraft and cruise missiles launched by subs.
Iran is not known to possess nukes, and its leaders have issued at least two fatwas (religious rulings) banning their development. In the 1980s, one of these fatwas also prohibited Iran from retaliating to Iraqi chemical attacks using Iran’s own chemical weapons arsenal. The country later eliminated these weapons before joining the Chemical Weapons Convention.
In 2015, the Islamic Republic, the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a landmark treaty promising Iran relief from sanctions in exchange for restrictions on its peaceful nuclear programme. Washington pulled out of the agreement in 2018, and the Biden administration has yet to live up to its campaign pledge to rejoin it.
March 6, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | IAEA, Iran, Israel, Sanctions against Iran, Zionism |
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“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
1: ‘The Concept of Coronavirus Herd Immunity Is Deadly and Dangerous’ https://www.self.com/story/coronavirus-herd-immunity
Since COVID19 first hurtled over the horizon, before landing upon us all with great force, I find that I have been asked to believe in many impossible things. First, I was told that attempting to create herd immunity was not achievable. It would also be extremely dangerous and would inevitably result in many hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.
Then the vaccines arrived at fantastical speed and I was told that mass vaccination, by creating herd immunity, would be the factor that would allow us to conquer COVID19 and return to normal life. I am not entirely sure which of these things is impossible, but one of them must be.
2: ‘Vaccines, on the other hand, are believed to induce stronger and longer lasting immunity.’ https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/does-the-vaccine-give-better-protection-than-having-fought-off-the-virus_uk_601c0663c5b62bf30754c563
I was then told the vaccine would provide greater immunity than being infected with COVID19. Which was interesting. I am not sure if this is actually impossible, but it seemed unlikely that anyone could make such statements after about three hundred people had actually been studied, and just two months had passed.
At the time I was aware of two people proven to have been re-infected with COVID19, out of about ten million cases. So, getting infected certainly seemed to provide a pretty good degree of immunity. A re-infection rate of 0.00005%
I also know that vaccinations can only ever really create an attenuated response. Whereas a full-blown infection triggers a full-blown immune response. So, I think it is pretty close to impossible that vaccination can provide greater protection than that from getting the actual disease. Which is why I think it is utterly bonkers we are actually vaccinating people who have circulating antibodies in their blood.
3: ‘Universal mask use could save 130,000 U.S. lives by the end of February, new study estimates.’ https://www.statnews.com/2020/10/23/universal-mask-use-could-save-130000-lives-by-the-end-of-february-new-modeling-study-says/
I am also being asked to believe that face masks are essential to stop the spread of COVID19 and prevent millions of deaths worldwide. The use of masks to prevent viral spread is something I actually researched in depth before COVID19 arrived (for various reasons), as did the WHO. They looked at non-pharmaceutical interventions for prevention of influenza, and produced a hefty report, which covered the use of masks.
Yes, I agree, influenza is not exactly the same as COVID19. But it is pretty much the same size of virus, and it is thought to spread in much the same way. Anyway, the WHO reported their views on masks in 2019, using data from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) – the gold standard.
‘Ten RCTs were included in the meta-analysis, and there was no evidence that facemasks are effective in reducing transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.’ https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-eng.pdf?ua=1
Since then, there has only been one RCT done on COVID19 transmission, in Denmark. It did not find any significant benefit from masks in reducing spread. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33205991/
Never has a trial been subjected to such immediate and hostile reporting. Fact-checkers (whoever exactly they might be, or what understanding they have of medical research) immediately attacked it. One such, called PolitiFact, made the following judgement, which amused me.
“Social media posts claim, “The first randomized controlled trial of more than 6,000 individuals to assess the effectiveness of surgical face masks against SARS-CoV-2 infection found masks did not statistically significantly reduce the incidence of infection.”
The study concluded that wearing masks did not offer a very high level of personal protection to mask wearers in communities where wearing masks was not common practice. The study noted, however, that the data suggested masks provided some degree of self-protection.
We rate this claim Mostly False. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33205991/”
So, according to PolitiFact, masks provided self-protection, but not personal protection. An interesting concept. Note to self, try to find out the difference between these two things.
In fact, this was just one of hundreds of critical articles, with self-anointed fact checkers clearly desperate to pull it to pieces. Yes, we have now entered a world when political fact checkers feel free to attack and contradict the findings of scientific papers, using such scientific terms as ‘Mostly false.’ Maybe they should have called it ‘very unique’ at the same time. Or, like the curate’s egg, that was good in parts.
Ignoring the modern-day Spanish Inquisition, and their ill-informed criticisms, I will simply call this study. More evidence that face masks don’t work. Perhaps someone will come along with a study proving that face masks work. So far … nada. Another impossible thing.
4: As of the 2nd March 2021 there have been 122,953 deaths from COVID19 in the UK.
Unlike many people I have actually written COVID19 on death certificates. Mostly they have been educated guesses. On at least five of them, early last year, there had been no positive swab to go on. So, I was just going on probable symptoms. As were many other doctors at the time.
Which means that you can take five off that number for starters. Although, of course, once written, that is very much, that … when it comes to death certificates. In fact, early on in the pandemic, we were probably underdiagnosing as often as over diagnosing deaths from COVID19. Although no-one will ever know. With no positive swab – and few swabs were being done – and almost no post-mortems – you were simply guessing.
As for now … NOW we have the very strange concept that any death within twenty-eight days of a positive COVID19 swab is recorded as a COVID19 death. Simultaneously, I am told that if I have a positive test at work, and then take some time off work (I can never remember the latest guidance). I am not to have another swab for ninety days.
How so? Because it now seems (I actually knew this a long time ago), that swabs can remain positive for months after the infection has been and gone [or was maybe never there to begin with]. Or to put this another way, you can have a positive swab long after you have been infected – and recovered. There are just some bits of virus up your nose that can be magnified, through the wonders of the PCR test, into a positive result.
Which means that an elderly person, infected months ago, can be admitted to hospital for any reason whatsoever. The they can have a positive swab – everyone is swabbed. Then they can die, from whatever it was they were admitted for in the first place. Then, they will be recorded as a COVID19 death.
In truth, this is just the start of impossible things when it comes to the number of COVID19 deaths. Do not get me started on PCR cycle numbers, and false positives. We would be here all day.
Equally, how many people have truly died of COVID19, instead of simply with COVID19? If I painted a blue circle on your forehead, then you died, I would not say that you died of a blue circle painted on your forehead. I would say that you died with a blue circle painted on your forehead.
5: The Swedish COVID-19 Response Is a Disaster. It Shouldn’t Be a Model for the Rest of the World
This was actually the headline title from an article in TIME magazine. The article went on to state that ‘The Swedish way has yielded little but death and misery. And this situation has not been honestly portrayed to the Swedish people or to the rest of the world.’ https://time.com/5899432/sweden-coronovirus-disaster/
Death and misery. Hmmmm, I might make this the title of my next book. Bound to be a best seller.
Yes, Sweden has been attacked from all sides with terrific venom, for holding out against imposing severe lockdown. How dare they… follow the WHO’s initial advice. That everyone else ignored.
So, have they done well with regard to COVID19 deaths? Not particularly. Have they done badly? Not particularly. On Worldometer they rank twenty fourth highest for deaths per million of the population. Which is pretty much bang on average for Western Europe.
One reason why they might not have appeared to do better is that, in the year 2019, they had their lowest rate of death for at least ten years. Three and a half thousand less in total than in 2018 https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ . In Norway, a country used to beat Sweden with, due to their very low COVID19 deaths there was no difference in death rate between 2018 and 2019. To be blunt, the elderly population in Sweden had some catching up to do.
Once you factor this in, the much-lauded difference in deaths, between Norway and Sweden, kind of disappears.
‘Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during the epidemic as compared to the previous four years in Norway and Sweden, two countries which employed very different strategies against the epidemic. Excess mortality from COVID-19 may be less pronounced than previously perceived in Sweden, and mortality displacement might explain part of the observed findings.’ https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v1.full
In absolute figures. Sweden had
- 92,185 deaths in 2018
- 88,766 deaths in 2019
- 97,941 deaths in 2020
A drop, then a rebound. Perhaps another way to look at the figures is to compare 2020 with a bad Swedish year in the past. In 2012, 91,938 people died. However, the population was lower at 9.5 million vs 10.2 million. So:
- The absolute death rate in 2012 was 0.957%.
- The absolute death rate in 2020 was 0.969%.
The difference between 2012 and 2020 is 0.012%. That is 120 extra deaths per million of the population, which is 1,224 people in population of 10.2 million. The statistics tell us that twelve thousand people died from COVID19 in Sweden. Maybe you can make all that add up. Frankly, I find it impossible.
6: Lockdowns have worked.
Before COVID19 came along, no country had ever attempted a lockdown – ever. So, no-one had any idea if such a thing could possibly work. There was no evidence, from anywhere, to support its use.
It was the Chinese who started it, and who claimed great success for their jackboot lockdown tactics. Well, they convinced me… not. Frankly, if I had to choose a country from which to obtain high quality, unbiased information, about anything, China would not feature in my top one hundred and ninety-four countries
But there you go, lockdown worked under the control of the kind and caring CCP. Hoorah, cheering all round, and the first person to stop cheering gets shot. Well, we don’t want any damned nay-sayers, do we? After that, according to almost everything I have read, everywhere, it worked for everyone else too. Remarkable.
Yes, it is certainly true you can find countries that locked down, closed their borders, and kept the rates low. That, however, is not proof of anything at all. The scientific method requires a little more rigour than this.
In fact, the main thing that scientific rigour requires is that you specifically do not go around looking for facts that support your hypothesis. Because that, I am afraid, is the exact opposite of science. What you need to do, instead, is to go around looking for facts that disprove your hypothesis. This is what Karl Popper called falsification.
For example, my hypothesis is that “all swans are white”. I seek, and find, only white swans. So, this makes my hypothesis is correct? No. What science requires you do is to hunt tirelessly for black swans. If you never find one, fine. However, you need to be aware that the moment you do, your hypothesis has just been disproven. In real life things are very rarely as simple as this, but that is the basic principle.
However, with lockdown (and I recognise that no two countries locked down in the same way) the hypothesis is that countries which did not lockdown will have higher rate of death for COVID19 than those that did.
So, let us look, first, at the countries with the highest rate of COVID19. Excluding very small countries e.g., San Marino, or Gibraltar, we have, in descending order of deaths per million of the population https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ .
- Czechia
- Belgium
- Slovenia
- UK
- Italy
- Montenegro
- Portugal
- USA
- Hungary
- Bosnia and Herzegovina
- North Macedonia
- Bulgaria
- Spain
- Mexico
- Peru
- Croatia
- Slovakia
- Panama
- France
Every single country in this list carried out fairly strict lockdowns. The UK, apparently, has the strictest lockdown in the world, this winter.
Four countries that have been roundly criticized for having far less restrictive lockdowns are: Sweden, Japan, Belarus and Nicaragua (Realistically there are others, in poorer countries, where lockdowns have not happened – because they can’t afford it)
In these four ‘non-lockdowns’ countries, the death rate is, on average 391 per million.
In the top twenty ‘lockdown’ countries, the death rate is, on average 1,520 per million.
The only non-lockdown country in the top ninety for death rates is Sweden. It comes just below France, at number twenty-four.
Now, if the difference between lockdown and non-lockdown countries were ten per cent, or even fifty per cent, I would fully accept that there are many other variables that could explain such finding away. Although, of course, we should really look at a higher rate in the non-lockdown countries, not a lower rate.
Yet although this evidence is out there, I am being asked to believe that lockdowns work. At least the WHO agrees with me on this impossible thing. As Dr David Nabarro, the WHO special envoy on COVID19 said:
“We really do appeal to all world leaders, stop using lockdown as your primary method of control,” he said.
“Lockdowns have just one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-12/world-health-organization-coronavirus-lockdown-advice/12753688
Lockdowns, according to the WHO, in unguarded moments, have just one consequence. They make poor people an awful lot poorer.
‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If this is granted all else follows.’
March 6, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
7 Comments
The anti-Lockdown protests in Dublin
On Sunday, an irate Irish society finally said ‘no more’. For a year they had been subjected to a criminally long lockdown to the detriment of their physical, emotional, and financial well being.
Thousands of them took to the streets of Dublin to display their dissatisfaction with a Davos-owned political class and the police state they were held hostage in. Besides one or two trouble-makers the protests were peaceful and the message was loud and clear.
Enough is enough. The Irish did what they do best – demanded freedom, stood up to their oppressors and sang songs.
The oligarchs winced. Butterflies were doing somersaults in their overfed bellies. Panic set in and beads of sweat dripped down their deranged little heads. Their biggest fear was realised; the people refused to comply. As a result, what followed was an onslaught of desperation from every political party and establishment sycophant in the nation.
The usual rhetoric was thrown out; anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, far-right, etc, etc.
Yawn!
In fact, the head henchman of the political Fianna Fail and Fine Gael cartel, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris, was in such a desperate state of mind that he screwed up his lines and said that the far-left were involved as well – much to the outrage of the far-left radicalised mainstream media, forcing him to withdraw his statement later.
It sure was a sight to behold, watching their faces as the reality dawned on them that at any point the people could, with the click of a finger, take back their power and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. It was only the inaction of a remaining portion of the population, consisting of indoctrinated zombies, rejecting any effort to reclaim their livelihoods, who saved their backsides.
But for sure it showed them, in case they needed confirmation, that if large enough numbers of people refuse their dictatorial, arbitrary mandates it crushes their illusory power. How would they explain that to the banking and pharmaceutical dynasties that they exist to serve?
In the fallout, widespread establishment media condemnation followed – for the greatest enemy of the tyrant is the advocate of liberty.
The act of peaceful protestors speaking out against elitist Fascism, the medical mafia and the Church of Scientism was too much for the Fourth Estate. It was a sin against the Cult of Covid and there was no excuse for any Irish person demanding the most basic of liberties, according to them.
With the millions and millions of dollars that disgraced Irish state broadcaster, RTE, have been receiving from the pharmaceutical and government vaccine PR institutes, the idea of peasants marching through the streets against the kakistocracy risked putting an end to the lucrative pandemic illusion.
No way could that be allowed to happen. The age-old Bolshevik tactic of using psychiatry to stifle resistance had to be rolled out.
So it was imperative that the protestors were viewed as being an unhinged small minority of the Irish population. Former Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar called them ‘bonkers’. Others said they were part of ‘the lunatic fringe’.
Like all forms of Fascist propaganda, it was predictable.
But were those comments warranted?
Is it true that the estimated 4000-5000 people who took to the streets of Dublin on Sunday were all, in actual fact, nut-jobs? Were they dangerous conspiracy theorists? Were they expressing the views of a minority? Were they really ‘the lunatic fringe’?
I had to consider this and here’s what I concluded.
There is undoubtedly a fringe element of society in Ireland that are lunatics. There is undoubtedly a small group of people in our island nation that are, as Leo said, ‘bonkers’. But they are not the people who were on Grafton Street on Sunday.
Aside from the occasional follower of the US Military intelligence-created QAnon movement, the majority of people who marched on Sunday were hard-working, decent, law-abiding Irish men and women who voiced their discontent at the current status quo and who want to get back to making a living and chasing their dreams.
The ACTUAL fringe lunatics are, unfortunately, as they say, running the asylum. They are the people who are in charge. They are the ones who have proved to be utterly, completely, inarguably insane. It is these people who are completely bat-shit crazy. It is they who are bonkers.
Imagine, if you will, a portion of the population who are so helplessly detached from reality that they would shut down the economy of a nation, plunge its people into joblessness and destitution and keep them living under North Korean-style, Communist travel restrictions, using the pretence of a flu virus with a 99.98% survival rate for those who are infected.
Imagine being so severely sick in the head, as Professor Anthony Staines of Dublin City University (DCU) evidently is, that you would encourage your colleagues in private messages, soon leaked, to ‘increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty’ among the public to further mendacious medical agendas.
Imagine being as clinically insane as GSK and Eli Lilly-funded Professor Luke O’Neill of Trinity College, that you would advocate for attending music concerts, gigs and festivals in ridiculous plastic bubbles.
Imagine being so severely deluded, as he is, that you would suggest students attending their graduation night should wear non-removable bracelets to prove they’ve been vaccinated and then chuckle at the concept of civil liberties.
Imagine Looney Luke being so sociopathic that he would promote the idea of mandatory mask-wearing and then appear in public without wearing one himself. And all this only a few months after stating on live TV that masks are unnecessary for asymptomatic people.
The next display of Narcissistic Personality Disorder would come from Labour leader, Alan ‘Rules for Thee but Not For Me’ Kelly who, after tiresomely preaching to the masses about the importance of wearing their shame muzzles, appeared on public transport without wearing his, advising later he was too busy watching a game of football on his phone to be concerned about public health policy.
Then there’s Fine Gael politician Damien English who is so far gone that, during a live debate on national TV, dealing with the subject of retail outlets and their necessity during lockdown, he stated that clothes were not essential. Even the RTE host at the time, Miriam O’Callaghan, remarked ‘but, that seems mad Minister’ making us privy to a rare moment when the State broadcaster airs truthful content.
It gets worse.
Imagine a truly certifiable, callous, demented doctor, Chief Medical Officer and High Priest of the Covidians, Dr. Tony Holohan who is so psychopathically inclined and so devoid of empathy that he would refuse, unequivocally, to apologise for his negligent actions and subsequent cover-up which led to the death of multiple women, on his watch, due to the failures of the now notorious cervical smear scandal.
And consider a gang of thugs so mentally unbalanced they would turn up in their droves to forcibly block off public streets and intimidate passers-by, before harassing and abducting a lady (one in desperate need to open her business so she could pay her bills) in broad daylight and having no shame for it.
In a nation where a sinister gang of psychopathic hoodlums will deploy a patrol car and a riot van just to confiscate an electric bicycle from one citizen; search through the shopping bags of the elderly as they return from the supermarket; one that will humiliate and embarrass a victim of psychological illness to the point she commits suicide and one that will don balaclavas and wield batons and pepper spray while intimidating human rights and housing activists, perhaps the media and their government overlords are searching in the wrong places for the psychos in our society.
Then, we must also consider the deeply disturbed minds of the academics who are campaigning for the absolute subjugation of an entire nation. Consider the Independent Scientific Advisory Group (ISAG) and its zany wackos who want to see the nation subjected to further tyranny, with even more extreme restrictions on freedom of movement, as part of a bizarre and dangerous ‘Zero Covid’ push.
Ironically, and quite disconcertingly, one of the faces of this anti-human movement refers to herself as a human rights activist. Could you be any more dissociated from reality?
The men in white coats have a lot of work to do. This becomes obvious when we observe the Covidian sect known as NPHET (Ireland’s Coronavirus advisory group, who happen to dictate policy to a cuckolded government,) and their troubling desire to put muzzles on small children as young as four years of age, demanding that they are kept on all day for 7 to 8 hours, with no consideration for children with attention deficits or a history of trauma. Truly berserk.
Unsurprisingly, one of Ireland’s leading physicians, Dr. Gabriel Scally approves of these medieval measures on children. As a man who recently distributed a book known as Rules for Radicals to the fellow fanatics in his field, which in the introduction pays tribute to Lucifer, his support for inflicting torturous conditions on children can be expected.
We find more loose screws even at the very top of the ladder in Irish politics. When I say the top, of course, I mean the top that’s visible to the public eye, just before you reach the actual unelected government.
Here you’ll find Micheal Martin, the current Irish Taoiseach. Martin at times suffers from psychosis and lives in a land of make-believe. At one point he even suffered from false memory syndrome. In 2008, years after syphoning off and leeching from the Irish public, the banks in the nation went belly up and, inevitably (as banks do) turned to the government (read; taxpayer) for bailouts. Not according to Micheal Martin though.
In an obvious bout of neurosis, he argued that it never happened.
Assuming that this was a one-off, we moved on – until Micheal’s psychosis returned. This time he advised the public that the acts of torture, sexual abuse, imprisonment, slavery, rape, infanticide, child trafficking and GSK medical experimentation which occurred in the Catholic Church, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael-created Mother and Baby Institutions were a result of a profound failure of Irish ‘society’, insinuating that we were all to blame. He quickly corrected this after much backlash.
As a side note, GSK, despite their own documentation verifying the crimes against children, has declined to apologise for the horrors they carried out.
But what more can we expect from Micheal Martin – a clown who stands by the people of Belarus and their right to protest as he begrudges his own people that very same right.
You could fill up a funny farm with these people. But in their view, it’s the freedom-loving men and women of Ireland who are ‘bonkers’.
Leo himself is fit to be admitted. Who else, if not a disarranged, unzipped bozo, would stand in front of a nation of people economically and personally devastated by government policy during a supposed-pandemic and play silly games with celebrity millionaire associates on live press briefings.
As the nation buckled under the weight of a bought-and-paid-for, treasonous political class, Leo engaged in stagecraft, quoting Hollywood movie lines. If that’s not bonkers then I can’t say what is.
No wonder then Leo appears as a card-carrying member of the Young Leader program on the website of the World Economic Forum – founded by the stark raving mad son of a former Nazi Party member.
A keen student of war-mongering maniac Henry Kissinger, Klaus Schwab would grow into a man who has a need to read the mind of every human being alive and force them to eat insects. I guess we should judge Leo by the company he keeps.
How ironic it is that a man who often throws out the ‘far right’ label should be courted by an individual who was born in the 1930s Reich to a family highly regarded by the SS.
And then there’s the cuckoo climate extremists – a rabid cluster of fanatics who have lost the plot. Eamon Ryan is the perfect example of one. Absolutely nuts, he believes that the burning of fossil fuels, a practice that has existed in Ireland for literally thousands and thousands of years, is suddenly a life or death situation and if we don’t stop it we’ll all be doomed in the next 9 years.
As a result of this Ireland’s peat harvesting and production are to be brought to a halt and solid fuels are to be imported from overseas. This is the brainchild of the leader of the Green Party who believes, in his paranoid state of mind, that anything less would result in catastrophe.
To prevent such calamity, Eamon has also promised to take action that will force us to share a single car between ten families. This is all to make Ireland CO2 neutral, which will mean life itself cannot continue, as human beings, animals and plant life cannot exist without it.
The dangerous schizoids in charge of policy are completely bonkers. If any more proof of this is needed, then you only need to look at some of the agendas that they and those before them have signed the nation up to.
For example, Ireland is firmly committed to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, a push for Global Socialism and totalitarianism which promises a future in which ‘wealth is shared’ as part of what many Fabian progressives and academics in the nation believe should be the next ‘Great Leap Forward’ – referencing Chairman Mao Zedong of China’s movement which ended up causing the deaths of 45 million people.
In my book, The COVID-19 Illusion; A Cacophony of Lies, I show how the entire pandemic debacle is contrived in order to achieve these malevolent ends.
Then there’s the Irish government’s Industry 4.0 Strategy, a salute to Klaus Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset, which promises that soon ‘you’ll own nothing and be happy’, living in a surveillance state among the Internet of Things and an A.I-driven dystopia.
This is the tomorrow envisioned by the mad hatters in control of the nation. No wonder they are so averse to the idea of a freedom.
Of course there’s Leo’s unhealthy obsession with having us all tagged, traced and tracked through his endorsement of the Mark of the Beast Vaccine Passport program, whilst ignoring the advice of the Council of Europe, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and many others who anticipate a tsunami of discrimination and an apartheid system – as is already being experienced in Israel.
In truth, Leo Varadkar and his cronies know full well that the protestors who marched on Sunday were not ‘bonkers’. He knows that they are part of an ever-growing segment of Irish people who are tiring of the powers-that-should-not-be.
In truth, Leo knows that those same people have the power to end his hustle at a moment’s notice.
In truth, Leo and his associates know that it is they who are insane. And as soon as the vast majority of Irish people wake up to this insanity and realise that it is destructive to their freedom, their liberties and their way of life, then it’s game over for him.
Leo knows this is not very far away.
The lunatic fringe, indeed.
March 6, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | Ireland |
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US President Joe Biden has decreed to extend the set of sanctions against Iran, which are in force since 1995, for another year, the White House press office announced.
“The actions and policies of the Government of Iran – including its proliferation and development of missiles and other asymmetric and conventional weapons capabilities, its network and campaign of regional aggression, its support for terrorist groups, and the malign activities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its surrogates – continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” the statement reads.
“For these reasons, the national emergency declared on March 15, 1995, must continue in effect beyond March 15, 2021,” according to the statement.
The US national emergency state with respect to Iran was declared in March 1995 by former US President Bill Clinton.
March 6, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Wars for Israel | Joe Biden, Sanctions against Iran, United States |
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Recently, the United States and Britain, actively using the propaganda tools that they possess, have increasingly begun to accuse Russia and China of interfering in their domestic affairs and election campaigns, and of effectively preparing coups in these countries. However, apart from making proclamatory statements, neither Washington nor London has presented any facts or documents that confirm these accusations, nor can they present them, since these accusations are false.
Along with that, documented information about complicity on the part of United States and Britain in various coups that were being set up has begun to appear more frequently in publicly accessible reports in various media outlets.
For example, according to the recent publication in the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung, UN investigators found out that in 2019 elite fighters from the American Erik Prince’s private military company Blackwater, infamous for their actions during the American occupation of Iraq and several other states, had to take action twice to eliminate the Government of National Accord, which is recognized by the international community. But this “Project Opus” failed…
A group of UN experts studying violations of the UN arms embargo against Libya learned that in the Libyan war in recent years there has been a second, secret front to directly get rid of officials and commanders of the Government of National Accord that rules in Tripoli. “Project Opus” specifically called for delivering 20 elite Blackwater fighters to sites near Tripoli in June 2019 to conduct operations. The officers contacted by the German newspaper in Benghazi confirmed the arrival of 20 fighters from England and South Africa, and one American, in June 2019. The second group, consisting of snipers and fighters trained to fight behind enemy lines, flew to Benghazi in April 2020 and then headed off to the front near Tripoli. On April 24, 2020, 13 French citizens reached the Libyan-Tunisian border and presented themselves as diplomats to the Tunisian border guards, even though they carried heavy weapons. They were arrested, but under diplomatic pressure from Paris they were allowed to leave for Tunisia.
In early May 2020, the world media exploded with reports: another attempt at a military invasion of Venezuela was thwarted, Washington’s mercenaries were captured by the Venezuelan authorities, the United States wanted to repeat the operation in Cochinos Bay (the so-called attempt by the US Central Intelligence Agency to land Cuban emigrants in the Bay of Pigs, something which was aimed at overthrowing Fidel Castro). It is worth remembering how on May 3 mercenaries from the American private military company Silvercorp tried to land on the coast of Venezuela near the city of La Guaira, which is located just 32 kilometers from Caracas. Sixty armed, well-equipped militants with satellite phones and fake documents planned to reach the capital and capture the Venezuelan president for his subsequent transfer to the United States. Two of those arrested, Airan Berry and Luke Denman, were US citizens that had served in Afghanistan and Iraq. On May 4, American media interviewed the former US special forces fighter and the head of the Silvercorp PMC, Jordan Goodrow, who trained these fighters in Colombia. Goodrow declared that the goal of “Operation Gideon” was to organize raids into Venezuela to fight “the regime”. The former special forces soldier showed an eight-page $213 million contract signed in October 2019 by Washington-backed self-proclaimed Venezuelan “president” Juan Guaido and Donald Trump’s political advisers. On March 23, the Colombian authorities confiscated an entire arsenal on their territory that was specifically meant for the mercenaries. The mercenaries were equipped fairly well.
The Washington Post also published a document according to which members of the Venezuelan opposition, following negotiations, in October 2019 entered into a deal with the American private military company Silvercorp, located in Florida. The PMC employees were supposed to infiltrate the territory of Venezuela to overthrow the country’s legitimate president, Nicolas Maduro.
These events in Venezuela were recently well assessed by Bloomberg :
“One would hope that the Central Intelligence Agency could do better than a farcical scheme that was disowned by the Venezuelan opposition, penetrated by regime security forces and disrupted as soon as it began. Yet this trivial episode invites us to think seriously about the role of covert intervention and regime change in US policy.”
Exposing these subversive activities by Blackwater and other US and British mercenaries shows that they are usually committed by former military personnel and criminals involved in a wide variety of activities around the world. They act as bodyguards, protecting people and businesses in “hot spots” (like oil-producing areas off the coast of Nigeria and Sudan), as well as convoys and freight shipments in war zones, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since from the very beginning of hostilities in the region both public opinion in the United States and Democrats in Congress viewed sending their own soldiers to hot spots extremely unfavorably, they had to look for replacements elsewhere.
American wars in the beginning of the 21st century have become a real gold mine for these organizations, which have turned from bands of thugs that toppled shaky “cannibalistic” regimes in Africa during the Cold War into real international corporations. They represent a significant benefit for the United States and its Western allies leading the war, since they consist of veterans that are already experienced – military professionals who have not found a niche for themselves in civilian life. In addition, these organizations are considered private enterprises, and therefore are not accountable to Congress, so the losses these soldiers incur are not included in the total number of casualties for a country’s conventional army, which makes it possible to give a more favorable representation of the situation in a war zone at home. Public opinion in the United States has long called for rejecting the services these companies provide, and reinforcing transparency in their activities. The UN has repeatedly raised the issue of revising the definition of “mercenary”, and banning organizations like Blackwater, over the past several years – but so far it has not yet achieved any significant results.
Besides these examples of Washington’s attempts to instigate a military coup in other countries, nowadays a number of documents have been raised for public review related to the period of the height of the US intervention in Syria in 2014, when Assad’s forces were growing weaker and Damascus was under the threat of capture by Islamists that the West nurtured and supported. For example, the Middle East Eye agency has shown quite convincingly – and with documentary evidence – how during a British-supported operation called Sarkha (Scream), the media tried to turn the Alawites against Assad, and by doing so accomplish a coup in Syria. The publication gives official documents that attest to the social media “protest movement” that was actually created under the authority of the British government. The very same scenario for Operation Sarkha was developed by the American company Pechter Polls of Princeton (New Jersey, USA), which was working under a contract with the British government. The contract for subversive work in Syria was initially administered by the Military Strategic Effects department at the UK Department of Defense, and then by the British government-run The Conflict, Stability and Security Fund, whose objective is to
“resolve conflicts that threaten the Great Britain’s interests.” The project’s budget was £600,000 ($746,000) per year. The published documents indicate that the goal of the operations was “supporting the activities of the Syrian opposition media to reach an audience in Syria… Platforms for this work were created jointly by the UK, USA, and Canada to strengthen popular resentment toward the Assad regime.”
In another issue of the Middle East Eye, documents obtained by the publication show how British contractors hired Syrian citizens who were journalists to promote “moderate opposition” – often without their knowledge. Contracts with these mercenaries were entered into by the British Foreign Office, and were managed by the country’s Ministry of Defense, sometimes by military intelligence officers, paying small amounts of money to the contractors.
After getting to know everything indicated above, the question naturally arises: who exactly is really interfering in the affairs of other states? And how objective is the propaganda coming from Washington and London, as well as their foreign policy as a whole?
March 6, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | Libya, Syria, UK, United States, Venezuela |
1 Comment
The U.S. ceased to be any kind of representative government in 2020.
And that’s just the way the totalitarians in Europe want it.
The moment the Supreme Court abdicated its responsibility to even recognize Texas’ complaint against Pennsylvania was the moment the veneer of Constitutional authority in D.C. was removed.
With the Court cowed into political subservience and the presidency and the legislature secured there is nothing left of any Constitutional ‘checks and balances’ in D.C.
Now that the Democrat-controlled House is done embarrassing themselves with a sham impeachment of Donald Trump they can get serious about consolidating power such that they never relinquish it.
It’s called H.R. 1 and, in the words of John Fund, “It is the worst piece of legislation I have even seen in my 40 years reporting from Washington.”
I’m not going into the details of it here, Fund does a fine job of outlining them, along with Zerohedge. And whether this abortion of a bill passes through a filibuster in the Senate is irrelevant.
What is relevant is that this bill is a laundry list of changes to the electoral system of the U.S. to ensure single party rule for what’s left of the lifespan of the United States as a 50 entity compact among equals.
Oh, I’m sorry, that isn’t correct because not one of the current members of the Supreme Court believes that’s what the U.S. is anymore, a compact of equals.
If any of them did they would have argued for Texas’ right to sue Pennsylvania for its election law changes and heard the case under the court’s original jurisdiction.
Even if they’d thrown the case out on its merit that would have been somewhat acceptable, but to refuse to hear it was an insult to anyone with a passing acquaintance with the Constitution.
What Speaker Nancy Pelosi has done with this bill is to make manifest for the world to see that D.C. is ruled and operated by a mafia. And that mafia works for its own betterment, not those it rules over.
That’s been the very clear message since the election. Because election outcomes not controlled by the D.C. mafia are verboten.
Especially now that the plan to tear down and ‘Build Back Better’ the global economy is in process. Nothing as tawdry and plebian as democracy and civilian input can be tolerated when such plans are afoot.
Americans are just now getting the memo that Europeans got repeatedly over the past two generations. The words of former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker echo through the corridors of the fabulously ugly EU headquarters in Brussels.
“There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties.”
So it was in November and so it will be in 2022 and 2024. If we learned anything from 2020 it is that nothing is off the table in the pursuit of legitimizing a naked grab for power.
The pols in D.C. can tell themselves that Trump was a delusional crackpot all they want. They can have their quislings in the media repeat that lie endlessly in the hope someone would actually believe it. They can issue endless dire warnings about domestic terrorism from those who know in their hearts their voice was stolen from them.
They can convince those too cowardly or naïve to admit the truth of what happened, but they cannot ignore the consequences of their actions.
Ruling through force is a self-negation of the legitimacy of the rule itself. Forcing people to accept your vision of the future literally invalidates the vision. Because if your ideas had any merit you wouldn’t have to force people to abide by them.
This is why the European Union is set up the way it is. There is no power vested in the democratic part of the Union. The EU parliament has no real power, only advisory power.
The real power lies with the unelected EU Commission and the leadership of the European Central Bank. Their decisions are rubber-stamped by the European Court of Justice whose name is, at best, a sick joke.
We have a president taking office under sincere doubts about the election. Steadfast refusals by those who support him to even entertain the idea that there was anything at all wrong with the election results.
If that’s the case, why do we even need these changes? If Pelosi and company won this election fair and square (which they didn’t) then what’s the rush to put forth H.R. 1 in the first place?
I ask these questions knowing full well that H.R.1 will never pass a Senate where the filibuster was recently defended by the controlled opposition known colloquially as the GOP.
But Pelosi’s anchor baby of a bill isn’t intended to pass in its current form. It’s meant to begin the obligatory Straussian Two Step every bad idea in D.C. goes through.
Repeat after me: Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis.
This bill is the Thesis. The GOP will filibuster for the Antithesis and they will eventually agree on something that looks like a compromise but will be fundamentally worse.
If you ever wondered why we get such abysmal legislation on just about every issue, you now know the mechanism.
And it further doesn’t matter that states are passing election law changes to harden their elections against what happened last fall. Eventually D.C. will mandate this is how Federal elections are handled.
And if any state doesn’t comport with these changes there will be asymmetric punishments handed out by withholding funding.
This is the same thing that Hungary fought tooth and nail to stop in the COVID relief agreement in the EU, to keep separate national sovereignty and national laws and funding.
The point, ultimately, is that the Biden administration and the Democrats are moving very quickly to remake this country in Europe’s autocratic image.
Because the Straussian Two Step is too inefficient for The Davos Crowd. The European way is a so much more efficient form of control.
They have to do so through different means, with different language, “protecting voter disenfranchisement,” but the end result is exactly the same — a central government that issues edicts that the vassal states must comply with ignoring the desires or voices of the people it rules over.
A few weeks ago I asked you, “What happens after The Churn?“ What happens when the rules of the game of survival change so rapidly that we have no framework left to make sense of the world we live in.
H.R. 1 represents one of those post-Churn building blocks of a world we will soon barely recognize. The worst part is so many will cheer for it rather than return to the chaos of the old world.
March 6, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | European Union, United States |
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