Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

How we fool ourselves. Part III: Social biases

By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | April 25, 2021

“Is the road to scientific hell paved with good intentions?” – political psychologist Philip Tetlock (1994)

Part I in this series addressed logical fallacies. Part II addressed biases associated with a consensus building process. Part II addresses the role of social conflicts and biases.

Additional biases are triggered by social conflict between an individual’s responsibility for responsible conduct of research, and the larger ethical issues associated with the well-being of the public and the environment. Further, social biases are triggered by careerist goals, loyalty to one’s colleagues and institutional loyalties.

Scientists have the responsibility of adhering to the principles of ethical research and professional standards. But what happens when other responsibilities get in the way of these professional standards? These might include responsibilities to their conscience, their colleagues, institutions, the public and/or the environment. One can imagine many different conflicts across this range of responsibilities that that can bias the scientific process. As an example, scientists that have been heavily involved with the IPCC may be concerned with preserving the importance of the IPCC and its consensus, which has become central to their professional success, funding and influence.

Arguably the most important of these are conflicts between the responsible conduct of research and larger ethical issues associated with the well-being of the public and the environment. Fuller and Mosher’s book Climategate: The CruTape Letters argued that ‘noble cause corruption’ was a primary motivation behind the Climategate deceits. Noble cause corruption is when the ends of protecting the climate (noble) justify the means of sabotaging your scientific opponents (ignoble).

Psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia claims that the most common and problematic bias in science is ‘motivated reasoning’. People that have a ‘dog in the fight’ (reputational, financial, ideological, political) interpret observations to fit a particular idea that supports their particular ‘dog.’ The term ‘motivated reasoning’ is usually reserved for political motivations, but preserving their reputation or funding is also a strong motivator among scientists.

The embedding of political values into science occurs when value statements or ideological claims are wrongly treated as objective truth. Scientists have a range of attitudes about the environment; the problem occurs because there is the presumption that one set of attitudes is right and those who disagree are in denial. This results in conversion of a widely shared political ideology about climate change into ‘reality.’

Confirmation bias can become even stronger when people confront questions that trigger moral emotions and concerns about group identity. People’s beliefs become more extreme when they’re surrounded by like-minded colleagues. They come to assume that their opinions are not only the norm but also the truth – creating what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls a ‘tribal-moral community’ with its own sacred values about what’s worth studying and what’s taboo. Such biases can lead to widely-accepted claims that reflect the scientific community’s blind spots more than they reflect justified scientific conclusions.

Psychologists Cusiman and Lombrozo found that people facing a dilemma between believing an impartial assessment of the evidence and believing what would better fulfill a moral obligation, people often believe in line with the latter. Cuisman and Lombrozo found that morally good beliefs demand less evidence than morally bad beliefs. They also found that people sometimes treat the moral value of a belief as an independent justification for belief.

Motivated biases become particularly problematic once these biases are institutionalized, with advocacy statements made by professional societies, editorials written by journal editors, and public statements by the IPCC leadership.

April 25, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Non-Prophylactically Ironic Dome over the Occupied Palestine

By Mansoureh Tajik for the Saker Blog | April 25, 2021

Exactly at 1:20 am (Tehran time) on Thursday, April 22, 2021 a missile hit near Dimona nuclear reactor, the “secret” nuclear site in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The Jerusalem Post headlined the event as “Syrian missile lands near Dimona nuclear reactor, interception fails.”[1] The article went on to story the event as follows:

“It was unclear at first from where the missile was launched. Several signs indicated it having been launched from Iraq, while according to other reports, it came from the city of Daraa in southern Syria following an Israeli airstrike.”

“IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Hidai Zilberman told reporters that ‘the explosion was due to the firing of an SA-5 surface-to-air missile toward Israel from Syria that exploded in the southern Negev. The firing of the missile came during Israeli airstrikes in southern Syria,’ Zilberman said, and that ‘it was an errant missile and not directed toward the Dimona nuclear reactor.’”

It was not an errant missile. It did not come from where the General said it came. It was not during Israeli airstrikes in southern Syria. The interception did not fail because there was interception. The missile was directed toward exactly where it needed to hit near Dimona nuclear reactor and it hit exactly at 1:20 am the time Sardar Soleimani, the martyred commander of Qods Force was assassinated. The hit had a message.

The missile strike (not “landing” as if it were some civilian passenger airline) on the land in the vicinity of Dimona took place 22 hours after another serious explosion that happened inside Tomer factory which develops and manufactures military equipment including missiles for Israeli Defense. About Tomer, Haaretz reported:

“The explosion occurred during a ‘routine test’ by the Tomer factory for advanced weapons, which develops rocket engines, the Ofek satellite launchers and houses various types of missiles. In response to the blast, Tomer said ‘this was a controlled test with no exceptional circumstances.’ Tomer’s factory is located in central Israel, and in proximity to residential areas. The company manufactures missiles for use by the IDF and other Israeli defense systems. They are the manufacturers behind Israel’s Arrow 4 missile interception system.”[2]

Again, no. The explosion did not occur during a routine test and it was not a controlled test. The explosion was in fact controlled but not by any force friendly to Tomer, the Zionist entity, or IDF. That explosion, too, had a message. On Tuesday, April 20, in a public speech delivered during funeral procession held for Sardar Hejazi, the vice commander of Qods Force, Sardar Qa’ani, the current Commander of Qods Force (replacing Sardar Soleimani after his martyrdom) clearly and unambiguously declared:

“Today, in the resistance fronts from Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and the Children of Resistance [informal term that refers to all resistance fighters] every single day, delivers one major operation against the enemies including [US] America and Israel and they will continue this path until the global command has been achieved.”[3]

This statement was not a threat nor a warning nor a promise by Sardar Qa’ani. It was a declaration. The news vice commander of Qods Force, who was appointed after the martyrdom of Sardar Hejazi, announced on Thursday, April 22:

“The usurper Zionist regime must know that the resistance group in every segment of the planet earth are positioned right next to you and are getting you closer to your dusk.”[4]

In an interview conducted by Tasnim News Agency on Friday, April 23, with Hadi Qabisi, the director of Al-Ittihad Center for Development and Research, regarding recent explosions in Israel, he explained:

“The rules of engagement in the framework of the Resistance in terms of their demand and direction has changed. This now affects the change in balance in the region if the Resistance decides to go to war.”

“Mere shooting of missile from Syria to the occupied territories and reaching of that missile to Naqab region, regardless of what kind of missile whether it was air-to-air or surface-to-air or surface-to-surface, makes evident the inability of Israel defense system dubbed Iron Dome. This shows the erosion of Zionist Regime’s deterrence power while the capabilities of the Resistance Axis are increasing day by day. The consequence has a negative impact on all aspects of Zionist Regime. In addition, this military development cannot be separated from other events in the region such as Iran’s capability and power to strengthen its position in Vienna talks or an increasing tension between two global poles ([US] America and Russia) in other critical scenes such as Ukraine.”[5]

On Sunday, April 25, 2021, Major General Muhammad Baqeri, the Head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Armed Forces, said:

“The Zionists think they could permanently target Syrian soil, create mischief in other places and in the sea without backlash. For certain, several operations in recent days and operations that are forthcoming will have a sobering effect on them and the future of the Resistance is quite bright. We will not announce anything about who exactly is doing which operation but responses from the Resistance camp to Zionists are quite significant. We will not specify the operation but Zionist regime will not be in peace.”[6]

On April 22, 2021, a letter signed by two members of the congressmen, Ted Deutch and Michael T. McCaul, and co-signed by nearly 300 other members, urged the full funding of security assistance to Israel in the Fiscal Year 2022 appropriations bills. An excerpt from the letter reads:

“Israel continues to face direct threats from Iran and its terrorist proxies. In February, an Israeli-owned ship in the Gulf of Oman was hit by a mysterious explosion that Israel has attributed as an attack by Iran. In 2019, Hizballah launched three anti-tank missiles at an Israeli Defense Forces vehicle in Israel. Hizballah is estimated to have an arsenal of over 130,000 rockets and missiles, and is believed to be developing new precision-guided munitions to be deployed in Lebanon. American security assistance to Israel helps counter these threats, and our rock-solid security partnership serves as a deterrent against even more significant attacks on our shared interests.”

“Congress is committed to maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge and its ability to defend itself, by itself, against persistent threats. Our aid to Israel is a vital and cost-effective expenditure which advances important U.S. national security interests in a highly challenging region.”[7]

Regarding maintaining Israel’s “qualitative military edge”, firstly, maintenance is for that which already exists. The famed prophylactic dome is engineered to emulate eyed Swiss cheese and can protect Israel exactly as much as it has done for Saudi Arabia and US bases in Iraq and Persian Gulf oil well states with flag. Secondly, the cost of maintaining illusions in West Asia has decidedly increased exponentially for the United States of America and its most cherished regimes.

References

[1] Anna Ahronheim, Udi Shaham. “Syrian missile lands near Dimona nuclear reactor, interception fails.” The Jerusalem Post, April 22, 2021. Accessed online at: https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/alarms-sound-in-south-of-israel-665953

[2] Yaniv Kubovich. Powerful Explosion Rocks Sensitive Israeli Missile Factory During Test. April 21, 2021. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/powerful-explosion-rocks-sensitive-israeli-defense-factory-during-test-1.9732074

[3] Khabar Online. “Unambiguous Message of Sardar Qa’ani to Israel and [US of] America during funeral procession of Sardar Hejazi.” Farvardin 31, 1400 [April 20, 2021] @11:14 am. News Code: 506836. Accessed online at: khabaronline.ir/news/1506836

[4] Tasnim News Agency. “Sardar Fallahzadeh, Vice Commander of Quds Force: Resistance Groups are positioned right next to Zionist Regimes Bases.” Ordibehesht 2, 1400 [April 22, 2021] @ 11:02 am. Accessed online at https://tn.ai/2489397

[5] Tasnim News Agency. “Interview with Syrian Analyst: Zionist Regime’s Deterrent Capabilities are wearing out day by day.” Ordibehesht 3, 1400 [April 23, 2021] @ 21:03. Accessed online at: https://tn.ai/2490197

[6] Tasnim News Agency. “Major General Baqeri: Future Operations will bring the Zionists to their senses.” Ordibehesht 5, 1400 [April 23, 2021] @ 10:45. Accessed online at: https://tn.ai/2491070

[7] “Letter Chair DeLauro and Ranking Member Granger” addressed to Congress of the United States, Washington DC. Accessed online at: https://teddeutch.house.gov site.

April 25, 2021 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | 5 Comments

The “Russian Threat”

By Paul Craig Roberts | Institute for Political Economy | April 25, 2021

During 2016 CIA director John Brennan and FBI director James Comey, together with the corrupt Democrat party, began orchestrating Russiagate in order to prevent Trump from reducing the risk of nuclear war by normalizing relations with Russia. President Trump tried to nip a New Cold War in the bud, but that was not in the interest of the power and profit of the military/security complex which desperately needs the “Russian threat” as its raison d’etre.

Stephen Cohen, myself and a few others expressed concern that the tensions between the two nuclear powers were being driven to more dangerous highs than ever existed during the 20th century Cold War. Many websites joined in debunking the orchestrated Russiagate fabrication.

To discredit these voices, a new website, PropOrNot, suddenly appeared with a list of 200 “Russian agents/dupes.” Those of us who had raised red flags about Russiagate and the worsening of tensions were on the list. The Washington Post gave the accusation credibility by reporting the PropOrNot accusation that those who dissented from a hostile policy toward Russia were “Putin agents.”

A number of the falsely accused websites were intimidated and abandoned the truth. CounterPunch went even further. It dropped its best and most incisive writers—people such as Mike Whitney and Diana Johnstone. CounterPunch, which had once collected, published, and marketed a collection of my essays as a book, suddenly discovered that it preferred fiction over fact. Other websites that had religiously reproduced all of my columns now became selective about which parts of the official narrative they would permit to be examined on their sites. This was, perhaps, the beginning of the movement to de-platform all who challenge the narrative.

The threat to truth-tellers has now been elevated by election thief Joe Biden’s latest Executive Order declaring a “national emergency” to “deal with the Russian threat.” Pepe Escobar reports that Biden’s order opens every American to being accused of being a Russian agent engaged in undermining US security. “A sub-paragraph (C), detailing ‘actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or abroad,’ is vague enough to be used to eliminate any journalism that supports Russia’s positions in international affairs.”

“Supports Russia’s position” includes an objective description and non-partisan analysis of Russian policy. The crucial point is that, in effect, Biden’s executive order places everyone reporting objectively on Russia’s political positions as a potential threat to the United States.

If we are honest, we will acknowledge that we have undergone the complete collapse of the United States. Truth is prohibited in the media, school systems, and universities if it conflicts with the elite agendas served by the official narratives. The First Amendment is dead and buried. Free speech is reserved for the official narratives, such as “systemic racism” and “Russian threat.” Those who exercise their Constitutional right find themselves de-platformed or fired.

To understand how the victory of propaganda over truth elevates the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon, consider the difference between the 20th century and 21st century cold wars.

In the original Cold War both Soviet and American leaders worked to defuse tensions. Agreements were made on arms control and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. There were regular meetings or summits between American and Soviet leaders. Diplomatic decorum was maintained. There were agreements that permitted each side to inspect the other’s compliance.

This process began with President John F. Kennedy and Soviet First Secretary Khrushchev. It continued through President Reagan and, more or less, President George H. W. Bush. It ended with the Clinton regime and has been downhill ever since. President Trump intended to reduce the dangerous tensions, but was not permitted. Indeed, his intent was sufficient cause for the Establishment to drive him from office. 2020 was a coup, not an election.

In the 20th century Cold War Russian experts differed in their assessments of the threat, and their differences were publicly aired. Differing assessments were debated. Dissenters were not demonized as Russian agents. Today American Russian experts find that being Russophobic is a career boost. In the 20th century the New York Times and Washington Post were aligned with peace efforts. Today they are part of the neoconservative warmongers’ propaganda ministry.

The alarming conclusion is that since the Clinton regime, the US government has worked consistently to worsen relations with Russia even to the extent of publicly demonizing the Russian president and strangling objective debate in the US. This is the perfect foundation for war.

All the while insouciant Americans elected governments that successively raised the likelihood of nuclear annihiliation while shutting down dissident concerns. As I reported on March 17, “In the United States Russian Studies has degenerated into propaganda. Recently, two members of the Atlantic Council think tank, Emma Ashford and Matthew Burrows, suggested that American foreign policy could benefit from a less hostile approach to Russia. Instantly, 22 members of the think tank denounced the article by Ashford and Burrows.”

Today even in Republican and conservative circles to question Putin’s demonization raises disapproving eyebrows (the same for China and Iran). The US Establishment has succeeded in labeling objective analysis as “pro-Russian” (or pro-Chinese or pro-Iranian). This means that an objective view of US/Russian relations is off-limits to US policymakers.

The “Russian threat” is another hoax, one that will destroy the world.

April 25, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism, Russophobia | , | 2 Comments

Inventing Enemies to Wage Perpetual War

By Stephen Lendman | April 25, 2021

Washington needs enemies to advance its hegemonic agenda for unchallenged global control.

Since none exist, they’ve been invented throughout US history — first against Native Americans, then against foreign nations.

Post-WW II, the US attacked nonbelligerent North Korea preemptively, a state of perpetual war on humanity has existed for over 70 years with no signs of US regimes stepping back from the brink — just the opposite.

Its wars rage at home and abroad in multiple theaters by hot and/or other means.

US dark forces have draconian aims in mind.

They include concentrating wealth in privileged hands exclusively, creating ruler/serf societies at home and abroad, instituting draconian social control, and large-scale depopulation.

The latter involves mass-jabbing maximum numbers of people with toxic experimental drugs that don’t protect and may eliminate countless millions or billions of people in the months and years ahead if nothing is done to challenge and stop this diabolical war on humanity.

Distracted by bread and circuses, a mind-manipulated US public shows no signs of awakening to reality.

No matter how often most Americans were fooled before, they’re easy marks to be duped again repeatedly.

Abroad, the Pentagon’s empire of bases are platforms for waging endless wars on humanity.

Washington’s main enemies are peace, stability, cooperative relations with the world community of nations, the rule of law, and countries free from its control — notably China, Russia and Iran.

If global war erupts ahead, it’ll be made-in-the-USA — most likely in the South China Sea or Taiwan Strait, the Middle East, or Europe’s heartland bordering Russia.

US controlled fascist tyranny in Kiev is key to advancing Washington’s hegemonic aims.

Sharing a near-1,500 mile land and sea border with Russia, Ukraine is used by US dark forces as a dagger aimed at its heartland.

Last week, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova explained that Washington has gone all-out to portray nonbelligerent Russia as an aggressor state — notably by phony accusations disconnected from reality.

“If you spend years communicating an idea to your own people and to the world at large, using mass media, issuing reports and making alarmist publications that depict Russia as a warmonger nation that’s about to strike” preemptively, most people in the West and elsewhere are easily fooled to believe it, she said — because mainstream truth-telling is suppressed.

Western and many other nations bow to US interests — even when compromising their own.

According to Zakharova, if a US ruling regime asked “Germany” or another nation “to stop breathing, will it obey?”

“Will it stop breathing? Or will it realize finally that not breathing will mean dying?”

For a nation-state, it means lost sovereignty to a higher power abroad — along with betrayal of their people by abandoning their rights in service to a foreign power.

Last September, Vladimir Putin called for cooperative Russian/US relations “in the field of security in the use of information and communication technologies.”

According to Russia’s Foreign Ministry last week, his proposal “envisage(d) the adoption of a set of practical measures on resetting bilateral relations in the sphere of using information and communications technologies, including the restoration of specialized dialogue formats and channels of communication, (including) high level ones,” adding:

His initiative includes “reaching an agreement on preventing incidents in information space, exchanging guarantees of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, as well as reaching a global agreement on taking political commitment by nations to refrain from attacking each other with the use of” information technology or other means.

As expected, his good faith outreach fell on deaf ears in Washington, especially after Biden replaced Trump by brazen election rigging.

A state of permanent US war on Russia by other means is longstanding, recklessly escalated by Biden regime hardliners.

The same thing is ongoing against China and other nations free from scourge of US hegemonic control.

During his annual state of the nation address last week, Putin stressed that “(u)nfriendly actions toward Russia do not cease,” adding:

Moscow will find “asymmetrical, speedy and tough” ways to defend its national interests if hostile nations (like the US) refuse dialogue.

A clash of civilizations exists between hegemon USA and nations free from its control.

Because of US rage to control planet earth, its resources and populations, is global war 3.0 just a matter of time?

April 25, 2021 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | | 2 Comments

Czech President: Vrbetice Blast Could Be Accident, Russians Never Emerged in Reports in Six Years

By Tim Korso – Sputnik – 25.04.2021

Czech President Milos Zeman has cautioned against jumping to conclusions when it comes to the cause of the explosion at the ammunition warehouse near Vrbetice in 2014 and called for waiting until an official probe into the matter is concluded. He stressed that the investigation is still ongoing and that an accident still can’t be ruled out.

The president, in an extraordinary address to the nation on 25 April, further stated that counterintelligence reports, even those not available to the public, have over the last six years never mentioned anything about two Russian military intelligence (GRU) agents possibly being responsible for the explosion in Vrbetice. He added that reports from the country’s Security Information Service never mentioned that two alleged GRU agents, whom the Czech government recently blamed for the blast, had ever visited the warehouse at Vrbetice.

Zeman noted that he treats both versions – an accident and an operation by foreign agents – seriously and said that both have to be thoroughly investigated. The president added that the recent events could be a “game” involving special services that may have serious repercussions for the Czech Republic.

Diplomatic Spat Between Prague and Moscow Over Vrbetice Blast

Zeman’s bombshell statements come a week after the Czech government accused Russia of being behind the explosion at the Vrbetice ammunition warehouse. Prague also claimed that the explosion was organised by two alleged GRU agents named Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov.

The two were previously accused by British authorities of carrying out an alleged attack involving a toxic agent against former GRU agent Sergei Skripal, but they strongly denied being GRU agents themselves or being involved in any way in Skripal’s poisoning.

Following the Czech government’s accusations on 17 April, Prague expelled 18 Russian diplomats and removed the Russian state company Rosatom from the list of contenders for building a new reactor at the Dukovany Nuclear Power Plant.

Moscow has strongly denied Prague’s accusations and linked the Czech Republic’s actions to a new wave of anti-Russian hysteria initiated and led by the US. Russia responded to the expulsion of its diplomats reciprocally, sending away 20 Czech diplomats. Prague may also fall under the conditions of a recently announced law banning the embassies of “unfriendly” countries from hiring Russian citizens.

April 25, 2021 Posted by | Russophobia | 1 Comment

The Capture of Goodness

By Sinead Murphy | OffGuardian | April 25, 2021

‘Goodness’ is not the word I wanted to use in this article. But ‘ethics’ sounded too abstract, ‘morality’ too rule-bound, ‘virtue’ too archaic, and ‘kindness’ too corporate (at least since ‘random acts of kindness’).

The ubiquity of that dreaded term ‘safety,’ brayed at us from every angle, has made all the old names for concern for each other’s welfare seem ill-fitting and out of date. ‘Goodness,’ for all its faults, will have to do.

*

On Tuesday 30th March, leaders of 23 countries, including the UK, France and Germany, issued a statement on the matter of ‘pandemic preparedness.’

Its key phrase was reprinted across the media: Nobody is safe until everyone is safe.

As we embark on our second Covid year, the sentiment is chilling.

Nobody is safe until everyone is safe is the latest phase in the capture of human goodness that has been the most profound effect of Covid.

At first, we were asked to keep our distance. Other people, for whose sake we do most of the good things we do, were put beyond our reach.

We no longer held the door for the next person to pass through. We no longer offered to carry an old lady’s shopping. We stopped shaking one another’s hand and patting each other on the back. We no longer hugged.

Almost all of the ways in which we knew how to be good to each other were paused; the bonds of mutual support were severed.

Then, for the first time uncertain about how to do good – then, we were asked to mask up. Not for our own sake. For the sake of the other person – I mask for you, you mask for me. Being good to other people was returned to us. But it was not quite like it had been before.

Other people, still at a distance, were now also without faces, and faces are so important in arousing our pity, commanding our assistance, eliciting our smile. Goodness had been readmitted, but for the sake of newly anonymous beings.

Then, still at a distance, still masked up, we were encouraged to take the jab. Not for our own sake – at least, not directly. For the sake of the herd. For herd immunity.

This concept, so energetically rejected as cruel during the first months of Covid, was returned to us. But it was not quite like it had been before. It was cleansed of its natural components, redefined by the World Health Organisation as an achievement of vaccination, its taint of ‘let it rip’ buried under a great enthusiasm for pharmaceutical engineering. Herd immunity was back. And goodness was redirected towards an anonymous crowd.

And now we are told that nobody is safe until everyone is safe. Now we are to be good, not even to a masked and distanced other, not even to an anonymous herd, but to everyone.

Everyone? All seven billion inhabitants of the earth? It is worse than that. The statement issued by world leaders on 30th March champions a concept of ‘One Health,’ which is described as encompassing ‘humans, animals and our planet.’

How in the world is any of us to act for the good of this everyone? The idea is sublime. It may strike us with awe, even admiration, but there is nothing we can do for its sake. Our good deeds, already scrambled by distancing and masking and herding, are now, at last, out of play.

One year ago, we were tempted from the well-trodden paths of goodness onto a seemingly higher road, emblazoned with slogans of sacrifice, decorated with rainbows and resounding with the clapping of people pulling together. But the road leads nowhere. It is a dead end.

In January, in the northern snow, I was saying hello to my neighbour over the low garden wall. So that she could find her key, she placed her little girl, ten months old and all wrapped up in her snowsuit, onto the soft ground. While my neighbour was searching in her bag, her baby slowly keeled over. Without thinking, I stepped across and leaned down to lift her. But it was the wrong thing to do. Her mother snatched her up and I retreated in vague apology.

What is now the right thing to do when a small baby falls sideways onto the snow? The answer: nothing. Goodness is cancelled. Or, rather, it is redirected through an idea so sublime that nothing follows from it for mere humans with their merely human faculties. Everyone means nothing to us. For the sake of everyone, we can do nothing.

But there is a problem about doing nothing. Because it may just be that human beings are only good insofar as they do good things. Goodness requires practice and wastes away from lack of practice. It is more like playing the piano than riding a bike; you have to keep it up or you can no longer really do it. How long before our good natures grow rusty and flake away? How long before we no longer know how to be good?

Which is why, I presume, we now have these badges of goodness: masks, certificates.

Our enthusiasm for both may have little to do with their dubious efficacy in stopping the spread of a respiratory virus, and much to do with our need for reassurance that, even though we no longer do good things, we still really are good people.

Sinead Murphy teaches Philosophy at Newcastle University. Her most recent publication is Zombie University: Thinking Under Control (Repeater, 2017).

April 25, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | 1 Comment

Did Bill Gates Reveal the Reason Behind the Lock-Downs?

By Rosemary Frei | OffGuardian | April 4, 2020

In a candid interview, Bill Gates has outlined that, despite the comparatively small threat of Coronavirus, he and his colleagues “don’t want a lot of recovered people” who have acquired natural immunity. They instead are hoping we become reliant on vaccines and anti-viral medication.

Shockingly, Gates also suggests people be made to have a digital ID showing their vaccination status, and that people without this “digital immunity proof” would not be allowed to travel. Such an approach would mean very big money for vaccine producers.

On March 24, 2020 Bill Gates gave a highly revelatory 50-minute interview (above) to Chris Anderson. Anderson is the Curator of TED, the non-profit that runs the TED Talks.

The Gates interview is the second in a new series of daily ‘Ted Connects’ interviews focused on COVID-19. The series’s website says that:

TED Connects: Community and Hope is a free, live, daily conversation series featuring experts whose ideas can help us reflect and work through this uncertain time with a sense of responsibility, compassion and wisdom.”

Anderson asked Gates at 3:49 in the video of the interview – which is quickly climbing to three million views – about a ‘Perspective’ article by Gates that was published February 28 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“You wrote that this could be the once-in-a-century pandemic that people have been fearing. Is that how you think of it, still?” queried Anderson.

“Well, it’s awful to say this but, we could have a respiratory virus whose case fatality rate was even higher. If this was something like smallpox, that kills 30 percent of people. So this is horrific,” responded Gates.

“But, in fact, most people even who get the COVID disease are able to survive. So in that, it’s quite infectious – way more infectious than MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome] or SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] were. [But] it’s not as fatal as they were. And yet the disruption we’re seeing in order to knock it down is really completely unprecedented.”

Gates reiterates the dire consequences for the global economy later in the interview.

“We need a clear message about that,” Gates said starting at 26:52.

“It is really tragic that the economic effects of this are very dramatic. I mean, nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes. But … bringing the economy back and doing [sic] money, that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life. So we’re going to take the pain in the economic dimension, huge pain, in order to minimize the pain in disease and death dimension.”

However, this goes directly against the imperative to balance the benefits and costs of the screening, testing and treatment measures for each ailment – as successfully promulgated for years by, for example, the Choosing Wisely campaign – to provide the maximum benefit to individual patients and society as a whole.

Even more importantly, as noted in an April 1, 2020 article in OffGuardian, there may be dramatically more deaths from the economic breakdown than from COVID-19 itself.

“By all accounts, the impact of the response will be great, far-reaching, and long-lasting,”

Kevin Ryan wrote in the article. Ryan estimated that well over two million people will likely die from the sequelae of the lock-downs and other drastic measures to enforce ‘social distancing.’

Millions could potentially die from suicide, drug abuse, lack of medical coverage or treatment, poverty and lack of food access, on top of other predictable social, medical and public-health problems stemming from the response to COVID-19.

Gates and Anderson did not touch on any of those sequelae. Instead, they focused on rapidly ramping up testing and medical interventions for COVID-19.

Gates said at 30:29 in the interview that he and a large team are moving fast to test anti-virals, vaccines and other therapeutics and to bring them to market as quickly as possible.

The Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust with support from Mastercard and now others, created this therapeutic accelerator to really triage out [candidate therapeutics]…You have hundreds of people showing up and saying, ‘Try this, try that.’ So we look at lab assays, animal models, and so we understand which things should be prioritized for these very quick human trials that need to be done all over the world.”

The accelerator was launched March 10 with approximately $125 million in seed funding. Three days later Gates left Microsoft.

Not long before that, on January 23, Gates’s organization the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced it will fund three programs to develop COVID-19 vaccines. These are the advancing of DNA-vaccine candidates against MERS and Lassa fever, the development of a “‘molecular clamp’ platform” that “enables targeted and rapid vaccine production against multiple viral pathogens,” and the manufacture and Phase 1 clinical study of an mRNA vaccine against COVID.

“The programmes will leverage rapid response platforms already supported by CEPI as well as a new partnership. The aim is to advance nCoV-2019 vaccine candidates into clinical testing as quickly as possible,” according to a news release.

Then at 32:50 in the video, Anderson asked whether the blood serum from people who have recovered from a COVID infection can be used to treat others.

“I heard you mention that one possibility might be treatments from the serum, the blood serum of people who had had the disease and then recovered. So I guess they’re carrying antibodies,” said Anderson. “Talk a bit about that and how that could work and what it would take to accelerate that.”

[Note that Anderson did not ask Gates about, instead, just letting most of the population – aside from people most vulnerable to serious illness from the infection, who should be quarantined — be exposed to COVID-19 and as a result very likely recover and develop life-long immunity. As at least one expert has observed, “as much as ninety-nine percent of active cases [of COVID-19] in the general population are ‘mild’ and do not require specific medical treatment” to recover.]

“This has always been discussed as, ‘How could you pull that off?’” replied Gates. “So people who are recovered, it appears, have very effective antibodies in their blood. So you could go, transfuse them and only take out white cells, the immune cells.”

However, Gates continued, he and his colleagues have dismissed that possibility because it’s “fairly complicated – compared to a drug we can make in high volume, you know, the cost of taking it out and putting it back in probably doesn’t scale as well.”

Then a few seconds later, at 33:45, Gates drops another bomb:

We don’t want to have a lot of recovered people […] To be clear, we’re trying – through the shut-down in the United States – to not get to one percent of the population infected. We’re well below that today, but with exponentiation, you could get past that three million [people or approximately one percent of the U.S. population being infected with COVID-19 and the vast majority recovering]. I believe we will be able to avoid that with having this economic pain.”

It appears that rather than let the population be exposed to the virus and most develop antibodies that give them natural, long-lasting immunity to COVID-19, Gates and his colleagues far prefer to create a vast, hugely expensive, new system of manufacturing and selling billions of test kits, and in parallel very quickly developing and selling billions of antivirals and vaccines.

And then, when the virus comes back again a few months later and most of the population is unexposed and therefore vulnerable, selling billions more test kits and medical interventions.

Right after that, at 34:14, Gates talked about how he sees things rolling out from there.

Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person […] Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around. So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”

[Sometime on the afternoon of March 31 the last sentence of this quote was edited out of the official TED video of the interview. Fortunately, recordings of the complete interview are archived elsewhere.]

In the October 2019 Event 201 novel-corona virus-pandemic simulation co-sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum and a division of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a poll that was part of the simulation said that 65% of people in the U.S. would be eager to take a vaccine for COVID-19, “even if it’s experimental.”

This will be tremendously lucrative.

Vaccines are very big business: this Feb. 23 CNBC article, for example, describes the vaccine market as six times bigger than it was 20 years ago, at more than $35 billion annually today, and providing a $44 return for every $1 invested in the world’s 94 lowest-income countries.

Notably, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – which has an endowment of $52 billion – has given more than $2.4 billion to the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2000, according to a 2017 Politico article. (While over the same time frame countries have reduced their contributions to the world body, particularly after the 2008-2009 depression, and now account for less than one-quarter of the WHO’s budget.) The WHO is now coordinating approximately 50 groups around the world that are working on candidate vaccines against COVID-19.

The Politico article quotes a Geneva-based NGO representative as saying Gates is “treated liked a head of state, not only at the WHO, but also at the G20,” and that Gates is one of the most influential people in global health.

Meanwhile, officials around the world are doing their part to make sure everyone social distances, self-isolates and/or stays locked down.

For example, here’s Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Eileen de Villa, at her and Toronto Mayor John Tory’s March 30 press briefing:

“We find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic. We should expect some more people will get sick – and for some, sadly, will die. This is why it is so important to stay at home to reduce virus spread. And to protect front-line workers, healthcare workers and our essential workers, so they can continue to protect us. People shouldn’t have to die, people shouldn’t have to risk death taking care of us because others won’t practice social distancing or physical distancing.”

Yet look how close Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David Williams, is sitting to Haley Chazan, Senior Manager, Media Relations, for Christine Elliott, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health of Ontario.

This was on Friday, March 27, just before the start of that day’s daily press conference by Dr. Williams and Ontario’s Associate Medical Officer of Health Dr. Barbara Yaffe:

They were sitting two seats, or just a couple of feet, apart. A short time later Chazan got up and stood even closer to Dr. Williams for a little while:

Dr. Williams and Chazan do not live together. Rather, Dr. Williams very likely knows – just as Gates knows – that there is little if any reason to worry about being in close contact with other people unless you or they are vulnerable to developing a severe illness from COVID-19. He surely knows, also, that if you contract COVID-19 and you’re otherwise healthy you’ll very likely have few symptoms, if any, and recover quickly. And that this exposure in fact is beneficial because in the process you will develop antibodies to the virus and have natural, long-lasting immunity to it.

Yet in the March 27 press conference, just like all the others he has participated in during the COVID-19 crisis, Dr. Williams lectured the public about maintaining social distancing. He told people not to go outside on the coming weekend to enjoy the nice weather because, otherwise, they might walk past someone and not be two metres apart.

Dr. Williams is among the large cadre of powerful officials who’ve crashed the global economy by forcing tens of millions of small- and medium-sized businesses to close in the name of the need for forced, severe, social distancing and lock-downs.

They’ve shattered society, suspended most civil liberties and prohibited most activities and connections that keep people mentally and physically healthy. At the same time the officials have prioritized COVID-19 care over everything else and, as a result, severely limited billions of people’s access to life-saving healthcare services ranging from acquiring medication and blood transfusions to having organ transplants and cancer surgeries.

Rosemary Frei has an MSc in molecular biology from a faculty of medicine and was a freelance medical journalist for 22 years. She is now an independent investigative journalist in Canada. You can find her recent detailed investigative analysis of COVID here.

April 25, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | 2 Comments

Visions of the Future

Corbett • 04/24/2021

So what do the elitists have in store for humanity? You don’t need a crystal ball, you just need to read their own writings and watch their propaganda videos. Join James on this edition of The Corbett Report podcast as he takes a tour through the future to see the world that the globalists are seeking to create.

Watch on Archive / BitChute / Minds / Odysee / YouTube or Download the mp4

For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.

For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).

 

Documentation

Episode 070 – How to Predict the Future
Time Reference: 1:30

 

How to Predict the Future – #PropagandaWatch
Time Reference: 1:32

 

SPARS Pandemic, 2025-2028: A Futuristic Scenario for Public Health Risk Communicators
Time Reference: 3:16

 

“The SPARS Pandemic Of 2025: Echo Chambers And Vaccine Opposition” by Derrick Broze
Time Reference: 3:32

 

The “SPARS Pandemic Of 2025” Simulation & The Dangerous Bipartisan Vaccine Agenda
Time Reference: 5:31

 

After the Virus (Cognizant)
Time Reference: 11:49

 

After the Virus: The World of 2025 – #PropagandaWatch
Time Reference: 11:56

 

After the Virus: A Discussion Looking Back on the Next 5 Years (video)
Time Reference: 12:37

 

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
Time Reference: 15:36

 

17 Sustainable Development Goals
Time Reference: 17:05

 

UN Rolls Out Agenda 2030 “Global(ist) Goals” – #NewWorldNextWeek
Time Reference: 17:38

 

Time Editorial on Destination 2030
Time Reference: 25:58

 

Doughnut Cities
Time Reference: 27:21

 

The Vegan Dynasty
Time Reference: 27:31

 

“The Green Premium” by Bill Gates
Time Reference: 28:13

 

Building A Better Internet
Time Reference: 28:52

 

Episode 344 – Problem Reaction Solution: Internet Censorship Edition
Time Reference: 30:35

 

8 predictions for the world in 2030
Time Reference: 31:43

 

Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better
Time Reference: 32:17

 

Here’s how life could change in my city by the year 2030
Time Reference: 32:24

 

A Future Without Waste | Ida Auken
Time Reference: 32:50

 

Flashmobs For Freedom – #SolutionsWatch
Time Reference: 35:00

 

Report: The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2036
Time Reference: 35:04

 

Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future
Time Reference: 35:23

 

Global Trends 2040
Time Reference: 40:21

 

Paul Kingsnorth and… the CIA?
Time Reference: 40:55

 

Megacities on the Move
Time Reference: 43:53

 

Forum For The Future – friends and partners
Time Reference: 44:02

 

Four Visions of City Life in 2040 – Planned-opolis
Time Reference: 44:43

 

2045: A New Era for Humanity
Time Reference: 47:50

 

BBC: Human species ‘may split in two’
Time Reference: 54:15

 

April 25, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | 2 Comments