Letter to PACAC about ethical concerns arising from the Government’s use of covert psychological ‘nudges’
Mr William Wragg, MP, Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
1st February 2022
Dear Mr Wragg,
Re: Ethical concerns arising from the Government’s use of covert psychological ‘nudges’.
Thank you for meeting me to allow me to explain my concerns about the government’s use of behavioural science during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. I noted your positive comments about the need to better understand how nudge sits within parliamentary democracy and ministerial accountability, in a Telegraph article dated 28th January 2022, entitled ‘Government nudge unit “used grossly unethical tactics to scare public into Covid compliance”’, which was written in response to a letter by psychologist Gary Sidley et al requesting an investigation. I concur with Gary’s letter wholeheartedly.
During the course of researching my book A State of Fear: how the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic I gained a fascinating but sometimes disturbing insight into how reliant the government is on behavioural science and how little transparency there is about the people, methods, impacts and ethics.
Behavioural scientists and politicians have called for public consultation in the past, but it has not happened. The Science and Technology Select Committee’s 2011 report Behaviour Change noted that there are ‘ethical issues because they involve altering behaviour through mechanisms of which people are not obviously aware’ and ‘ethical acceptability depends to a large extent on an intervention’s proportionality’. David Halpern, the head of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), has said that ‘if national or local governments are to use these approaches [behavioural psychology tools], they need to ensure that they have public permission to do so – ie, that the nudge is transparent, and that there has been appropriate debate about it’.
The MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy discussion document which David Halpern co-authored recommended a public consultation about the use of behavioural insights. This has never been more pertinent. Fear messaging was used to encourage compliance with the rules. This has changed our lives and our relationships with each other. It has also changed our relationship with the government. This was predicted in the same report, which warned:
‘People have a strong instinct for reciprocity that informs their relationship with government – they pay taxes and the government provides services in return. This transactional model remains intact if government legislates and provides advice to inform behaviour. But if government is seen as using powerful, pre-conscious effects to subtly change behaviour, people may feel the relationship has changed: now the state is affecting “them” – their very personality.’
Our personalities were changed 2020-2021. And the use of fear – a particularly destabilising tactic – has made recovery harder. The collateral damage is becoming clearer, not least with the identification of Covid Anxiety Syndrome, whereby people have heightened fears which are disproportionate to the remaining threat. While it is difficult to extricate the different causes – lockdown, the epidemic itself, government messaging, the media – the overall result merits close scrutiny.
One of the BIT founders, Simon Ruda, admitted in an article published in Unherd, that ‘the most egregious and far-reaching mistake made in responding to the pandemic has been the level of fear willingly conveyed on the public’. It’s a pity that this revelation was made so late in the pandemic management. (After the sale of BIT to NESTA for a ‘healthy capital gain’, as Ruda observes, for the BIT shareholders.) If the previous calls for public consultation on the use of nudge had happened years ago, then maybe this egregious mistake could have been avoided. But it is never too late.
I believe the UK needs a full analysis of the tactics used and their impacts from experts, including psychologists, behavioural scientists, mental health specialists, politicians, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, civil liberties organisations, lawyers, as well as representatives of the public.
Furthermore, the harmful impacts of behavioural science go beyond the handling of the Covid epidemic. The impact of behavioural insights on mental health was reported in Loan Charge All-Party Parliamentary Group Report on the Morse Review into the Loan Charge March 2020. It concluded that independent assessment and a suspension of HMRC’s use of behavioural insights was needed, ‘in light of the ongoing suicide risk to those impacted by the Loan Charge’. Clear misconduct and bullying, including using 30 behavioural insights in communications, were cited in one of the seven known suicides of people facing the Loan Charge.
The collaboration between a major UK broadcaster and BIT to promote one of the most controversial policies today is deeply alarming. The report, The Power of TV: Nudging Viewers to Decarbonise their Lifestyles, jointly published by BIT and Sky, shows little regard for the obligation imposed on broadcasters by Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code to maintain ‘due impartiality’ across all their output, particularly when it comes to news and current affairs. It also neglects the requirement that broadcasters expose viewers to a wide range of different views when it comes to ‘matters of major political and industrial controversy and major matters relating to current public policy’. I wrote a letter of complaint to Ofcom with Toby Young, Founder of the Free Speech Union, on 21st December 2021.
Recently, the Home Office has hired an advertising agency to mobilise public opinion against encrypted communications, with plans that include some shockingly manipulative tactics to sway concerned parents.
In the past two years I have noted new behavioural science appointments within the government, Public Health England (now UKHSA) and NHS, and nudge seems likely to play a bigger part in future government attempts to transform us into ‘model citizens’ and foreground acceptance of controversial policies. Indeed, this is openly acknowledged. One recent report from a team at the University of Bath already shows how behavioural psychologists hope to segue from Covid to climate behaviour change while ‘habits are weakest and most malleable to change’. A BIT paper on how to nudge the public towards Net Zero referred to our ‘powerful tendency to conform’.
I agree with Gary Sidley that the government must be held to account over its use of behavioural science. The Covid epidemic has shone a spotlight onto how embedded behavioural science is within government, but the inquiry would benefit from widening the scope to a historical review and also agree new frameworks for the future. This should include a historical analysis of all campaigns (especially the many unpublished ones), a review of the ethical framework government behavioural scientists adhere to, and scrutiny of accountability. Most importantly, a review must include the general public, who are as yet unaware of the prolific campaigns to influence them below the level of consciousness, but nevertheless fund the campaigns through taxation.
Nudge assumes we are not rational beings. Ruda does not shy away from this in his article, clearly stating that ‘behavioural science was conceived as a means of recognising and correcting the biases that lead humans to make non-rational decisions’. Stripping away our rational choices and influencing us at a subliminal level is anti-democratic and we are now at a crucial point to take stock of the government’s use of these tactics. I hope that PACAC can conduct a comprehensive and independent investigation. I would be delighted to assist by sharing notes and evidence.
I look forward to speaking with you.
Yours sincerely,
Laura Dodsworth
February 1, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception | Human rights, UK |
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Nobody in the medical community is speaking out about how ludicrous this is. So I will.

Traditional ritual mask wearing
The Biden administration is giving out 400 million free N95 masks.
Here’s what they aren’t telling you:
- An N95 respirator will “work” for around 2 hours in a hospital or similar setting with filtered air
- An N95 respirator will “work” for around 30 min outdoors
So if 200M Americans receive two respirators each, they get around 4 hours of protection. And that only works if the respirators are fitted perfectly with no gaps and people are trained on their use. And as we noted before, even if everything was perfect, you aren’t likely to get anywhere close to 95% reduction in virions (because of the size of the particles and the rate of airflow into the respirator), and even with such a reduction, that’s unlikely to make the difference between getting infected and not getting infected.
In general, N95’s are ineffective with respect to protection against viral spread. Randomized studies show cloth and surgical masks do nothing. Zero.
Not surprising at all. If you read the WHO 2004 “Laboratory Biosafety Manual” (Third Edition) it says, “Surgical type masks are designed solely for patient protection and do not provide respiratory protection to workers.”
So it’s not like we haven’t figured that one out 15 years before COVID. It says surgical masks do not work. Period.
Yet, here we are 18 years later and the CDC and medical community are still pretty clueless.
Consider this quote from highly respected UCSF infectious disease Professor Monica Gandhi in a story about the Bangladesh mask study (which, despite the headlines, proved that masks don’t work at all as I’ve pointed out before):
The study results prompted Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco, to switch from cloth masks. “I bought surgical masks for myself — pink ones,” she says.
See? You cannot make this stuff up. It is unbelievable how uninformed the doctors are. Professor Gandhi uses protection that even the WHO says does nothing (and so did that Bangladesh mask study).
And you are taking advice from her?!?!
Check out how much better N95’s are compared to surgical masks:

That’s right. Anyone with a working brain can see N95 masks are not effective at all. There is no measurable difference!
Full article
January 31, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, Joe Biden, United States |
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Days prior to today’s scheduled release of a tranche of documents related to the Pfizer COVID vaccine, the pharmaceutical company asked a federal court to let it intervene before any information is released.
It’s the latest development in an ongoing court case that began with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in August 2021 by Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT).
PHMPT asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release all documents related to its Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine and full approval of the Pfizer-Comirnaty COVID vaccine.
Judge Mark Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas on Jan. 6 issued an order requiring the FDA to release 12,000 pages of documents by Jan. 31 and an additional 55,000 pages per month thereafter, until the release of the nearly 400,000 pages of documents is complete.
Pfizer claims to support the disclosure of the documents, but asked to intervene in the case to ensure that information exempt from disclosure will not be “disclosed inappropriately.”
In a memorandum it submitted to the court, Pfizer said it:
“[S]eeks leave to intervene in this action for the limited purpose of ensuring that information exempt from disclosure under FOIA is adequately protected as FDA complies with this Court’s order.”
Attorneys for Pfizer also claimed while it was not asking the court to reconsider the Jan. 6 order, it would consider challenging the order at an unspecified later date, telling the court:
“Pfizer does not presently intend to move the Court to reconsider its January 6, 2022 order, but Pfizer is not in a position at this time to waive its ability to do so if circumstances change such that there is good cause at a later time to do so.”
Pfizer did not clarify what such a change of circumstances might entail.
Lawyers for PHMPT, in a brief submitted Jan. 25 to the court, asked Pittman to reject Pfizer’s motion and requested the judge ask Pfizer to clarify how, exactly, its intervention would help expedite the release of the documents, arguing that Pfizer:
“… provides no reason why it needs to intervene in this matter to render that purported assistance. Nor can Plaintiff discern why Pfizer needs to intervene in this matter to assist the FDA with expediting release of the requested documents—it can render this assistance without intervening.”
PHMPT, a group of more than 30 medical and public health professionals and scientists from institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and UCLA, in September 2021 filed a lawsuit against the FDA when the agency denied its original FOIA request.
In that request, PHMPT asked the FDA to release “all data and information for the Pfizer vaccine,” including safety and effectiveness data, adverse reaction reports, and a list of active and inactive ingredients.
The first batch of documents released in November 2021, which totaled a mere 500 pages, revealed there were more than 1,200 vaccine-related deaths within the first 90 days following the release of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine.
Arguments regarding Pfizer’s motion are scheduled to be heard in court on Jan. 28, though as of this writing, no further updates regarding the case or this scheduled hearing have been publicly disclosed.
Pfizer represented by world’s third-largest law firm
Pfizer on Jan. 21 submitted two filings to the court: a motion to intervene in the case “for a limited purpose,” and an accompanying “memorandum of points and authorities” supporting the motion.
It remains unclear how Pfizer defines “inappropriately” or “for a limited purpose,” or why it waited two weeks after Judge Pittman’s order, and only days before the Jan. 31 scheduled release of 12,000 pages to file its motion.
Pfizer claims it was unaware of the case until executives read news reports about it in December 2021, despite the fact that the case garnered coverage from major news outlets, including Reuters, in November of that year.
Still, the company hired DLA Piper LLP, one of the world’s most high-powered law firms, to represent it. DLA Piper is headquartered in London and maintains offices in 40 countries.
In 2014, the firm had revenues totaling $2.48 billion, making it the third-largest law firm in the U.S. by revenue.
DLA Piper was the 12th largest donor to President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign and the 9th largest donor to Hillary Clinton between 1999 and 2018.
Douglas Emhoff, spouse of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, was employed at the firm until 2020, earning $1.2 million in partnership income that year.
FDA supports Pfizer’s motion, requests extension
In a response to Pfizer’s motion, the FDA said it welcomed Pfizer’s “help,” claiming that this is “due to the unprecedented speed with which the Court has ordered [the] FDA to process the records at issue.”
In addition to supporting Pfizer’s motion, the FDA also requested an extension from the court that would further delay the scheduled release of the documents.
Aaron Siri of the Siri & Glimstad law firm, who is representing PHMPT in its lawsuit against the FDA, explained:
“The FDA now insists it must delay its first 55,000-page production until May 1, 2022 – four months after the Court entered its order.
“However, the FDA’s own papers seeking this delay make plain it can produce at a rate of 55,000 pages per month in February and March.”
The FDA claimed Pfizer is entitled to intervene in the case and the process of redacting the documents in question, due to the “Trade Secrets Act,” signed into law by President Obama in 2016, stating:
“FDA anticipates that coordination with Pfizer to obtain the company’s views as to which portions of the records are subject to Exemption 4, the Trade Secrets Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1905, or other statutory protections will be a necessary component of the agency’s endeavors to meet the extraordinary exigencies of this case.”
However, according to The Gateway Pundit, the Trade Secrets Act is being misinterpreted by the FDA and Pfizer:
“[T]he protections provided under that law allow for an owner of a trade secret to sue in federal court when its trade secrets have been misappropriated and does not even imply that a company could intervene in a public records request through the FOIA.”
PHMPT, in its Jan. 25 brief, also rejected the FDA’s continued claim that it cannot adhere to the disclosure schedule Pittman ordered on Jan. 6, arguing “the FDA has more than sufficient resources to expeditiously produce the requested documents.”
Siri, on his blog, also questioned this aspect of FDA’s argument, writing:
“The FDA … attests that over the coming weeks, it will have 28.5 full-time people reviewing the documents. Working 7.5 hours per day for 20 business days per month, 28.5 people reviewing 50 pages per hour can review a total of approximately 213,750 pages per month.
“The FDA affirms it has already ‘allocated the equivalent of nearly 11 full-time staff to this project’ and that ‘a review speed of 50 documents per hour was within the normal range for document review in a complex matter’ in private practice; and here the 50 document per hour rate would be faster since there is only a need to review for personally identifying information (‘PII’) for most pages. Hence, if the FDA’s 11 full-time reviewers work only 7.5 hours per day and review 50 pages (not documents) per hour, the FDA could review over 88,000 pages per month in February and March. That is more than sufficient to produce the 55,000 pages per month currently ordered for these two months.”
Instead of complying with this court’s “reasoned order,” Siri Wrote, the FDA claims these 11 reviewers can only review a total of 10,000 pages per month.
What the FDA does not say, and what basic math shows, according to Siri, is that a rate of 10,000 pages a month for 11 full-time reviewers amounts to only 5 pages per hour.
Siri also questioned the FDA’s commitment to transparency and hinted at a cover-up, stating:
“The Court is, other than Congress, the only check on the FDA. In a free country, transparency is paramount, and the FDA has chosen to thwart transparency and the requirements of FOIA by anemically understaffing the office it maintains to respond to FOIA requests.
“It is also incredible for the FDA to claim that compliance here would harm its health policy objectives. Even if the FDA really does need to spend $4 to $5 million which … is an absurd overestimate, that is an inconsequential amount of its overall $3.41 billion discretionary budget.
“It is understandable that the FDA does not want independent scientists to review the documents it relied upon to license Pfizer’s vaccine given that it is not as effective as the FDA originally claimed, does not prevent transmission, does not prevent against certain emerging variants, can cause serious heart inflammation in younger individuals, and has numerous other undisputed safety issues.”
Siri said the FDA’s “potential embarrassment” over its decision to license the Pfizer vaccine must take a back seat to the transparency demanded by FOIA and “the urgent need and interests of the American people to review that licensure data.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
BUY TODAY: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s New Book — ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’
January 31, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception | Comirnaty, COVID-19 Vaccine, FDA, Pfizer, United States |
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The media’s found yet another reason you might have a heart attack
In only our second article of this new year, This Year in the New Normal, OffG predicted that a major news story of 2022 would involve predicting and explaining heart problems that hadn’t actually happened yet.
Not even a month later, we’ve already been proven right.
Urgent warning as 300,000 Brits living with stealth disease that could kill within 5 years
That’s a Sun headline from three days ago.
The article is about a recent study, which apparently found that aortic valve stenosis is likely far more prevalent in the community than previously thought.
Aortic Stenosis (AS) is a disease affecting the valve of the heart which connects to the aorta, causing it to never open fully and making it more difficult for blood to flow.
Those with AS can suffer fatigue, chest pains, dizzy spells and even sudden death. Known complications include blood clots, which can lead to strokes or heart attacks.
According to the article…
the overall prevalence of severe aortic stenosis among the over 55s in the UK in 2019 could be almost 1.5 per cent – equal to around 300,000 at any one time.
Just under 200,000 (68 per cent) were symptomatic – meaning they had severe disease that would be eligible for surgery.
The remaining 90,000 (32 per cent) had a “silent” case of the condition and will probably not be diagnosed unless they are being screened for another problem.
Without timely treatment, up to 172,859 (59 per cent of the overall total) will die over the next five years to 2024, it’s estimated.
Are you following?
Let me sum it up for you in neat bullet points:
- Aortic Stenosis is a potentially deadly disease affecting the heart.
- A review has found that it is “under diagnosed”.
- Around 100,000 people in the UK could have the disease and not even know it.
- Many of them will likely die in the next five years.
Thus, any rise in heart attacks or other cardiac diseases is fully explained.
Any heart problems that do occur are totally unrelated to the experimental “vaccines” which are known to cause heart problems and blood clots, they want to be very clear on that.
Now, you could argue this is just a coincidence, a routinely hysterical public health scare story that just happened to land in the middle of the pandemic.
Obviously, we can’t prove that’s not the case, but there is plenty of evidence arguing against it.
For one thing, it is not as if aortic stenosis is a regularly recurring public health talking point, like breast cancer or diabetes. A brief google news search shows that, prior to Covid times, there was scant mention of the condition in the media for the past ten years. Only a handful of articles about celebrities having the condition or academic papers about new treatments.
It’s not a disease that has ever, as far as we can see, been thrust to the forefront of the public consciousness… until now.
It should also not be forgotten that this is not the first time an explanation for future heart attacks has been proferred. We have been hip-deep in pre-emptive explanations of cardiac arrest for weeks.
Remember “post pandemic stress disorder”? It’s a (completely made-up) nervous condition that some doctors predicted would increase the number of heart problems in the UK by 300,000 this year.
Interestingly, that’s 300,000 again. Both scares predicting the same exact number of cases is a funny little coincidence.
There are further examples, earlier this week it was reported that people who have had Covid are more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes.
Research papers claim “long covid” can lead to blood clots, heart inflammation and strokes (all acknowledged side effects of the “vaccines”).
It’s not just predictive anymore either, Scotland is in a rush to explain its sharp rise in heart attacks and strokes.
One such story might be a coincidence… but four or five?
The media just keeps coming up with more and more reasons we may see a lot of heart attacks in the near future.
Interesting that.
January 31, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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I’ll assume you have been reading my blog and agree with me that an attempt at gaining world domination is at this very moment failing.
It required a deadly pandemic, vaccines that actually worked, and the ability to snooker billions of people into believing that the responses of the government were logical, beneficial and well-intentioned.
It required keeping people separated from each other, communicating primarily via easily surveilled devices.
It required keeping people frightened and distrustful of one another.
It required loosening or destroying the bonds between family members.
It required uniform messaging by virtually all mass media.
It required making doctors and patients distrust one another, while yet submitting to government-enforced medical edicts, denying us the ability to act within any normal doctor-patient relationship.
It required a profound fear of death and loss, enough to supercede our normal instincts regarding loyalty, interpersonal relationships and friendship.
It required massive carrots and sticks to enforce a uniform narrative, against all data (most of which was persistently rigged) and the surrender of common sense.
The carrots came mostly in the form of taxpayer dollars. In the US, trillions have been spent since the start of the pandemic to enforce government lockdown edicts, masks, distancing, vaccinations… The list could go on and on.
No doubt plenty was spent before the pandemic as the chess pieces (crooks) were moved into place to get ready for the coup, under the guise of a medical emergency.
Fauci was already there. He moved Walensky in to control CDC. Janet Woodcock was made acting FDA Commissioner, and FDA sat without a Presidentially-appointed Commissioner for an entire year. Presumably the coup leaders had no one else who could be trusted to ruthlessly carry out every needed act. Such acts included issuing and then retracting EUAs to confuse the public over HCQ; doing a bait and switch with a Comirnaty license; then suing to prevent release of the licensing data, which no doubt failed to justify an EUA, let alone a license.
Here is one reasonable proposal for a way forward. Trillions were doled out to industry, schools, federal agencies, media etc. to get them to fall in line and do whatever was required.
These were federal contracts. We have the contracts. Simply require every entity that got paid off to give the money back to the federal treasury. Or, they can keep some of it if they clean up their act. Can’t pay it back? Ever heard of debtors’ prison?
Will media figure out how to stop lying and fearmongering? I think they could solve that in a heartbeat if it meant they did not have to return all the money.
What about schools? Could they ditch bogus curricula, mask mandates, plexiglass, vaccine mandates, testing… if the alternative was returning $190 billion dollars to the federal treasury?
Emergency rules at the state level: rescind them immediately or return the federal grants to states and state agencies. Give them a choice.
Remove the chief medical officers of every hospital and state agency, every state CDC, and HHS Department. All federal executive agencies. Have the deputies take over immediately. Pay the former agency heads their prior salary if they take on their new role: documenting all the methods by which martial law was imposed. Later they can go through a truth and reconciliation process. Based on South Africa’s example, if they fully spill the beans, they are pardoned. If not, they stand trial for their crimes. The deputies must also spill their beans, btw.
Honesty, kindness and consideration for one’s fellow man will become the new norms that are praised by society. Greed will not be seen as something to aspire to, and the tax structure will disincentivize greed. Under JFK, those paying the highest marginal tax rate had to part with 91% of their top earnings. We can do that again; why not? The tax structure is what allowed the Gateses and Bezoses and their ilk to amass the ill-gotten gains. The tax structure can also take away.
Antitrust prosecutions will be undertaken unless large corporations break themselves up in an approved manner.
We can do this. Let’s just be creative and fair. There are plenty of models around to draw ideas from. Let’s move carefully and deliberately back from the abyss.
And paper ballots, with identifiable markings and no scans or electronic ballots, will be all that is acceptable, with video cameras documenting the vote counts. Votes cannot be moved around–they will be counted where they are cast. Absentee ballots will require a visit to a public office with ID, preceding the date of any election.
Courts will be established to review initial information re corruption very quickly on members of Congress and other critical figures; if there is reasonable evidence of malfeasance, they will have to take a leave from office while the evidence is weighed.
January 31, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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The seeds of the current crisis were sown several decades ago, when Washington decided to double-deal with Moscow
The current and rapidly escalating tensions between the US and Russia over Ukraine have dominated international headlines and moved stock markets in recent weeks. In reality, they have their roots in a series of NATO actions and omissions following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989/91. On the Russian side, there is a widespread perception that Moscow was misled by both Washington and NATO, a pervasive malaise about a breach of trust, and a violation of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ on fundamental issues of national security.
While the US protests that it never gave assurances to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastwards, declassified documents prove otherwise. But even in the absence of declassified documents and contemporary statements by political leaders in 1989/91, including Secretary of State James Baker and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (which can be confirmed on YouTube), it is all too obvious that there is a festering wound caused by NATO’s eastward expansion over the past 30 years, which has undoubtedly negatively impacted Russia’s sense of security. No country likes to be encircled, and common sense should tell us that maybe we should not be provoking another nuclear power. At the very least, NATO’s provocations are unwise; at worst, they could spell apocalypse.
We in the West play innocent, and retreat into ‘positivism’, asserting that there was no signed treaty commitment, that the assurances were not written in stone. Yet realpolitik tells us that if one side breaks its word or is perceived as having double-crossed the other, if it acts in a manner contrary to the spirit of an agreement and to the overriding principle of good faith (bona fide), there will be political consequences.
It seems, however, that we in the West have become so used to what I would call a ‘culture of cheating’, that we react in a surprised fashion when another country does not simply accept that we cheated them in the past, and that, notwithstanding this breach of trust, they should accept the ‘new normal’ and resume ‘business as usual’ as if nothing had happened. Our leaders in the US, UK and EU contend that they have a clean conscience and refuse to consider the fact that the other side does feel uncomfortable about having been taken for a ride. A rational person, a fortiori a statesman, would pause and try to defuse the ‘misunderstanding’. Yet the US culture of cheating has become so second nature to us that we do not even realise when we are cheating someone else, and we seem incapable of understanding that denying our actions and reneging on our words adds insult to injury.
The culture of cheating is in the family of the doctrine of ‘exceptionalism’. We self-righteously claim the right to cheat others, but do not accept that others can cheat us. Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi (that which Jupiter can do is not permitted for the bovines). This constitutes a kind of predator behaviour that neither religion nor civilisation has succeeded in eradicating. We mount false-flag operations and accuse the other side of the same. The CIA and M15 have been caught red-handed on so many occasions, yet no one seems to be asking whether, in the long run, such conduct is counter-productive, whether our credibility is shot.
Perhaps one explanation for this kind of behaviour is that we have elevated the culture of cheating to a kind of secular virtue – equivalent to cunning, daring and boldness. It is seen as a positive attribute when a leader is ‘craftier’ and ‘sneakier’ than his/her rival. The name of the game is to score points in an atmosphere of perpetual competition where there are no rules. Our geopolitical competitors are just that – rivals – and there is no interest whatsoever in fraternising with adversaries. Co-operation is somehow perceived as ‘weak’, as ‘un-American’. ‘Dirty tricks’ are not seen as dishonest but as clever, even patriotic, because they are intended to advance the economic and political interests of our country. In a way, ‘dirty tricks’ are perceived in a positive light, as artful, ingenious, adventurous, even visionary. This curious approach to reality is facilitated by a compliant and complicit corporate media that does not call our bluff and, instead, disseminates ‘fake news’ and suppresses dissenting views. Unless an individual has the presence of mind to do his/her own research and to access other sources of information, he/she is caught in the propaganda web.
The US government has practised this culture of cheating in its international relations for over 200 years, particularly in its dealings with the First Nations of the continent, who were lied to over and over, and whose lands and resources were shamelessly stolen. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in ‘Why We Can’t Wait’, “Our nation was born in genocide”. How many ‘Indian’ treaties were broken, again and again? And when the Sioux, Cree and Navajo protested, we massacred them. See the studies of the United Nations’ Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. This ‘culture of cheating’ is documented countless times in connection with the Monroe Doctrine and US relations with Mexico, Latin America, Hawaii, the Philippines and so on.
One of the elements that is totally missing from the Ukraine debate is the right of self-determination of peoples. Undoubtedly the Russians in Ukraine are not just a minority, but constitute a ‘people’, and, as such, the Russians in Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea possess the right of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter and in Article 1 common to the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Until the deliberately anti-Russian coup d’état of February 2014, the Ukrainians and Russian-Ukrainians had lived side by side in relative harmony. The Maidan brought with it Russophobic elements that have since been exacerbated by systematic war propaganda and incitement to hatred, both of which are prohibited by Article 20 of the ICCPR. Thus, it is not certain whether the Russians in the Donbass feel safe enough to want to continue living with Ukrainians who have been and are being incited to hate them. Back in March and June 1994, I monitored the parliamentary and presidential elections in Ukraine as a representative of the UN Secretary-General. I travelled around the country. There was no doubt that the Russian speakers had a profound sense of Russian identity.
There would be no conflict in Ukraine today – although both Kiev and Moscow deny an invasion is imminent – if Barack Obama, Under Secretary of State for Political AffairsVictoria Nuland and several European leaders had not destabilised the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovich and organised a vulgar coup to install Western puppets. Bottom line: Western interference in the internal affairs of other states can backfire, and the culture of cheating and deceit that we continue to practise renders it impossible to reach sustainable solutions. The UN Charter, the only mandate underpinning the existing ‘rules-based international order’, has the necessary mechanisms to resolve our differences on the basis of the principles of sovereign equality of states and the self-determination of peoples.
Professor Alfred de Zayas is an international law expert at the Geneva School of Diplomacy who served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order from 2012-18.
January 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | NATO, United States |
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January 23, 2022: Half a million people went to Brussels (Belgium, EU capital) to demonstrate against the mandatory QR-codes and Covid vaccinations. What was a beautiful, colorful. and peaceful protest was corrupted by Antifa, the Police, the Military, and the Main Stream Media. This short film shows you the evidence of a scam, a set-up to make the “anti-vaxxers” look like criminals, vandals, aggressors. It’s time to expose the oppressors of the People! Please share this video wide and far…
Script, voice-over and editing: Janet Ossebaard
January 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | Antifa, Belgium |
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Remember the good old days at the beginning of the COVID coup – before the new dogmas started to tangle themselves into self-contradictory knots?
Back then, if you wanted to know what to think, the Infallible Ones always had simple answers.
What was the enemy? A virus called SARS-CoV-2. Where did it come from? Chinese bats and pangolins. When would it end? After a few weeks of “lockdown” and the introduction of “vaccines.” How did you protect yourself from it in the meantime? By isolating yourself at home, wearing a muzzle, obsessively washing your hands, leaving your shoes outside the door, avoiding other human beings, scrubbing the walls and counters – above all, by obeying whatever orders the Infallible Ones gave you.
And if you didn’t obey? You would die.
But “oh, what a tangled web we weave,” as the poet said, “when first we practice to deceive.” The Infallible Ones’ teachings were soon mired in baffling inconsistencies. A “few weeks” of lockdown gave way to months, which in turn gave way to threats of recurring confinements whenever the authorities deemed it expedient. Summertime assurances of the “success” of the national incarceration – which had upended the health care system, educationally crippled a generation of children, and tossed away the livelihoods of millions of innocent people, though the Infallible Ones seldom mentioned any of that – were succeeded by “expert” scoldings to the effect that we Americans had been too selfish to be confined at all.
When randomized clinical trials proved that face masks were useless, the Infallible Ones told us to wear two masks instead of one. When the Infallible Ones abandoned the canard of “asymptomatic transmission” – after it had fulfilled its function of stoking public hysteria – they adopted the equally silly canard that “the unvaccinated” were unique breeding grounds for viral mutations.
Even the virus itself, which the Infallible Ones had originally pronounced so unique, became the very opposite of unique as the Infallible Ones translated it into an ever-enlarging ensemble of similar viral “strains” in which new ones appeared just often enough to offset the gains supposedly made by the “vaccines.”
And meanwhile – most important of all – what was supposed to be a temporary suspension of constitutional government became a “new normal”; the law, or what had always been the law, turned out to be as obsolete as the idea of dealing with an infectious disease by giving medical treatment to the genuinely sick. In the world of the “new normal,” anyone who mentioned “civil rights” was hustled off social media and into First Amendment limbo. Democracy was mocked as a reactionary’s pipe dream – when it was mentioned at all.
That’s the record, in brief, of the past two years. And if we have learned anything from this cavalcade of deceit, it is, or should be, that the COVID coup is fundamentally not about medicine or science. It is not about inflated “case” rates or jiggered statistics or fake news or the pseudo-studies circulated by propaganda outfits like the World Health Organization or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yes, all those things have figured in the derangement of constitutional democracy that has characterized the COVID coup. But at bottom it’s not about any of them.
The real nature of the campaign is at once simpler and far more dangerous. What we’re experiencing is an attack on the very foundation of ordered liberty, an assault that is already in the process of submerging democracies beneath what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called a “permanent ‘state of exception.’” To put it bluntly: our ruling classes, in one country after another, have effectively switched off their nations’ constitutions and the whole set of civil liberties that are supposed to accompany them – not by formally abolishing them, mind you, but by adopting the extra-legal mechanisms of a “state of emergency” in place of normal constitutional procedures, with the result that the ordinary rules of democracy and the rights of individuals have, for most practical purposes, been indefinitely suspended.
That’s why the COVID coup began, in my own country, with declarations of an “emergency” in four-fifths of the states – and why, with very rare exceptions, those “states of emergency” remain in effect to this day, nearly two years later. Again, this cannot be explained away as a response to a respiratory virus. When an “emergency” involves suspending constitutional government for two years, it should be obvious that the “emergency” has ceased to be a real emergency (if it ever was one) and has become an extralegal norm – and this is even more emphatically true when virtually no one in the political opposition, the civil rights bar, or the mainstream media so much as mentions this fundamental fact.
My point is that those of us who recognize what is happening are going to have to shift our tactics. We can no longer attack COVID-19 propaganda in piecemeal fashion, challenging one medical falsehood at a time. That approach, I’m afraid, is likely to be self-defeating. As long as we focus on disproving each particular COVID “narrative,” the Infallible Ones can continue to manage the debate in mass media as a conflict between the interpretations of “experts” and those of “conspiracy theorists.”
And that allows them to skirt the real issue. COVID fascism is not a comedy of scientific errors. For all intents and purposes, it is a coup d’état. And it must be resisted accordingly.
Still, if we aren’t going to debunk every lie swirling through mass media or dished out by the “experts,” how can we be sure that we stand on solid factual ground as we resist the coup unfolding all around us – particularly if, as I’m arguing, we must begin by asserting that our struggle is about regaining our freedoms, not about correcting a medical policy?
Actually, there are many reasons we can be sure. And now, as we approach the third year of the coup, I want to offer a short list of them.
1) The COVID coup has consistently relied on unconstitutional methods
The first and most unmistakable clue about the real nature of the coup is its aggressive destruction of constitutional government. Right from the start, it involved suspensions of the legislatures; from there it moved quickly to arbitrary rule by executive fiat (mask “mandates” followed by “vaccine passports”), and then indulged head-on in violations of constitutional rights, as in the imposition of mass “quarantines” without a court order – an illegal act even under “emergency” dispensation.
I have argued this in print for over a year and a half, so I won’t belabor the point now except to stress the complicity of mass media in the unprecedented assault on our basic rights. The most important lie, of course, has been one of omission: the press simply never mentions the absence of any constitutional basis for the repeated attacks on freedom.
But I would like to call attention to a small but very revealing lie that crops up every time the press reports a new COVID-related “order.” Last month’s story about sweeping new muzzling requirements in California was a case in point. “California is ordering a statewide mask mandate for indoor public spaces,” blared the Los Angeles Times. But “California” does not and cannot issue a “mandate.” Promulgations of legal requirements belong to the appropriate organs of government – and that means that an honest report would have necessarily told readers how the mandate in question came to be. What body passed the law? Who signed it? Which agency issued the regulation, if it was a regulation, and what was the statutory authority for it to do so? In my opinion, it was no accident that the Times never informed its readers that the new California “mandate” was a unilateral edict signed by Tomas Aragon, the head of California’s Department of Public Health – an edict that did not even attempt to identify any authority for such an action in California’s statutes or regulatory code.
I repeat: in a constitutional government, health regulations are always grounded in such authority; “mandates” that ignore this are violations of law at best, dictatorial usurpations at worst. And the propagandists in the media, though they know this, obviously do not want you to know it.
The same story – political crime furthered by media complicity – emerges just as clearly from New York’s latest assault on the Nuremberg Code. The fiat recently issued by the state’s dictator – officially, Governor Kathy Hochul – claims to acquire authority for a statewide “vaccine mandate” from New York’s Public Health Law, section 225. But that statutory section does not address vaccination policy at all – and since the COVID-19 “vaccines” do not even prevent person-to-person transmission, there is no legal way the section’s general language about “the preservation and improvement of public health” can be construed to give the state’s governor the power to force 5-year-old children to be injected with experimental drugs, as Ms. Hochul has ordered.
In short, the “governor” – the word really must be put in quotation marks at this point – is acting outside her legal powers. And if we had a political opposition and a functioning court system worthy of the name, she might be facing impeachment instead of routine accolades from the tame “liberal” press, which calls this democracy-wrecking child poisoner “a moderate Democrat.”
Consider, by contrast, the intense debate over the 1985 decision of New York State’s public health council to rewrite its regulations so as to force the closing of gay bathhouses. That decision – taken at the height of the AIDS outbreak – was denounced by liberals at the time and is sharply criticized by students of political history to this day. Imagine the reaction if New York’s governor had simply written a unilateral order closing all gay bathhouses in the state, thumbing his nose at New York’s legislature and the whole existing regulatory system on the grounds that, in his view, New York faced an “emergency” that justified the suspension of democracy!
But that is exactly what has happened in states across the country – New York and my own state of New Jersey among them – for nearly two years: state executives have issued fiats suspending legal processes on the grounds of a hazily-defined “emergency,” and have followed them up with a series of unilateral decrees that drastically altered the lives of their citizenry – in direct defiance of their states’ constitutions. You cannot support that and support constitutional democracy at the same time. The propagandists may not like to admit it, but when they sing the praises of mask “mandates,” they are celebrating dictatorship.
And the democracy-busters are everywhere. In New York City, outgoing Mayor Bill DeBlasio slapped a “vaccine mandate” on all municipal employees, topping off the outrage by extending the same requirement to 184,000 private business and organizations. The mayor’s constitutional authority to order this assault on bodily integrity was so obviously shaky that a local judge promptly stayed his order. But that didn’t bother DeBlasio, who said, “I hope [this measure] will be emulated all over the country because it’s time to get even tougher to end the COVID era.” Got it? When you’re being “tough,” who cares about the law?
2) The one thing no one in the mainstream wants to mention is the biggest thing of all: that our civil liberties are evaporating
DeBlasio and Hochul are both Democrats, and it’s tempting to focus on the hypocrisy at the leftward end of the mainstream political spectrum. But it’s not just the “liberals” who have betrayed the Bill of Rights. We’re constantly told that the U.S. Supreme Court is dominated by “conservatives,” but when New York’s rampaging governor decreed that healthcare workers must submit to COVID-19 vaccination – even if they have religious objections to the experimental drugs (she claimed personal knowledge that God doesn’t support exemptions for these particular drugs) – only three justices out of nine were prepared to offer any relief. I don’t always agree with Neil Gorsuch, but the ominous conclusion of his dissenting opinion in that case (Dr. A. v. Hochul) deserves to be committed to memory:
[I]n America, freedom to differ is not supposed to be “limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.” [Citation omitted.] The test of this Court’s substance lies in its willingness to defend more than the shadow of freedom in the trying times, not just the easy ones…
Still, it seems the old lessons are hard ones. Six weeks ago, this Court refused relief in a case involving Maine’s healthcare workers. [Citation omitted.] Today, the Court repeats the mistake by turning away New York’s doctors and nurses. We do all this even though the State’s executive decree clearly interferes with the free exercise of religion – and does so seemingly based on nothing more than fear and anger at those who harbor unpopular religious beliefs. We allow the State to insist on the dismissal of thousands of medical workers – the very same individuals New York has depended on and praised for their service on the pandemic’s front lines over the last 21 months. To add insult to injury, we allow the State to deny these individuals unemployment benefits too… [H]ow many more reminders do we need that “the Constitution is not to be obeyed or disobeyed as the circumstances of a particular crisis… may suggest”? [Citation omitted.]
How many, indeed?
Business elites are pursuing the COVID agenda as viciously as the politicians, if not more so. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has stated publicly that he will fire every employee in New York who doesn’t submit to the “vaccine” experiment, even those who attempt to work from home. Wouldn’t it be nice if the erstwhile champions of “free enterprise” actually stood up for freedom when it’s being robbed from the people who work for them? But I don’t see any criticism of Dimon from the business press, which has fallen as silent as the civil-rights crowd.
And please don’t let anyone tell you that these “vaccines” aren’t experimental, or that pressuring people into taking them doesn’t violate the Nuremberg Code’s prohibition against human medical experimentation without informed consent. The case for applying the terms of the Code is simply overwhelming. As we all know, the drugs in question were rushed through privately-administered trials that did not include the animal testing protocols normally required by the Food and Drug Administration. The data from those trials – the only ones ever conducted – remain sealed from public view, and we already know from Brook Jackson about serious irregularities in the limited tests performed by the manufacturers while they were conveniently insulated from public view. That means that these drugs remain untested, and their massive use is the first real experimental trial they have ever had.
In fact, the manufacturers insisted on – and received – blanket legal immunity before they would issue their drugs to the public. This unprecedented action – one that protected the drug makers rather than the public – resulted directly from the manufacturers’ awareness that, given the lack of prior testing, no one could predict the results of the drugs until they had actually been tried out on large numbers of people. You cannot have it both ways. If you insist that you haven’t safety-tested your products before issuing them – and that’s what Pfizer, Moderna and J&J all did insist when they developed the drugs in 2020 – you can’t deny that the people you inject with them over the following year are participating in an experiment.
Besides, the propagandists themselves are giving away the game: they openly refer to the massive vaccination program now under way as “proof” that the drugs are safe. But this means that they are relying on the results of actual use as a substitute for a clinical trial.
“The vaccine does work,” Dr. Mark Sawyer, who served on the FDA advisory committee that approved the drugs in 2020, told CNBC. “[T]hat’s been clearly shown by both death rates and hospitalization rates when comparing vaccinated people to unvaccinated people.” Mind you, the propagandists really have no choice about saying this; the United States, like other countries, is actively vaccinating whole groups of people – pregnant woman and young children – who were completely excluded from the manufacturers’ trials. But to cite that experience as evidence of the drugs’ safety means – again – that people now getting their jabs are actually being herded into an enormous human medical experiment. And of course they’re not being told the truth about this.
Human medical experimentation without informed consent is not just another legal lapse. It is a crime against humanity. Think of that when you read the next op-ed singing the praises of the “vaccination” campaign.
3) The “facts” fed to the public are manifestly worthless
Yes, I know: I began this essay with the statement that we can’t fight COVID fascism one lie at a time. But even a quick sampling is enough to confirm – for anyone who still needs proof – that we’re all eye-deep in propaganda so deceitful that none of it can be taken seriously.
Take the latest fear porn to emerge from New York, always a reliable bellwether for gathering trends in COVID-19 propaganda. The day after Christmas, a deafening chorus of mass media belted out a claim of the New York State Health Department that “the number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 is rising” in New York, adding some gloating if irrelevant details about the police-state measures to be imposed on anyone reckless enough to attempt the traditional New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. (For the record, the official harassment included: mandatory muzzles outside as well as inside; required proof of “vaccination” plus personal ID for everyone over 5 years old; a police blockade around the area which banned people from entering until after 3:00 p.m.; and a sharp limit on total crowd size even afterwards. Must have been a delightful party.)
The ghouls responsible for this “alert” clearly wanted us to believe that New York’s children are keeling over in droves from the “deadly virus,” and that if we don’t immediately get every single kid injected with experimental drugs they’re all going to die.
But what does the evidence actually show? Well – nothing.
First, although the headlines made it sound as though all “children hospitalized with COVID-19” were hospitalized because of COVID-19, the fine print in the database linked from the articles told a different tale. In fact, the figures reflected the “number of patients hospitalized, and number of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) among patients with lab-confirmed COVID-19 disease”: in other words, they included all hospitalizations, due to any cause, for patients who had merely generated one positive test result for COVID-19 during the relevant period. Since those tests usually consist of a PCR assay at an unspecified amplification cycle threshold, and since such “tests” are notoriously unreliable, the number of “positive” test results in children hospitalized for causes that included, for all we know, broken arms, strep throat, measles, concussions, etc., tells us virtually nothing about how COVID-19 has been affecting New York’s children.
Second, there’s the question of absolute as opposed to relative numbers. How many actual pediatric hospitalizations had occurred in New York when the Health Department sounded its alarm? The ghouls never told us that – and once again, the fine print contradicted their arm-waving headlines. The Health Department’s press release noted parenthetically that a total of 30 children between 12 and 17 had yielded a positive COVID-19 test result in New York hospitals during the preceding week, and that “roughly half” of the total number involved children under 5. True, that left open the question of how many were between 5 and 11, but I think it’s safe to assume that if children between those ages had been admitted to hospitals in larger numbers than their older contemporaries, the Health Department would have said so.
So let’s say, for argument’s sake, that we’re talking about 60 hospital admissions for children over 5, yielding a week-long total of about 120. Given that there are nearly 4.2 million children in the state of New York, 120 positive tests for COVID-19 (via dubious methods) in New York hospitals over a seven-day period hardly seems cause for panic.
And this was just one of a whole string of similar fabrications.
The CDC has been claiming for months that “unvaccinated people who had previously recovered from a coronavirus infection” are “five times as likely to get Covid as people who had received both shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.” Because this result directly contradicted a much-publicized study from Israel, I took the trouble to review the actual data. And it turned out that the numbers not only don’t support the CDC’s claim; they demonstrate the exact opposite of what the “experts” claim they do.
Setting to one side the methods used to determine who had “previously recovered” from a COVID-19 infection, and to ensure that “vaccinated” subjects had not also previously recovered from such an infection (both of which are questionable), the paper’s authors recorded 6,328 hospitalizations “among fully vaccinated and previously uninfected patients,” while among unvaccinated patients who had previously recovered, the total number of hospitalizations was only 1,020.
Even the small proportions of those patients who subsequently tested “positive” for COVID-19 were heavily weighted in favor of the vaccinated: 324 as opposed to 89. Now, take a moment to consider how devastating those numbers are for the claim made by the CDC: namely, that vaccination alone gives you far more protection from COVID-19 than natural immunity. The study’s own data prove this to be a lie. In fact, if the numbers are taken seriously, they suggest that you are more than six times as likely to be hospitalized after being “vaccinated” than after recovering from a COVID infection – and that you are more than three times as likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19. When was the last time you heard that explained in mainstream media?
So don’t waste your time on the latest COVID-19 “study” touted in the New York Times to bludgeon more gullible citizens into compliance. Just assume you’re being lied to, and you’ll be right often enough that the exceptions won’t matter.
4) The “experts” cannot be taken seriously
And then there are the “experts.” How many times do these mouthpieces of the Infallible Ones have to contradict themselves before we stop listening to them? At first they told us (correctly) that face masks offer no real obstacle to the spread of a respiratory virus. Then, reversing themselves without explanation, they insisted that wearing a mask – any sort of mask – provided an essential layer of protection. (Right on cue, the media set up a howl about “maskless” people being sighted at Trump rallies – or similarly disreputable places – as if they had been caught cavorting down Main Street without any clothes on.)
Now the “experts” have outdone themselves by telling us that if we want real protection, we’ve got to “upgrade” to N95 or KN95 respirator masks. Doesn’t that mean that they’ve been lying to us for over a year and a half when they assured us that wearing a cloth or paper mask was the submissive citizen’s way of “doing his part”? Of course it does, but don’t expect the mainstream press to raise that uncomfortable question.
And what about the “vaccines”? When those experimental drugs were first released, I was one of many critical writers who observed that the two-shot regime demanded by the authorities was only the beginning: that soon we’d be ordered to have a third shot, then a fourth, and that eventually we’d be told that “real” vaccination was an unending process, like the “new normal” itself. Nonsense, scoffed the Infallible Ones.
But now Anthony Fauci himself is saying that the very definition of “fully vaccinated” is up for grabs, so that “it’s going to be a matter of when, not if,” that definition changes. Take a moment to wrap your mind around the enormity of this idea. In the future, your medical status won’t be based on objective facts but on the arbitrary pronouncements of the powers that be. No matter which shots you’ve had, or how many, or how recently, or whether you’re sick, or likely to become sick, or what sort of antibodies you’ve got, or what medical treatments you have or haven’t undergone in the past, if Dr. Fauci and his fellow ghouls decide to rewrite the definition of “vaccinated” you may find yourself suddenly among that demonized underclass that, according to the editorialists of the New York Times, are responsible for all the world’s troubles.
And when that happens, there won’t be anything you can do about it except to obey the latest orders of the Infallible Ones. Not even your “vaccine pass” will help you.
So it’s not even a matter of the experts constantly contradicting themselves, feeding us one false story after another – though of course they’ve done that. Now they’ve taken Newspeak to an altogether different level, arrogating to themselves the power to change the meanings of actual medical terms. In the future there won’t be any contradictions from the experts because, whenever they find it convenient, the experts will simply redefine a word or two in order to render their past pronouncements consistent with their current ones.
And who are these “experts”? Most media reports about COVID-19 statistics cite the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, directly or indirectly, as their key source of information. But they rarely mention that Johns Hopkins’ coronavirus information arm is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, both of which have significant ties to the pharmaceuticals industry – a fact that should have disqualified it long ago as a source of “objective” data.
As for the Center for Health Security itself, I have pointed out in a previous article its close links with the American Enterprise Institute, the folks who led the way to the Iraq invasion of 2003. The lies behind that invasion unraveled pretty quickly. But that was because the propagandists at AEI were careless enough to make claims – mostly about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” – that could be publicly verified. Their partners at Johns Hopkins have been more discreet: when they claimed there would be “no summertime lull” in 2020, insisting that COVID-19 deaths were not seasonal and that lockdowns would continue, off and on, for “several years,” those lies could be explained away afterward as over-pessimistic projections – projections that might still come true, for all we know, if everyone doesn’t obey Big Brother.
(By the way, I’m not the only one to notice the disturbing history of the blandly-named Center for Health Security. The German lawyer Paul Schreyer has detailed its long-term involvement in bioterror “simulations” at which subjects like the imposition of martial law and other police-state tactics have often been discussed by the high-level participants.)
So these high-profile “experts” are nothing but the lying professional mouthpieces of a lying political class.
Do you really need to know more about them?
5) The COVID coup involves a radical redefinition of human value
Finally, we must realize that the perversions of the past two years have not only been political and legal. The Infallible Ones have been tampering with basic terms of humanity and morality – and that should have all of us up in arms.
Let’s start with the obvious. A policy that deliberately discourages doctors from treating sick patients – that, in fact, causes the deaths of countless people who could otherwise have been saved – is not a medical policy at all; it is a crime.
Yet this was exactly the policy pursued by Fauci, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health, which for nearly two years did their level best to prevent the use of empirically-proven therapies for COVID-19. As a result, according to Dr. Scott Atlas (whose dissenting voice on Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force was generally buried under noisy media slanders), “urgently needed clinical trials by the NIH and FDA were never performed,” while “[i]n another unprecedented move, doctors were blocked from prescribing [hydroxychloroquine], even though prescribing any other approved drug for an off-label use was routine.” And anyone who tried to tell the truth on social media about drugs like hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin was likely to run head-on into social media censorship.
But the evil runs even deeper than that. Today we are being sold a premise never before embraced by a civilized society: the notion that every human being is a public menace by definition, that people are sick until proven healthy and dangerous until proven otherwise, that the mere act of breathing – that is, of living – requires some sort of moral and political justification. And the terms of that justification can only be determined by the powers that be; you and I are not given a say in what relieves us of the status of a public danger.
Just consider how radically incompatible such an idea is with any sort of open or democratic society. If people are defined as public menaces, how can they simultaneously constitute the ultimate public authority – a status that is the defining characteristic of a democracy? How can enemies of the people be “the people”? If a human being’s right to breathe (unless he’s been injected with experimental drugs, wears a muzzle and doesn’t write anything objectionable on social media) may be arbitrarily curtailed, what rights can a human being possibly be said to possess? It hardly needs to be said that the traditional notion of “citizenship” is no longer intelligible in such a context.
Meanwhile, we must be honest with ourselves. No political party is going to save us from the COVID coup. In the U.S., with rare exceptions, Republicans are sniping at their rivals about “cultural” issues and ignoring the most massive attack on freedom in modern American history. And even when the incumbent Democrats do badly at the polls, they stubbornly refuse to get the point.
A “half-dozen Democratic governors” recently told Politico what they thought the trouble was: “The party,” they said, “needs to find a message that acknowledges voters’ exasperation with the virus and its economic and societal impacts.” Such comments tell us all we need to know about these professional frauds, who still hope we’ll believe that “the virus” closed our businesses, stole our performing arts, wrecked our health care, tortured our kids and turned loose a batch of untested drugs on our immune systems, with more mandatory shots on the way even as the death toll of this ghastly experiment rises and rises. But of course “the virus” didn’t do any of that. The bosses did. And if we don’t stop them, they’ll go right on doing it.
And if we needed any more evidence of just how much is at stake, we got it this month from a major life insurance company in Indiana, which announced as the new year began that “the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people” between 18 and 64 years old. This “unheard of” increase cannot be attributed to COVID-19; the insurance executives themselves say that death rates have sharply declined for that illness.
What then? Might the soaring death rates have something to do with the “vaccines” that have been foisted on hundreds of millions of Americans? Or the health consequences of police-state tactics that have ravaged our society? It’s high time we demanded answers to those questions.
With what methods? Addressing fellow academics on December 8, Giorgio Agamben questioned whether it made sense any longer “to fight or act in the name of principles and concepts such as democracy, the constitution, law” and so forth; after all –
What sense would it make to invoke rights to Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini?… We are facing a government that has abandoned all legality. If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the situation we are in….
What we have before us is an adversary, an uncivilization at its end, and this seems to be confirmed by the extreme measures this adversary has chosen. How could a government choose such infamous, extreme, destructive measures as this government has done?… Therefore, I believe, we have to invent new strategies; facing such an adversary we have to invent new strategies.
“New” in this context does not have to mean unprecedented. We are accustomed to limiting ourselves to a secular political vocabulary. But when the essence of humanity is under assault, we need to think of other and more basic sorts of expression. What we’re engaged in is a spiritual struggle. It’s a battle for the survival of the human soul, and in that battle our main weapons are likely to be spiritual ones: courage, hope, self-sacrifice, faith.
Remember, the enemies of humanity have a weak point: they do not believe in human beings, and consequently they do not understand the power contained in each soul that refuses to be duped. Listen to any of their recent pronouncements, and you will notice at once that the Infallible Ones think that they are talking to children. “How to Think About Covid Data Right Now,” reads an actual headline in the New York Times for January 7 – as if it were perfectly natural for the Times to teach its readers “how to think.”
But I suspect that far more people are offended by such condescension than the Times and its fellow propagandists have yet realized. And woe to the swindler who underestimates his mark! The propagandist who believes he is lying to children might do well to recall one famous man’s warning to the effect that “it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” But I will leave my readers to draw their own conclusions about this.
January 29, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, Human rights |
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Authors of papers published in JAMA and NEJMreceived millions in undisclosed payments in 2017, an analysis finds.
A new analysis finds that 81 percent of authors whose work appeared in [two of the world’s most prestigious medical journals–SB] the Journal of American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine in 2017 failed to disclose conflicts of interest in the form of industry payments.
The analysis reviewed 31 clinical trial reports from each of the two journals that were published in 2017 and identified 118 authors who, in total, received $7.48 million dollars in industry payments. The payment information came from Open Payments, a US government website where drug and device makers must report payments to physicians and health care providers. The analysis was posted as a preprint on medRxiv on January 1 and has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Of the 118 authors on the included papers, only a dozen did not receive any payments, according to the preprint. Of the 106 researchers who received payments, the payments ranged from as little as $6.36 to as much as $1.49 million. Researchers received payments for travel, food, speaking, and consulting services, among other things, STAT News reports. The 23 researchers that received the largest payments received a total of $6.32 million, of which $3 million was undisclosed.
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends that researchers disclose payments they received in the three years prior to submitting a study for publication, so the analysis included all payments made to researchers between 2014 and 2017.
When publishing in ICMJE member journals, which includes JAMA and NEJM, researchers are required to follow the disclosure guidelines promoted by the ICMJE—which include disclosing payments. But this expectation was not met by many of the authors of the papers included in the analysis. According to STAT, the authors of the preprint say that their results suggest voluntary disclosure may not be adequate for avoiding financial conflicts or ensuring transparency.
“I’m not surprised, but really, I’m saddened and disappointed,” says Brian Piper, a neuroscientist and medical ethicist at the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, and one of the authors of the preprint, to STAT. “These are high-impact and highly influential journals. For many Americans, these are the centerpieces of evidence-based medicine. Many physicians subscribe to them. Many journalists turn to them for information.”
An NEJM statement to STAT says that the journal “follows the disclosure rules set by the ICMJE. The editors do review all of the more than 5,000 disclosure forms received each year but do not have access to primary records on which the information entered in the forms may be based. We expect the disclosure forms submitted by authors to be accurate and complete.”
JAMA has not yet responded to a request for comment on the preprint, STAT reports.
According to STAT, Piper notes that disclosures that continue to rely on individuals may be a failed approach. Instead, he suggests that journals review Open Payments and provide a link showing payments made to authors.
January 28, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | JAMA, NEJM |
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Yesterday the U.S. State Department submitted written responses to Russian negotiating positions in the ongoing U.S.-Russia negotiations over the Ukraine crisis. The exact text and details of the responses are confidential. However, Secretary of State Blinken’s statement regarding the content of the U.S. response is disturbing. At a press briefing, Blinken reaffirmed the U.S. refusal to engage with the core Russian position that the Ukraine should not be permitted to enter NATO, adding that in the written response “we make clear that there are core principles that we are committed to uphold and defend — including Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and the right of states to choose their own security arrangements and alliances.”
This is problematic from several perspectives. At the most basic level, it indicates that the U.S. is refusing to seek compromise regarding what Russia believes to be a core national security interest, namely that the U.S. should not make an alliance commitment to the military defense of Ukraine. Russia views Ukraine as a strategically critical nation due to its location directly on the Russian border and deep historical and cultural ties to Eastern Ukraine.
As Secretary Blinken must understand, NATO membership is not a decision made by Ukraine alone, and his claim that NATO membership is simply a matter of the Ukraine’s “right to choose” its own security arrangements is deeply misleading. NATO membership involves a two-way commitment, not simply the free choices of the entering member. Current alliance members must commit to mutual defense of the new member. Since the U.S. has by far the largest and most effective military forces in NATO, the most vital element of NATO membership is the American commitment to defend member borders. So Russia’s negotiating position is directed at a potential American commitment to defend Ukraine. Rather than engage honestly with the question of whether such an American military commitment really makes sense, Blinken deflects and reframes it as a matter of “core principles” around Ukraine’s choices and sovereignty.
In the long term, this indicates an unwillingness to grapple with the question of how to align American military commitments and resources with our long-term strategic interests, and whether Ukraine represents a core interest which justifies the placement of many tens or even hundreds of thousands of new troops in Europe and risking a major war with another nuclear power.
More importantly in the short term, it digs the U.S. into a position “on principle” that no compromise whatsoever is available on the critical question of Ukrainian membership in NATO. This is particularly confusing because the Biden Administration has been clear that it is currently unwilling to directly commit the U.S. military to the defense of Ukraine – which is precisely what would be immediately required if Ukraine became a NATO member. A credible defense for Ukraine would require a massive increase in U.S. forces in Europe, possibly approaching Cold War level ground and air forces. It is hard to see any domestic appetite for expending this level of resources, and internationally an immediate beneficiary would be China.
January 28, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | NATO, Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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Pfizer and Moderna set to ask the FDA & CDC to grandfather in their reformulated coronavirus vaccines with almost no data
I just got another 30-day suspension from Facebook. It’s always interesting to see which posts set off the Stasi. The purpose of censorship is to delete any facts that contradict the Pharma narrative. So every time they censor one of my posts it tells me that this content was directly over the target.
Many of my previous suspensions were in the weeks leading up to key FDA and CDC decisions on mRNA vaccine applications. I was highly visible on social media sharing information about why the risks of these shots outweigh the benefits. It seems that Pfizer and Moderna just put out the word that they want to get the approval across the line and the Stasi get to work banning anyone with data or analysis that might hurt their application. They ban me about three weeks before the FDA/CDC decision, get the approval they seek, and then my suspension expires.
And that seems to be the case again here.
In this instance, Facebook suspended me for a post from two months ago. They never explain their decision and never point out any factual errors in my post. But ask yourself, why did this particular post trigger the Thought Police?
November 28, 2021
Guys and gals listen up. The battle ahead is this: both Pfizer and Moderna have announced plans to develop new multivalent mRNA shots within 100 days to address new variants. They will argue to the FDA and CDC that these new shots (now the fourth dose of a failed product) should be grandfathered in without further clinical trials because they are similar to the existing (deadly toxic junk) product. If that happens, then all future doses of this product, whatever the formulation, will never go through clinical trials of any kind.
I am hard-pressed to imagine a more apocalyptic scenario — injections, for most everyone in the developed world, every six months, forever, with no clinical trials, and no idea of what is in the vial. It’s a eugenicists’ dream.
We must begin pushing now to tell every elected official and every regulator that there must be new clinical trials or they will be prosecuted at Nuremberg 2.0.
Republicans hoping to take back the Congress in 2022 must be on record as demanding new clinical trials.
Existing trials are terrible but they give us a chance to see how these companies rig the data and they give us a point of comparison (to show that they lied) when real world data comes in. We have very little data on new variants but Pfizer and Moderna’s plans to proceed without clinical trials are a possible extinction-level event for humanity.
Updated to add: the message to elected officials has to be simple — Any new formulation needs a proper new clinical trial (50,000 participants, at least 2 years follow up, conducted by an independent 3rd party).
My assertions in this post are based on years of studying the Pharma playbook. Is there any evidence that anything I said in this post is incorrect? Pharma is going to try to get these reformulated coronavirus vaccines grandfathered in without further regulatory scrutiny.
To the extent that there are any clinical trials — they will be these sham trials like the recent third dose Emergency Use Authorization applications. As you will recall, the Moderna third dose “trial” had 149 participants in the treatment group and the Pfizer “trial” had 200 participants total. I wrote about that (here). These “trials” were so bad that the top two vaccine safety regulators at the FDA quit rather than approve this worthless toxic junk under political pressure from the Biden administration. Indeed these “trials” were so bad that the hand picked Yes-men (and women) on the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee rejected the applications (16 to 2) — so Janet Woodcock just pushed the applications through under her signature, against their advice.
The fact that FB censored this two-month old post out of the blue suggests that this is exactly what Pfizer and Moderna are about to do — they are going to bum-rush these reformulated coronavirus vaccines through the rotten FDA and CDC and start injecting them into billions of people with no data on safety or effectiveness.
These reformulated vaccines are ostensibly to address the Omicron variant — although a new variant will have already taken its place by the time these reformulated vaccines are available. So once again these vaccines are likely to have zero or negative efficacy against the virus and produce unknown levels of harm including iatrogenic injury and antibody dependent enhancement. The introduction of reformulated vaccines is also likely to accelerate the evolution of new variants.
This is why we need a revolution. This is why we must overthrow the existing regime. Common carriers and most bourgeois institutions in the U.S. work for the Cartel. And the Cartel is engaged in democide throughout the developed world because democide is very profitable and this is now their business model.
January 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, Facebook, FDA |
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As explained in prior posts, in a lawsuit seeking all of the documents the FDA relied upon to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, a federal judge shot down the FDA’s requested rate of 500 pages per month and instead ordered the FDA to produce at the rate of 55,000 pages per month starting on March 1.
Since the government has trillions of dollars of our money, it is putting it to good use by fighting to assure that the public has the least amount of transparency possible. To that end, it has now asked the Court to make the public wait until May for it to start producing 55,000 pages per month and, even then, claims it may not be able to meet this rate.
The FDA’s excuse? As explained in the brief opposing the FDA’s request, the FDA’s defense effectively amounts to claiming that the 11 document reviewers it has already assigned and the 17 additional reviewers being onboarded are only capable of reading at the speed of preschoolers.
Meanwhile…
As the FDA tries to obtain months of delay, guess who just showed up in the lawsuit? Yep, Pfizer. And it is represented by a global chair and team from a law firm with thousands of lawyers. Pfizer’s legal bill will likely be multiple times what it would cost the FDA to simply hire a private document review company to review, redact, and produce the documents at issue. Within weeks, if not days.
Pfizer is coming in as a third party. But Pfizer assures the Court it is here to help expedite production of the documents. Sure it is! Where was Pfizer before the Court ordered the 55,000 pages per month? Right, doing what it normally does: letting the government work on its behalf – like the way the government mandates, promotes, and defends Pfizer’s product.
But the government did not please Pfizer this time and so here it comes, likely looking for a second bite at the apple. Of course the FDA consented to Pfizer appearing. You can read the response my firm filed to Pfizer’s motion , as well as all of the other relevant recent filings in the link provided below.
Let me end by noting that all of this insanity is simply in response to an attempt to obtain some basic transparency. This should again bring into sharp focus why the government should never coerce or mandate anyone to get an unwanted medical product or procedure. Just look at this circus – the government mandates Pfizer’s product, gives it immunity for any safety or efficacy issues, promotes its product using taxpayer money, gives Pfizer over $17 billion and then uses taxpayers’ money to fight to avoid providing even the most basic level of transparency to the public.
The introduction from the brief opposing the FDA’s request is below and you can find copies of all the relevant court filings (FDA Motion to Modify Scheduling Order, January 18, 2022 / Plaintiff Opposition to Motion to Modify, January 24, 2022 / Pfizer Motion to Intervene, January 21, 2022 / FDA Response to Pfizer Motion, January 25, 2022 / Plaintiff Response to Pfizer Motion, January 25, 2022) here:
INTRODUCTION TO OPPOSITION TO FDA’S MOTION
It is understandable that the FDA does not want independent scientists to review the documents it relied upon to license Pfizer’s vaccine given that it is not as effective as the FDA originally claimed, does not prevent transmission, does not prevent against certain emerging variants, can cause serious heart inflammation in younger individuals, and has numerous other undisputed safety issues.[1] However, the FDA’s potential embarrassment over its decision to license this product must take a back seat to the transparency demanded by FOIA and the urgent need and interests of the American people to review that licensure data. The Court already recognized this unprecedented urgent need in its January 6th order directing the FDA to produce 55,000 pages per month.
The FDA now insists it must delay its first 55,000-page production until May 1, 2022 – four months after the Court entered its order. However, the FDA’s own papers seeking this delay make plain it can produce at a rate of 55,000 pages per month in February and March. The FDA affirms it has already “allocated the equivalent of nearly 11 full-time staff to this project” and that “a review speed of 50 documents per hour was within the normal range for document review in a complex matter” in private practice; and here the 50 document per hour rate would be faster since there is only a need to review for personally identifying information (“PII”) for most pages. Hence, if the FDA’s 11 full-time reviewers work only 7.5 hours per day and review 50 pages (not documents) per hour, the FDA could review over 88,000 pages per month in February and March. That is more than sufficient to produce the 55,000 pages per month currently ordered for these two months.
Instead of complying with this Court’s reasoned order, the FDA claims these 11 reviewers can only review a total of 10,000 pages per month. What the FDA does not say, and what basic math shows, is that a rate of 10,000 pages a month for 11 full-time reviewers amounts to only 5 pages per hour! This rate is made even more absurd because most of the pages the FDA will be reviewing during this period are repetitive data files that only require second level review to redact minimal amounts of PII that Pfizer may have left in the documents. FDA’s reality defying claim and contemptuous approach to its production obligations should not be countenanced. (Infra § I.)
It is also apparent that the instant demand is just the start of a campaign to delay the production ordered by the Court. In this first salvo, the FDA is not really asking the Court. It is instead expressly telling the Court it does not intend to produce more than 10,000 pages per month for February and March, and despite claiming it is making “unprecedented” efforts, the FDA repeatedly tells the Court: “It is not possible to guarantee that FDA will be able to fully comply” with the 55,000-page production rate thereafter. (Dkt. No. 38 at APPX004, APPX008.) Americans must follow the law and the FDA, a multi-billion-dollar agency, should similarly be given no safe harbor from complying with the orders of this Court. (Infra § II.)
The FDA should also be held to what it attests. The FDA, with over 18,000 employees and an over $3 billion discretionary budget, repeatedly assures the Court that it is taking steps to “marshal every possible resource available to it,” “acting with maximal urgency to assemble every possible resource available to it” and “putting every available resource at its disposal into its efforts to achieve compliance.” (Dkt. No. 37 at 10, 3, 10.) The FDA also attests that over the coming weeks, it will have 28.5 full-time people reviewing the documents. Working 7.5 hours per day for 20 business days per month, 28.5 people reviewing 50 pages per hour can review a total of approximately 213,750 pages per month. Putting aside that most of this production can be reviewed far faster than the rate of 50 pages per hour, Plaintiff asks that the FDA be held to its representations and be directed to produce at the rate of 180,000 pages per month starting in April. (Infra § III.)
The Court is, other than Congress, the only check on the FDA. In a free country, transparency is paramount, and the FDA has chosen to thwart transparency and the requirements of FOIA by anemically understaffing the office it maintains to respond to FOIA requests. It is akin to the boy that kills his parents and asks for sympathy for being an orphan. Decrying that this Court is now making it comply with the law – by actually producing documents in a timely manner – is ridiculous. It is also incredible for the FDA to claim that compliance here would harm its health policy objectives. Even if the FDA really does need to spend $4 to $5 million which, as shown below, is an absurd overestimate, that is an inconsequential amount of its overall $3.41 billion discretionary budget. Moreover, the issues with the Pfizer vaccine – including waning immunity, variants evading immunity, the failure to prevent transmission, myocarditis, and pericarditis – show that the FDA’s priority should be to address this product before rushing off to engage in other activities. (Infra § IV.)
For these reasons, as explained below, the Court should refuse to reduce the rate of production in February and March and should increase the rate of production for April and thereafter to 180,000 pages per month consistent with the FDA employing 28.5 full-time reviewers in the coming weeks to conduct the review and the fact that most of the pages need only be reviewed for PII.
… you can read the rest of the brief here
[1] Reflecting the issues with this product, the FDA failed to send a representative to a federal court hearing in this matter on December 14th because of the “FDA’s protocols” regarding COVID-19. Meaning, despite the FDA’s claim the vaccine is “effective,” the FDA is apparently still scared to send a representative to the hearing. Its actions speak volumes and cast serious doubt on its words.
January 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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