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The Next Step for the World Economic Forum

BY ROGER KOOPS | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | FEBRUARY 20, 2022

It has been obvious since early 2020 that there has been an organized cult outreach that has permeated the world as a whole. It’s possible that this formed out of a gigantic error, rooted in a sudden ignorance of cell biology and long experience of public health. It is also possible that a seasonal respiratory virus was deployed by some people as an opportunity to seize power for some other purpose.

Follow the money and influence trails and the latter conclusion is hard to dismiss.

The clues were there early. Even before the WHO declared a pandemic in March 2020 (at least several months behind the actual fact of a pandemic) and before any lockdowns, there were media blitzes talking about the “New Normal” and talk of the “Great Reset” (which was rebranded as “Build Back Better”).

Pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Astra-Zeneca were actively lobbying governments to buy their vaccines as early as February 2020, supposedly less than a month after the genetic sequence (or partial sequence) was made available by China.

As a person who spent his whole professional career in pharmaceutical and vaccine development, I found the whole concept of going from scratch to a ready-to-use vaccine in a few months simply preposterous.

Something did not add up.

I knew of the names with which everyone has become familiar. Bill Gates, Neil Ferguson, Jeremy Farrar, Anthony Fauci, and others had either been lobbying for or pursuing the lockdown strategies for many years. But still, the scope of the actions seemed too large to even be explained by those names alone.

So, the fundamental questions that I have been asking myself have been why and who? The “Why” seems to always come back to issues besides public health. Of course the “Who” had the obvious players such as the WHO, China, CDC, NIH/NIAID, and various governments but there seemed to be more behind it than that. These players have been connected to the “public health” aspect but that seemed to be only scratching the surface.

I am not an investigative journalist and I would never claim that role, but even I can do some simple internet searches and start to see patterns evolve. The searches that I have done have yielded some very interesting “coincidences.”

If I give you the names of the following people – Biden, Trudeau, Ardern, Merkel, Macron, Draghi, Morrison, Xi Jinping – what do you think that they have in common? Yes, they are all pampered and stumble over themselves, but that is also not the connection.

One can see very quickly that these names certainly connect to lockdown countries and individuals who have ignored their own laws and/or tried in some way to usurp them. But, there is more to it than that and I will give a hint by providing a link with each name.

They are all associated with the World Economic Forum (WEF), a “nonprofit” private organization started (in 1971) and headed by Klaus “You will own nothing and be happy” Schwab and his family. This is a private organization that has no official bearing with any world governance body, despite the implication of the name. It could just as well have been called the “Church of Schwabies.” The WEF was the origin of the “Great Reset” and I would guess that it was the origin of “Build Back Better” (since most of the above names have used that term recently).

If you think that the WEF membership ends with just leaders of countries, here are a few more names:

Allow me to introduce more of the WEF by giving a list of names for the Board of Trustees.

  • Al Gore, Former WP of the US
  • Mark Caney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action
  • T. Shanmugaratnam, Seminar Minister Singapore
  • Christine Lagarde, President, European Central Bank
  • Ngozi Okonja-Iweala, Director General, WTO
  • Kristalian Georggieva, Managing Director, IMF
  • Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Minister of Canada
  • Laurence Fink, CEO, BlackRock

You can see a cross section of political and economic leaders on the board. The leader of the organization, that is the leader of the Board, is still Klaus Schwab. He has built an impressive array of followers.

If you want to really see the extent of influence, go to the website and pick out the corporate name of your choice; there are many to choose from: Abbott Laboratories, Astra-Zeneca, Biogen, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, Serum Institute of India, BASF, Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Blackrock, CISCO, Dell, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Zoom, Yahoo, Amazon, Airbus, Boeing, Honda, Rakuten, Walmart, UPS, Coca-Cola, UBER, Bank of China. Bank of America. Deutsche Bank, State Bank of India, Royal Bank of Canada, Lloyds Banking, JP Morgan-Chase, Equifax, Goldman-Sachs, Hong Kong Exchanges, Bloomberg, VISA, New York Times, Ontario (Canada) Teacher’s Pension Plan

The extent of reach is huge even beyond the worldwide leader network. For example, we all know what Bill Gates has been doing with his wealth via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). But, the Wellcome Trust is equal to the task. Who is the Director of the Wellcome Trust? One named Jeremy Farrar, of the United Kingdom SAGE and lockdown fame – arguably the architect of the US-UK lockdowns in 2020 – is closely associated with WEF.

Concerning the reach that can occur, let me give some examples from the BMGF alone, and it comes from the time that I spent in 2020 reading their extensive funding list.

A few years ago, the BMGF awarded the Institute for Health Metric Evaluation (IHME) a ten-year, almost $280 million award. IHME (associated with the University of Washington in Seattle) was at the forefront of the computer modeling that was driving the lockdowns and the nonpharmaceutical Interventions during 2020. People have seen their name often in print or on MSNBC or CNN.

In 2019, IHME awarded the Editor of the Lancet (Dr. Richard Horton) a $100,000 award and described him as an “activist editor.” The Lancet, once considered one of the best medical journals, has been at the forefront of censoring opposing scientific viewpoints since 2020 and publishing “papers” that were not fit to be published. I never could understand what it meant to be an “activist” editor in a respected scientific/medical journal because, stupid me, I always thought that the first job of the editor was to be impartial. I guess I learned in 2020 how wrong I was.

Of course, the Lancet is also heavily funded from pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer (also a member of the WEF).

But, the BMGF reach goes far beyond just IHME and these connections have been quite recognizable. Here are some examples of the organizations and moneys received during 2020 alone broken down by areas.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grants 2020

Organization Name Amount USD
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health 20+ million
World Health Organization (WHO) 100+ million
Oregon Health Sciences Univ. 15+ million
CDC Foundation 3.5+ million
Imperial College of London 7+ million
Chinese CDC 2+ million
Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health 5+ million
Institute of Health Metric Evaluation (IHME) 28 million (part of a 10 yr/279 million USD grant)
Nigeria CDC 1.1 million
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Z. (Gmbh) 5+ million
Novartis 7+ million
Lumira Dx UK LTD 37+ million
Serum Institute of India 4+ million
Icosavac 10 million
Novavax 15 million
BBC 2 million
CNN 4 million
Guardian 3+ million
NPR 4 million
Financial Times LTD 0.5 million
National Newspaper Publishers Assoc. 0.75 million

Bill Gates has also invested heavily in Moderna and his investments have paid out nicely for him. The BMGF has also given close to $100 million to the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

The questions now have to be asked:

  • Is this some beginning of a controlled authoritarian society intertwined via the WEF?
  • Has the Covid panic been staged to set the stage? Please note, I am not a “Covid Denier” since the virus is real. But, has a normal seasonal respiratory virus been used as an excuse to activate the web?

The next questions, for those of us who at least pretend to live in “Democratic” societies, have to be:

  • Is this what you expected and/or want from the people you elect?
  • How many people knew of the “Associations” of the people that they voted for? (I certainly did not know of the associations until I did the searches but maybe I am just out of touch)

Can we anticipate their next moves? There may be some hints.

The Next Move 

Jeremy Farrar of The Wellcome Trust recently wrote an article for the WEF with the CEO of Novo Nordisk Foundation, Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen. It is a summary of a larger piece written for and published by the Boston Consulting Group.

In this article, they propose that the way to “fix” the problem of antibiotic resistant bacteria is via a subscription service. That is, you pay a fee and when you need an antibiotic, presumably an effective one will be available for you.

My guess is that they have the same philosophy for vaccines and that certainly seems to be the approach with Coronavirus. Keep paying for and taking boosters.

In view of this philosophy, the vaccine mandates make sense. Get society “addicted” to an intervention, effective or not, and then keep feeding them. This becomes especially effective if you can keep the fear going.

This approach is so shortsighted, from a scientific viewpoint, it astounds me. But, like much of recent history, I think science has little to do with it. The goal is not scientifically founded but control founded.

After the discovery of penicillin almost one century ago, there were scientists who warned that antibiotic usage should be considered very carefully in practice because evolutionary pressures would lead to antibiotic resistant species of bacteria. At that time, they were considered to be rogue scientists; after all, didn’t we suddenly have a miracle cure for many deadly problems?

From the time of discovery, it took over a decade before fermentation methods were developed to produce sufficient quantities of antibiotics to be practical. These methods allowed for the use of penicillin on the battlefield towards the end of WWII and undoubtedly saved many lives then and later in subsequent wars (Korea and Vietnam) by preventing serious infections resulting from wounds sustained during battle.

However, it did not take long before the medical establishment was handing out antibiotics like candy. I experienced this myself when I was a child in the 1960s. It seemed like every time we went to the doctor, no matter what the problem, I was given a series (not just one) of injections of penicillin. There were never any attempts to determine if I had a virus, bacteria, or even an allergy. The answer was: in with the needle. I cannot count how many times I was “jabbed” as a child.

It didn’t take long before resistant species started to appear. The result was that more and more money was pumped into R&D for antibiotics. When I was in graduate school during the 1980s, one sure way to get some NIH funding was to tie the research into the “antibiotic” search. Antibiotics became big business.

We now have several classes of antibiotics that are used for specific cases. We have Aminoglycosides (Streptomycin, Neomycin, etc.), Beta-Lactams Cephalosporins (four generations including Cefadroxil-G1, Cefaclor-G2, Cefotaxime-G3, Cefepime-G4 , Beta-Lactams Penicillins (including Ampicillin, Amoxicillin, and Penicillin), Other Beta-Lactams (Meropenem), Fluoroquinolones (Levofloxacin, Gemifloxicin, etc.), Macrolides (Azithromycin, Clarithromycin, etc.), Sulfonamides (Sulfisoxazole, etc.), Tetracyclines, and others such as Clindamycin and Vancomycin (typically reserved for resistant bacteria). All in all, physicians have over 50 different choices for antibiotics.

The most common place to encounter antibiotic resistant bacteria is in a hospital. Most people who get some sort of infection in the normal routine of life, like a sinus infection or skin infection, will not likely encounter an antibiotic resistant species.

Except there has been another source of the problem and that has been in the food supply. Antibiotics have become very popular with large scale meat production facilities of all types including beef, poultry, swine, and even fish. These include actual farms where the animals are raised as well as in the processing of the meat. The overuse of antibiotics in these industries has also produced resistant forms of bacteria.

For example, in attempts to limit the bacteria e. coli, common to mammalians, antibiotics have been used and this has resulted in some antibiotic resistant forms of e. coli. An infection via e. coli (antibiotic resistant or not) can be avoided by proper cooking and handling of meats. However, sometimes that does not happen and there are e. coli outbreaks (also from improperly washed vegetables that may use contaminated irrigation water).

For most healthy people, experiencing e. coli (either resistant or not) is only a passing discomfort that includes intestinal cramps, diarrhea, and other GI complaints. Depending on the amount of contamination, a person may suffer for a day or two or for several days.

But, with some people, it can be serious or deadly (such as in elderly people in poor health and young children). If that occurs, then the presence of an antibiotic resistant form can be a serious matter. Presence of a non-resistant form can be treated more readily.

A few years ago I had pneumonia; a relatively mild case. I was given a choice of in-patient treatment or out-patient and it was a no-brainer. If I wanted to make sure that my pneumonia could be handled by the normal course of antibiotics (I was given a quinolone), staying at home and away from the hospital was important. I knew that hospital-acquired pneumonia could be a much more serious situation. So, I stayed at home and easily recovered. That did not mean I was guaranteed getting a more serious resistant form in the hospital but I understood that the risk was much greater.

Producing more antibiotics and giving them on subscription to the users is not the answer. That will only lead to more resistant forms and there will be this continuing loop of antibiotic use. But, if the actual goal is societal addiction to antibiotics out of fear, just like addiction to universal Covid vaccines out of fear, then it makes sense.

Finding a few universal antibiotics that deal with the resistant forms is important and it is also important to use those sparingly and only as a last resort. In addition, better management of antibiotic use in our society would go a long way to attenuating the problem.

There is nothing particularly controversial about that observation. It was accepted by nearly every responsible health professional only two years ago. But we live now in different times of extreme experimentation, such as the deployment of world-wide lockdowns for a virus that had a highly focused impact, with catastrophic results for the world.

It was the WEF on March 21, 2020 that assured us “lockdowns can halt the spread of Covid-19.” Today that article, never pulled much less repudiated, stands as probably the most ridiculous and destructive suggestion and prediction of the 21st century. And yet, the WEF is still at it, suggesting that same year that at least lockdowns reduced carbon emissions.

We can easily predict that the WEF’s call for a universal and mandated subscription plan for antibiotics – pushed with the overt intention of shoring up financial capitalization of major drug manufacturers – will meet the same fate: poor health outcomes, more power to entrenched elites, and ever less liberty for the people.

Roger W. Koops holds a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Riverside as well as Master and Bachelor degrees from Western Washington University. He worked in the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Industry for over 25 years. Before retiring in 2017, he spent 12 years as a Consultant focused on Quality Assurance/Control and issues related to Regulatory Compliance. He has authored or co-authored several papers in the areas of pharmaceutical technology and chemistry.

February 20, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Fall of Canada, The Danger in the US

Understanding Martial Law

By Dr Naomi Wolf | February 19, 2022

The world has watched, in pain, as images of police violence from Ottawa, and of a bid for Canadian tyranny (that I would ever write those words!) are flashed around the world.

As usual, I hate to be Cassandra; but the chessboard ahead is all too clear. On Feb 12, 2022, I warned, during an appearance on Steve Bannon’s WarRoom, that we all must all now brace for a period during which the powers that now clearly seek to enslave our planet, and subdue our human species, will be broadcasting scenes of civil society mayhem, and of shocking violence against protesters.

I also predicted that there would be food shortages and other economic harms that would be blamed on the protesting truckers, and I warned too that people should print out their bank and any liquid asset records, as there would be cyberattacks on financial institutions and the freezing of accounts. All of that, of course, took place in the week that followed.

I recently received a kind note on social media thanking me for my bulletins about the near future as it helped people, the writer explained, to stave off shock and disorientation. I have often spoken about how tyrants rely on just these effects of shock and disorientation to “tenderize” a targeted population, so I will keep alerting you all to the near future, as unpleasant as that task can be.

So in this essay I wish to explain, especially to Canadians, what martial law really is, and how very dangerous it is, since many leaders there, especially Parliamentarians, appear to be in the treacherous “hangover” state of thinking that they still inhabit the old world that died when Justin Trudeau declared emergency law. I also wish to warn what happens historically at this moment in the decline of a formerly democratic nation, and what the murder of Canadian democracy — at least for now — means to the rest of the world.

Parliamentarians in Canada do not seem to understand that now their former colleague, Justin Trudeau, can arrest not just truckers, whose lawful protest has been declared illegal, but also the Parliamentarians themselves. This is, sadly, the next step in this kind of drama, historically. It is an extraordinarily dangerous sign that Parliament is not seated. When the Australian Parliament was suspended, by the time they reconvened, their powers had been dramatically curtailed. Tyrants seek to normalize the convening of Parliaments as “optional” or to suspend normal Parliamentary processes long enough to hollow out a legislative body’s deliberative powers, and to ensure that when and if a Parliament (or a Congress, for that matter) meets again, it will be merely a ceremonial assembly.

Parliamentarians in Canada also do not seem to understand that “dictator” is no longer rhetorical. A member of Parliament was shushed when he cried out this epithet, but the fact is that this is not a slur at this point. Justin Trudeau is by definition now in fact a dictator.

At this stage in history, you do not go back to a previous state of civil society order without arrests, though hopefully you can do so without civil war. Historically, when a would-be dictator has reached this point in the suspension of democratic processes and has sought this level of a power grab, his arrests of the opposition’s leaders, on trumped-up charges, come next. Also arrested at this point are labor leaders, outspoken members of the clergy, and independent journalists and editors.

Beware the word “incitement”; the next stage is an edict that casts criticism of what Trudeau is doing, as a crime, or an act of violence.

At this stage in history, too, the identity of the security forces are at issue. Who are these frighteningly gas-masked, uniformed, extremely violent men represented as police in the streets of Ottawa? For that matter, who are the masked, black-uniformed, extremely violent men represented as police beating the protesters in Paris, a week ago?

It is not easy to get police and military to enforce violence upon their own people, their own neighbors and community members. A real danger at this point in the overthrow of a democracy (for that is what happened in Canada in this past week) is the deployment of militias accountable not to the people but to the newly minted dictator. This happened in Italy when Mussolini sought control, in Germany when the National Socialists sought power, and so on. Remember that there are mercenary armies around the world, such as those run by Xe, formerly Blackwater, for hire; remember that the Southern border of the United States is wide open and many observers have reported a massive influx of young adults of military age traveling alone . With an open border in North America, a mercenary army can flow not just into Canada, if permitted by border guards directed by a would-be dictator; they can also flow into strategic points in the United States.

But Parliamentarians and heads of provinces in Canada should be aware that those violent entities in the streets of Ottawa may be loosed against them, as well as against other hapless citizens trying to make use of their Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, of course, guarantees freedom of speech and expression, peaceful protest, and assembly.  The Charter of Rights and Freedoms also guarantees Canadians the right to a democracy itself, so what Justin Trudeau has done is unlawful on its face. Canadians, any Canadians, according to the Charter, can take him to court for having suspended their democracy unlawfully.

There is also the criminal charge at stake. Justin Trudeau may well be guilty of an act of treason, which is defined in Canadian law as preparing to levy war against Canada, which is what I personally see in the Ottawa livestreams; and treason in Canadian law is also defined in other broad ways, including this: “(a) uses force or violence for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Canada or a province”;

“High treason

  • 46 (1) Every one commits high treason who, in Canada,
    • (a) kills or attempts to kill Her Majesty, or does her any bodily harm tending to death or destruction, maims or wounds her, or imprisons or restrains her;
    • (b) levies war against Canada or does any act preparatory thereto; or
    • (c) assists an enemy at war with Canada, or any armed forces against whom Canadian Forces are engaged in hostilities, whether or not a state of war exists between Canada and the country whose forces they are.
  • Marginal note: Treason

    (2) Every one commits treason who, in Canada,

    • (a) uses force or violence for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Canada or a province;
    • (b) without lawful authority, communicates or makes available to an agent of a state other than Canada, military or scientific information or any sketch, plan, model, article, note or document of a military or scientific character that he knows or ought to know may be used by that state for a purpose prejudicial to the safety or defence of Canada;
    • (c) conspires with any person to commit high treason or to do anything mentioned in paragraph (a);
    • (d) forms an intention to do anything that is high treason or that is mentioned in paragraph (a) and manifests that intention by an overt act; or
    • (e) conspires with any person to do anything mentioned in paragraph (b) or forms an intention to do anything mentioned in paragraph (b) and manifests that intention by an overt act.”

What I must share with sincere regret is that at this point in history, it is a situation of either “arrest or be arrested.” I am not advocating; simply describing a consistent pattern in history.

At this point in a power grab, either Parliamentarians and patriotic heads of the military peacefully arrest an out-of-control leader who has sought to overthrow a democracy, or else they must be aware that history shows that their own arrests may be nigh.

I also note that we down South of the Canadian border are far from safe. It is alarming that our own President has not spoken out against Justin Trudeau’s militaristic power grab, or against his violence against peaceful protesters using their lawfully protected freedoms of speech and assembly. It is even more alarming that the Biden administration is seeking to extend our own state of emergency.

The COVID-19 State of Emergency in the US was declared almost two years ago, at the start of the pandemic; now that the virus is “endemic”, against all science and reason the State of Emergency has been extended.

This situation – that the United States is operating under emergency powers – is the biggest underreported story of the century to date. Emergency law means that President Biden has powers he does not have under non-emergency law; specifically, the COVID-19 emergency powers acts, extended eight times already, give HHS powers that it did not have before. President Biden declared a year ago the:

“Continuation of the National Emergency Declared by Proc. No. 9994

Notice of President of the United States, dated Feb. 24, 2021, 86 F.R. 11599, provided:

[…] For this reason, the national emergency declared on March 13, 2020, and beginning March 1, 2020, must continue in effect beyond March 1, 2021. Therefore, in accordance with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)), I am continuing the national emergency declared in Proclamation 9994 concerning the COVID–19 pandemic.

This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.”

And the current declaration by President Biden, as of this past week, that the Emergency Act must be extended, is about an Act that is open-ended in duration.

What this declaration does, going around Congress, is to continue to allocate billions of dollars to HHS, which billions in effect flow to constituencies to create a massive economic incentive for stakeholders to keep the drama of the pandemic, including forcible masking, pressure for vaccine passports, the possibility of closing businesses again, and all the misery of the past two years, ongoing forever. A state of emergency also allows the President to update the next Emergency Powers act in the future, with the kinds of suspension of democratic processes that we saw further North.

We are in a highly precarious situation in the US, when it comes to the restoration of the rule of law.

Sorry for this bleak bulletin, but this is where we are in the world. What is happening in Ottawa and in Paris is two to three weeks ahead of what will be attempted against us in the United States.

Washington State’s Board of Health tried to pass a regulation to create a detention camp for those exposed to a contagious disease; fierce citizen pressure, including from readers of my site DailyClout.io, stopped that action.

Then New York State under emergency law tried to pass the same kind of regulation. They will not stop coming at us.

Boards of Health are exactly what are empowered to do whatever is deemed necessary by — Boards of Health, under the COVID-19 Emergency Powers Act. They are our Trojan horse. If we are to be brought to our knees here in the US currently, it will be via these bland-sounding agencies and the master agency, HHS.

Beware of the focus now moving to “mental health”, as empowering Boards of Health with detention powers, with a focus of policing mental health, means that your and my dissident commentary can lead to our being entangled by these hyper-empowered and now-lawless entities in the near future.

In every direction, the WEF has staked its alumni and speakers in national leadership roles, or, as in Boston, at the helm of local leadership; in every direction, they are cracking the totalitarian whip via “health” or in Canada, via the “emergency” of lawful peaceful protest.

The people’s mass noncompliance, the leadership of the opposition in taking on tyrants, and hopefully too the people’s quickly-mastered knowledge of their own Constitution, their own Charter of Rights, and their own legislative processes, alone can save us all.

The image of the great conflict of the 60s was of a young woman placing a daisy in a rifle barrel. The image of our great conflict, is that of scores of truckers on their knees, in the snow, praying, surrounded by unidentifiable standing thugs.

We have been here before. God have mercy on us; and as for us men and women, may we only remember in time that we are free people.

February 20, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , , | Leave a comment

Joe Biden Regime One Year On… America Is Back, With More Aggression Than Ever

Biden hasn’t started a war yet. But he’s still got three years to go and the first one fills the outlook with dread.

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 19, 2022

This weekend marks Joe Biden’s first year in office since his inauguration on January 20, 2021, as 46th president of the United States. In that time, it’s quite staggering how rapidly relations have deteriorated between the U.S. and Russia on the one hand and China on the other.

Right now, Europe is on the cusp of a war breaking out between a U.S.-backed regime in Ukraine and Russia. The volatile situation has the potential to drag the U.S. and other NATO powers into a proxy war with Russia, if not a full-blown international military conflict that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration.

Washington’s baleful relations with Beijing have been eclipsed by the recent stand-off with Russia. But make no mistake, U.S.-China tensions have also been heightened with the attendant risk of war. Much of the tension has been increased by the Biden administration’s provocations towards China over the breakaway island province of Taiwan. Under Biden, U.S. arms sales to Taiwan have burgeoned as have the large-scale maneuvers of American military forces near Chinese territory – in the name of “freedom of navigation”.

Let’s rewind to Biden’s inauguration on that cold, sunny day of January 20 last year. There was the usual jamboree that often accompanies a new Democrat president. We saw it when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were installed in the White House. Likewise, with Biden’s tenure, there were expectations of a more professional president, a more multilateral president, a more proficient president on foreign policy, and, dare we say, a more refined and law-abiding president. As usual, there was rosy rhetoric about how Biden would recover America’s international image that had been tarnished under his boorish predecessor, Donald Trump.

Biden declared over and over again that “America was back” as he took office. European leaders swooned at the prospect of again having an American ally who respected them. The expectation was that the “adults were back in control” of U.S. policy (whatever that’s supposed to mean) and that the feathers ruffled by Trump would be smoothed.

Strategic Culture Foundation can take pride in not having bought into any of the wishful thinking regarding a Biden administration. We predicted in several articles at an early stage of his presidency that international relations would take a serious turn for the worse under Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

Take, for example, this interview on November 23, 2020, with Christopher Black. It was headlined: “A Biden Administration Will Be Dominated by More U.S. Aggression”. It predicted that the world “would see more intensified militarism and aggression under a Joe Biden presidency than under the outgoing Trump administration.”

Another observation in the same interview was “the Biden administration will be bent on war… in particular against Russia and China… we can expect U.S. provocations to accelerate.”

See also our weekly editorial on January 22, 2021, entitled: “President Biden’s New Administration, Old Aggression”.

In a subsequent column, on January 28, 2021, Strategic Culture Foundation highlighted how the Biden administration would ramp up efforts to sabotage the Nord Stream 2 gas project between Russia and the European Union. This unspoken objective has come to a head in the present crisis over Ukraine. It is driving the geopolitical dynamics behind the conflict between the U.S. and Russia, as explained in a later SCF article published on June 8, 2021, – some five months before the crisis erupted in Western media coverage.

Virtually every U.S. president has gone to war or overseen some form of criminal foreign aggression. Barack Obama – the “hope and change president” went on to unleash American wars and bombing in seven countries. Obama’s vice president was Joe Biden who owns some of the past criminality. Donald Trump didn’t start any new American wars but he too was up to his neck in waging aggression abroad.

Republican and Democrat presidents are all the same. They are tools of U.S. imperialism.

So far, Biden hasn’t actually started a new war. He has continued some of the existing militarism. And if he keeps going in the same mode, a war against either Russia or China or both is a “distinct possibility” to use Biden’s words this week about an alleged Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Underpinning the intensified aggression under Biden is the objective historic condition of failing U.S. imperial power. This has nothing to do with whether the president is Democrat or Republican. From the early post-Cold War years we had the Wolfowitz Doctrine, coined under a Republican president as it happened, that set out the objective of staving off U.S. imperial decline and in particular staving off the challenge to U.S. power from a resurgent Russia or an ascendant China.

Under prevailing U.S. establishment politics and the national security state, the Cold War policy against Russia and China would inevitably continue. American power relies fundamentally and intrinsically on confrontation with perceived rivals who must be treated as enemies to be subjugated.

It just so happens that Biden and his administration are more in tune with the U.S. political establishment and the national security state than, for example, the maverick egomaniac Trump. That’s why there has been a more determined and discernible deterioration in U.S. relations with Russia and China over the last year.

Biden hasn’t started a war yet. But he’s still got three years to go and the first one fills the outlook with dread.

One final note: Strategic Culture Foundation has come under fire from the U.S. authorities who have banned America-based writers from publishing articles in our journal. The U.S. government accuses SCF of being an agent of Russian foreign intelligence. See this recent hit-job on ABC news which cites some of our headlines without providing links to the articles. SCF is not an agent of the Russian government. It is an independent journalistic forum for analysis and comment. The prescience of our articles cited above on exposing the criminality of U.S. imperial power would suggest that is the real reason why SCF is being targeted with American slander and sanctions.

February 20, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

How a false hydroxychloroquine narrative was created, and more

Meryl Nass, MD
Alliance for Human Research Protection | June 28, 2020

Below, Dr. Meryl Nass reviews a long list of corrupt practices that undermine the integrity of medical science and the practice of medicine during the current  medical crisis. The coronavirus crisis has been made significantly worse by stakeholders who are preventing doctors from prescribing for their patients, existing, safe and effective medicines, because the stakeholders are invested  on garnering projected future profits from not-yet-developed vaccines and “countermeasures” specifically developed against  COVID-19.

The stakeholders who influence and issue medical practice guidelines, include public health officials, global public health institutions, government advisory committees, and clinical trialists who design trials to provide commercially beneficial results. Editors of prestigious high impact, medical journals contribute to the corruption of medicine by publishing fraudulent studies, and reports of clinical trials that were designed to cause foreseeable deaths, The focus of Dr. Nass’ J’Accuse post are clinical trials that deliberately subjected some patients to toxic doses of Hydroxychloroquine. [Dr. Nass is a longtime member of the AHRP Board of Directors].

These collaborators engaged in an orchestrated effort to prevent physicians from utilizing an existing, off-patent, cheap and affordable drug, that thousands of clinicians attest to its therapeutic benefit.

  • The problem with Hydroxychloroquine, a drug with a 70-year safety track record, is that there is no profit to be made from this cheap, off-patent drug!

*****************

It is remarkable that a series of events taking place over the past 3 months produced a unified message about hydroxychloroquine, and produced similar policies about the drug in the US, Canada, Australia, NZ and western Europe. The message is that generic, inexpensive hydroxychloroquine is dangerous and should not be used to treat a potentially fatal disease, Covid-19, for which there are no (other) reliable treatments.

Were these acts carefully orchestrated? You decide.

Might these events have been planned to keep the pandemic going? To sell expensive drugs and vaccines to a captive population? Could these acts result in prolonged economic and social hardship, eventually transferring wealth from the middle class to the very rich? Are these events evidence of a conspiracy?

Here is a list of what happened, in no special order. Please help add to this list if you know of additional acts I should include. This will be a living document. I have penned this as if it is the “to do” list of items to be carried out by those who pull the strings. The items on the list have already been carried out. One wonders what else might be on their list, yet to be carried out, for this pandemic.

1. You stop doctors from using the drug in ways it is most likely to be effective (in outpatients at onset of illness). You prohibit use outside of situations you can control.

Situations that were controlled to show no benefit included 3 large, randomized, multi-center clinical trials (Recovery, Solidarity and REMAP-Covid), which are generally believed to yield the most reliable evidence. However, each of them used excessive doses that were known to be toxic; see my previous articles here and here.

2.  You prevent or limit use in outpatients by controlling the supply of the drug, using different methods in different countries and states. In NY state, by order of the governor, hydroxychloroquine could only be prescribed for hospitalized patients.  France has issued a series of different regulations to limit prescribers from using it.  France also changed the drugs’ status from over-the-counter to a drug requiring a prescription.

3.  You play up the danger of the drug, emphasizing side effects that are very rare when the drug is used correctly. You make sure everyone has heard about the man who died after consuming hydroxychloroquine in the form of fish tank cleaner.

4.  You limit clinical trials to hospitalized patients, instead of testing the drug in outpatients, early in the illness, when it is predicted to be most effective.

5.  You design clinical trials to give much too high a dose, ensuring the drug will cause harm in some subjects, sufficient to mask any possible beneficial effect. You make sure that dozens of trials in dozens of countries around the world use these dangerous doses.

6.  You design clinical trials to collect almost no safety data, so any cause of death due to drug toxicity will be attributed to the disease instead of the drug.

7.  You issue rules for use of the drug based on the results of the unethical, overdosing Recovery study.

8.  You publish, in the world’s most-read medical journal, the Lancet, an observational study from a huge worldwide database that says use of chloroquine drugs caused significantly increased mortality. You make sure that all major media report on this result. Then 3 European countries announce they will not allow doctors to prescribe the drug. And Sanofi announces it will no longer supply the drug for use with Covid, and will halt its own clinical trials, based on a fabricated study.

9.  Even after hundreds of people renounce this observational study due to easily identified fabrications–which, as James Todaro, MD, wrote was a “study out of thin air“–the Lancet held firm for two weeks, serving to muddy the waters about the trial, until finally 3 of its 4 coauthors (but not the journal) retracted the study. You make sure few media report that the data were fabricated and the “study” a fraud. You let people believe the original story: that hydroxychloroquine routinely kills.

10.  You ensure federal agencies like FDA and CDC hew to your desired policies. For example, FDA advised use only in hospitalized patients (too late) or in clinical trials (which are limited, are difficult to enroll in, or use excessive doses). As of mid June, FDA now advises patients and doctors to only use the drug in a clinical trial!

Another example:  you have FDA make unsubstantiated and false claims, such as: “Hospitalized patients were likely to have greater prospect of benefit (compared to ambulatory patients with mild illness)” and claim the chloroquine drugs have a slow onset of action. If that were really true, they would not be used for acute attacks of malaria or in critically ill patients with Covid. (Disclosure: I once dosed myself with chloroquine for an acute attack of P. vivax malaria, and it worked very fast.). Providing no other treatment advice, CDC refers clinicians to the NIH guidelines, discussed below.

11.  You make sure to avoid funding/encouraging clinical trials that test drug combinations like hydroxychloroquine with zinc, with azithromycin, or with both, although there is ample clinical evidence that such combinations provide a cumulative benefit to patients.

12.  You have federal and UN agencies make false, illogical claims based on models rather than human data. For example, you have the FDA state on June 15 that the dose required to treat Covid is so high it is toxic, after the Recovery and Solidarity trials have been exposed for toxic dosing. This scientific double-speak gives some legal cover to the clinical trials that overdosed their patients.

According to Denise Hinton, RN, the FDA’s Chief Scientist, or a clumsy FDA wordsmith:

”Under the assumption that in vivo cellular accumulation is similar to that from the in vitro cell-based assays, the calculated free lung concentrations that would result from the EUA suggested dosing regimens are well below the in vitro EC50/EC90 values, making the antiviral effect against SARS-CoV-2 not likely achievable with the dosing regimens recommended in the EUA. The substantial increase in dosing that would be needed to increase the likelihood of an antiviral effect would not be acceptable due to toxicity concerns.”

13. You have a WHO report claim toxic doses are needed. This of course is nonsense since

a) CDC researchers showed strong effects against SARS-1 at safely achievable concentrations,

b) the drug at normal doses is being tested in over 30 different medical conditions (see clinicaltrials.gov), and

c) reports from many different countries say that the drug is effective for Covid-19 at normal doses, while

a high dose chloroquine treatment arm was halted in Brazil and a preprint of the study was posted April 11, after finding the toxic effects were causing ventricular arrhythmias and deaths.

  • Toxicity was noted after only 3 days of treatment, during which 3.6 grams of chloroquine were administered. But the Solidarity (3.2 grams of hydroxychloroquine in 3 days), Recovery (3.6 grams  of hydroxychloroquine in 3 days) and REMAP-Covid trials (3.6 grams of hydroxychloroquine in 3 days) continued overdoing patients until June, despite Brazil’s evidence of deaths by overdose.
  • Tellingly, JAMA editor Gordon Rubenfeld wrote about the Brazilian study, “if you are prescribing HCQ after these JAMA results, do yourself and your defense lawyer a favor. Document in your medical record that you informed the patient of the potential risks of HCQ including sudden death and its benefits (???).” 

14.  You create an NIH Guideline committee for Covid treatment recommendations, in which 16 members have or had financial entanglements with Gilead, maker of Remdesivir. The members were appointed by the CoChairs. Two of the three CoChairs are themselves financially entangled with Gilead.  Are you surprised that their guidelines recommend specifically against the use of hydroxychloroquine and in favor of Remdesivir, and that they deem this the new “standard of care”?

15.  You frighten doctors so they don’t prescribe hydroxychloroquine, if prescribing it is even allowed in their jurisdiction, because prescribing outside the “standard of care” leaves them open to malpractice lawsuits.  You further tell them (through the FDA) they need to monitor a variety of lab parameters and EKG when using the drug, although this was never advised before, which makes it very difficult to use the drug in outpatients. You have the European Medicines Agency issue similar warnings.

16.  You manage to control the conduct of most trials around the world by designing the WHO-managed Solidarity trials, currently conducted in 35 countries. WHO halted hydroxychloroquine clinical trials around the world, twice.

The first time, May 25, WHO claimed it was in response to the (fraudulent) Lancet study.

The second time, June 17, WHO claimed the stop was in response to the Recovery trial results.

Recovery used highly toxic doses of hydroxychloroquine in over 1500 patients, of whom 396 died.

You stop the trial before the data safety monitoring board has looked at your data, a move that is unlikely to be consistent with trial protocol. WHO’s trial in over 400 hospitals overdosed patients with 2.0 g hydroxychloroquine in the first 24 hours.  

WHO’s trial in over 400 hospitals was unlikely to provide useful results, as it too overdosed patients with hydroxychloroquine.  The trial was halted days after the toxic doses were exposed.

17.  You have the WHO pressure governments to stop doctors prescribing hydroxychloroquine.

18.  You have the WHO pressure professional societies to stop doctors prescribing hydroxychloroquine.

19.  You make sure that the most-consulted medical encyclopedia, UptoDate, provides bad guidance to physicians, advising them to restrict hydroxychloroquine to only patients in clinical trials, citing the above sources of information.

Anthony Fauci, MD

20.  You have the head of the Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Tony Fauci, insist the drug cannot be used in the absence of strong evidence… while he insisted exactly the opposite in the case of the MERS coronavirus outbreak several years ago, when he recommended an untested drug combination for use… which had been developed for that purpose by his agency.

And while he was bemoaning the lack of evidence, he was refusing to pay for trials to study hydroxychloroquine. And he was changing the goalposts on the Remdesivir trial, not once but twice, to make Remdesivir show just a tiny bit of benefit, but no mortality benefit. And don’t forget, Fauci was thrilled to sponsor a trial of a Covid vaccine in humans before there was any data from animal trials. So much for requiring high quality evidence before risking use of drugs and vaccines in humans!

21.  You convince the public that the crisis will be long-lasting. You have the 2nd richest man in the world, and biggest funder of the WHO, Bill Gates, keep repeating to the media megaphone that we cannot go back to normal until there is a vaccine. (The Gates Foundation helped design the WHO clinical trials, and Gates is heavily invested in pharmaceuticals and vaccines.)

Bill Gates
  1. You have CDC (with help from FDA) prevent the purchase of coronavirus test kits from Germany, China, WHO, etc, and fail to produce a valid test kit themselves. The result was that during January and February, US cases could not be reliably identified, and for several months thereafter insufficient and unreliable test kits made it impossible to track the epidemic and stop the spread.
  1. You have trusted medical spokesmen lie to the public about the pandemic’s severity, so precautions weren’t taken when they might have been more effective and less long-lasting. Congress was repeatedly briefed about the pandemic in January and February, which scared several Congress members enough that they sold off large amounts of stock, risking insider trading charges. Senator Burr is one of them, currently under investigation for major stock sales on February 13.

Yet Dr. Fauci told USA Today on February 17 that Americans should worry more about the flu than about coronavirus, the danger of which was “just miniscule.” Then on February 28, Drs. Fauci and Robert Redfield (CDC Director) wrote in the New England Journal :

“… the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

  1. You destroy the reputation of respected physicians who stand in your way. Professor Didier Raoult and his team in Marseille have used hydroxychloroquine on over 4,000 patients, reporting a mortality rate of about 0.8%. (The mortality rate of patients given hydroxychloroquine in the Recovery trial was 25.7%.) Raoult is very famous for discovering over 100 different microorganisms, and finding the long-sought cause of Whipple’s Disease. With this reputation, Raoult apparently thought he could treat patients as he saw fit, which he has done, under great duress.  Raoult was featured in a New York Times Magazine article, with his photo on the cover, May 12, 2020. After describing his accomplishments, the Times very unfavorably discussed his personality, producing a detailed hit piece. He is now considered an unreliable crank in the US.
  1. You have social media platforms ban content that does not agree with the desired narrative. As YouTube CEO and ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin, Susan Wojcicki said,

“YouTube will ban any content containing medical advice that contradicts World Health Organisation (WHO) coronavirus recommendations. Anything that would go against World Health Organisation recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”

  1. When your clinical trials are criticized for overdosing patients, you have Oxford-affiliated, Wellcome Trust-supported scientists at Mahidol University publish papers (a literature review with modeling and a modeling study) purporting to show that the doses used were not toxic. You develop a new method to measure hydroxychloroquine in a handful of Recovery patients who were not poisoned. However, there are 2 problems you forgot with this approach:
  • The Brazilian data, including 16 deaths, extensive clinical information and documented ventricular arrhythmias, are much more valuable than theoretical models of what might be happening in the body.
  • Either the drug is too toxic to use for a life-threatening disease, or even extremely high doses are safe. You can’t have it both ways.

Oxford is the institution running the Recovery trial, and invented a Covid vaccine that already has 400 million doses on order. The Wellcome Trust funded the Recovery trial.

  1. You change your trial’s primary outcome measures after the trials have started, in order to prevent detection of drug-induced deaths (Recovery) or to make your drug appear to have efficacy (NIAID Remdesivir trial). 
  1. You stop manufacturers from supplying the drug. Shortly after the fraudulent Lancet paper came out, Sanofi announced it would no longer supply the drug for use with Covid, and would halt its two hydroxychloroquine clinical trials. One of the cancelled Sanofi trials was expected to test 210 outpatients early in the course of disease. The trial remains suspended at the time of writing, while the Lancet paper was retracted 13 days after publication.
  2. You surely don’t want a trial of hydroxychloroquine treatment early in the disease, since it might show an excellent effect.

February 20, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

THE AFTERMATH…

Computing Forever | February 14, 2022

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February 20, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , | Leave a comment

The War Party Wants a New Cold War, and the Money That Comes with It

By Ryan McMaken | Mises Wire | February 12, 2022

In perhaps the most predictable column of the year, the Wall Street Journal this week featured a column by Walter Russell Mead declaring it’s “Time to Increase Defense Spending.”

Using the Beijing Olympics and the potential Ukraine war to push for funneling ever more taxpayer dollars into military spending, Mead outlines how military spending ought to be raised to match the sort of spending not seen since the hot days of the Cold War.

Mead claims that “[t]he world has changed, and American policy must change with it.” The presumption here is that the status quo is one of declining military spending, in which Americans have embraced some sort of isolationist foreign policy. But the reality doesn’t reflect that claim at all. The status quo is really one of very high levels of military spending, and even outright growth in most years. This sort of gaslighting by military hawks is right up there with left-wing attempts to portray the modern economy as one of unregulated laissez-faire.

Rather, according to estimates from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, military spending is set to reach a post–World War II high in 2022, rising to more than $1.1 trillion. That includes $770 billion spent on the Pentagon plus nuclear arms and related spending. Also included is current spending on veterans. Keeping veteran spending apart from defense spending is a convenient and sneaky political fiction, but veteran spending is just deferred spending for past active-duty members—necessary to attract and retain personnel. And finally, we have the “defense” portion of the interest of the debt, estimated to be about 20 percent of total interest spending. Taking all this together, we find military spending has increased thirteen years out of the last twenty and is now at or near the highest levels of spending seen since the Second World War.

This, not surprisingly, is not enough for Mead, who would like to see military spending much closer to the Cold War average of 7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), up from today’s spending of a little less than 4 percent. To get this average back up would require at least an extra $300 billion in spending, and possibly even spending levels not seen since the bad old days of the Vietnam War. In those days, of course, the US was busy spending enormous amounts of taxpayer wealth on a losing war that cost tens of thousands of American lives. The spending was so enormous that the US regime was driven to breaking the dollar’s last link to gold and subjecting ordinary Americans to years of price controls, inflation, and other forms of economic crisis.

But none of that will dissuade hawks like Mead, who pound the drum incessantly for more military spending. Note also that Mead uses the “spending as a percentage of GDP” metric, which is a favorite metric of military hawks. They use this metric because as the US economy has become more productive, wealthy, and generally larger, the US has been able to maintain sky-high military spending levels without growing the amount of spending in relation to GDP. The use of this metric allows hawks to create the false impression that military spending is somehow going down and that the US is being taken over by peaceniks. In reality, spending levels remain very high—it’s just that the larger economy has been robust.

Yet even if we use this metric—and then compare it to those of other states with large militaries—we find that Mead’s narrative doesn’t quite add up. These numbers in no way suggest that the US regime is being eclipsed by rivals in terms of military spending.

For example, according to the World Bank, China—with a GDP comparable to that of the US—has military spending amounting to about 1.7 percent of GDP (as of 2020). Meanwhile, the total was at 3.7 percent of GDP in the United States. Russian military spending rose to 4.2 percent of GDP in 2020, but that’s based on a GDP total that’s a small fraction of the US’s GDP. Specifically, the Russian economy is less than one-tenth the size of the US economy.

Thus, when we look at actual military spending, we find the disconnect to be quite clear.

According to the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, in 2020 total Chinese military spending totaled approximately $245 billion in 2019 dollars. In Russia, the total was $66 billion. In the US, the total—which in the SIPRI database excludes veteran spending and interest—amounted to $766 billion in 2020.

In other words, total military spending by these presumed rivals amounts to mere fractions of total spending in the US. Moreover, as China scholar Michael Beckley has noted, the US benefits from preexisting military capital—think military know-how and productive capability—built up over decades. Even if the US and China (or Russia) were spending comparable amounts on military capability right now, this would not demonstrate any sort of actual military superiority in real terms.

But, as usual, Mead’s strategy is to claim that financial prudence is in fact imprudence with the usual refrain of “you can’t afford to not spend boatloads of extra money!” This claim is premised on the new domino theory being offered by anti-Russia hawks today. This theory posits that if the US does not start wars with every country that has pushed back against US hegemony—i.e., Iran or Russia—then China will see this “weakness” and start conquering countless nations within its own periphery.

The old cold warriors were telling us this back in 1965 also, insisting that a loss in Vietnam would place all the world under the Communist boot. Needless to say, that didn’t happen, and it turned out Vietnam had nothing to do with American national security.

But none of this will convince the usual hawks—for example, the Heritage Foundation—that there’s never enough military spending.

Prudence, however, suggests the US should be going in the opposite direction. At its most belligerent, the US regime should be adopting a doctrine of restraint—focusing on naval defense and cutting back troop deployments—while changing its nuclear posture to one that is less costly and more defensive.

The ideal solution is far more radically anti-interventionist than that, but a good start would be eliminating hundreds of nuclear warheads and freezing military spending indefinitely. After all, the US’s deterrent second-strike capability does not at all depend on keeping an arsenal of thousands of warheads, as many hawks insist. And geography today continues to favor US conventional defense, just as it always has.

Unfortunately, we’re a long way from a change toward much more sane policy, but at the very least we must reject the latest opportunistic calls for a new cold war and trillions more taxpayer dollars burned in the name of “defense.”

February 19, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Climate Lockdown – Beta version

The continued infantilisation of the population

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | February 19, 2022

Today, in the UK we are experiencing a storm, storm Eunice. Apologies to my American friends but I can’t stand the naming of storms, a recent phenomenon, which we have borrowed from the US. This personification of weather, makes it more scary, as if we have made a weather God angry and it is punishing us.

Anyway back to the storm. This was a powerful storm with winds up to 80-100mph and was given a red weather warning.

It is being called the worst storm in decades and No 10 called a COBRA meeting due to there being a risk to life and limb.

There will be a lot of damage and hopefully nobody will die but empirically and speaking to others around the country, this is no different to storms we get once every year or so. Even if it turns out that it is far worse, the points I am about to make still stand.

In previous years, if there was a storm, we all heard about it on the radio and arranged our lives accordingly. If I was going for a clifftop stroll, I would cancel it. If a tree surgeon had a tree to cut down, they would postpone it. The rest of life would go on as normal.

However, this time was noticeably different. The Covid hysteria that has been present over the last two years seeped into this emergency. The Covid induced anxiety floating around had not found a place to settle recently, as the population grew weary and they were told to start living with the virus. But when you reduce people down to shrivelling wrecks, that anxiety doesn’t dissipate, like a virus it seeks another host. And this time it infected people’s perception of a storm.

It is sensible to close exposed bridges, for example, I am not saying to ignore the storm completely but life is full of risks and we learn to live with them. A storm is a particularly small risk in the scheme of things.

Risks are becoming too much for people and micro-managing bureaucrats are seeking more and more areas of our lives in which to meddle. So today, in certain areas of the country, all trains were cancelled, most schools were closed, people were advised to work from home and the population in general was advised not to leave their homes unless absolutely essential. And the scariest part of it all was not the storm, it was that a lot of people complied.

You would expect this kind of response from a hurricane but not a storm.

Anecdotally, people said “actually the storm wasn’t as bad as I thought but I’m staying at home because we’ve been told to”. In the schools that were open, some parents had trouble getting their petrified children into the classroom from fear of dying. Other parents had second thoughts and took their children home just after dropping them off.

Yesterday, even before the storm started, schools began closing. Like dominoes, once one closed, a chain reaction happened with parents messaging their schools saying “why aren’t you closing and keeping my children safe”. Once this started, other schools started closing to avoid this kind of moral dilemma. As with Covid, once the emotive topic of dying is raised (however small that chance may be), all debate is off and the irrationally loud voices win.

So once again, children’s lives have been disrupted for no reason. And not just educationally disrupted. For some, they have been sitting at home, terror-stricken that they or one of their friends or family members might die in the storm.

There have been rumours and theories for a while that the next lockdowns will be due to climate change.

And Covid lockdowns were shown to have, understandably, helped the environment.

But you don’t need a conspiracy to bring in climate lockdowns, you just need a highly malleable and terrified population, ready to jump whenever they are told. Ready to stay indoors for their safety and the greater good. Unable to rationally discuss the pros and cons of any micromanagement of their lives.

The longer this goes on and the more interference people have from bureaucratic micro-mangers in bullshit jobs, the less people will be able to survive without being told what to do.

Let’s hope, this beta version climate lockdown fails and we go back to being told there’s a storm tomorrow and that’s it. Otherwise, whatever emergency comes next, people will blindly do as they are told and vilify those who question the wisdom of those decisions. And as we have seen with virus lockdowns, those decisions cause far more harms than good. Even if not in the short term, certainly in the long term.

February 19, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Was the Felicity Ace Fire caused by Electric Vehicle Batteries?

By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | February 18, 2022

What made the Felicity Ace cargo so flammable? “It was not clear whether the [EV] batteries first sparked the fire”.

Felicity Ace Car Carrier Continues to Burn in Mid-Atlantic 

A salvage team from SMIT is en route to the retreive the abandoned M/V Felicity Ace, which continues to burn near the Azores.

BERLIN/LISBON, Feb 18 (Reuters) – A ship carrying around 4,000 vehicles, including Porsches, Audis and Bentleys, that caught fire near the coast of the Azores will be towed to another European country or the Bahamas, the captain of the nearest port told Reuters on Friday.

Lithium-ion batteries in the electric cars on board the vehicle carrier Felicity Ace have caught fire and the blaze requires specialist equipment to extinguish, captain Joao Mendes Cabecas of the port of Hortas said.

It was not clear whether the batteries first sparked the fire.

“The ship is burning from one end to the other… everything is on fire about five meters above the water line,” Cabecas said. … Read more

We may never know if an EV started the fire, but even if the EVs didn’t start the fire, they are certainly making it a lot more difficult to extinguish the fire. EV battery fires are chemically comparable to thermite fires, hot enough to melt steel, so there may not be much left to analyse by the time the ship fire finally burns itself out.

This disaster could have real consequences for the EV market, both transporting EVs by sea or land, and consumer desire for a product which is potentially such a severe fire hazard. I would not be surprised if in the future, once insurers understand the hazard, owning an EV could make your home uninsurable, unless you can prove it is parked well away from your house.

At the very least insurers may start demanding strict end of use dates on the batteries. The hazard likely grows as the battery ages, though if the Felicity Ace fire was started by a new battery, you can never say the hazard is zero.

The following video demonstrates how ferocious EV fires can be in a home environment – and this fire is just an electric scooter. Automobile batteries are far larger. How much would be left of your house, how much time would you have to get to safety, if an electric automobile caught fire in a built in garage or car port? EV fires are not constrained by lack of oxygen. The battery itself contains everything necessary to initiate and sustain a deadly, white hot fire which is almost impossible to extinguish.

February 19, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

How the Charter of Rights let Canada down

BY YUAN YI ZHU | UNHERD | FEBRUARY 18, 2022

If Canada has a sacred cow, akin to the NHS in the UK, it is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms — a constitutional bill of rights added to our constitution in 1982. As a national symbol, it is more popular than the national flag, the national anthem, and even hockey. Many Canadians can barely imagine that other, more benighted, lands might also have put some fundamental rights down in writing.

This would normally be harmless enough. Canada is after all a young nation, and nations need symbols. But the Charter, though full of admirable sentiments, has also infantilised Canadian politics and public discourse. A vague document full of broad promises coupled with important qualifications (rights are subject to limits as “can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society”) and exceptions (judicial interpretations of rights may be subject to legislative override under s. 33, the notwithstanding clause), it has enabled generations of Canadian judges to act as supreme legislators by interpreting it in all sorts of creative ways, striking down disfavoured legislation at a whim.

Only a few months ago, for instance, a Canadian court ruled that it was unconstitutional to require prospective schoolteachers to pass a basic maths test — the Charter, you see, forbids this, because equality rights something-something. No policy of any importance is implemented without the courts, and usually the Supreme Court of Canada, chiming in, which suits politicians admirably because they can fob awkward issues to the judges in that way.

This is where the Canadian trucker protests come in. Earlier this week, the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act to stop these protests, which have now lasted for almost two months. The Emergencies Act, which replaced the bluntly but honestly named War Measures Act in 1988, gives the power to the Governor-in-Council (in practice the Cabinet) to declare an emergency. Once an emergency is declared, the government can impose a host of drastic measures by executive fiat, subject to parliamentary review within seven days.

The measures the Canadian government have imposed make for uneasy reading, whatever your view on the trucker protests. They not only make it illegal to participate in or travel to the protests, but also to give money to any protester or to provide them with car insurance — while making it legal to freeze their bank accounts without a court order. In effect it makes it impossible for many of them to earn their livelihoods, or simply to live (Canada being such a large country, large parts of it are unliveable without an automobile, and driving legally requires car insurance). They also give the government the power to force tow truck drivers to provide their services to the government. Breach of these regulations carries a maximum of five years’ imprisonment.

The international reaction was distinctly queasy. Even outlets such as the New York Times, hardly the natural ally of protesters against Covid restrictions, saw those measures for what they were: a “temporary suspension of civil liberties”. But the Times quickly backed down after being bombarded with tweets by Canadian journalists and politicians angry with that description.

Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations who was once one of Canada’s leading politicians, tweeted out the following representative gem:

The Preamble to the Emergencies Act states clearly that it is subject to the Charter of Rights. Contrary to what the NY Times has stated, civil liberties have not been suspended in Canada. Get a grip. – BOB RAE, TWITTER

But by any definition, freezing someone’s assets without due process is a violation of civil liberties. Likewise depriving people of their livelihoods or taking away people’s right to refuse to perform work for the government. You may think that these violations are justified, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are violations.

But Canadians’ grasp of the constitutional facts have been so atrophied by decades of unthinking Charter worship that many are no longer able to think about rights independently of it, to see that rights do not begin and end with a piece of paper with an impressive title. Just because the emergency decrees pay lip service to the Charter doesn’t make them any less rights-violating.

Ultimately, the best protection for rights is not any particular piece of legislation, but a robust societal consensus in their favour, as well as active thinking and discussion about their parameters. Through the Charter, Canadians have gained a constitutional guarantee for certain rights formulated in abstract terms, but may have lost much of the cultural wherewithal necessary to sustain a broader culture of rights. Would-be constitutional tinkerers in the United Kingdom and elsewhere might want to take note.

February 19, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Russian-led military bloc could send peacekeepers to Ukraine – top general

By Layla Guest | RT | February 19, 2022

With fears of an all-out military conflict in Ukraine’s war-torn Donbass region, troops from a major Moscow-led military faction could be sent on a mission to stabilize the tense situation if Kiev and the international community agree on the plan, the bloc’s secretary general has said.

Speaking as part of an exclusive interview to Reuters, published on Saturday, Stanislav Zas weighed in on which measures the Collective Security Treaty Organization could take if given the go-ahead.

“We have colossal potential in our hands. We all understand that we need to be very careful with this sharp instrument,” he said.

According to the lieutenant-general, the CSTO has the capacity for a large-scale deployment. “Believe me, we can send as many as needed.”

“If we need 3,000, we’ll send them. If we need 17,000 we’ll send them. If we need more there’ll be more. As many as are needed,” he continued.

However, he added the caveat that such a move would need to be given the greenlight from multiple sides, including Kiev, which is not a member of the bloc.

“Hypothetically you can imagine it … if there were goodwill from Ukraine – it is after all their territory – if there was a U.N. Security Council mandate, and if it was needed and such a decision was supported by all our governments,” he explained.

The interview, which was conducted before the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics began mass evacuations of civilians to Russia, comes amid clashes erupting in the Donbass in the past few days. Ukrainian soldiers and those loyal to the two self-declared separatist regions have accused one another of aggression along contact lines, with claims of heavy shelling coming from both sides.

In January, units from the multinational CSTO were sent to Kazakhstan after street protests decrying the government’s removal of price controls on liquified petroleum gas, a fuel that many use to power their cars, turned violent.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested that Moscow could have ulterior motives with the troop deployment, stating “I think one lesson in recent history is that once Russians are in your house, it’s sometimes very difficult to get them to leave.” However, the forces left just days after their arrival having completed their mission.

February 19, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

Canada wants to make financial aspects of Emergencies Act permanent

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | February 19, 2022

Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland wants to make permanent the invasive financial surveillance system introduced as part of the “Emergencies Act” to crush the civil liberties protests.

Freeland had announced the initial powers earlier this week to freeze the bank accounts of those who support the protests.

“As of today, all crowdfunding platforms, and the payment service providers they use, must register with FINTRAC and must report large and suspicious transactions to FINTRAC (Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada),” Freeland said at the time. “This will help mitigate the risk that these platforms receive illicit funds; increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by FINTRAC; and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement into these illegal blockades.”

“This is about following the money. This is about stopping the financing of these illegal blockades. We are today serving notice, if your truck is being used in these illegal blockades your corporate accounts will be frozen.”

Under the Emergencies Act, banks are required to freeze accounts without the need for a court order.

Freeland explained: “The government is issuing an order with immediate effect under the Emergencies Act, authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations. This order covers both personal and corporate accounts.”

But now, Freeland has announced that she plans to make some of the emergency measures permanent.

The government also intends to introduce new legislation to make new authorities for FINTRAC.

“We used all the tools that we had prior to the invocation of the Emergencies Act and we determined we needed some additional tools,” Freeland announced in a panel interview on Zoom.

“Some of those tools we will be putting forward measures to put those tools permanently in place. The authorities of FINTRAC, I believe, do need to be expanded to cover crowdsourcing platforms and payment platforms.”

February 19, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

NATO did promise Moscow it wouldn’t expand: former German defense official

RT | February 19, 2022

Despite their denials, Western leaders did make a promise to the USSR that NATO would not expand to Central and Eastern Europe when Moscow agreed to Germany’s reunification, Willy Wimmer, a former vice president of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has claimed in an interview with RT on Saturday.

The veteran politician, who served as parliamentary secretary to Germany’s defense minister between 1985 and 1992, said that he personally witnessed this promise when he “sent Chancellor Helmut Kohl the statement on the Bundeswehr in NATO and NATO in Europe, which was completely incorporated into the treaties on reunification.”

Berlin’s decision at that time “not to station NATO troops on the territory of the former East Germany and to stop NATO near the Oder” was part of this promise, Wimmer added.

The bloc has long denied such a promise had ever been made, insisting it has always had an ‘open door policy.’ However, a document recently published by Germany’s Der Spiegel weekly purportedly shows that the pledge was made, supporting Moscow’s claims the commitments were later broken.

The minutes of a March 6, 1991 meeting in Bonn between the political directors of the foreign ministries of the US, UK, France, and Germany on German reunification appear to show that the Western nations made it “clear” to the still-existing Soviet Union that NATO would not expand further to the east.

Wimmer believes that the promises made by the Western leaders in the early 1990s were eventually dashed by the US ambitions formulated in the infamous 1992 ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’.

The ‘doctrine’ was in fact a Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999 fiscal years that was leaked to the New York Times at that time and sparked a wave of criticism even in the US itself. The document outlined the policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military actions designed to suppress potential threats and prevent any supposedly authoritarian states from becoming superpowers. The official text of the guidance was then changed following the uproar but many tenets of the ‘doctrine’ still found their way into the former US President George W. Bush’s foreign policy.

Since that time, the US and its allies have been on the “wrong track” as they have been virtually doing everything to create a fairly “justified” impression in Moscow that the Western nations seek to “kick Russia out of Europe, to build a new wall between the Baltic and the Black Sea” and eventually to “destroy” Russia instead of cooperating with it, Wimmer pointed out.

The root of all the current security problems in Europe lies within America’s policy of continuously antagonizing Russia, according to Wimmer. “All the misery we are dealing with started with the United States conducting the policy aimed at kicking Russia out of Europe for the last 20 or almost 30 years,” he said.

As long as the US continues to “do everything to achieve this goal” both through NATO and bilateral agreements, Europe’s security problems can hardly be resolved, Wimmer warned, adding that it was Washington that should fundamentally change its ways.

The former OSCE vice president also echoed Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, describing the present state of relations between Russia and the West as a conversation between “a mute” and a “deaf.” Moscow’s top diplomat made similar remarks earlier in February following talks with British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss.

The US and its partners in Europe have been “certainly deaf” for decades since they “drew no conclusions” from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s landmark speech at the Munich Security Conference back in 2007, when he showed quite clearly “where the problems lie on the Euro-Asian continent,” Wimmer said.

At that time, the Russian leader warned that US unilateral hegemonism and “uncontained” use of force in international relations erode the global security system and weaken international law. It was also one of the first times he mentioned NATO’s promise to Russia not to expand to the east.

February 19, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

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