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How Two Hairstylists Changed Our Mask Policy

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | December 20, 2021

Americans and people around the globe have been forced to wear face masks in order to “protect public health,” without evidence that they actually work to reduce COVID-19 transmission, hospitalizations and deaths.

You may remember, in fact, that in the early days of the pandemic, there was a rush on masks, causing supplies for health care practitioners to dwindle. At the time, health officials were adamant that people should NOT wear masks.

In February 2020, Christine Francis, a consultant for infection prevention and control at the World Health Organization, said, “Medical masks … cannot protect against the new coronavirus when used alone … WHO only recommends the use of masks in specific cases.”1

Those specific cases include if you have a cough, fever or difficulty breathing. In other words, if you’re actively sick and showing symptoms. “If you do not have these symptoms, you do not have to wear masks because there is no evidence that they protect people who are not sick,” she continued.

Also in February 2020, U.K. health authorities advised against the use of masks, even for people working in community or residential care facilities, stating, “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.”2

In March 2020, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams publicly agreed, tweeting a message stating, “Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!” and going on to say that they are not effective in preventing the general public from catching coronavirus.3

As of March 31, WHO was still advising against the use of face masks for people without symptoms, stating that there is “no evidence” that such mask usage prevents COVID-19 transmission.4 How, then, did masks suddenly become a key strategy in the fight against COVID-19? A study involving two hairstylists.

Beauty Salon Study Used to Cement US Mask Mandates

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides more than 15 studies as their basis for recommending face masks. All of them are observational in nature, not randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which are considered the gold standard of scientific research.

“In general, observational studies are not only of lower quality than RCTs but also are more likely to be politicized, as they can inject the researcher’s judgment more prominently into the inquiry and lend themselves, far more than RCTs, to finding what one wants to find,” explained Jeffrey Anderson, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in a review published by City Journal.5

The CDC focused, in particular, on one of the studies — an observational cohort study of two hairstylists at a Missouri beauty salon who tested positive for COVID-19.6 The two stylists developed respiratory symptoms, but continued to see 139 clients for several days until they received positive COVID-19 tests. Both of the stylists wore masks during this time, as did most of the clients.

Sixty-seven of the clients ended up getting tested for COVID-19, none of whom tested positive. The other 72 clients did not report any symptoms, which led the CDC to state, “Adherence to the community’s and company’s face-covering policy likely mitigated spread of SARS-CoV-2.”7 But were the masks really the pivotal factor in the seeming lack of transmission at the salon? Anderson wrote:8

“This study has major limitations. For starters, any number of the 72 untested customers could have had Covid-19 but been asymptomatic, or else had symptoms that they chose not to report to the Greene County Health Department, the entity doing the asking.

The apparent lack of spread of Covid-19 could have been a result of good ventilation, good hand hygiene, minimal coughing by the stylists, or the fact that stylists generally, as the researchers note, ‘cut hair while clients are facing away from them.’”

One of the most important factors limiting the study’s usefulness, however, is its lack of a control group. Would the results have been different if the stylists or clients weren’t wearing masks? Nobody knows. For comparison, Anderson mentioned a scenario at a gym in Virginia, where most people did not wear masks. A trainer tested positive for COVID-19, but none of the 50 gym members who had worked with the trainer got sick.

“Clearly, this doesn’t prove that not wearing masks prevents transmission,” Anderson noted,9 yet this is precisely the logic that the CDC used in their support of the beauty salon study.

RCTs Cast Doubt on Masks

“It’s striking how much the CDC, in marshalling evidence to justify its revised mask guidance, studiously avoids mentioning randomized controlled trials,” Anderson continued. “Mask supporters often claim that we have no choice but to rely on observational studies instead of RCTs, because RCTs cannot tell us whether masks work or not. But what they really mean is that they don’t like what the RCTs show.”

Anderson evaluated 14 RCTs conducted worldwide on the effectiveness of masks in reducing respiratory virus transmission. Eleven of them found that masks don’t work to reduce transmission or, worse, are counterproductive and may increase risks. Only three of the studies suggest masks might be useful:10

“… one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.”

In one example,11 which claims to be the first RCT of cloth masks, conducted in 2015, 1,607 hospital health care workers were randomized to wear medical masks, cloth masks or a control group, which included mask wearing. The mask was used every shift for four consecutive weeks.

Not only were rates of infection significantly higher in those wearing cloth masks compared to medical masks or controls, but both types of masks let particles through — “Penetration of cloth masks by particles was almost 97% and medical masks 44%,” the researchers wrote.12 It wasn’t only that cloth masks weren’t effective; the researchers cautioned against their use, as “moisture retention, reuse of cloth masks and poor filtration may result in increased risk of infection.”

In another instance, a review of 13 of the 14 RCTs mentioned above, published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, similarly found, “There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks” and “the pooled results of randomized trials did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks during seasonal influenza.”13

The “Danmask-19 Trial,” published November 18, 2020, in the Annals of Internal Medicine,14 found that among mask wearers 1.8% (42 participants) ended up testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, compared to 2.1% (53) among controls.

When they removed the people who reported not adhering to the recommendations for use, the results remained the same — 1.8% (40 people), which suggests adherence makes no significant difference. The authors had difficulty getting the study published, as its results question mandatory masking. Anderson added:15

“Meanwhile, the CDC website portrays the Danish RCT (with its 4,800 participants) as being far less relevant or important than the observational study of Missouri hairdressers with no control group, dismissing the former as ‘inconclusive’ and ‘too small’ while praising the latter, amazingly, as ‘showing that wearing a mask prevented the spread of infection’ — when it showed nothing of the sort.”

Mask-Triggered Environmental Disaster Is Looming

If masks don’t work, the extreme environmental toll they’re taking becomes even more tragic. Writing in BMJ Open, researchers used a model to estimate usage, costs and waste incurred by N95 respirator usage over the first six months of the pandemic in the U.S.16

They found that, for health care workers, using a new N95 respirator for each patient encounter would require 7.41 billion respirators, cost $6.38 billion and generate 84 million kilograms (kg) (92,594 tons) of waste — that’s just over a six-month period and in the U.S. alone.

Even if this were cut down to one N95 mask per health care worker per day, it would still require 3.29 billion respirators, cost $2.83 billion and generate 37.22 million kg of waste. An MIT team has developed a reusable N95 mask made from silicone that contains a filter that can be sterilized and reused.17 Study author Giovanni Traverso told MIT News:18

“Our vision was that if we had a reusable system, we could reduce the cost. The majority of disposable masks also have a significant environmental impact, and they take a very long time to degrade.

During a pandemic, there’s a priority to protect people from the virus, and certainly that remains a priority, but for the longer term, we have to catch up and do the right thing, and strongly consider and minimize the potential negative impact on the environment.”

However, this doesn’t speak to the unfathomable number of disposable masks being discarded daily outside of health care settings. In a study, Swansea University researchers noted that 200 million disposable plastic facemasks are produced in China daily, and “improper and unregulated disposals” have led to a significant plastic pollution problem.19

Most disposable face masks contain three layers — a polyester outer layer, a polypropylene or polystyrene middle layer and an inner layer made of absorbent material such as cotton. Polypropylene is already one of the most problematic plastics, as it’s widely produced and responsible for large waste accumulation in the environment.

It’s not only the plastic itself that’s the problem but also the chemicals it contains. When seven disposable facemask brands were submerged in water to simulate what happens with littering when masks end up in waterways, micro- and nanoscale fibers and particles and heavy metals, including lead, antimony and copper, were detected, raising significant environmental and public health concerns.20

Just how many masks are being used and discarded? One estimate suggests 129 billion facemasks are used each month worldwide, while another found that 3.4 million are disposed of daily.21 But once they’re thrown in the trash, they don’t just disappear. To put this into perspective, an Environmental Advances study calculated that one face mask can release 173,000 microfibers daily into the sea.22

The researchers also found that face masks alone may account for an additional 72 to 31,200 tons of microplastic waste ending up in the world’s oceans in 2020. “Action is therefore urgently needed to limit the amount of discarded surgical masks reaching the marine ecosystem,” they wrote.23

Widespread mask mandates are not simply a matter of “wearing one can’t hurt.” This public health policy needs to be immediately reevaluated based on its ineffectiveness and potential for immense harm, both for the people wearing them and the environment being exposed to them.

Sources and References

December 20, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Michael Mann Says 64F At Penn State Is “Ridiculous”

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 19, 2021

More misinformation from Michael Mann:

In fact December temperatures of 64F are perfectly normal at Penn State.

The highest December temperature was 71F In 1998:

http://climod2.nrcc.cornell.edu/

December 20, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

One more go at the 97% consensus

Guest post by Rafe Champion | JoNova | December 11, 2021

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. – Michael Crichton

The 97% consensus on catastrophic human-induced climate warming is one of the great PR coups of all time, demonstrating the effectiveness of The Big Lie for propaganda purposes. Cook’s 2013 paper became a springboard, coming strategically before the Paris COP, for Barack Obama and John Kerry to achieve a face-saving but meaningless result at the event. It was the rejoinder to the leaked emails from East Anglia that sank the Copenhagan COP.

It became the “go to” rejoinder and the killer argument in every private discussion and public debate – “I am just following the science.” Commentators and public service advisors use it to intimidate politicians and the public although practically no one has read the all-important paper by John Cook and associates, or even knows someone who has.

Three tasks

We have to explain how the offending paper fooled uncritical readers. My colleague Jeff Grimshaw has explained this with reference to the advertising tricks used to sell cat food. We also have to explain that the merits of rival scientific theories are determined by critical discussion and rigorous testing, not by a show of hands in the scientific community. Yet another task is to understand how a scientific culture emerged where Cook and associates would be allowed to pursue their work and there are many journals are pleased to publish the results.

The paper has no useful scientific content because it is not about science, it is about the opinions of a sample of scientists, interpreted by green activists and then sliced and diced to eliminate or misrepresent opinions that were not acceptable to the researchers.

The decisive step was to count everyone who thought there was warming and any amount of human influence in the category of people who are worried about warming. Close reading and repeated re-reading is necessary to understand how the information was collected and manipulated to get that result. Then a trick from the advertising industry came into play to sell their product – “97.1% of cats liked it!”

No scientists dispute warming because the arguments are about how much, over what period and with what cause, so you can bet on 100% agreement there, and likewise no scientists dispute human influence (even if it is just the heat island effect) and you can expect 100% there as well. The result should be 100% consensus on CAGW (the revised version) but 97.4% has a strangely reassuring “scientific “ ring to it, not quite 100% but very precise!

The two parts of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) meme: (1) warming is going to be catastrophic and (2 ) human activities are driving it.

Both of these need to be established to justify trillions of dollars of spending on projects that inflict massive environmental damage – like chemotherapy for the planet.

Both of them! Not just one or the other.

If the warming is dangerous and we make little or no contribution to it, then we can do little or nothing to avert the danger.

Alternatively if the warming is not dangerous then the extent of our influence is a matter of scientific interest but we don’t need to worry about it.

Starting with the first leg of the double. The case for the danger of warming is laughable because nobody can credibly deny the benefit of warming over the last 200 years, and the advance of warming has been glacial in recent times.

As for the human emissions of CO2 that are supposed to drive warming, we can reply, starting at the shallow end of the scientific pool. The geological record shows that high levels of CO2 never caused runaway warming. The level of CO2 at present (including a small fraction from human emissions) is nowhere near the pre-historical high points. Doubling atmospheric CO2 from 420ppm at present, with the current increase of 2ppm per annum, will take 200 years. There is a diminishing return from additional CO2 and most of the effect of rising CO2 since the Industrial Revolution has been used up with the one degree of warming since then. And so on and so forth as you go towards the deep end of the pool to learn from Happer and Lindzen on atmospheric physics.

How did Cook and associates manage to fool people into thinking that scientists are terrified of CAGW?

Regrettably a lot of people wanted to believe the consensus and serious public discussion is almost impossible because most people are scientifically illiterate. To be fair, that is not a sin, they just didn’t study science – you don’t beat a dog for chasing cats and you don’t blame cats for chasing mice. The sin for journalists, politicians and their advisors is to ignore the views of the significant number of very highly qualified scientists who are not alarmed. That may be harder since Steven Koonin emerged on the scene, untainted by incorrect political affiliations.

In case President Obama’s strident advocacy of the consensus was not enough, it would have gone viral through the Climate Action Network, a global coalition of 1500 organizations in 130 countries dedicated to driving climate alarm at the local level and in every form of media. There are 10 regional nodes and 12 national nodes, including Australia, and a few years ago they triggered a global offensive to enhance the language of alarmism with guidelines that The Guardian announced a few years ago – the standard terms are now global heating and climate crisis so on. Greta Thunberg signalled the new language in her viral tweet:

“It’s 2019. Can we all now call it what it is: climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency?”[i]

The latest word is that CAN is closing some parts of the network, presumably because its work is done. Radical environmentalism evolved from the efforts of self-funded activists to organizations with enough money to employ fulltime workers to whole government departments like the US Environmental Protection Agency. Has anyone got a list of all the agencies in Australia that are doing climate and energy activism at our expense?. You could start here and here.

Selling the consensus and cat food

This is explained by my co-author Jeff Grimshaw in our forthcoming book Triggerwarming: A primer for politicians and journalists and anyone else who doesn’t know anything about climate science.

Consider the phrase “97% of scientists agree”? And how about “eight out of ten owners said their cat prefers it!”? Have you ever wondered where these promotional numbers come from? In the research conducted by John Cook and colleagues around the world, there were two stages of data collection followed by some very complicated analysis. It is necessary to read the paper several times to be clear about what they actually found, as distinct from their personal opinions and what they want the reader to think that they found. At the first stage Cook and the team read the abstracts of some 12,000 published papers on climate to find if the authors had a position on AGW:

“We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming.” 

So how did 32.6 become 97? Have a look at cat food advertisements to explain this. How does anyone know that eight out of ten cats prefer a particular type of cat food? Did they ask the cats? In reality, the company simply asked cat owners if their cats liked their cat food and 80% said yes. So they discovered that cats like the cat food they are fed, and with only a modest distortion of the facts the company could claim that (almost) a consensus of cats liked their brand of cat food. After a complaint to the UK Advertising Standards Authority, the slogan was changed to “eight out of ten owners who expressed a preference said their cat prefers Brand X.” That language hides as much as it reveals (how were they selected and what were they asked?) but the original slogan was well established and a slight change made no difference to the “vibe” of the advertisement.

Getting back to Cook and associates, in the abstract of the paper we read:

“Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” 

Nice work with the advertising gimmicks John! Of course he is a psychologist, not a climate scientist and he probably did a unit on Statistical Manipulation for Marketing and Advertising.

So that is advertising part of the deception, and what happened to the two key questions that scientists need to answer in the debate about CAGW – How much warming and how much human contribution? In their capacity as magicians the methodological arm-waving of Cook et al distracted the attention of readers from the lack of content (actually how many people read past the abstract?) and in their capacity as alchemists they transmuted the base metal of dodgy numbers into gold for climate alarmists. Not 24 carat gold to be sure. How do you rank it?

__________________________________________________

Jo Nova’s answer:

Cook’s work was a scientific wasteland from the start. Consensus is a fallacy. Science is not a democracy. The keyword survey of abstracts was always a meaningless proxy for biased government funding, and profoundly unscientific. To discuss it in any other terms is to pretend it had any scientific value at all.

Cook’s study could never tell us anything about the climate around the planet, all it could ever do was measure sociobehavioural aspects of the Climate Academic Complex. The more biased the government funding, the more biased the abstracts would be. If Cook was even slightly competent he might have shown that government funded science will find whatever it’s paid to find. Alas, it’s not that useful. Cook got biased friends to subjectively “rate” abstracts. This is not even junk sociology.

Posts on Cooks “consensus”.

December 20, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

The Scheming of Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | December 17, 2021

Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci have become household names in the U.S., their largely sterling reputations protected by a heavily biased press. Less known is the deep partnership between the two — the culmination of which has created a formidable public-private partnership that wields incredible power over the American public, along with global health and food policies.

You can read all of the details in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bestselling book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” which contains more than 2,200 footnotes backing up its data. It exposes the connection between Gates and Fauci, as well as how Gates patterned his rise to control after John Rockefeller’s empire.

In 1913, Rockefeller created the Rockefeller Foundation, which is largely responsible for creating the Big Pharma-controlled medical paradigm that exists today. The foundation imbued its philosophy, precepts and ideologies into the League of Nations Health Organization, which turned into the World Health Organization.

Now, Gates contributes to WHO via multiple avenues, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) as well as GAVI, which was founded by the Gates Foundation in partnership with WHO, the World Bank and various vaccine manufacturers. Together, this makes Gates WHO’s No. 1 funder.

How Gates Used Rockefeller’s Business Model

Inspired by Rockefeller’s business model, Bill and Melinda Gates donated $36 billion worth of Microsoft stock to the BMGF between 1994 and 2018. Gates also created a separate entity, Bill Gates Investments (BGI), which manages his personal wealth and his foundation’s corpus.

BGI predominantly invests in multinational food, agriculture, pharmaceutical, energy, telecom and tech companies with global operations. Federal tax laws require the BMGF to give away a portion of its foundation assets annually to qualify for tax exemption.

Gates strategically targets BMGF’s charitable gifts to give him control of the international health and agricultural agencies and the media, allowing him to dictate global health and food policies so as to increase profitability of the large multinationals in which he and his foundation hold large investment positions.

As was the case with Rockefeller, whose wealth only grew after his Standard Oil Company was forced to split into 34 different companies, Gates’ strategic gifts have only magnified his wealth. Gates’ personal net worth grew from $63 billion in 2000 to $129.6 billion in 2021,1 his wealth expanding by $23 billion during the 2020 lockdowns alone.2

How Gates Controls the WHO

How does a private citizen, not an elected official, gain so much control over a global health agency like WHO? When it was founded, WHO could decide how to distribute its contributions. Now, 70% of its budget is tied to specific projects, countries or regions, which are dictated by the funders.3 As such, Gates’ priorities are the backbone of WHO, and it wasn’t a coincidence when he said of WHO, “Our priorities, are your priorities.”4

As of 2018, the cumulative contributions from the Gates Foundation and GAVI made “Gates the unofficial top sponsor of the WHO, even before the Trump administration’s 2020 move to cut all his support to the organization,” according to Kennedy. “Plus, Gates also routes funding to WHO through SAGE [Strategic Advisory Group of Experts] and UNICEF and Rotary International bringing his total contributions to over $1 billion.”

These tax-deductible donations give Gates both leverage and control over international health policy, “which he largely directs to serve the profit interest of his pharma partners.”

Further, “Gate’s vaccine obsession has diverted WHO’s program contributions from poverty alleviation, nutrition and clean water to make vaccine uptake its preeminent public health metric. And Gates is not afraid to throw his weight around,” according to Kennedy. “… The sheer magnitude of his foundation’s financial contributions has made Bill Gates an unofficial — albeit unelected — leader of the WHO.” Gates’ power has grown further due to his decadeslong partnership with Fauci.

Fauci’s Immense Power

Alone, both Gates and Fauci wield immense power in their fields. Together, they’re a formidable, if unfortunately nefarious, force.

As the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) — “Fauci has a $6.1 billion budget that he distributes to colleges and universities to do drug research for various diseases,” Kennedy says. “He has another $1.7 billion that comes from the military to do bioweapons research.”5

This is where Fauci’s power lies: in his capacity to fund, arm, pay, maintain and effectively deploy a large and sprawling standing army. The NIH alone controls an annual $37 billion budget distributed in over 50,000 grants supporting over 300,000 positions globally in medical research.6

The thousands of doctors, hospital administrators, health officials and research virologists whose positions, careers and salaries depend on AIDS dollars flowing from Dr. Fauci, Gates and the Wellcome Trust (Great Britain’s version of the Gates Foundation) are the officers and soldiers in a mercenary army that functions to defend all vaccines and Dr. Fauci’s HIV/AIDS doxologies.

Along with Gates, Fauci had the power to influence funding of U.S. foreign aid to Africa for AIDS, prioritizing that for vaccines and drugs instead of nutrition, sanitation and economic development. Yet, Fauci and his team, funded by Gates, have never created a vaccine for AIDS, despite squandering billions of dollars, and causing uncounted human carnage. In 2020, many of the Gates/Fauci HIV vaccine trials in Africa suddenly became COVID-19 vaccine trials.7

As explained in Kennedy’s book, HIV provided Gates and Fauci a beachhead in Africa for their new brand of medical colonialism and a vehicle for the partners to build and maintain a powerful global network that came to include heads of state, health ministers, international health regulators, the WHO, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, key leaders from the financial industry and military officials who served as command center of the burgeoning Biosecurity Apparatus.

Their foot soldiers were the army of frontline virologists, vaccinologists, clinicians and hospital administrators who relied on their largesse and acted as the community-based ideological commissars of this crusade.

Fauci ‘Enthusiastic’ About Gates COVID Partnership

April 1, 2020, Fauci spoke with Gates on the phone, according to emails released in 2021. Fauci referred to the phone call in an email to Emilio Emini, the director of the Gates Foundation’s tuberculosis and HIV program, stating, “As I had mentioned to Bill yesterday evening, I am enthusiastic about moving towards a collaborative and hopefully synergistic approach to COVID-19.”8

The email was part of 3,000 emails obtained via a FOIA public records request by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN). Despite having no medical degree, Gates has been granted direct access to top government health officials, who regard him as a public health authority. In June 2021, Daily Mail reported:9

“The Gates Foundation has committed at least $1.75 billion toward the global effort to fight the pandemic — a sum that opened doors at the highest levels of government. Following Fauci’s phone call with Gates, the Gates Foundation executive Emini emailed him to follow up and ask ‘how we can coordinate and cross inform each other’s activities.’

‘There’s an obvious need for coordination among the various primary funders or the focus we need to have given the state of the pandemic will become lost through uncoordinated activities,’ Emini wrote.”

Fauci also said he would facilitate a call between Emini and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA),10 which provides funding for vaccine and drug development, promoting “the advanced development of medical countermeasures to protect Americans and respond to 21st century health security threats.”11 Daily Mail continued:12

“The Gates Foundation’s partnership with BARDA resulted in at least one joint funding project. In June 2020, Evidation Health announced that BARDA and the Gates Foundation were financing an effort to ‘develop an early warning algorithm to detect symptoms of COVID-19.’

It’s unclear whether the warning system was ever launched, and Evidation issued no further statements on the project after the initial announcement. Other emails released … make it clear that the Gates Foundation remained actively involved in the NIH’s pandemic response.”

The Fauci-Gates partnership led to $1 billion in increased funding to Gates’ global vaccine programs, even as the NIH budget itself experienced little growth.13 Long before the April 2021 phone call, however, Kennedy’s book reveals that Fauci and Gates met in person, shaking hands in 2000 in an agreement to control and expand the global vaccine enterprise.

Why Haven’t You Heard About This Before?

When you’re one of the richest people in the world, you can buy virtually anything you want — including control of the media so that it only prints favorable press. If you have enough money — and Gates certainly does — you can even get major media companies like ViacomCBS, which runs MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and BET, among others, to insert your approved PSAs into their programming — and BMGF has.14

Via more than 30,000 grants, Gates has contributed at least $319 million to the media, Alan MacLeod, a senior staff writer for MintPress News, revealed.15 From press and journalism associations to journalistic training, Gates is an overarching keeper of the press, which makes true objective reporting pertaining to Gates himself — or his many initiatives — virtually impossible.16

Speaking with MintPress News, Linsey McGoey, a professor of sociology at the University of Essex, U.K., explained that Gates’ philanthropy comes with a price:17

“Philanthropy can and is being used deliberately to divert attention away from different forms of economic exploitation that underpin global inequality today.

The new ‘philanthrocapitalism’ threatens democracy by increasing the power of the corporate sector at the expense of the public sector organizations, which increasingly face budget squeezes, in part by excessively remunerating for-profit organizations to deliver public services that could be delivered more cheaply without private sector involvement.”

It’s a sentiment Kennedy, who believes Fauci and Gates should be investigated for criminal wrongdoing, has echoed. In an interview, he stated that billionaires are in collusion with media, corporations and politicians in order to increase their tremendous wealth:18

“The most important productive strategy or the big talk around the oligarchs and the intelligence agencies and the pharmaceutical companies who are trying to impoverish us and obliterate democracy, their strategy is to create fear and division.

So orchestrate fear, divide Republicans from Democrats and blacks from whites and get a lot of infighting so nobody notices that they are making themselves billions and billions, while they impoverish the rest of us and execute the controlled demolition of American constitutional democracy.”

For more details on how the Fauci-Gates-Pharma alliance is furthering the agenda of totalitarian control, using unfathomable power and greed — all under the guise of a pandemic — read “The Real Anthony Fauci.”

Sources and References

December 20, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Ivermectin and the Price of Life

By Justus R. Hope, MD | The Desert Review | December 13, 2021

What is your life worth? More to the point, what is your loved one’s life worth? What value would you place on your child, your mother, father, or spouse?

When the world experienced an average of nearly 15,000 COVID deaths per day, Dr. Andrew Hill decided on the price of a human life. Dr. Hill made that calculation during a conversation with Dr. Tess Lawrie, in January of 2021, during the peak of the Winter Surge.

In a zoom conversation between Dr. Tess Lawrie, nicknamed the “Conscience of Medicine,”  and Dr. Andrew Hill, then the most influential Ivermectin advocate in the world, Dr. Hill chose dollars over human lives.

Hill’s parent institution, the University of Liverpool, had just received a 40 million dollar donation from UNITAID four days before Hill’s Ivermectin paper was published, and Dr. Hill’s conclusion was changed 180 degrees from his position just a few weeks earlier.

Andrew Hill admitted that his sponsors (UNITAID) pressured him to alter his conclusion. Hill explained, “I think I’m in a very sensitive position here.”

Dr. Lawrie called Hill out. She stated, “Lots of people are in sensitive positions; they’re in hospital, in ICUs dying, and they need this medicine.”

Lawrie criticized Hill, “This is what I don’t get, you know, because you’re not a clinician. You’re not seeing people dying every day. And this medicine prevents deaths by 80%. So 80  percent of those people who are dying today don’t need to die because there’s Ivermectin.”

Hill responded that the NIH would not agree to recommend IVM.

Dr. Tess Lawrie fired back, “Yeah, because the NIH is owned by the vaccine lobby…This is bad research. So at this point, I am really, really worried about you.”

Hill answered, “Okay. Yeah. I mean, it’s a difficult situation.”

Lawrie responded, “No, you might be in a difficult situation. I’m not because I have no paymaster. I can tell the truth… How can you deliberately try and mess up…you know? So, how long are you going to let people carry on dying unnecessarily – up to you? What is the timeline you’ve allowed for this, then?”

Andrew Hill reacted, “Well, I think… I think that it goes to WHO and the NIH, and the FDA, and the EMEA. And they’ve got to decide when they think enough is enough.”

Dr. Lawrie pointed out the obvious, “You’d rather… risk loads of people’s lives. Do you know if you and I stood together on this, we could present a united front and we could get this thing. We could make it happen. We could save lives; we could prevent people from getting infected. We could prevent the elderly from dying…

I’m a doctor, and I’m going to save as many lives as I can. And I’m going to do that through getting the message [out] on Ivermectin…Okay. Unfortunately, your work is going to impair that, and you seem to be able to bear the burden of many, many deaths, which I cannot do.”

Dr. Lawrie demanded to know the identity of the unknown UNITAID author who changed Dr. Hill’s conclusions, the person whose influence was to cause so many preventable deaths.

“So who is it in UNITAID, then? Who is giving you opinions on your evidence?”

Hill answered, “Well, it’s just the people there. I don’t…”

Dr. Lawrie pressed Hill, “Could you please give me a name of someone in UNITAID I could speak to, so that I can share my evidence and hope to try and persuade them to understand it?

Dr. Hill evaded, “Oh, I’ll have to think about who to, to offer you with a name… But I mean this is very difficult because I’m, you know, I’ve got this role where I’m supposed to produce this paper and we’re in a very difficult, delicate balance… Yeah, it’s a very strong lobby…”

The conversation concludes with Dr. Hill promising to do everything in his power to get Ivermectin approved if she could give him six more weeks.

Dr. Lawrie, “So, how long do you think the stalemate will go on for?”

Dr. Hill, “From my side. Okay… I think end of February, we will be there in six weeks.”

Dr. Tess Lawrie, “How many people die every day?”

Dr. Andrew Hill, “Oh, sure. I mean, you know, 15,000 people a day.”

Dr. Tess Lawrie, “Fifteen thousand people a day times six weeks… Because at this rate, all other countries are getting Ivermectin except the UK and the USA, because the UK and the USA and Europe are owned by the vaccine lobby.”

Dr. Andrew Hill, “My goal is to get the drug approved and to do everything I can to get it approved so that it reaches the maximum…”

Dr. Tess Lawrie, The Conscience of Medicine, concluded with this, “You’re not doing everything you can, because everything you can would involve saying to those people who are paying you, ‘I can see this prevents deaths. So I’m not going to support this conclusion anymore, and I’m going to tell the truth.’”

Finally, Dr. Lawrie added, “Well, you’re not going to get it approved the way you’ve written that conclusion. You’ve actually shot yourself in the foot, and you’ve shot us all in the foot. All of… everybody trying to do something good. You have actually completely destroyed it… I don’t know how you sleep at night, honestly.”

The fact that Dr. Andrew Hill allowed another person to change his paper’s conclusion has been known for more than six months and was published in the book, Ivermectin for the World.

“However, he [Dr. Andrew Hill] was reigned in before more damage [to the vaccine lobby] was done:

  1. He was invited to the NIH, along with Dr. Marik, probably to give the appearance of propriety.
  2. He was given a gag order and told not to speak to any more press until The WHO made an official decision on Ivermectin. It turned out that this decision would go against the drug despite Dr. Hill’s findings.
  3. Dr. Hill’s conclusion would be changed by someone else, and the rest is history.”

What was not known, until the transcript of the zoom conference between Dr. Hill and Dr. Lawrie was leaked, were the specifics of the quid pro quo. It turns out that the height of the COVID-19 Winter surge, when about 15,000 people per day were dying, was precisely the same time as the zoom conference, held on January 18, 2021. Moreover, it was days after Andrew Hill’s University of Liverpool took the $40 million payoff.

The transcript of this conference call appeared in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s’ book, The Real Anthony Fauci, and in this article published by The Defender newsletter:

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/ivermectin-big-pharma-rfk-jr-the-real-anthony-fauci/

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Real-Anthony-Fauci/Robert-F-Kennedy/Children-s-Health-Defense/9781510766808

World daily COVID deaths were averaging around 15,000 per day on January 18, 2021, and six weeks later were averaging some 9,700. Currently, the world is seeing about 7,500 per day die.

80% of these or more could have been prevented with Ivermectin, a statement with which Dr. Hill would likely agree.

Overall, since that fateful decision of Andy Hill to allow his sponsor to “change” his paper’s conclusion, 2.475 million people [11 months x 30 days per month x 7500 deaths per day] have died, 80% of them could have been saved had Ivermectin been approved. So precisely 1.98 million lives were lost as a result of the betrayal.

The price per life?

Forty million dollars was the value of the donation made to the University of Liverpool by UNITAID. This sum comes out to 20 dollars and 20 cents per life. That is what we are all worth in the calculus of the vaccine lobby.

UNITAID bills itself as a “global health agency” hosted by the World Health Organization and supported by the vaccine lobby.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contributed hundreds of millions to UNITAID. In October, they committed $120 million more to the new expensive Merck drug molnupiravir, a costly and genotoxic competitor of Ivermectin.

Some experts say it will stimulate the emergence of viral mutants and worsen the pandemic.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/covid-pill-being-rolled-among-121237206.html

If that prospect is not concerning enough, consider this: One dose of Remdesivir, a drug that does not save lives, but one that is widely used on most United States ICU COVID cases, costs $3,100 per dose, or to put it bluntly, one dose of Remdesivir is worth roughly 153 lives. Yet, the worst drug earned the FDA’s approval while the best one, Ivermectin, was suppressed for money.

Ivermectin, a drug that has nearly eradicated River Blindness in much of the world, a safe drug already given to humans in over 4 billion doses, can be purchased mail-order from India at 1,000 12mg tablets for $163. That comes out to 16.3 cents per dose.

Dr. Alan Bain recently saved the life of 71-year-old Sun Ng thanks to a court order issued by Judge Paul Fullerton. Following the hospital’s initial refusal, Ng’s family sued Edward-Elmhurst Health and Sun Ng was administered the Ivermectin for five days. After the treatment, Ng “removed his breathing tube” and was taken out of ICU.

Sun Ng’s Recovery with Ivermectin

Dr. Bain, unable to get a local pharmacy to fill the prescription for Ivermectin, obtained the mail-order version and saved Ng’s life.

https://patch.com/illinois/naperville/covid-patient-given-ivermectin-edward-improving-report

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/dying-covid-19-patient-recovers-after-court-orders-hospital-to-administer-ivermectin_4130754.html

Thus, five 12 mg doses cost about 82 cents but are worth more than the 20 dollar value placed by the vaccine lobby and Andrew Hill on a human life because pennies were all it took to purchase the Ivermectin that saved Sun Ng.

Ivermectin has 27 randomized controlled studies involving tens of thousands of patients showing reduced time to viral clearance, hastened recovery time, and reduced mortality. On the other hand, the vaccine lobby’s choice, Remdesivir, was rejected by the WHO as a drug that failed to improve survival and other outcomes.

https://covid19criticalcare.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/SUMMARY-OF-THE-EVIDENCE-BASE-FINAL.pdf

https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/who-recommends-against-the-use-of-remdesivir-in-covid-19-patients

One thousand doses of Ivermectin can be purchased online for $163. Yet, UNITAID paid $40 million to change Dr. Hill’s conclusions to call for more studies [delaying Ivermectin approval], essentially condemning millions of human beings to death from COVID-19. So while 82 cents may be the price of life, it seems that twenty pieces of silver remains the price of death.

Dr. Justus R. Hope, writer’s pseudonym, graduated summa cum laude from Wabash College where he was named a Lilly Scholar. He attended Baylor College of Medicine where he was awarded the M.D. degree. He completed a residency in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation at The University of California Irvine Medical Center. He is board-certified and has taught at The University of California Davis Medical Center in the departments of Family Practice and Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. He has practiced medicine for over 35 years and maintains a private practice in Northern California.

December 19, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

FDA Should Need Only ‘12 Weeks’ to Release Pfizer Data, Not 75 Years, Plaintiff Calculates

By Seth Hancock | The Defender | December 17, 2021

U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials skipped the start of oral arguments Tuesday as a federal district court weighed whether the agency can take 75 years to fully release documents on Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID vaccine, according to a lawyer representing plaintiffs who sued the FDA for the documents.

A U.S. Department of Justice lawyer representing the FDA told the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas the agency will produce more than 329,000 related documents as fast as it can, while safeguarding personally identifiable information and Pfizer trade secrets.

Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT), the group behind the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and subsequent lawsuit, is seeking safety and effectiveness data, adverse reaction reports and a list of active and inactive vaccine ingredients.

PHMPT is a group of more than 30 scientists, medical professionals, international public health professionals and journalists. The group’s lawsuit argues the FDA is overestimating the time needed and understaffing the job.

“Assuming a low average of 50 pages per hour per person, even to review the hundreds of thousands of pages the FDA estimates, the agency would need just 19 reviewers to work full-time for 12 weeks to review and produce these documents — which is a tiny fraction of its approximately 18,000 employees,” said PHMPT in a legal brief filed Monday.

The day before oral arguments, the FDA released 14 document files, the largest file including 2,030 pages. PHMPT posted an updated list which shows documents released since Nov. 17.

FOIA does not mandate any particular processing schedule, only that the agency process requests “as soon as practicable,” the FDA said in a legal brief filed Monday.

“The bottom-line issue still remains what processing schedule is ‘practicable’ for the agency,” the FDA said.

At the agency’s proposed rate of 500 documents per month, the last documents would be released in 2096.

A quote from Business Intelligence Associates, an e-discovery company, estimated 400,000 pages could be produced within six to eight weeks at a cost of $132,000, according to PHMPT.

PHMPT wants the FDA documents released within 108 days. That’s the same amount of time the FDA spent reviewing the responsive documents for “the far more intricate task” of licensing Pfizer’s vaccine, the group said in its lawsuit.

Attorney Aaron Siri, who represents PHMPT, said:

“Americans must routinely produce documents, pay fines, and otherwise expend resources to comply with the law. Courts don’t inquire as to the ability or financial resources to comply with the law — they must comply.

“In fact, it would be laughable if a billionaire defendant came before a court and claimed poverty to escape making a document production, but that is the FDA’s position.”

The FDA budget for fiscal year 2019 was $6.1 billion.

In the FDA’s 64-page briefing, the agency argued it needed the full 75 years to redact and release the documents out of “fairness” to other FOIA requesters.

PHMPT defined fairness differently in its responding brief:

“Fairness would be giving millions of Americans who are mandated to receive this liability-free vaccine today assurance regarding the FDA’s review by allowing independent scientists access to the same data the FDA reviewed, without making them wait decades.

“Fairness would be allowing Americans injured by the vaccine today, who cannot sue Pfizer or anyone else for the harm, hope that independent scientists with access to that data can more readily develop treatments for their ailments.

“Fairness would be our federal health authorities allocating more than one person spending a few hours each month to review Pfizer’s documents for public disclosure after having given Pfizer over $17 billion of taxpayer money to develop and market the product.

“That would be fair to the American people.”

Siri noted that no decision has been made by the court and that a transcript of this week’s hearing should be released soon.

U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) earlier this month introduced a bill that would force the FDA to release them in 100 days.

© 2021 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.

December 19, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Washington ‘hunts’ Russian citizens in third countries – Moscow

RT | December 19, 2021

Moscow has condemned the extradition of a Russian IT firm owner from Switzerland to the US. His lawyer said Washington wants to tie the man to alleged meddling by Moscow in the 2016 American presidential election.

The extradition of businessman Vladislav Klyushin is “another episode of Washington’s continuing ‘hunt’ for Russian nationals in third countries,” the Russian Embassy in Switzerland, told TASS on Sunday.

Spokesperson Vladimir Khokhlov said Moscow was “deeply disappointed” by the decision of a Swiss court to reject Klyushin’s appeal to block his extradition on Friday. The man was handed over to American police officers in Zurich on Saturday, who escorted him on a flight, according to Switzerland’s Federal Office of Justice.

The software developed by Klyushin’s media monitoring and analytics company, M13, is used by Russian state agencies, including the federal government and Presidential Executive Office, according to the firm’s website. The businessman was detained by Swiss police in March during a family skiing trip, his lawyer, Oliver Ciric, told the media.

Swiss justice officials said the US accused Klyushin of insider trading that involved “tens of millions of dollars.”

Ciric believes the persecution of the businessman is politically motivated, and that he will face “inhuman and degrading treatment” when extradited to the US.

He told The Times in September that the charges of insider trading were being used as a pretext to transport Klyushin to the US. The lawyer said his client would likely be charged with heading an alleged Russian covert operation to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election and hack the server of the Democratic Party.

In the same interview, Ciric claimed that Klyushin had access to “certain security information” related to the Russian government, and rebuffed recruitment attempts by US and British intelligence agents in the past.

The lawyer said that Klyushin’s criminal case file has been sealed by a Massachusetts court, which is “quite unusual” for financial charges that are typically publicized by a US financial regulator.

US officials accused the Kremlin of seeking to influence the vote and hacking the server of the Democratic National Committee and an email account of John Podesta, who led Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Donald Trump. Russia consistently denied these allegations. Klyushin has denied any involvement in insider trading and hacking.

December 19, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

A week of life under the Ministry of Fear. This time, we locked ourselves down.

By Laura Dodsworth | December 18, 2021

Last Sunday evening, Boris Johnson interrupted the nation’s TV viewing with an announcement about the new Covid-19 variant. “Fighting Omicron is the most important thing we can do,” he said. It’s early days, and in the absence of clinical data or indeed any rise in hospitalisations and deaths, it remains to be seen if this is true.

We were left in no doubt about how to fight – get boosted. In retrospect, the triadic structure of previous press briefings (“Hands, Face, Space” and “Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives”) was the ultimate in sophistication compared to the frequent repetition of “boosted” (eight times), “booster” (eight times) and “vaccination” (four times) in one short speech.

This past week exemplifies nearly two years of life under the “Ministry of Fear”, as Sir Desmond Swayne MP termed it. Amid a Tory rebellion, he delivered a tirade in the House of Commons on the day that MPs voted on Covid Passes, the expansion of mask mandates and compulsory jabs for NHS workers. He accused the UK government of “twisting the fear lever” and unleashing “the dogs of war”.

He is not alone. Andrew Bridgen MP said that, in his opinion, “the most dangerous epidemic sweeping the world and sweeping our country is an epidemic of fear”. I agree Pandemics come and eventually go, but our basic psychology is here to stay. The UK government has relied upon the use of fear, nudges, behavioural science techniques and propaganda to subliminally encourage people to comply with the regulations, as I set out in my book A State of Fear: how the UK government weaponised fear in the Covid-19 pandemic.

These techniques work so well that, this time, we have essentially locked ourselves down. Without so much as a new law, statutory instrument, or prime ministerial request, Nativity plays, office Christmas parties and pub bookings are cancelled. Stocks of lateral flow test ran dry. People queued for eight hours for their boosters. The media enthusiastically obliged with a new “tidal wave” of articles and programmes prophesying catastrophic cases and demonising the “selfish” unjabbed. Journalists asked for more restrictions, sooner.

I spoke to Swayne who told me he believes the fear is driven very much by the doom-mongering scientists on SAGE and Independent SAGE whose worst case scenarios necessitate action, and then “the media hams it up”.

One of the government’s early concerns was that some people actually understood that the risk from Covid-19 to their demographic is low, hence fear was leveraged to ensure everyone feel at risk so that they would follow the rules. Similarly, last Sunday, Johnson acknowledged that “some people” would believe Omicron to be less severe than previous variants – and at this point there is little clinical data to prove Omicron will be more serious or able to evade our natural immunity and vaccine-derived antibodies – but he warned “scientists cannot say that Omicron is less severe”. Essentially we were told to ignore the lack of scientific evidence and instead embrace fear and follow instructions.

So, how to convince us of a threat, before the threat has actually manifested? By using the same methods they have honed throughout the pandemic, including the use of big scary numbers, advertising, subtle messaging, alarmist language and the most punitive fines since the Dark Ages.

I dedicated a chapter of my book to the metrics of fear – daily death tolls, the reproduction number, cases and worst case modelling. This week’s numbers have crumbled like icing sugar.

Sajid Javid estimated that there were 200,000 infections, which appears to have been a back of the envelope calculation, based upon assumptions and extrapolations. Dominic Raab said there were 250 people in hospital with Omicron, when there were 10. Dr Jenny Harries, head of the UKHSA, warned the Omicron variant is “probably the most significant threat” of the pandemic and we should expect a “staggering” growth rate, but her dire warning was juxtaposed with acknowledging it’s too early a stage to be clear about the clinical severity.

These speed-generated pessimistic numbers and contradictions give the rational mind whiplash and leave you vulnerable to fear. As Swayne put it, “It’s designed to make your flesh creep. Even if you then ameliorate it, the first scary bit is out there.”

To lay the groundwork, masks were re-introduced as a “softening up exercise for Plan B,” according to a government advisor who sits on a government Covid taskforce. He anonymously confided that, “Masks are a behavioural psychology policy. We need to stop pretending that it’s about public health. Nudge is a big thing in government.” Masks turn us into walking billboards advertising danger.

I have already argued that the whole point of the Winter Plan was Plan B and Covid Passes. The government has not provided convincing scientific evidence for vaccine passports, but they are widely understood to be a ‘tool’ to drive take-up. Now, fines of up to £10,000 can be imposed for  falsifying Covid Passports – a life-destroying amount designed to strike fear into your heart.

The advisor shared internal documents with me that show Covid Passes were ready to go in early November. Worryingly, they also show that government is also working with analysts to see whether “mandatory vaccination would hit the right target or not”.

The government has launched new advertising campaigns. One TV advertisement, intended to encourage ventilation has frightened children. One father wrote to tell he had complained to his MP and the Advertising Standards Authority because the “sinister black mist” snaking out of people’s mouths terrified his four and six year old in the ad break of a Christmas film. His daughter had nightmares and was still crying about “germs” the next day. He is angry about the “intentionally fear-inducing piece of Gov media forced in their face”.

Martin Kemp played the part of Santa Claus preparing for Christmas by getting his booster jab in a government advertisement. Santa has a long history of being enlisted for propaganda purposes from Soviet space missions to selling World War Two US government bonds. Even Tesco got in on the act this year in their festive ad, making Santa brandish a Covid Pass QR code to enter the country. However, this badly misjudged public mood and #BoycottTesco trended on Twitter.

Press and social media ads have returned to the red and yellow ‘danger’ style chevons, although they feature smiling younger people presumably boosted against Omicron. The “O” in boosted is golden and enlarged, presumably to echo “O-micron” and also evoke the circle of protection Johnson wants the booster to deliver. The people are surrounded with a warming Ready Brek-style glow.

I warned in The Telegraph in October that I would not be surprised to see ministers on television, urging us to follow restrictions in order or to “save Christmas”, once again. I’ll be on Santa’s ‘Nice List’ for getting that right.

Some polls are used as both a nudge and a spoiler of public policy. When you see a result such as 76% of Britons want to see the return of compulsory face masks in shops and on public transport (Yougov) you are meant to identify with the group and imagine yourself in the majority – “ah yes, that is what I think too!” The poll was also a signal to seed the idea of the ensuing policy change. This mutually influential relationship between polls and policy is especially clear in the case of questions such as “If someone has had two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine, but it has been over six months since their second dose, would you consider that person to be ‘fully vaccinated’?” (also Yougov) which should have nothing to do with public opinion.

Polls don’t always go the ‘right way’ though. Good Morning Britain ran a Twitter poll which asked “With Omicrom cases doubling every two days, is it time to make vaccines mandatory?” After 89% of 44,533 respondents voted no, the Twitter poll was pulled. Presumably it was not the answer that GMB wanted and, curtain pulled back, they knew that we knew it.

There is less fear in the air this time despite the “tidal wave” of fear-mongering. Redfield and Wilton Strategies latest research into public attitudes found that 81% of people plan to have a normal Christmas and New Year and feelings of safety in public have only marginally declined. Once you have seen the nudges you cannot un-see them, and fear cannot be sustained indefinitely.

When the government resorts to fear and hyperbole to gain compliance, it shows what they think of us. We are emotionally kettled rather than treated as responsible individuals with agency. As a Nudge Unit report said, we have a “powerful tendency to conform” and the government relentlessly exploits this human feature. I suspect that this time, the government is keen to address concerns that it has not acted swiftly enough in the past, and believes the strong warnings are in our best interests. Perhaps Ministers are themselves in thrall to the anxiety-inducing steep-lined graphs.

10 Downing Street released a nugget sized version of Johnson’s Omicron announcement on Youtube, with a tight crop and dramatic music. The selected few dramatic sentences could have been borrowed from a disaster genre ‘B’ movie. I’m not sure if Youtube comments are more or less valid than Yougov, but they are certainly revealingly scathing about “fear inducing language”, “Orwellian passports” and NHS queues.

I think there is a sense that people will do quite a lot to have a normal Christmas and get life back to normal, but fear of Covid and trust in the messaging are running out, just like those lateral flow tests.

December 18, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Omicron scare tactics

By Joel S Hirschhorn | December 17, 2021

What is the public to believe about omicron variant? The usual nutty pro-vaccine media are making a lot of fear-mongering noise about omicron.

Here are some things to keep in mind.

A very new medical research article provided compelling information that COVID vaccines are not effective against omicron. The article concluded: “The Omicron variant presents a serious threat to many existing COVID-19 vaccines and therapies.” The only data coming out is on the ineffectiveness of the vaccines. There are no data on whether ivermectin and natural immunity are equally ineffective.

This too was said: “The scientific community has chased after SARS-CoV-2 variants for a year. As more and more of them appeared, our interventions directed to the spike became increasingly ineffective. The Omicron variant has now put an exclamation mark on this point.”

Here is a really important point to keep in mind. Omicron may look like it has high transmissibility, but this may have much more to do with the ineffectiveness of vaccines than with the intrinsic nature of this variant!

See my previous article on omicron that showed research indicating intrinsic low transmissibility relative to delta, and similar to other variants:

French Research and Real-World Data Counter Omicron Hysteria

Consider these relevant omicron facts.

In South Africa, with only 26% vaccinated, despite omicron, not only has there been no surge in COVID deaths, they are the lowest they’ve been in 18 months. This, after more than three weeks into omicron in South Africa. If screams about a surge were accurate, it would have started by now. And doctors there say the omicron cases are far less severe than presumably delta.

Fewer than 1 in 50 people with confirmed omicron cases are being hospitalized in South Africa – which suggests that the actual hospitalization to infection rate is far lower still.  Why? Because so many people with omicron have such mild cases they don’t bother getting tested.

South African scientists announced the discovery of the Omicron variant on November 25. Since then, the country has had more than 230,000 Covid-19 cases, but just 377 deaths. And as of this writing, none of those deaths are confirmed to have resulted from Omicron.

The UK as of now has reported 1 (1!) omicron death, and it was “with” the virus, not necessarily from it. If there have been deaths globally from omicron, they have not been reported

When you read about mounting COVID cases in the US just remember that there normally has been a winter surge in cases. Cases can also be easily manipulated by public health agencies by running PCR tests at high cycles, creating false positive. Keep your attention on deaths in people where there has been gene sequencing to confirm omicron. Ugly and corrupt political forces controlling public health agencies have every reason to create a surge in cases so that fear can be maintained and the public made receptive to getting vaccine and booster shots.

Be patient, do not go crazy over omicron. Keep doing the many good things to maintain a healthy immune system, such as taking vitamins D and C, zinc and quercetin.

Plus, a new medical research article on ivermectin concluded that it really is very effective as a prophylactic, a genuine alternative to COVID vaccines.

December 18, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Maxwell Case: Surveilled And Silenced

Twitter censors trial coverage as FBI connections broached

By Moneycircus | OffGuardian | December 17, 2021

The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, former partner of Jeffrey Epstein, looks like it is being set up to fail. Prosecutors rested their case after nine days in which victims seemed barely prepared for cross-examination and co-conspirators were notable by their absence.

Even this threadbare reckoning was too much information for Twitter, which banned a popular account reporting daily from Manhattan Federal Court. The new Twitter CEO has previously said the company is not bound by the First Amendment, and blocked posts that were drawing 500,000 views.

The touchy revelation seems to have been that hard drives removed from Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse in 2019 already had FBI tags on them, suggesting they’d previously been seized and returned to the predator.

The state-corporatist media, like the federal prosecutors, have ignored the clear implication of surveillance and even blackmail. The court case is limited to six counts relating to sex trafficking and Maxwell’s alleged involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen women.

Not only does it seem U.S. agencies may have been complicit in compromising individuals — Twitter tries to stop us from knowing. Kudos to The Free Press Report for its daily summary of the trial.

AUX ARMES

It is said that Catherine de’ Medici maintained a unit of female spies. These women, multi-talented in languages and the arts, also formed the escadron volant or flying squadron, so named after the queen introduced ballet to the French court.

The military overtones come from their duties in the field of state security in which they applied all their skills, including those of the boudoir. The way in which Catherine deployed her agents resounds down the years.

The tense political climes demanded tough measures. Henry II (reigned 1547–59) had died in a jousting tournament and his son Francis II, married to Mary Queen of Scots, lived only a year. That left Catherine as regent to Henry’s second son Charles IX (1560–74).

The inference remains that these young women were pressed into service. Catherine was also from a dominant family in her own right as daughter of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino. The squadron dispersed her rivals, presumably using blackmail alongside manipulative techniques of jealousy, rivalry or distraction.

The term blackmail dates from this time. Originally called simply “mail” it referred to rent. When paid in silver it was white, or reditus albi but when paid in labour, produce or livestock it was black — reditus nigri.

Whether it originally had negative connotations is moot. By the sixteenth century however, it was used on the Scottish borders to refer to protection money extracted by raiders. By the 19th it described extortion by officials or journalists.

The Medicis used those around them and leveraged their skills to gain information, and this extended to the arts. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Reubens (1577–1640) was fluent in six languages — daubed with talent by the brushful — and no mean spy.

His father had lived in Antwerp when it was was centre of the trading world, moving in the circles of William of Orange. He would reach the loftier orbit of Marie de’ Medici, second wife of Henri IV of France — a fateful choice for Henri, who would die by an assassin’s knife the day after her coronation.

Reubens would frequent the courts of Philip IV, mixing with his favourite the Count-Duke of Olivares, and that of Charles I and the Duke of Buckingham. Reubens was loyal to the Spanish power during the Dutch revolt, and he seems to have counseled against war with the English and French.

ALL’S FAIR

Though tastes in art have tumbled since Reubens’ day it remains a tool of cultural exchange and power, while celebrity and bodily beauty are employed more ruthlessly than ever.

The CIA used modern art — the more abstract the better — in the 1960s to overshadow the Soviets in a display of superior creativity and intellectual freedom. Along with compliant authors, journalists, think-tankers and activists it promoted the careers of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.

So when we read of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell partying with what may soon again be called the Jet Set, it is easy to miss the underlying power relations. Likewise the grasping seeking out of influence of the museum crowd, amid the contrived and the affected, the grey suits of the moneyed world trying to escape their conventional selves into an orbit where the word eclectic long ago became cliché.

Their connections targeted those in the scientific sphere, leveraging Maxwell’s father’s ownership of Pergamon Press, a publisher of scientific journals. Epstein had his own connections through universities like MIT and Harvard and John Brockman’s Edge Foundation, where futurists and transhumanists discussed how to manipulate hierarchies of need to create new models of cybernetic governance.

This should ring bells for those who have watched how Event Covid rolled out, with the use of behavioural psychology taking primacy in the government response, even ahead of medical treatment.

ITERATING AT SCALE

Hobnobbing is the perfect opportunity, for those of ill will, to try to compromise others but the famous blackmails of the past were, like kidnappings, individual. It takes a spy agency to do it en masse.

So who leveraged Epstein and Maxwell’s performance art? Who, in the jargon of Silicon Valley, Mountain View and venture capitalists helped them achieve “iteration at scale”?

Much that we have heard about the duo points to this objective: the townhouse with cameras in every room and a video-editing suite to record them. Flight lists of politicians and business executives: we likely know only a fraction of the roll call but they don’t seem to be the sort you’d invite to your private island for laughs.

Tabloid stories in the 1990s had already linked Epstein and Prince Andrew, quoting the gossip of the time that Epstein “worked for CIA.” The connection with intelligence goes deeper than braggadocio.

Robert Maxwell and his daughters are prominent in the evolution of information technology, including Christine Maxwell’s Chiliad Inc, which claimed as clients for its data analysis software the FBI, Treasury and NSA, and may have included the CIA — an echo of the PROMIS monitoring software that Robert Maxwell helped to sell to intelligence agencies.

Just before the Maxwell trial we got another connection, a declassified CIA inspector general report into child abuse by CIA staffers, obtained by BuzzFeed News through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. This showed that at least 10 employees and contractors had committed sex crimes against minors and were not prosecuted. Of the news services only CBS seems to have given the story much prominence.

The revelations are ominously reminiscent of the accusations by Human Rights Watch that the State Department contractor DynCorp trafficked women and girls in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Documents submitted to a Florida court in 2008 suggest one of Epstein’s helicopters shared the tail number N474AW with a State Department plane leased to DynCorp.

At the very least the CIA failed to act. It is a small step that connects human trafficking, the drug operations chronicled over 50 years by the academic Alfred McCoy, and the money laundering that U.S. financial authorities have ignored and exposed in equal measure.

The historical provenance goes back to Barings Bank and the opium trade, African slavery, and trafficking in Chinese labourers who dug the trenches for the First World War — and stayed on to bury the dead.

COAT OF MANY COLOURS

The Medici coat of arms was five red spheres on a gold shield, under one ball of blue. Jokes aside, given the power of the Medici matriarchy, we can imagine that bouncing balls are to be dispatched to the four corners, with one to spare.

If you send your descendants to penetrate countries, whether you are a banker or monarch, like French kings who sent their sons to Albion, the first thing they will establish is an intelligence operation. In the same way Walsingham, spymaster to the Tudors; or the Cecils and Sackvilles who as Treasurers profited from managing finances for the crown.

Practically the first act of Pope Francis in 2014 was to fire the heads of the Vatican bank. The route to big money is to latch on to monarchs and governments, or the don, or whoever lords it over the manor and to help him fleece it.

It begs the question: if Epstein was a solo operator running an extortion ring his operation would not have lasted one year, let alone 30. For he trod on the toes of the powerful, the architects of the Forever Wars from Helmand to the coca fields of Colombia.

This suggests his connections were more than tangential with intelligence agencies of several countries which are, after all, the footsoldiers of those who established them: Wall Street, the old East India Company money, The Investors, the bankers — slice and dice, pin to a cocktail stick and label to your liking.

Who, then, was kept in check by the rustle and crack of closeted skeletons? Even Donald Trump who gave Epstein the cold shoulder in later years and was unfairly traduced by the Russiagate saga, was an associate of Roy Cohn and managed Resorts International, the casino inheritance of Meyer Lansky. Far from a royal court but princelings still.

Seen from this aspect, the Maxwell trial is the iceberg tip of the oldest, most powerful, still-active syndicate. It sheds light — or would, if fully prosecuted — upon the techniques and trades of the ancient professions, those timeless merchants of weapons, drugs and trafficking.

Twitter is keen that we should not make the connection for The Wretched of the Earth, as Frantz Fanon wrote, might recognize the common enemy and become conscious of a target, and possessed of the will to resist.

COVERT COVID

Without excusing those who accepted Epstein’s invitation, those who were captured in the web were captured still.

A report by the Frazer Institute points out that the United States in particular has a history of the state misusing surveillance to commit blackmail, intended to silence dissent, as revealed by the Church Committee of 1976.

Following its report, Congress established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), to consider requests for secret warrants. Russiagate showed how that went.

The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the US government was using the Internet to conduct mass indiscriminate surveillance. Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, said in a 2009 interview:

if you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place.”

Yet Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, expressed the human necessity of privacy in Olmstead v. U.S (1928):

The makers of our Constitution… knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”

When the U.S. government acts as the accomplice of blackmailers, and social media companies like Twitter scurry to provide cover, the rights of us all stand on quicksand.

Whatever your view on Event Covid the accent on state security is grave: the military figures prominently, with unprecedented censorship and unbending discipline by politicians in lockstep, if not goose step. There is more than a whiff of compulsion. If you let slip there’s a blackmail operation, don’t you reveal who is behind it?

FOOTNOTES

[1] The Free Press Report
[2] Gina Dimuro, 2018 – Catherine De Medici And Her “Flying Squadron” Of Female Spies
[3] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Independent, 1995 — Modern art was CIA ‘weapon’
[4] Emma North-Best, Muckrack, 2017 — Sir Robert Maxwell’s FBI file is getting more classified by the minute
[5] Leopold, Cormier, Buzzfeed, Dec 1, 2021 — Secret CIA Files Say Staffers Committed Sex Crimes Involving Children
[6] Wikipedia — Sex trafficking of children in Bosnia
[7] Ben Woodfinden, 2016 — Mass Surveillance and the Threat to Personal Privacy (PDF)

Moneycircus is written by a former executive producer in network news who lives in Tbilisi, Georgia. You can subscribe and support his work here.

December 17, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Meet Ghislaine: Daddy’s Girl

BY WHITNEY WEBB | UNLIMITED HANGOUT | DECEMBER 16, 2021

Absent from mainstream discourse on Ghislaine Maxwell’s ongoing trial is any mention of the ties, not only of herself, but her family, to Israeli intelligence. Those ties, forged by Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell, are critical to understanding Ghislaine’s history and her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual blackmail and trafficking network.

The trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, the alleged madam of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual blackmail and sex trafficking network, has attracted considerable mainstream and independent media attention, though not as much as one might expect given the level of media attention that surrounded Epstein’s 2019 arrest and death or given the public interest in the Epstein/Maxwell scandal and its broader implications.

Unsurprisingly, the broader implications of the Epstein/Maxwell scandal have been largely, if not entirely absent, from mainstream media (and some independent media) coverage of Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial as well as absent from the case itself. For example, despite physical evidence of sexual blackmail stored at Epstein’s residences being shown by the prosecution (with the names of those incriminated being notably redacted), the prosecution chose not to mention even the potential role of blackmail in Ghislaine Maxwell’s activities and motives as it related to her involvement in sex trafficking activities alongside Jeffrey Epstein. Not only that, but the names of Ghislaine’s close contacts and even some of her defense witnesses, along with considerable information about her role in Epstein’s network that is very much in the public interest, is due to be filed under seal and forever hidden from the public, either due to “deals” made between the prosecution and the defense in this case or due to rulings from the judge overseeing the case.

Going hand in hand with the blackmail angle of this case is the specter of Ghislaine Maxwell’s family ties to intelligence agencies, as well as the intelligence ties of Jeffrey Epstein himself. Given that blackmail, particularly sexual blackmail, has been used by intelligence agencies – particularly in the US and Israel – since the 1940s and beyond, it is deeply troubling that neither the blackmail or intelligence angle has played any role in the prosecution’s case or in the mainstream media’s coverage of the trial.

To remedy this lack of coverage, Unlimited Hangout is publishing a 2-part investigative report entitled “Meet Ghislaine”, which is adapted from this author’s upcoming book on the subject. This investigation will detail key aspects of Ghislaine Maxwell’s links to intelligence agencies and sexual blackmail activities that are relevant to the case against her and perhaps explain the silence from the prosecution and their interest in sealing potentially incriminating evidence against Ghislaine from public scrutiny. Part 1 of this article will focus on Ghislaine’s father, Robert Maxwell, a “larger than life” figure who straddled the worlds of both business and espionage and whose daughters inherited different aspects of his espionage contacts and activities as well as his influence empire following his 1991 death.

The Making of a Maxwell

To understand Ghilaine Maxwell’s history, one must start with a hard look at the rise of her father, Robert Maxwell. Born in what is now part of Ukraine, “Robert Maxwell” was the last in a series of names he used, with Abraham Hoch, Jan Ludvick, and Leslie Du Marier among his earlier aliases. The name Robert Maxwell emerged at the behest of one of his superiors in the British military. Maxwell had joined the British military during World War II, having left the village of his birth prior to the war, when the Third Reich began its expansion. Maxwell’s parents and his siblings are believed to have died in the Holocaust.

Robert and Betty Maxwell pose at their 1945 wedding; Source

Robert Maxwell was involved with the British intelligence service MI6 during the war and, after the war, was befriended by Count Frederich vanden Huevel, who had worked closely with Allen Dulles during the war. Dulles went on to be the first director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and, during the war, was busy running interference for prominent Nazis and actively undermining FDR’s “total surrender” policy for senior Nazi leadership.

The chaos of postwar Europe allowed Maxwell to plant the seeds for what would become his future media empire. Thanks to his contacts with Allied Forces in postwar Berlin, he was able to acquire the publishing rights for prominent European scientific journals and, in 1948, those interests were folded into the British publishing company Butterworth, which had long-standing ties to British intelligence. In the early 1950s, the company was renamed Pergamon Press, and this company became the cornerstone of Maxwell’s media empire.

Pergamon’s access to prominent academics, scientists, and government not only led to Maxwell acquiring great wealth but also attracted the interest of various intelligence agencies— British, Russian, and Israeli among them—all of which attempted to recruit Maxwell as an asset or as a spy. When MI6 attempted to recruit Maxwell for the service, it concluded, after conducting an extensive background check, that Maxwell was a “Zionist—loyal only to Israel.” His subsequent relationship with MI6 was choppy and largely opportunistic on both sides, with Maxwell later laying some of the blame for his financial troubles on MI6’s alleged attempts to “subvert” him.

Maxwell was not officially recruited to work for Israeli intelligence until 1961, but his critical role in securing weapons and airplane parts for the 1948 war that created the state of Israel suggests a strong relationship with prominent politicians and military figures in the nation from its beginning, as this was certainly the case with other prominent businessmen who had helped arm Zionist paramilitaries before and during 1948. In the early 1960s, Maxwell was formally approached by Israeli intelligence to make use of his access to the variety of prominent businessman and world leaders that he had cultivated while growing his media empire.

A few years after being officially recruited as an asset of Israeli intelligence, Maxwell ran for public office, becoming a member of the British Parliament for the Labour Party in 1964. His bid for re-election failed, which left him out of office by 1970. Around that same time, he also lost control of Pergamon Press, though he reacquired it a few years later.

Having nearly lost everything, Maxwell devoted his time to consolidating control over his ever-growing web of interlocking companies, trusts, and foundations that now encompassed much more than media concerns, while also developing his ties to prominent politicians, businessmen, and their fixers, a group that Maxwell proudly referred to as his “sources.” Among these early “sources” were soon-to-be UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher; Israel’s biggest arms dealer and one of its powerful oligarchs, Saul Eisenberg; financial behemoths such as Edmund Safra; and master manipulators such as Henry Kissinger. Another early “source” was George H. W. Bush, who was then part of the Nixon administration and soon served as CIA director before becoming Reagan’s vice president and then US president himself.

Maxwell’s sources and influence extended well beyond the West, with many of his most prominent contacts found in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. He had cozy relationships with dictators, intelligence officials, and even organized crime lords such as Semion Mogilevich, sometimes referred to as the “boss of the bosses” of the Russian mafia. It was none other than Robert Maxwell who orchestrated the entry of Mogilevich-connected companies into the United States, a move that was accomplished after Maxwell successfully lobbied the state of Israel to grant Mogilevich and his associates Israeli passports, thereby allowing them easier access to US financial institutions.

The expansion of Maxwell’s prominent contacts paralleled the growth of his media empire. By 1980, he had acquired the British Printing Corporation, which he renamed the Maxwell Communication Corporation. Just a few years later, he bought the Mirror Group, publisher of the British tabloid the Daily Mirror. This was followed by his acquisition of US publishers Prentice Hall and MacMillan and later the New York Daily News. Much of the money Maxwell used to acquire the Mirror Group and several of these other companies came from financial backers of Israeli intelligence. Money “borrowed” from Maxwell-owned media outlets such as the Mirror Group and its pension fund was used to finance Mossad activities in Europe and elsewhere; then, the funds were restored before the absence was noticed by company employees not privy to these operations. Maxwell later derailed this well-oiled system by dipping into these same funds to finance his own ostentatious and salacious habits.

Robert Maxwell poses with the first edition of “The European” newspaper he founded in 1990; Source

During this period, Maxwell’s ties to Israeli intelligence deepened in other ways, particularly during the time when Yitzhak Shamir was prime minister. Shamir, previously a leader of the Zionist terrorist group known as Lehi or the Stern Gang, deeply loathed the United States, a sentiment he confided to Maxwell during one of Maxwell’s visits to Israel. Shamir told Maxwell that he blamed the Americans for the Holocaust because of US failure to support the transfer of European Jews to Palestine prior to the war. Shamir’s views on the US likely informed Israel’s more aggressive espionage targeting the US that emerged during this time and in which Maxwell prominently figured.

Maxwell and the PROMIS Affair

Maxwell’s prominent roles in the PROMIS software scandal and the Iran-Contra affair during the 1980s were facilitated by his purchase of numerous Israeli companies, several of which were either fronts or “providers of services” for Israeli intelligence. The most notable of these was Scitex, where Yitzhak Shamir’s son Nachum was a major executive throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and Degem, a computer company with a large presence in Central and South America as well as Africa.

Even before Maxwell’s purchase of Degem, it had been used by Mossad as a cover for agents, and particularly assassins, who would use its offices as a cover before conducting kidnappings and murders of individuals linked to groups with ties to or sympathies for Israel’s enemies, particularly the PLO. Some of the most notable events occurred in Africa, where Mossad assassins used Degem as cover to launch killings of members of the African National Congress. In Latin America, Degem was also used as cover for the Mossad to infiltrate terrorist and nacroterrorist organizations such as Peru’s Sendero Luminoso (known in English as the Shining Path) and Colombia’s National Liberation Army or ELN.

After Maxwell’s purchase of Degem, it served as the main vehicle through which Israel conducted what was arguably its most brazen and successful espionage operation of the era—the bugging and then mass marketing of the stolen software program known as PROMIS.

Rafi Eitan, the notorious Israeli spymaster who served as Jonathan Pollard’s handler and who played a key role in the creation of the Talpiot program, was serving as the head of the (now defunct) Israeli intelligence service known as Lekem when he heard of a revolutionary new software program being used by the US Department of Justice. The program was known as the Prosecutors Information Management System, better known by its acronym PROMIS.

Rafi Eitan with Israeli politician Ariel Sharon in 1987; Source

Eitan had learned of PROMIS from Earl Brian, a longtime associate of Ronald Reagan who had previously worked for the CIA. PROMIS is often considered to be the forerunner of the PRISM software used by US and allied spy agencies today and was developed by former NSA official Bill Hamilton. Hamilton had leased the software to the US Department of Justice through his company, Inslaw Inc., in 1982.

Eitan and Brian hatched a plan to install a “trapdoor” into the software and then sell PROMIS throughout the world, providing Israel with invaluable intelligence on the operations of its enemies and allies while also netting Eitan and Brian massive profits. According to the testimony of former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, Brian provided a copy of PROMIS to Israeli military intelligence, which contacted an Israeli American programmer living in California. That programmer then planted a trapdoor or back door into the software.

Once the back door was installed, Brian attempted to use his company Hadron Inc. to market the bugged PROMIS software around the world. Having been unsuccessful at trying to buy out Inslaw, Brian turned to his close friend Attorney General Ed Meese, whose Justice Department abruptly refused to make payments to Inslaw that were stipulated by contract, essentially using the software for free. Hamilton and Inslaw claimed that this was theft. Some have speculated that Meese’s role in that decision was shaped not only by his friendship with Brian but also by the fact that his wife was a major investor in Brian’s business ventures.

Meese’s actions forced Inslaw into bankruptcy, and Inslaw subsequently sued the Justice Department, with the court finding that the Meese-led department “took, converted, [and] stole” the software through “trickery, fraud and deceit.” Meanwhile, with Inslaw seemingly out of the way, Brian sold the bugged software to Jordan’s intelligence service, which was a major boon for Israel, and to a handful of private companies. Eitan, nevertheless, was unsatisfied with Brian’s progress and quickly turned to the person he thought could most effectively sell PROMIS to governments of interest all over the world—Robert Maxwell.

Salesman and Spy

Through Degem and other fronts, Maxwell marketed PROMIS so successfully that Israeli intelligence soon had access to the innermost workings of innumerable governments, corporations, banks, and intelligence services around the world. Many of Maxwell’s biggest successes came in selling PROMIS to dictators in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Following the sales, and after Maxwell collected a handsome paycheck, PROMIS, with its unparalleled ability to surveil anything from cash flows to human movement, was used by these governments to commit financial crimes with greater finesse and to hunt down and “disappear” dissidents.

In Latin America, Maxwell sold PROMIS to military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. It was used to facilitate the mass murder that characterized Operation Condor, as the friends and families of dissidents and so-called subversives were easily identified using PROMIS. PROMIS was so effective for this purpose that, just days after Maxwell sold the software to Guatemala, this US-backed dictatorship rounded up twenty thousand “subversives” who were never heard from again. Of course, thanks to the back door in PROMIS, Israeli intelligence knew the identities of Guatemala’s disappeared before the victims’ own families. Both the US and Israel were also intimately involved in the arming and training of many of the Latin American dictatorships that had been sold the bugged PROMIS software. It is worth noting that Israel’s government and military-industrial complex was simultaneously involved in selling arms to many of these same governments.

Though Israeli intelligence immediately found obvious uses for the steady stream of sensitive and classified information, their biggest prize was yet to come. Eitan soon tasked Maxwell with selling PROMIS to top secret US government labs in the Los Alamos complex, including Sandia National Laboratories, which was and is at the core of the US nuclear weapons system. In order to plot how he would accomplish such a feat, Maxwell met with none other than Henry Kissinger, who told him that he needed to enlist the services of Texas senator John Tower, who was then head of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Kissinger has never been charged or even challenged for his role in facilitating a foreign-espionage operation targeting highly sensitive US national security information.

Maxell, using Mossad-derived money, paid Tower $200,000 for his services, which included opening doors — not just to the Los Alamos complex but also to the Reagan White House. PROMIS was then sold to the laboratories through a US-based company that Maxwell had purchased in 1981 and transformed into a front for Mossad. That company, called Information on Demand, was headed by Maxwell’s daughter Christine Maxwell beginning in 1985 until Robert’s death in 1991, during which period she helped sell the bugged PROMIS software to several Fortune 500 companies. Isabel Maxwell, sister to Ghislaine and Christine, would also work at the company before its closure in 1991.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Christine Maxwell teamed up with CIA official Alan Wade to market homeland-security software known as Chiliad to the US national security state, while Isabel would work closely at the intersection between Israeli intelligence and its private technology sector around that same period. Ghislaine, along with her two intelligence and technology-connected sisters, would hold a significant stake in a technology company that appears to be the actual origin of the Bill Gates-Jeffrey Epstein relationship, as explained in this Unlimited Hangout investigative report from May.

A few years after its acquisition by the Maxwells, Information on Demand was investigated by the FBI for its intelligence links beginning in 1983. However, that investigation was repeatedly shut down by higher-ups in the Meese-led Department of Justice, which, as previously mentioned, had been complicit in the whole sordid PROMIS affair. The investigation was shut down for good in 1985. The cover-up, oddly enough, continues today, with the FBI still refusing to release documents pertaining to Robert Maxwell and his role in the PROMIS scandal.

At the time, the halting of the FBI investigation green-lighted Information on Demand’s sale of PROMIS to Sandia National Laboratories, which provided Israeli intelligence with direct access to the core of the US nuclear weapons programs and nuclear weapons technology. This was a boon for Israel’s still-undeclared trove of nuclear missiles and warheads and helped ensure that Israel would remain the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, seen in the light of the PROMIS scandal and the Pollard spy affair, shows that it was largely accomplished through trickery, deception and espionage rather than Israeli technical or scientific prowess.

This same year, 1985, is also when the CIA finally caught up with their Israeli equivalent and created its own back door into PROMIS, which it sold mostly to allied intelligence services in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. It wasn’t nearly as successful as Maxwell, who sold an estimated $500 million in bugged PROMIS programs for Israel. The CIA, on the other hand, only sold around $90 million.

Heiress to an Espionage Empire

After Maxwell’s wild success in selling PROMIS on behalf of Israeli intelligence, he was recruited for another Israeli intelligence-driven operation—the Iran-Contra deal. It was through his Iran-Contra dealings that Robert Maxwell reportedly met Jeffery Epstein, whom he brought into the fold of Israeli intelligence that same year with the personal approval of the “higher ups” of Israeli military intelligence. The head of Israeli military intelligence at this time was Ehud Barak, who later come under fire for his well-documented and close ties to Epstein. The year 1985 was also the year when, conveniently enough, Epstein met Ohio billionaire Leslie Wexner and became intimately involved with his finances and affairs after Wexner’s previous fixer, Arthur Shapiro, was shot in the face in broad daylight before he was set to testify to the IRS on matters related to Wexner’s finances. Wexner would go on to co-found the Mega Group in 1991, several prominent members of which have close ties to Israeli political and intelligence figures and/or US-based organized crime networks like the National Crime Syndicate.

Epstein’s entry into this world was facilitated through his romantic ties to Ghislaine Maxwell, which had allegedly preceded Robert Maxwell’s successful efforts to bring him into the fold of Israeli military intelligence. Epstein was only one of several boyfriends Ghislaine is said to have had in the 1980s, but Epstein was certainly the most similar in terms of both behavior and “talents” to her father.

Ghislaine Maxwell and her mother Betty pose next to a framed picture of Robert Maxwell in Jerusalem, November 1991; Source

Ghislaine’s other boyfriends during and prior to this period certainly deserve mention. One of the more interesting was an Italian aristocrat named Count Gianfranco Cicogna, whose grandfather was Mussolini’s finance minister and the last doge of Venice. Cicogna also had ties to both covert and overt power structures in Italy, particularly to the Vatican, the CIA’s presence in Italy, and to the Italian side of the National Crime Syndicate. The other half of that syndicate, of course, was the Jewish American mob with its ties to the Mega Group, itself deeply connected to the Epstein scandal and whose members were frequent business partners of Robert Maxwell. It’s worth noting that Gianfranco Cicogna met a grisly end in 2012 when the plane he was flying exploded in a giant fireball during an air show, a morbid spectacle that can surprisingly still be viewed on YouTube.

Ghislaine and Robert Maxwell also had odd ties to the Harvey Proctor scandal in the United Kingdom, whereby a tabloid of Robert Maxwell’s—with Maxwell’s full approval—ran a story claiming that efforts were being made to blackmail Robert Maxwell with information regarding Ghislaine’s alleged relationship with the future Duke of Rutland. Maxwell clearly wanted the information linking Ghislaine to the duke put out into the public sphere, but the story is odd for a few reasons. The motive of the blackmailer was ostensibly to prevent Maxwell-owned papers from covering the Harvey Proctor scandal. But the son of the duke who was allegedly involved with Ghislaine was also a close friend and later the employer of Harvey Proctor.

The appearance of Harvey Proctor, a Conservative member of Parliament, in this tabloid spectacle is interesting for a few reasons. In 1987, Proctor pleaded guilty to sexual indecency with two young men who were sixteen and nineteen at the time, and several witnesses interviewed in that investigation described him as having a sexual interest in “young boys.” Later, a controversial court case saw Proctor accused of having been involved with well-connected British pedophile and procurer of children Jimmy Savile; he was alleged to have been part a child sex abuse ring that was said to include former UK prime minister Ted Heath. Savile’s close relationship with Prince Charles of the British Royal family is well known and, as will be mentioned shortly, Ghislaine is alleged to have been cozy with the Royals before Prince Andrew’s frequent public appearances with Ghislaine and Epstein, beginning around the year 2000.

Of course, the Maxwell-owned papers, in covering the alleged efforts to blackmail Robert Maxwell, did not mention the “young boys” angle at all, instead focusing on claims that distracted from the then-credible accusations of pedophilia by claiming that Proctor was merely into “spanking” and was “whacky”, among other things. It is hard to know exactly what was going on in this particular incident, but the whole bizarre affair paints an interesting picture of Ghislaine’s social circle at the time.

In this same 1985 period, Ghislaine also became involved with “philanthropy” tied to her father’s business empire by hosting a “Disney day out for kids” and benefit dinner on behalf of the Mirror Group for the Save the Children NGO. Part of the event took place at the home of the Marquess and Lady of Bath, a gala that was attended by members of the British Royal family. It’s worth noting that the Marquess of Bath at the time was an odd person, having accumulated the largest collection of paintings made by Adolf Hitler and having said that Hitler had done “great things for his country.” The same evening that the Ghislaine-hosted bash concluded, the Marquess of Bath’s son was found hanging from a bedspread tied to an oak beam at the Bath Arms in what was labeled a suicide.

The attendance of Royals at this Ghislaine-hosted gala was not some lucky break for Ghislaine or her “philanthropic” efforts, as Ghislaine had already been close to the royals for years, with subsequent employees and victims of Ghislaine having personally seen pictures of her “growing up” with the royals, a relationship allegedly facilitated by the Maxwell family’s ties to the Rothschild banking family. Ghislaine was heard on more than one occasion as describing the wealthy and influential Rothschilds as her family’s “greatest protectors,” and they were also among Robert Maxwell’s most important bankers, who helped him finance the construction of his vast media empire and web of companies and untraceable trusts.

It was also during this period that Ghislaine learned some unusual skills, including how to pilot airplanes, helicopters, and submarines, and became fluent in several languages.

Then, abruptly in 1991, Ghislaine and her entire remaining family saw their fortunes shift dramatically—at least in public—with the death of Robert Maxwell, a death that most of the Maxwell family and most of his biographers regard as a murder, an act allegedly performed by the very intelligence agency that employed him.

According to journalist John Jackson, who was present when Ghislaine and her mother Betty boarded her father’s yacht shortly after his death, it was Ghislaine who “coolly walked into her late father’s office and shredded all incriminating documents on board.” Ghislaine denies the incident, though Jackson has never retracted the claim, which was reported in a 2007 article published in the Daily Mail. If Jackson is to believed, it was Ghislaine – out of all of Robert Maxwell’s children – who was most intimately aware of the incriminating secrets of her father’s financial empire and espionage activities.

As Part 2 of this series will show, the evidence points to this being the case, particularly with Ghislaine’s entry into New York’s elite social circles having been planned by her father before his 1991 death. Of course, those social connections in New York, as well as those in Europe and elsewhere, would prove instrumental in the operation and protection of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual trafficking and blackmail network. Ghislaine’s slippery behavior in the years that followed, including activities both related and unrelated to the sex trafficking of minors, show that Ghislaine inherited much more than her personality from her father as she, along with several of her siblings, played a key role in keeping alive various aspects of her father’s legacy, including his espionage activities.

Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.

December 16, 2021 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

‘US is Utterly Dishonest’: Why Tehran Won’t Accept Partial Removal of Sanctions by Washington

By Ekaterina Blunova | Sputnik | December 16, 2021

Partial removal of sanctions by the US is not enough to facilitate the revival of the Iranian economy, hurt by the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” policies, say Iran affairs experts, adding that under the new government Tehran is set to protect the country’s national interests more determinedly.

The United States signalled on 14 December that it is fully prepared to lift those sanctions against Iran that are inconsistent with Washington commitments under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That “would allow Iran to receive the economic benefits of the deal,” remarked Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US ambassador to the United Nations, during a UN Security meeting.

For his part, Iran’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Majid Takht Ravanchi stressed that Washington should lift all sanctions slapped on Tehran and provide guarantees that it would not withdraw from the accords again and it would not abuse the procedures set out in the JCPOA and Resolution 2231.

‘All Anti-Iran Sanctions Have to be Lifted’

“The United States is being utterly dishonest,” says Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a professor at Tehran University, who was part of the Iranian delegation that helped to negotiate the 2015 nuclear deal. “All the sanctions are inconsistent with the 2015 nuclear deal. The maximum pressure campaign was targeting innocent women and children. It was an act of war and the objective was to force Iran to accept changes to the nuclear deal.”

The Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018 despite Tehran observing all the provisions of the nuclear accords. Subsequently, the US slapped sanctions on major spheres of the Iranian economy, including the country’s petroleum industry, under the so-called “maximum pressure” campaign.

“Through the maximum pressure campaign, the United States imposed sanctions under all sorts of different names: missile defence, terrorism, Iran’s regional allies, the nuclear programme, human rights and everything except global warming was included, when all of these sanctions had one objective, and that was to force Iran to appease the United States and the Europeans,” Marandi emphasises.

Although the White House changed the rhetoric, in reality, it is trying to cheat Iran and violate its commitments by lifting only those sanctions that were labelled under the nuclear programme, according to the academic.

Moreover, while “the US has a range of sanctions on Iran and President Biden has not removed any since coming to office,” notes Professor Shahram Akbarzadeh from Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.

Even though the partial removal of sanctions sounds like a positive sign, it will not make a big difference to Iran’s access to the global economy, according to Akbarzadeh. He explains that “many international corporations will continue to be reluctant to invest in Iran because of the extreme uncertainty surrounding the future of talks and the prospects of Iran’s entry into the international market.”

“The Iranian leadership is unlikely to see partial sanctions removal as enough to assuage their concerns,” Akbarzadeh believes. “It insists on an unconditional return to that deal, and Washington has been reluctant to ‘give-in’ to that demand.”

According to the professor, this dynamic may hinder the progress of the Vienna talks over the revival of the JCPOA.

Ebrahim Raisi gives a news conference after voting in the presidential election, at a polling station in the capital Tehran, on June 18, 2021. – Raisi on June 19 declared the winner of a presidential election, a widely anticipated result after many political heavyweights were barred from running. – Sputnik International, 1920, 21.06.2021

‘US is Not in Strong Position in Vienna Talks’

While the US is not present at the table in Vienna, American diplomats are taking part in indirect talks with their Iranian counterparts. Washington does not have an upper hand in the ongoing talks, according to Seyed Mohammad Marandi:

“The Iranians see that the United States has huge problems at home,” he notes. “Political, social and economic problems are causing major issues inside the United States. The United States is increasingly losing ground to a rising China and the re-emerging Russia, and Iran and its allies across the region are growing stronger and American allies are growing weaker.”

In response to Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the Islamic Republic started to gradually loosen the JCPOA restrictions on uranium enrichment starting from July 2019. “The Iranian peaceful nuclear programme is developing and it’s a leverage [in the talks],” according to the professor.

It’s the Americans who need the deal right now and the Iranians know that, Marandi notes, adding that Tehran will see “if the Americans will become reasonable enough to do what is good for themselves.”

At the same time, Washington and its European allies have apparently overlooked the damage their policies inflicted on the Iranian economy and the country’s population, the professor highlights, adding that “the issue of compensation is always on the table.”

The new Iranian government led by President Ebrahim Raisi has adopted a more robust approach in protecting Iranian national interests, according to Marandi. Even though the new Iranian government is critical of the JCPOA deal, it will not tear it apart, unlike the US government, but will observe its commitments. At the same time, Tehran will demand “that what has been signed, the JCPOA, be fully respected by the United States and the Europeans,” the professor underscored.

The Vienna negotiations between Iran and other signatories to the 2015 deal, including the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China resumed in December after a five-month hiatus caused by the election of a new government in Tehran.

At the beginning of this month, the White House voiced its dissatisfaction with proposals by the new Iranian government. According to European diplomats, Tehran has demanded changes to a set of compromises agreed upon a few months ago with the previous Iranian administration. The E3 group of Britain, France and Germany went so far as to accuse the Iranian leadership of “walking back almost all of the difficult compromises crafted after many months of hard work.”

Iran’s chief negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani tweeted on 14 December that the E3 and Washington “persist in their blame game habit, instead of real diplomacy”: “We proposed our ideas early, and worked constructively and flexibly to narrow gaps; diplomacy is a two-way street. If there’s a real will to remedy the culprit’s wrongdoing, the way for a quick good deal will be paved.”

For his part, Iran’s Permanent Representative to the UN Majid Takht Ravanchi told a UN Security Council meeting on Tuesday that Iran does not impose any preconditions or new conditions in the negotiations to revive the JCPOA and only wishes to see the restoration of the initial terms of the nuclear accord.

“We call for the full, timely, unconditional and verifiable implementation of the JCPOA. No more, no less,” Ravanchi underscored.

December 16, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

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