Should Dr. Birx Be Forgiven For Breaking Her Own Rules?
By Ethan Yang | American Institute for Economic Research | December 28, 2020
Another day, another politician violates their own rule. Do as I say not as I do; this has been the prevailing theme of the pandemic as politicians openly flout the laws and recommendations they advocate for. From people like Speaker Nancy Pelosi to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to local county supervisors in Los Angeles, hypocrisy thrives at every level of government. Our leaders tell society to suck it up and lock down while providing little justification or direction. Meanwhile, they reserve the right to travel, dine out, and see their loved ones for themselves after devoting effort to prevent the rest of us from doing so. As they enjoy these luxuries, their policies bring economic devastation, social deprivation, and encourage fellow citizens to turn on one another.
Another public official to be added to this long list of hypocrites is Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. AP News writes,
“The day after Thanksgiving, she traveled to one of her vacation properties on Fenwick Island in Delaware. She was accompanied by three generations of her family from two households. Birx, her husband Paige Reffe, a daughter, son-in-law and two young grandchildren were present.”
This is of course after she and her colleagues made a number of recommendations not to travel or gather on Thanksgiving. According to the New York Post,
“Birx had urged people in the days leading up to Thanksgiving to keep gatherings to “your immediate household.”
“I don’t like it to be any number,” Birx said on CNN’s “New Day.”
“Because you know, if you say it can be 10, and it’s eight people from four different families, then that probably is not the same degree of safe as 10 people from your immediate household.”
Birx said at the time that every American is obligated to make sacrifices to stop the spread of the virus.”
Dr. Birx believes that we should not gather with anyone besides those in our immediate household yet here she is just like many politicians before her. The New York Post also writes that when confronted on the matter Dr. Birx attempted to justify the trip by stating that she was going to “winterize the property before a potential sale.” On the matter it reports,
“I did not go to Delaware for the purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving,” Birx said in a statement.
She argued that the members of the trip belong to her “immediate household,” though she acknowledged they live in separate homes.”
As unconvincing as that sounds, even if Dr. Birx didn’t go to celebrate Thanksgiving that doesn’t change the fact that she was meeting with people from different households. Preparing the house for sale doesn’t change things either as American businesses have been crumbling under the boot of lockdowns since March. Although failing to prepare her house for sale might have lasting and adverse consequences, every day Americans have been making these sacrifices for months.
The New York Post provides a follow up on this situation when it reports that to justify her visit Dr. Birx said the following,
“My parents stopped eating and drinking because they were so depressed,” the 64-year-old complained to Newsy.
“My daughter hasn’t left that house in 10 months, my parents have been isolated for 10 months. They’ve become deeply depressed,” Birx said of the need to “recover from the trauma of the last 10 months.”
Although this is certainly a compelling reason to visit her family, the problem is that this is what countless Americans have been dealing with as well. Dr. Birx has simply realized what the consequences of her policies have been. For many Americans, lockdowns have generated the social agony her family has experienced. Plenty of Americans have also lost jobs and livelihoods. According to data from Yelp, 60 percent of businesses that closed will never open again. For many Americans, they have experienced even worse. According to the CDC, drug overdoses have skyrocketed in 2020, expanding the list of self-inflicted deaths both intentional and unintentional. Despite all this, the average American has obediently complied with these guidelines even though they have every right not to.
Should We Forgive Dr. Birx?
Dr. Birx and the countless politicians like her should be forgiven under the following condition: That they learn from their mistakes and empathize with the average American’s struggle with their policies. To understand the eternal lesson that policy intentions do not equal policy results. If we could have more people in power who understand this truth then society would be better off. Lockdowns are a classic example of a policy that seemed to have benevolent intentions but wound up having lethal consequences. There are laws that work and those that don’t. Lockdowns and all the arbitrary restrictions that come with them promote contempt for the rule of law while doing little to control the virus. They have not only done little to prevent the spread of Covid-19, but they have wrecked society as a result. Part of the process of leadership is having the humility to admit that you were wrong and understanding that you can’t force a square peg through a round hole. Likewise, you cannot drastically shut down society and prohibit everything it means to be human without expecting terrible results.
The great economist Friedrich Hayek once wrote,
“The basic source of social order, however, is not a deliberate decision to adopt certain common rules, but the existence among the people of certain opinions of what is right and wrong…. Except where the political unit is created by conquest, people submit to authority not to enable it to do what it likes, but because they trust somebody to act in conformity with certain common conceptions of what is just. There is not first a society which then gives itself rules, but it is common rules which weld dispersed bands into a society.”
Hayek spoke of lawmaking as a sort of discovery process of policies that are compatible with society rather than simply forcing one’s will on society. Lockdowns are a clear example of an unsustainable law that is not only incompatible with society but impossible to follow. Dr. Birx has learned firsthand that her recommendations are not sustainable in the long run and even she of all people can’t follow such an edict. Rather than feeling humiliated and ashamed, she should attempt to enlighten her colleagues about her discovery. Otherwise, this will go down as another one of countless instances of elitism and hypocrisy exercised by our public servants.
Dr. Birx may have saved her family from emotional trauma or worse by visiting them. Surely she had taken the necessary precautions to ensure that her trip was as safe as possible. It would certainly be reasonable to make such a trip given the circumstances. She weighed the dangers and rewards of the actions she was taking and made a thoughtful decision. Rather than apologizing and retreating, she should fight for the average American’s right to do the same. One could only wish.
Ethan Yang joined AIER in 2020 as an Editorial Assistant and is a graduate of Trinity College. He received a BA in Political Science alongside a minor in Legal Studies and Formal Organizations. He currently serves as Local Coordinator at Students for Liberty and the Director of the Mark Twain Center for the Study of Human Freedom at Trinity College.
German MP suggests restrictions ‘similar’ to Covid-19 lockdowns to fight climate change
RT | December 28, 2020
Humanity should sacrifice “personal freedom” just as many nations did during the Covid-19 pandemic in order to successfully fight climate change, a German MP has said, adding that there will “never” be a vaccine against CO2.
Germany had barely started its coronavirus vaccination campaign when a Social Democratic MP, Karl Lauterbach, warned that his compatriots need to brace themselves for yet another challenge: global warming.
“We need measures to deal with climate change that are similar to the restrictions on personal freedom [imposed] to combat the pandemic,” the professor of health economics and epidemiology at the University of Cologne wrote in a guest piece for Die Welt newspaper. He added that he hoped climate change issues would play “a dominant role” during the upcoming election campaign ahead of the federal ballot scheduled for September 2021.
The politician said he “had an impression” that Germany, Europe, and particularly the US “would not have been able to defeat the Covid pandemic without the development of a vaccine.” All these nations are still quite far from defeating the virus, as their vaccination campaigns have only just started, and the number of new infections in these nations remains relatively high. But he appeared much more concerned about the fact “there will never be a vaccine against CO2.”
Lauterbach admitted he was rather skeptical about whether his dream future, in which humanity would beat climate change through the sacrifice of freedoms, would ever be achieved. “My experience of combating the coronavirus pandemic has unfortunately made me extremely pessimistic about whether we will be able to successfully stop climate change in time,” he admitted.
According to the MP, the problem lies with the fact that Germans have “underestimated” the pandemic and continue to do so. Now, as the vaccination campaign kicks off, some might be too tempted to throw off the shackles of yet another lockdown well before the time is right to ease the restrictions, he warned.
It is “necessary” for the lockdown to remain in place until the number of new cases falls “well below 50 per 100,000 people in a week,” the epidemiologist said, calling on fellow citizens to “have discipline, altruism and … patience to achieve this.”
However, many Germans seem unlikely to agree with such advice. The nation has repeatedly seen massive protests against coronavirus restrictions. The government’s decision to re-introduce a partial lockdown in early November sparked a new wave of demonstrations, some of which turned violent. Some of those opposing the lockdown went as far as to compare themselves with the anti-Nazi resistance, provoking a harsh rebuke from Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas.
The fact that Christmas parties in Germany were limited to close family members would have done little to brighten the nation’s mood. The ban on drinking alcohol in public and buying fireworks for use on New Year’s Eve probably came as unwelcome news too.
The nation launched its vaccination campaign on Saturday – a day ahead of the joint EU inoculation drive. Ensuring the German population is immune to the virus will likely still take some time, since each European country has so far received only around 10,000 doses. More are expected to be delivered in January.
The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom
By Glenn Greenwald | December 28, 2020
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was for more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” AP notes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S., which are thriving. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”
What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.
Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.
That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared before the Senate: “The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they’re taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.”
As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.
These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency. Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.
The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.
The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.
India arrests 75 in restive Kashmir following local polls
Press TV | December 26, 2020
Indian authorities have arrested at least 75 Kashmiri political leaders and activists in anticipation of an uprising following the triumph of an alliance of Kashmir’s regional political parties in a local election, a senior police official unveiled.
Those arrested included pro-independence leaders and members of the banned Jamat-e-Islami group, who were rounded up in what the government described as preventive custody, the official told Reuters on the condition of anonymity.
The detentions challenge the verdict of the people, said Imran Nabi Dar, spokesman for regional party, the National Conference, and a key member of the alliance.
The District Council election that ended early this week was the first such exercise since the government of India’s ultra-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked the special status of the Muslim-majority region under its control last year.
Authorities in New Delhi then waged a crackdown on opposition activists in the restive region and rounded up hundreds of people in purported efforts to forestall protests and violence.
The alliance’s latest victory confirms that Kashmiris have not accepted Modi’s decision to end Kashmir’s special status, said Omar Abdullah, a former chief minister and head of the National Conference.
Following their release from prolonged detention, Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, chief of the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party, announced the alliance in October aimed at seeking a peaceful restoration of Kashmir’s autonomy.
Meanwhile, the elections in Kashmir appear to have paved the way for other electoral processes in the volatile region. However, many say this ballot has made people of Kashmir politically aware of the fact that New Delhi is trying to thrust such an electoral process in order to create the impression that normalcy has taken hold after it stripped Kashmir of its autonomy, without actually working on building trust and bridging the gaps.
India last year scrapped the semi-autonomy of its part of Kashmir. New Delhi unilaterally introduced a slew of laws that locals say are aimed at shifting the region’s demographics and economically disempowering local residents.
Modi’s government revoked the New Delhi-controlled Jammu and Kashmir’s special status last year and claimed at the time that ending Kashmir’s special status was necessary for closer integration of the territory into the rest of India.
New Delhi’s approach towards the region has been widely criticized as being an extension of its tolerating instances of egregious discrimination and occasional deadly attacks against Muslims on the mainland.
Kashmir has long been a flash point between India and Pakistan, which have fought three of their four wars over the disputed Himalayan territory. Both countries rule parts of Kashmir while claiming it in full. Thousands of people have been killed since early 1990s.
Data giant Palantir’s murky track record raises alarming questions about secret, potentially illegal £23 million NHS deal
By Kit Klarenberg | RT | December 23, 2020
Palantir has won a huge contract to continue its work on the NHS Covid-19 Data Store. But the British public will have no way of knowing how the private information the company has been granted access to will be used.
The potentially illegal two-year deal, which began on December 12, was awarded under the Crown Commercial Services G-Cloud 11 Framework, a ‘streamlined’ – i.e. much-accelerated – system typically used for minor contracts, which doesn’t require a tender to be published. Under the terms of the agreement, the store will rely on Palantir’s Foundry data until at least December 2022.
The store was established in March to manage Covid-19 data and inform the government’s response to the virus. Palantir was one of several tech firms hired for the project, for the princely sum of £1, and ever since has been granted access to sensitive data such as patients’ ages, addresses, health conditions, treatments and whether they smoke or drink, among other private information.
Such information is clearly a highly valuable commodity, exclusive oversight of which is fraught with opportunity for abuse, but Whitehall insists any personally-identifying details are aggregated or anonymized prior to being shared with Palantir et al.
Despite these reassurances, the deal did not go unchallenged – not least because the contracts underpinning the deal weren’t published until June, mere hours before a legal action brought by political campaigning website openDemocracy and law firm Foxglove to secure their release was due to commence.
A very secret weapon
An even cursory review of Palantir’s operations starkly underlines why so many should be concerned about its involvement with the NHS, and its access to such intimate patient particulars.
Co-founder Peter Thiel’s inspiration for the company was a desire to repurpose the fraud recognition systems of PayPal – which he also co-founded – for defense and security applications. Most established investors weren’t interested in his pitch, but it caught the attention of In-Q-Tel, the little-known venture capital wing of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which gifted the start-up US$2 million in 2004.
A decade later, Palantir was valued in the billions and pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, primarily from US government agencies, including the CIA, Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command.
The company’s ‘Gotham’ platform pools these entities’ disparate and sprawling databases and allows for the effective sorting, management and cross-referencing of information contained therein.
These capabilities can be put to predictive purposes – for example, soldiers in Afghanistan used the tool to combine maps, intelligence reports, and reports of roadside bombings to plan missions. As a result, Bloomberg dubbed Palantir the War on Terror’s “secret weapon,” and Gotham also became of intense interest to law enforcement agencies the world over.
Due to the veil of secrecy surrounding Palantir’s commercial activities, the total number of forces employing the technology globally is unknown – although the company isn’t only opaque about what services it provides to which clients, but has been outright dishonest at the nature of its government partnerships in the past.
Usage metrics
In 2018, it was revealed police in New Orleans utilized Palantir software to trace targets’ ties to gang members, link suspects’ criminal histories, analyze social media, and forecast the likelihood individuals would commit crimes or become a victim thereof.
Several high-profile convictions of violent, murderous drug gangs were secured in the process, although it was operated in total secrecy for five years until exposure by tech website the Verge, with even the city council totally unaware.
The tendency toward concealment may at least in part be attributable to public outcry over predictive policing programs, which exhibit seemingly invariable racial bias. Even algorithms that do not specifically use race as a metric have been found prone to this prejudice, due to the inclusion of ancillary variables such as socio-economic background, education, and location.
Still, significant light was shed on how authorities use Gotham, and what information it collates, in September 2020, when two Los Angeles Police Department training documents – ‘Intermediate Course’ and ‘Advance Course’ – used to instruct officers on the workings of the system were leaked.
The data collected on citizens – both law-abiding and those with criminal records, or suspected of having committed a crime, or even being connected in any way to individuals who have – includes sex, race, names, contact details, addresses, prior warrants, mugshots, surveillance photos, personal relationships, past and current employers, and even tattoos, scars, piercings and other identifying features.
According to an ‘LAPD Palantir Usage Metrics’ document, in excess of 5,000 officers – accounting for half the Department’s members – had access to Gotham in 2016, and in that year, they collectively ran around 60,000 searches through the system in support of over 10,000 cases.
Such a cutting-edge service doesn’t come cheap, with subscriptions running to millions of dollars annually. This sizable investment comes despite questions hanging over Palantir’s predictive policing effectiveness, which may suggest the software’s value to authorities doesn’t necessarily lie in its crime-fighting prowess.
Official figures indicate violent crime rates remained virtually unchanged in Los Angeles from 2009 to 2019, while aggravated assaults increased. However, non-violent crime did fall over the same period, in particular burglary and vehicle theft.
‘Without any safeguards
Troublingly, crucial portions of Palantir’s NHS contract are entirely redacted, including sections titled “limit of parties’ liability,”“authorised user groups,” and “data integration and analytics capability for self-service” – which covers how many “authorised users” are permitted to create and modify tools designed using the data, and the data sets involved.
In other words, the public presently has no way of knowing precisely what private information Palantir has been granted access to, how it will be used, and with who and what it can be shared with.
Shocking stuff indeed, yet the mainstream UK media and lawmakers alike have been almost entirely silent on what should at the very least be the subject of intense national debate. Amazingly, the company’s name has been mentioned a grand total of twice in parliamentary debates over the course of 2020, and only once in a critical context.
This wall of establishment silence stands in stark contrast to the US, where legislators – including Senator Elizabeth Warren – have prominently raised privacy concerns over Palantir’s participation in ‘HHS Protect’, a program launched by the Department of Health and Human Services to track the spread of coronavirus. Under its auspices, the company harvests data from a variety of federal, state and local government sources, healthcare facilities, colleges, and more.
“The inclusion of Protected Health Information in this database raises serious privacy concerns,” a coalition of Democratic senators wrote in July. “Neither HHS nor Palantir has publicly detailed what it plans to do with this, or what privacy safeguards have been put in place, if any. We are concerned that, without any safeguards, data in HHS Protect could be used by other federal agencies in unexpected, unregulated, and potentially harmful ways.”
While ministers claim life in the UK will begin returning to “normal” around Easter 2021, the length of the deal places Palantir in a position of immense and entirely unaccountable privilege at the heart of an institution which theoretically provides vital services to every British citizen, for the next two years and potentially beyond.
Readers may wish to ask themselves who or what their elected representatives are truly working for, and which interests they ultimately serve – or better yet, pose these queries to parliamentarians directly.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
WHO Deletes Naturally Acquired Immunity from Its Website
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | American Institute for Economic Research | December 23, 2020
Maybe you have some sense that something fishy is going on? Same. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Coronavirus lived on surfaces until it didn’t. Masks didn’t work until they did, then they did not. There is asymptomatic transmission, except there isn’t. Lockdowns work to control the virus except they do not. All these people are sick without symptoms until, whoops, PCR tests are wildly inaccurate because they were never intended to be diagnostic tools. Everyone is in danger of the virus except they aren’t. It spreads in schools except it doesn’t.
On it goes. Daily. It’s no wonder that so many people have stopped believing anything that “public health authorities” say. In combination with governors and other autocrats doing their bidding, they set out to take away freedom and human rights and expected us to thank them for saving our lives. At some point this year (for me it was March 12) life began feeling like a dystopian novel of your choice.
Well, now I have another piece of evidence to add to the mile-high pile of fishy mess. The World Health Organization, for reasons unknown, has suddenly changed its definition of a core conception of immunology: herd immunity. Its discovery was one of the major achievements of 20th century science, gradually emerging in the 1920s and then becoming ever more refined throughout the 20th century.
Herd immunity is a fascinating observation that you can trace to biological reality or statistical probability theory, whichever you prefer. (It is certainly not a “strategy” so ignore any media source that describes it that way.) Herd immunity speaks directly, and with explanatory power, to the empirical observation that respiratory viruses are either widespread and mostly mild (common cold) or very severe and short-lived (Ebola).
Why is this? The reason is that when a virus kills its host, it cannot migrate. The more aggressively it does this, the less it spreads. If the virus doesn’t kill its host, it can hop to others through all the usual means. When you get a virus and fight it off, your immune system encodes that information in a way that builds immunity to it. When it happens to enough people (and each case is different so we can’t put a clear number on it) the virus loses its pandemic quality and becomes endemic, which is to say predictable and manageable. Each new generation incorporates that information through more exposure.
This is what one would call Virology/Immunology 101. It’s what you read in every textbook. It’s been taught in 9th grade cell biology for probably 80 years. Observing the operations of this evolutionary phenomenon is pretty wonderful because it increases one’s respect for the way in which human biology has adapted to the presence of pathogens without absolutely freaking out.
And the discovery of this fascinating dynamic in cell biology is a major reason why public health became so smart in the 20th century. We kept calm. We managed viruses with medical professionals: doctor/patient relationships. We avoided the Medieval tendency to run around with hair on fire but rather used rationality and intelligence. Even the New York Times recognizes that natural immunity is powerful with Covid-19, which is not in the least bit surprising.
Until one day, this strange institution called the World Health Organization – once glorious because it was mainly responsible for the eradication of smallpox – has suddenly decided to delete everything I just wrote from cell biology basics. It has literally changed the science in a Soviet-like way. It has removed with the delete key any mention of natural immunities from its website. It has taken the additional step of actually mischaracterizing the structure and functioning of vaccines.
So that you will believe me, I will try to be as precise as possible. Here is the website from June 9, 2020. You can see it here on Archive.org. You have to move down the page and click on the question about herd immunity. You see the following.
That’s pretty darn accurate overall. Even the statement that the threshold is “not yet clear” is correct. There are cross immunities to Covid from other coronaviruses and there is T cell memory that contributes to natural immunity.
Some estimates are as low as 10%, which is a far cry from the modelled 70% estimate of virus immunity that is standard within the pharmaceutical realm. Real life is vastly more complicated than models, in economics or epidemiology. The WHO’s past statement is a solid, if “pop,” description.
However, in a screenshot dated November 13, 2020, we read the following note that somehow pretends as if human beings do not have immune systems at all but rather rely entirely on big pharma to inject things into our blood.
What this note at the World Health Organization has done is deleted what amounts to the entire million-year history of humankind in its delicate dance with pathogens. You could only gather from this that all of us are nothing but blank and unimprovable slates on which the pharmaceutical industry writes its signature.
In effect, this change at WHO ignores and even wipes out 100 years of medical advances in virology, immunology, and epidemiology. It is thoroughly unscientific – shilling for the vaccine industry in exactly the way the conspiracy theorists say that WHO has been doing since the beginning of this pandemic.
What’s even more strange is the claim that a vaccine protects people from a virus rather than exposing them to it. What’s amazing about this claim is that a vaccine works precisely by firing up the immune system through exposure. Why I had to type those words is truly beyond me. This has been known for centuries. There is simply no way for medical science completely to replace the human immune system. It can only game it via what used to be called inoculation.
Take from this what you will. It is a sign of the times. For nearly a full year, the media has been telling us that “science” requires that we comply with their dictates that run contrary to every tenet of liberalism, every expectation we’ve developed in the modern world that we can live freely and with the certainty of rights. Then “science” took over and our human rights were slammed. And now the “science” is actually deleting its own history, airbrushing over what it used to know and replacing it with something misleading at best and patently false at worst.
I cannot say why, exactly, the WHO did this. Given the events of the past nine or ten months, however, it is reasonable to assume that politics are at play. Since the beginning of the pandemic, those who have been pushing lockdowns and hysteria over the coronavirus have resisted the idea of natural herd immunity, instead insisting that we must live in lockdown until a vaccine is developed.
That is why the Great Barrington Declaration, written by three of the world’s preeminent epidemiologists and which advocated embracing the phenomenon of herd immunity as a way of protecting the vulnerable and minimizing harms to society, was met with such venom. Now we see the WHO, too, succumbing to political pressure. This is the only rational explanation for changing the definition of herd immunity that has existed for the past century.
The science has not changed; only the politics have. And that is precisely why it is so dangerous and deadly to subject virus management to the forces of politics. Eventually the science too bends to the duplicitous character of the political industry.
When the existing textbooks that students use in college contradict the latest official pronouncements from the authorities during a crisis in which the ruling class is clearly attempting to seize permanent power, we’ve got a problem.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
France Forced To POSTPONE ‘Health Dictatorship’ Vaccine Legislation
Massive backlash against “vaccine blackmail” means delay in proposed legislation
By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 24, 2020
A radical bill proposed by the French Government that would see unvaccinated people refused basic services such as public transport has been put on ice after a massive backlash.
The proposed law mandates that citizens have proof of a negative COVID test or “preventative treatment, including the administration of a vaccine” in order to “access transport or to some locations, as well as certain activities.”
However, the government has been forced to delay the legislation after angry protests.
French Health Minister Olivier Véran publicly postponed the bill in an announcement Tuesday evening.
“Because there needs to be trust for the French people to go and get vaccinated of their own free will, because we’re still in a state of sanitary crisis … the government won’t present the text [to the National Assembly] for several months, before we’re out of the crisis,” Véran stated.
The bill was lambasted by political figures across the spectrum, with conservative MP Fabien Di Filippo labelling it “vaccine blackmail.”
RN leader Marine Le Pen branded the vaccine measure “essentially totalitarian.”
“In a backhanded way, this bill does not aim to make vaccinations mandatory, but will prevent anybody who doesn’t comply from having a social life,” she said.
RN party spokesman Sebastien Chenu called the plan a “health dictatorship,” while centrist senator Nathalie Goulet said the draft was “an attack on public freedoms.”
Guillaume Peltier, deputy leader of the center-right LR party, warned that the law would allow the government to “get all the power to suspend our freedoms without parliamentary control.”
France’s vaccination program, set to get underway on Sunday, will not be mandatory, but a majority of 55% of citizens say they will not get the shot.
As we previously highlighted, France has imposed some of the strictest lockdown measures in Europe, with citizens having to fill out a form every time they leave their home.
Meet ‘Dr’ Tony Blair, warmonger turned vaccination guru and health passport promoter
By Neil Clark | RT | December 23, 2020
Former British PM Tony Blair is calling for millions to be vaccinated with a single dose in a radical acceleration of the vax programme and also for the roll-out of health passports. But what, exactly, is his medical expertise?
‘Listen to the experts.’ ‘Follow the science.’ Two phrases we’ve heard ad nauseam in 2020.
But who qualifies as an ‘expert’ or ‘scientist’ is highly selective. A whole host of medical and scientific professionals who have argued against lockdowns as an anti-coronavirus strategy have been dismissed as ‘cranks’: we saw that quite clearly in the way the distinguished authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were treated.
By way of contrast, those with no qualifications in ‘the science’ have been elevated as public health gurus, simply because they are pro-lockdown and espouse the ‘official narrative’.
The most obvious example of these double standards is Bill Gates, a rather geekish multi-billionaire American computer software tycoon with a nice line in sweaters who is regarded as the ‘go-to’ man by leading news channels on what we should do next about Covid-19.
Gates’ funding of public health bodies and university departments – and media outlets too – is extraordinary. But that shouldn’t hide the fact that he is not a qualified doctor. Yet criticise Gates’ interventions and you’ll be screamed at by the very same people who say we shouldn’t be listening to experienced medical/scientific professionals who take a very different view. And so it is with Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.
‘The Blair Creature’ – to give him Peter Hitchens’ wonderful nickname – has emerged, on the day before Christmas Eve, to call for as many people as possible in Britain to get a special New Year present. “The aim should be to vaccinate as many people as possible in the coming months,” Blair writes in The Independent.
The target should be to cover a majority of the population by the end of February. “We should consider using all the available doses in January as first doses, that is, not keeping back half for second doses,” he continues. That’s despite the two vaccines in question only being licensed on the basis that people receive two doses.
Let’s remind ourselves of Tony Blair’s qualifications for giving advice on vaccination programmes. Er, he doesn’t have any. He studied law at Oxford where he played in a pop group called Ugly Rumours. He became a barrister, not a doctor or scientist. Then of course he went into politics, bombing various countries.
Yet here he is pontificating as if he’s some kind of world expert on vaccine programmes. But rather than focus on his lack of qualifications in immunology, the same ‘centrist’ crowd (many of whom hurled rather large stones at the genuine experts who did oppose lockdowns), laud the intervention of ‘The Blair Creature’. Tony is speaking, so we all must stop whatever we’re doing and listen.
Really? I’ll only start listening to Blair’s advice when those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that he assured us could be assembled and launched within 45 minutes turn up. Why on earth should we trust someone who launched an illegal war based on false accusations?
This is not even about the vaccine. It’s about loud ‘this is what needs to be done’ statements on Covid-19 coming from people who have no medical education, while those who do are being sidelined for not toeing the ‘party line’.
It’s not just mass ‘single dose’ vaccinations by the end of February that Blair is keen to see rolled out. He wants health passports too. “Prepare for a form of health passport now,” he says. “I know all the objections, but it will happen. It’s the only way the world will function and for lockdowns to no longer be the sole course of action.”
This is another example of ‘it’s not what is said, but who says it’ in operation. For several months, a number of commentators (myself included) have warned about the roll-out of health passports and how our freedom to travel, attend sports and cultural events, or even go to the shops could be dependent on us possessing one.
But we were dismissed as ‘conspiracy theorists’ or worse, even though the World Economic Forum has been enthusiastically promoting such schemes.
Now Tony Blair, the great idol of those who spend their lives calling others ‘conspiracy theorists’, says that health passports “will happen”. Got that? “Will happen.” Not ‘might happen’, or ‘will happen if governments and the public decide they’re a good thing’, but “will happen”.
There is not meant to be any debate on the matter. The Davos elites have decided. We plebs are merely expected to wait in line for our jabs, and then gratefully receive our health passports without which we won’t be able to do things we took for granted just 12 months ago.
Following ‘doctor’s orders’? Or implementing a dystopian ‘Great Reset’ political agenda with terrible consequences for personal liberty? You decide.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66
Just Say No To COVID Travel Bans
By Jordan Schachtel | December 22, 2020
We’ve seen this movie before, and it ended with the largest power grab in world history.
“It’s just a travel ban.”
“It’s just two weeks to stop the spread.”
“It’s just for non-essential workers.”
“Just wear a mask. It will allow for society to reopen.”
“It’s just a ‘pause’ on non-essential activities and businesses.”
2020, the year that will be defined by corona hysteria and unprecedented global power grabs, is coming to an end, and the simulation is apparently resetting. The conversation surrounding coronavirus mania has somehow reverted back to square one, with:
“It’s just a travel ban to the UK.”
Social media and news feeds are now rife with prominent politicians, “public health experts,” commentators and reporters discussing the merits of a travel ban to the United Kingdom, after reports surfaced that the Brits have discovered a new strain of the coronavirus, which is being advertised as 70% more infectious (!) than the last variant. According to the “public health experts,” it’s time to panic again, and take dramatic action to stop this virus.
Over 40 countries have now decided — following the reported discovery of the new variant of the coronavirus — to impose travel bans from the United Kingdom. With that has come a new pressure campaign in the United States, led by the likes of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and other lockdown advocates, to launch a new round of travel restrictions.
It seems that so many across the political spectrum have learned absolutely nothing from the pandora’s box of tyranny that was opened up at the beginning of the year, following the failure of travel bans to stop the spread of a respiratory virus with a 99.9% recovery rate.
Like it or not, the United States is a very interconnected nation, serving thousands of international flights per day. The U.S. is not New Zealand. We are not a tiny island nation that can just cut itself off from the rest of the world at a moment’s notice. If there’s a virus reportedly spreading across the Atlantic, it’s probably already here, too.
Additionally, many in the corona hysteria space seem to not understand the rudimentary science behind mutations. They’re seemingly too busy panicking and demanding further restrictions to be thoughtful about what to do next.
If a virus has mutated into an even more transmissible form, that can mean that the virus has become less lethal. This also means that mitigation and suppression pseudoscience measures, such as lockdowns, masks, curfews, and the like have even less of a chance of working this time around, given that they did not work to slow or stop the spread with a less transmissible variant.
If a disease with an approaching 99.9% recovery rate is becoming more transmissible, and possibly even less lethal, the idea that we should take dramatic, sweeping action to “fight” it is absolutely preposterous. Before corona madness, anyone who advocated for a travel ban to stop seasonal influenza or the common cold would have been laughed out of the room. The discourse surrounding “stopping the spread” of a virus has become so nonsensical and pointless, yet at the same time, these people and organizations are credentialed as “experts,” when their record of absolute failure would demonstrate otherwise.
We need to stop the spread of corona hysteria by rejecting any and all restrictions in the name of fighting a virus. Stop empowering government bureaucrats and “public health experts” to run roughshod over our lives. As we observed over the course of the year, a travel ban can fast transform into a devastating lockdown, when the travel ban inevitably fails in its mission. The only path forward involves advocating solely for a full reopening and a restoration of individual rights, not more restrictions in the name of stopping a virus that we have no control over.
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From the Archives
World War II Didn’t End The Great Depression
Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | April 4, 2024
A principal goal of Stark Realities is to “expose fundamental myths across the political spectrum” — and few myths are as universally embraced as the notion that US participation in World War II (1941-1945) lifted the American economy out of the Great Depression.
This myth is dangerous not only because it leads citizens and politicians to see a bright side of war that doesn’t really exist, but also because it helps foster a belief that government spending is essential to countering economic downturns. That belief, in turn, has helped propel us to a point where the national debt now exceeds $34.6 trillion, with interest payments alone on pace to reach $1 trillion a year in 2026, inviting financial catastrophe. … continue
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