Telegraph’s Global Security Correspondents Claim No Trade Off Between Lockdowns and the Economy
By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics • May 12, 2021
The Telegraph‘s Global Health Security correspondents Paul Nuki and Sarah Newey claimed this morning that there is “no trade off” between the economy and public health when it comes to COVID-19 and lockdowns.
Writing in the newspaper, the correspondents (whose coverage is partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) write that the “‘health v economy’ trade-off” is “false” because “countries where the virus was swiftly contained – such as Vietnam – have seen less economic damage, plus far fewer deaths”.
This claim, based on one country, fails to acknowledge that the entire South East Asian region, regardless of the measures taken, has had a much milder experience of COVID-19 than some other parts of the world, particularly Europe and the Americas. Furthermore, while it may be true that Vietnam’s early border closures produced better outcomes (there is some evidence of this), that bird has well and truly flown for most of the world so the example of Vietnam is now irrelevant as far as this pandemic is concerned.
Perhaps, though, they have a future pandemic in mind. In fact, the peer-reviewed evidence is that lockdowns have no impact on the epidemic death toll (although it’s worth noting that Vietnam, which Nuki and Newey hold up as an example we should follow in future, has never imposed a full, country-wide lockdown). It’s also not clear how countries which close their borders to an endemic virus can ever hope to open them again – a problem Vietnam is currently experiencing. Vietnam is also not exactly an international global hub.
The article is part the Global Health Security team’s promotion of an agenda to give the World Health Organisation more funding and more power to declare pandemics faster and be more proactive in ensuring compliance amongst states with public health edicts. They note approvingly that the pandemic has “thrust health to the centre stage, and may be an opportunity to promote a ‘green and healthy recovery’”. They appear to like the idea of a fast-acting global government imposing lockdowns so we can all be like Vietnam and “contain” the virus quickly, supposedly without suffering economic damage despite the vast disruption to the global economy this would bring.
Nuki and Newey highlight the problem of “viral misinformation” as one of 13 “mistakes” made early in the pandemic, though they blame the internet and social media rather than the WHO, despite its part in promoting myths about the virus such as that it doesn’t spread between humans and it doesn’t spread via aerosols.
But are Nuki and Newey engaging in disseminating misinformation of their own, making the bizarre claim that public health containment strategies have no trade-off with the economy based on a single unrepresentative country? When the U.K. economy shrank by a record 9.9% in 2020, this claim is frankly ridiculous and such claims are at odds with the Telegraph’s overall coverage of the way different countries have managed the pandemic, which has been quite balanced. Should the paper really be allowing a team of journalists whose work is partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to use its platform to promote an agenda of enhanced global control in the name of public health?
Update on ivermectin for covid-19
By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | May 9, 2021
Back in January I wrote an article about four randomized controlled trials of ivermectin as a treatment for covid-19 that had at that time released their results to the public. Each of those four trials had promising results, but each was also too small individually to show any meaningful impact on the hard outcomes we really care about, like death. When I meta-analyzed them together however, the results suddenly appeared very impressive. Here’s what that meta-analysis looked like:
It showed a massive 78% reduction in mortality in patients treated with covid-19. Mortality is the hardest of hard end points, which means it’s the hardest for researchers to manipulate and therefore the least open to bias. Either someone’s dead, or they’re alive. End of story.
You would have thought that this strong overall signal of benefit in the midst of a pandemic would have mobilized the powers that be to arrange multiple large randomized trials to confirm these results as quickly as possible, and that the major medical journals would be falling over each other to be the first to publish these studies.
That hasn’t happened.
Rather the opposite, in fact. South Africa has even gone so far as to ban doctors from using ivermectin on covid-19 patients. And as far as I can tell, most of the discussion about ivermectin in mainstream media (and in the medical press) has centred not around its relative merits, but more around how its proponents are clearly deluded tin foil hat wearing crazies who are using social media to manipulate the masses.
In spite of this, trial results have continued to appear. That means we should now be able to conclude with even greater certainty whether or not ivermectin is effective against covid-19. Since there are so many of these trials popping up now, I’ve decided to limit the discussion here only to the ones I’ve been able to find that had at least 150 participants, and that compared ivermectin to placebo (although I’ll add even the smaller trials I’ve found in to the updated meta-analysis at the end).
As before, it appears that rich western countries have very little interest in studying ivermectin as a treatment for covid. The three new trials that had at least 150 participants and compared ivermectin with placebo were conducted in Colombia, Iran, and Argentina. We’ll go through each in turn.
The Colombian trial (Lopez-Medina et al.) was published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) in March. There is one thing that is rather odd with this study, and that is that the study authors were receiving payments from Sanofi-Pasteur, Glaxo-Smith-Kline, Janssen, Merck, and Gilead while conducting the study. Gilead makes remdesivir. Merck is developing two expensive new drugs to treat covid-19. Janssen, Glaxo-Smith-Kline, and Sanofi-Pasteur are all developers of covid vaccines. In other words, the authors of the study were receiving funding from companies that own drugs that are direct competitors to ivermectin. One might call this a conflict of interest, and wonder whether the goal of the study was to show a lack of benefit. It’s definitely a little bit suspicious.
Anyway, let’s get to what the researchers actually did. This was a double-blind randomized controlled trial that recruited patients with mildly symptomatic covid-19 who had experienced symptom onset less than 7 days earlier. Potential participants were identified through a statewide database of people with positive PCR-tests. By “mildly symptomatic” the researchers meant people who had at least one symptom but who did not require high-flow oxygen at the time of recruitment in to the trial.
Participants in the treatment group received 300 ug/kg body weight of ivermectin every day for five days, while participants in the placebo group received an identical placebo. 300 ug/kg works out to 21 mg for an average 70 kg adult, which is quite high, especially when you consider that the dose was given daily for five days. For an average person, this would work out to a total dose of 105 mg. The other ivermectin trials have mostly given around 12 mg per day for one or two days, for a total dose of 12 to 24 mg (which has been considered enough because ivermectin has a long half-life in the body). Why this study gave such a high dose is unclear. However, it shouldn’t be a problem. Ivermectin is a very safe drug, and studies have been done where people have been given ten times the recommended dose without any noticeable increase in adverse events.
The stated goal of the study was to see if ivermectin resulted in more rapid symptom resolution than placebo. So participants were contacted by telephone every three days after inclusion in the study, up to day 21, and asked about what symptoms they were experiencing.
398 patients were included in the study. The median age of the participants was 37 years, and they were overall very healthy. 79% had no known co-morbidities. This is a shame. It means that this study is yet another one of those many studies that will not be able to show a meaningful effect on hard end points like hospitalization and death. It is a bit strange that studies keep being done on young healthy people who are at virtually zero risk from covid-19, rather than on the multi-morbid elderly, who are the ones we actually need an effective treatment for.
Anyway, let’s get to the results.
In the group treated with ivermectin, the average time from inclusion in the study to becoming completely symptom free was 10 days. In the placebo group that number was 12 days. So, the ivermectin treated patients recovered on average two days faster. However, the difference was not statistically significant, so the result could easily be due to chance. At 21 days after inclusion in the study, 82% had recovered fully in the ivermectin group, as compared to 79% in the placebo group. Again, the small difference was not statistically significant.
In terms of the hard end points that matter more, there were zero deaths in the ivermectin group and there was one death in the placebo group. 2% of participants in the ivermectin group required “escalation of care” (hospitalization if they were outside the hospital at the start of the study, or oxygen therapy if they were in hospital at the start of the study) as compared with 5% in the placebo group. None of these differences was statistically significant. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t real. Like I wrote earlier, the fact that this was a study of healthy young people meant that, even if a meaningful difference does exist in risk of dying of covid, or of ending up in hospital, this study was never going to find it.
So, what can we conclude?
Ivermectin does not meaningfully shorten duration of symptoms in healthy young people. That’s about all we can say from this study. Considering the conflicts of interest of the authors, my guess is that this was the goal of the study all along: Gather together a number of young healthy people that is too small for there to be any chance of a statistically significant benefit, and then get the result you want. The media will sell the result as “study shows ivermectin doesn’t work” (which they dutifully did).
It is interesting that there were signals of benefit for all the parameters the researchers looked at (resolution of symptoms, escalation of care, death), but that the relatively small number and good health status of the participants meant that there was little chance of any of the results reaching statistical significance.
Let’s move on to the next study, which is currently available as a pre-print on Research Square (Niaee et al.). It was randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled, and carried out at five different hospitals in Iran. It was funded by an Iranian university.
In order to be included in the trial, participants had to be over the age of 18 and admitted to hospital because of a covid-19 infection (which was defined as symptoms suggestive of covid plus either a CT scan typical of covid infection or a positive PCR test).
150 participants were randomized to either placebo (30 people) or varying doses of ivermectin (120 people). The fact that they chose to make the placebo group so small is a problem, because it makes it very hard to detect any differences even if they do exist, by making the statistical certainty of the results in the placebo group very low.
The participants were on average 56 years old and the average oxygen saturation before initiation of treatment was 89% (normal is more than 95%), so this was a pretty sick group. Unfortunately no information is provided on how far along people were in the disease course when they started receiving ivermectin. It stands to reason that the drug is more likely to work if given ten days after symptom onset than when given twenty days after symptom onset, since death usually happens around day 21. If you, for example, wanted to design a trial to fail, you could start treating people at a time point when there is no time for the drug you’re testing to have a chance work, so it would have been nice to know at what time point treatment started in this trial.
So, what were the results?
20% of the participants in the placebo group died (6 out of 30 people). 3% of the participants in the various ivermectin groups died (4 out of 120 people). That is an 85% reduction in the relative risk of death, which is huge.
So, in spite of the fact that the placebo group was so small, it was still possible to see a big difference in mortality. Admittedly, this is a pre-print (i.e. it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet), and the absolute numbers of deaths are small, so there is some scope for random chance to have created these results (maybe people in the placebo group were just very unlucky!). However, the study appears to have followed all the steps expected for a high quality trial. It was carried out at multiple different hospitals, it used randomization and a control group that received a placebo, and it was double-blinded. And death is a very hard end point that is not particularly open to bias. So unless the researchers have falsified their data, then this study constitutes reasonably good evidence that ivermectin is highly effective when given to patients hospitalized with covid-19. That’s great, because it would mean that the drug can be given quite late in the disease course and still show benefit.
Let’s move on to the third trial (Chahla et al.), which is currently available as a pre-print on MedRxiv. It was carried out in Argentina, and funded by the Argentinean government. Like the first trial we discussed, this was a study of people with mild disease. It literally boggles my mind that so many researchers choose to study people with mild disease instead of studying those with more severe disease. Especially when you consider that these studies are all so small. A study of people with mild disease needs to be very large to find a statistically significant effect, since most people with covid do well regardless. The risk of false negative results is thus enormous. If you’re going to do a small-ish study, and you want to have a reasonable chance of producing results that reach statistical significance, it would make much more sense to do it on sick hospitalized patients.
The study was randomized, but it wasn’t blinded, and there was no placebo. In other words, the intervention group received ivermectin (24 mg per day), while the control group didn’t receive anything. This is a bad bad thing. It means that any non-hard outcomes produced by the study are really quite worthless, since there is so much scope for the placebo effect and other confounding factors to mess up the results. For hard outcomes, in particular death, it should be less of a problem (although we wouldn’t expect any deaths in such a small study of mostly healthy people with mild disease anyway).
The study included people over the age of 18 with symptoms suggestive of covid-19 and a positive PCR test. The average age of the participants was 40 years, and most had no underlying health issues. A total of 172 people were recruited in to the study.
The researchers chose to look at how quickly people became free of symptoms as their primary endpoint. This is enormously problematic, since the study, as already mentioned, wasn’t blinded and there was no placebo. Any difference between the groups could easily be explained by the placebo effect and by biases towards treatment benefit among the researchers.
Anyway, the study found that 49% in the treatment group were free of symptoms at five to nine days after the beginning of treatment, compared with 81% in the control group. However, the lack of blinding means that this result is worthless. The methodology is just too flawed.
No data is provided on the number of people who died in each group. Since it isn’t reported, I think it’s safe to assume that there were no deaths in either group. Nor is any data provided on the number of hospitalizations in each group.
So, what does this study tell us?
Absolutely nothing at all. What a waste of time and money.
Let’s move on and update our meta-analysis. The reason we need to do a meta-analysis here is that none of the trials of ivermectin is large enough on its own to provide a definitive answer as to whether it is a useful treatment for covid-19 or not. For those who haven’t heard of meta-analyses before, basically what you do is just take the results from all different studies in existence that fulfill your pre-selected criteria, and then put them together, so as a to create a single large “meta”-study. This allows you to produce results that have a much higher level of statistical significance. It is particularly useful in a situation where all the individual trials you have to work with are statistically underpowered (have too few participants), as is the case here.
In this new meta-analysis, I’ve included every double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial I could find of ivermectin as a treatment for covid. Using only double-blind placebo-controlled trials means that only the highest quality studies are included in this meta-analysis, which minimizes the risk of biases messing up the results as far as possible. In order to be included, a study also had to provide mortality data, since the goal of the meta-analysis is to see if there is any difference in mortality.
I was able to identify seven trials that fulfilled these criteria, with a total of 1,327 participants. Here’s what the meta-analysis shows:
What we see is a 62% reduction in the relative risk of dying among covid patients treated with ivermectin. That would mean that ivermectin prevents roughly three out of five covid deaths. The reduction is statistically significant (p-value 0,004). In other words, the weight of evidence supporting ivermectin continues to pile up. It is now far stronger than the evidence that led to widespred use of remdesivir earlier in the pandemic, and the effect is much larger and more important (remdesivir was only ever shown to marginally decrease length of hospital stay, it was never shown to have any effect on risk of dying).
I understand why pharmaceutical companies don’t like ivermectin. It’s a cheap generic drug. Even Merck, the company that invented ivermectin, is doing it’s best to destroy the drug’s reputation at the moment. This can only be explained by the fact that Merck is currently developing two expensive new covid drugs, and doesn’t want an off-patent drug, which it can no longer make any profit from, competing with them.
The only reason I can think to understand why the broader medical establishment, however, is still so anti-ivermectin is that these studies have all been done outside the rich west. Apparently doctors and scientists outside North America and Western Europe can’t be trusted, unless they’re saying things that are in line with our pre-conceived notions.
Researchers at McMaster university are currently organizing a large trial of ivermectin as a treatment for covid-19, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. That trial is expected to enroll over 3,000 people, so it should be definitive. It’s going to be very interesting to see what it shows when the results finally get published.
Joe Biden’s Offshore Wind Energy Mirage
The reality is a lot of turbines, not much energy.
By Craig Rucker | Real Clear Energy | May 6, 2021
President Biden recently announced ambitious plans to install huge offshore industrial wind facilities along America’s Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Pacific coasts. His goal is to churn out 30 gigawatts (30,000 megawatts) of wind capacity by 2030, ensuring the U.S. “leads by example” in fighting the “climate crisis.”
Granted “30 by 2030” is clever PR. But what are the realities?
The only existing U.S. offshore wind operation features five 6-MW turbines off Rhode Island. Their combined capacity (what they could generate if they worked full-bore, round the clock 24/7) is 30 MW. Mr. Biden is planning 1,000 times more offshore electricity, perhaps split three ways: 10,000 MW for each coast.
While that might sound impressive, it isn’t. It means total wind capacity for the entire Atlantic coast, under Biden’s plan, would only meet three-fourths of the peak summertime electricity needed to power New York City. Again, this assumes the blades are fully spinning 24/7. In reality, such turbines would be lucky to be operating a top capacity half the time. Even less as storms and salt spray corrode the turbines, year after year.
The reason why is there is often minimal or no wind in the Atlantic – especially on the hottest days. Ditto for the Gulf of Mexico. No wind means no electricity – right when you need it most.
Of course, too little wind isn’t the only issue. Other times, there’s too much wind – as when a hurricane roars up the coast. That’s more likely in the Gulf of Mexico. But the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 had Category 4 winds in Virginia, Category 3 intensity off Cape Hatteras (NC), Long Island and Rhode Island, and Category 2 when it reached Maine. It sank four U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships.
When storms or hurricanes hit, turbines can be destroyed. Repairing or replacing hundreds of offshore turbines could take years.
If the White House is planning to generate all that power using common 6-MW turbines, our coastlines would need a hefty 5,000 of the 600-foot tall monsters dotting them. The Washington Monument is 655 feet tall.
Going instead with 12-MW turbines, like the 850-foot-tall GE Haliade-X turbines Virginia is planning to install off its coast, America would still need 2,500 of the behemoths – just to complete Phase One of Biden’s plan. 30,000 megawatts by 2030. Even if these were all plopped in the Atlantic, it still would not be enough to meet New York State’s current electricity needs.
And what about the environment?
How many millions of tons of steel, copper, lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, concrete, petroleum-based composites (for turbine blades) and other raw materials would be required to manufacture and install the turbines and undersea electrical cables, especially where deep-water turbines are involved?
How many billions of tons of ore would have to be mined, crushed, processed and refined – considering that it takes 125,000 tons of average ore for every 1,000 tons of pure copper metal?
Not only would nearly all of this mining and manufacturing require fossil fuels, but much of it would be done in China, or in other countries by Chinese-owned companies. Haliade-X turbines are also manufactured in China. And much of the mining and processing is done under horrid workplace safety and environmental conditions, often with near-slave and child labor.
More turbines will also kill countless birds and bats. Turbine infrasound and other noise have been implicated in disorienting and stranding whales and dolphins. The numbers, height and low-frequency turbine noise also interferes with surface ships, submarines, aircraft and radar.
Nuclear power or billions of batteries (or retained fossil fuel power plants) will have to back up every megawatt of intermittent, unreliable wind power, so that society can function every time the wind fails. That means more raw materials, transmission lines and costs.
Even with massive taxpayer subsidies, electricity generated by offshore turbines will cost many times what we are paying today, even in New York and California. That will have especially heavy impacts on energy-intensive industries, hospitals, and poor, middle-class, minority and fixed-income families.
Economic, environmental and climate justice reviews must fully, carefully and honestly assess every one of these factors. No “expedited” or “climate emergency” shortcuts should be permitted.
President Biden likes to say offshore wind energy is clean, green, renewable and sustainable. Wind itself certainly is. But harnessing the wind (or sun), to meet the needs of modern civilization is not – especially in ocean environments.
Claiming otherwise is a mirage – a scam. Maybe that’s why the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management already canceled two wind projects off Long Island. The costs and impacts are enormous, and local opposition was high. Do climate activists in and out of the Biden Administration expect otherwise anywhere else?
Craig Rucker is president of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org).
Why Californians Have Sky-High Electricity Bills
By Irina Slav – OilPrice.com – May 5, 2021
Californians pay for some of the most expensive electricity in the United States. They also live in one of the greenest states, at least from an energy perspective. California is only going to get greener. Meanwhile, electricity bills are expected to continue their rise. Some deny there is a link between the two.
The facts show otherwise.
A paper by the California Public Utilities Commission released earlier this year identified the state’s plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by adopting more renewable energy as one big factor for bigger utility bills and expectations for further increases in electricity rates in the coming years.
The report said that while the state’s plans to reduce emissions will negatively affect electricity bills, a concerted switch to what the authors call “all electric homes and electric vehicles” could lead to a substantial drop in monthly bills. However, this would require a large upfront investment, which would be impossible to shoulder by medium- and lower-income households.
“In the absence of subsidies and low-cost financing options, this could create equity concerns for low- to moderate-income households and exacerbate existing disparities in electricity affordability,” the report said.
But funding such a hypothetical move to “all electric homes and electric vehicles” is only part of the problem. Another part, ironically, is distributed energy systems.
A March report in CalMatters summarized the reasons for Californians’ high electricity bills as follows: first, the size and geography of the state make the fixed costs associated with the maintenance of its grid higher than in most other states; second, households with rooftop solar installations don’t pay for these fixed costs even if they use the grid. And all this is deepening the divide between wealthy and not-so-wealthy Californians, making electricity increasingly less affordable for the latter.
Distributed solar installations appear to be only affordable for the wealthier citizens of the state. They can afford the upfront costs and then benefit from lower electricity bills, according to one of the authors of a UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School study that CalMatters cited in its report.
Solar power is regularly touted as cheaper and cheaper, even exceeding the affordability of fossil fuels. The truth, however, is that the cost declines that have been celebrated by renewable power lobbies only concern the PV panels. Granted, any cost decline in solar is good news, but what most reports forget to mention is that it’s not just panels that make solar farms or even rooftop installations.
Besides panels, solar power installations also involve other components—whose costs are not falling—and there is the cost of installation. Taken together, all these make up a rather hefty sum, which explains why it is wealthy Californians who are the ones taking advantage of the state’s programs aimed at encouraging the adoption of low-carbon energy sources. They are also the ones reaping the benefits at the expense of poorer Californians.
California has something called a net energy metering (NEM) program that basically pays owners of solar installations for feeding electricity into the grid. An analysis of the system between 2017 and 2019, Utility Dive reported recently, shows that the costs of the program stood at $9.46 billion while the benefits stood at $7.96 billion. Another study of the program, focusing on customer bills, found that the benefits of the program came in at $7.58 billion while costs were as high as $20.58 billion and much of that was shouldered by the people who couldn’t afford to buy a rooftop solar installation. … Full article
World police: Washington seeks to imprison foreign businesspeople for violating illegal US sanctions
By STANSFIELD SMITH · The Grayzone · APRIL 27, 2021
The United States uses economic sanctions as a weapon against states that choose a development path independent of US global domination. Sanctions can take the form of blocking a nation’s financial and trade transactions, not allowing financial institutions to process them. The US can also freeze the assets of another country.
Washington employs sanctions as a tool to destabilize governments that refuse to kow-tow to it. Sanctions are a weapon of war on civilians. Richard Nixon made this clear when, with Chile’s 1970 election of socialist Salvador Allende, the US president ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream,” to “prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.”
Sanctions can destroy the economy of a country by causing hyperinflation and unemployment and preventing the import of necessities such as food, medicine, and equipment to keep infrastructure and industries running. Sanctions drive capital flight from targeted nations, as corporations and financial institutions seek to avoid being hurt themselves. This results in deadly consequences for the civilian population.
According to the United Nations, US sanctions are unilateral coercive measures that violate international laws. The UN General Assembly has repeatedly called on all states not to recognize or apply unilateral coercive measures, such as those employed by the US. Every year since 1992 it has condemned the US blockade of Cuba; Washington’s response has been to worsen it. The 120 member Non-Aligned Movement has condemned sanctions on Venezuela.
This global influence enables the United States to block money transfers for even the smallest transaction, and to confiscate billions of dollars held by targeted governments and individuals. By controlling the international financial system, Washington can demand that banks in foreign countries accept US restrictions, or face sanctions themselves.
According to the United Nations, however, US sanctions are unilateral coercive measures that violate international laws. The UN Charter – which the US was itself instrumental in writing – clearly states only those sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council can be considered legal. Sanctions imposed by one country on another are not legal.
The UN General Assembly has repeatedly called on member states not to recognize or apply unilateral coercive measures, such as those employed by Washington.
Yet the US government continues to freely snub the UN and its Security Council by imposing unilateral sanctions on a variety of countries, most severely against Iran, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, Sudan, and Venezuela.
US sanctions contributed to 40,000 deaths in Venezuela just between 2017 and 2018, as well as to the deaths of 4,000 North Koreans in 2018, most of them children and pregnant women. In the 1990s, sanctions against Iraq led to the deaths of as many as 880,000 children under five due to malnutrition and disease.
Washington even brazenly threatened to sanction judges of the International Criminal Court if they dared investigate US war crimes in Afghanistan. National Security Advisor John Bolton bullied them, stating: “We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system … We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.”
This turned out to be no idle threat: the Trump administration ultimately slapped sanctions on the ICC and its staff.
In 2020 and 2021, the US government has taken its unilateral coercive measures to an even more ominous level by charging and attempting to extradite foreign businesspeople who have been abiding by international law, rather than the economic dictates of Washington.
Alex Saab, a Venezuelan national; Mun Chol Myong, a North Korean businessman; and Meng Wanzhou, from China’s Huawei tech giant, have each been charged with violating Washington’s unlawful sanctions – even though all are non-US citizens living and conducting business outside of the United States. The three are being politically persecuted for acting in the interests of their own countries, and not the US.
Venezuela’s Special Envoy Alex Saab, arrested for trying to buy food for the government’s CLAP program
The case of Venezuelan special envoy Alex Saab
The Obama administration justified unilateral sanctions against Venezuela in 2015 with the baseless claim that Venezuela poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security” of the United States. As Reuters noted at the time, “Declaring any country a threat to national security is the first step in starting a US sanctions program.”
Alex Saab, a Colombia-born Venezuelan businessman, was appointed a special envoy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. His job was to help the government buy food for its social program, CLAP, which provides boxes of food and sanitary supplies to an estimated 80 percent of the population, helping keep them alive under the US economic attack.
Saab’s government role means he should have diplomatic immunity under international law. But Washington has ignored all international protocol in targeting him.
Saab was en route to Iran to acquire basic food, medicine, and medical equipment needed for the people of Venezuela when, on June 12, 2020, he was detained – in effect kidnapped – during a stopover in Cape Verde, due to a US government extradition request.
Since then, Saab has been detained, first in prison and now under house arrest. He says his “illegal detention is entirely politically motivated.”
The US government charged Saab with “money laundering.” However, in his case and those of the other two foreign nationals targeted by the US, money laundering means nothing more than making international trade transactions, which must generally go through the US-controlled SWIFT financial system through which all dollar transactions pass, that circumvent Washington’s unilateral sanctions.
Because of its control over the international financial system, the United States can impose sanctions on the trade any country undertakes with nations that Washington sanctions or blockades, such as Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, or Russia. ”Money laundering” is the charge that Washington uses to enforce its unilateral coercive measures on the rest of the world.
Saab explained in an April interview with a Colombian news outlet, “I have worked since 2015 to ensure the supply of basic food and medicine and other items to supply the [Venezuelan] government’s social welfare food program (CLAP). Since April 2018 I have been working as a servant of the state, as a special envoy and not as a private businessman.”
“For seven months … from the first day of my abduction, they tortured me and pressured me to sign voluntary extradition declarations and bear false witness against my government,” Saab recounted. He refused, stating “President Maduro has shown incredible leadership in the face of unprecedented sanctions and dirty political tricks from the US. I am honored to be able to assist President Maduro in any way I can, as he seeks to ensure the well-being of the people of Venezuela.”
In jail, Saab said he was kept in the dark for 23 hours a day, “lying on the concrete [floor].” This led him to partially lose his eyesight.
“I was forbidden to speak to anyone inside the prison, and everyone else was forbidden to speak to me,” Saab added. “I have lost 25 kilos [55 pounds].”
Switzerland investigated Saab over allegations of money laundering through Swiss banks. But, after a two-year investigation, Swiss courts formally closed their investigation on March 25, 2021, determining there was no evidence that Saab committed any irregularity.
Soon after the Swiss statement, the US Treasury Department on March 31 withdrew the sanctions that President Trump had issued on a group of companies allegedly linked to Alex Saab.
While Cape Verdean authorities approved Saab’s extradition to the US, the court of justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) declared his detention illegal, stipulating that he could not be extradited.
The African Bar Association also ruled that the Venezuelan diplomatic envoy should not be incarcerated. Nevertheless, the US government, continuing the Trump administration’s policy under President Joe Biden, has demanded that Cape Verde keep Saab under house arrest, pending extradition.
The case of North Korean businessman Mun Chol Myong
For the first time in history, a North Korean businessman was extradited to the United States from Malaysia on March 20, 2021. Mun Chol Myong faces charges of “money laundering,” “conspiracy,” and supplying goods to North Korea in violation of US law.
Mun was arrested in Malaysia in May 2019 shortly after a Washington, DC federal judge issued a warrant for his arrest. He spent nearly two years fighting extradition, arguing that his case was politically motivated and was being used as leverage in possible nuclear negotiations between the US and North Korea.
His actual crime, in the eyes of the US government, was supplying needed goods to North Korea in a manner that circumvented Washington’s sanctions and US-instigated UN sanctions. US government authorities, as of March 22, 2021, had not indicated what goods Mun is said to have exported to North Korea.
An indictment by the US District Court for the District of Columbia alleges that Mun and his unnamed “co-conspirators” used “front” companies and bank accounts registered to false names on behalf of North Korean entities that were barred from SWIFT. According to the FBI, by concealing transactions that benefitted North Korea, Mun deceived US financial institutions into processing more than $1.5 million in transactions which they would have otherwise not processed.
The US assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, John C. Demers, claimed Mun “is the first North Korean intelligence operative – and the second ever foreign intelligence operative – to have been extradited to the United States for violation of our laws.” Ignoring international law, Washington considers North Korean diplomats and international businesspeople to be “intelligence operatives.”
In other words, the US Justice Department is openly arguing that foreign nationals who have never been to or done work in the United States can be extradited there for violating “our laws.”
Demers went on to baselessly claim that Mun’s export of goods to North Korea was a national security threat to the American people, insisting, “We will continue to use the long reach of our laws to protect the American people from sanctions evasion and other national security threats.”
In the Justice Department’s press release, the assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, Alan E. Kohler Jr., added ominously, ”We hope he will be the first of many.”
The US government has enforced sanctions, amounting to a de facto blockade, against North Korea since 1950, at the start of the US war on Korea. These sanctions have been designed to cut the country off from international trade and cripple its economic and social development.
The United States claims present-day sanctions were enacted because of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, which is a legal program run by a country threatened by Washington’s own nuclear weapons.
North Korea’s charge d’affaires in Malaysia, Kim Yu Song, condemned Mun’s extradition as an “unpardonable crime,” declaring that it was the product of a US-led sanction program “which seeks to deprive our state of its sovereignty, peaceful existence and development,” and is “isolating and suffocating” the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
The DPRK protested the extradition of its citizen by suspending official diplomatic ties with Malaysia.
Chinese Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, arrested by Canada and faced extradition to the US for violating unilateral sanctions
The case of Chinese Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou
The most infamous of these three extradition cases is that of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer and deputy chair of the board of the Chinese tech giant Huawei.
Meng faces charges of fraud for allegedly misleading HSBC, a British bank, about Huawei business dealings in Iran, causing the bank to break unilateral US sanctions against Iran.
On August 22, 2018, a US District Court in New York issued an arrest warrant for Meng. Canada’s RCMP then arrested her in Vancouver on December 1, 2018, at US request.
Meng has now been under house arrest for almost two and half years. The Chinese government has said the detention is “lawless, reasonless and ruthless, and it is extremely vicious.”
The Trump administration relied on two Reuters articles from 2012 and 2013 to accuse Huawei of violating unilateral US sanctions on Iran.
Washington imposed sanctions on Iran shortly after its 1979 revolution. The present US sanctions are claimed to be in response to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, even though there is no proof that the country has been developing nuclear weapons.
As with the North Korean case, it is noteworthy that the only country that has actually used nuclear weapons on a civilian population sanctions other countries for supposedly developing them.
All UN-approved coercive measures against Iran were ended with the international nuclear agreement, or JCPOA, of 2015, and the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Tehran was in compliance with the deal.
Unilateral US sanctions on Iran were imposed without any legal basis, and Washington’s justification for extraditing Meng thus violates international law, because the sanctions that the Huawei executive is alleged to have circumvented are illegal according to the UN Security Council.
In an article explaining the Meng Wanzhou extradition case, political analyst K J Noh provided further context:
Most people understand that Meng is not guilty of anything other than being the daughter of Ren Zeng Fei, the founder of Huawei.
Huawei, as a global technological powerhouse, represents Chinese power and Chinese technical prowess, which the United States is hell-bent on destroying. Meng has been kidnapped as a pawn, as a hostage to exert pressure on Huawei and the Chinese government, and to curb China’s development.
In a maneuver reminiscent of medieval or colonial warfare, the US has explicitly offered to release her if China capitulates on a trade deal –– making clear that she is being held hostage. This constitutes a violation of the UN Convention on Hostages.
In court, Meng’s defense has argued that the US government deliberately misstated evidence and withheld evidence from the Canadian Court. Her attorneys say the Trump administration was using her as a “bargaining chip.”
Meng’s defense denied Washington’s jurisdiction to indict a Chinese national for her activities outside of US soil. “There is no connection … None of [Meng’s] alleged conduct occurred either in whole or in part in the United States. Nor did they have any effect there,” her lawyers stated.
It is also highly unusual for Washington to pursue criminal charges for sanctions violations against an individual rather than an institution. Where an executive is carrying out corporate policy, one would expect individuals not to be charged, rather, the corporation would be fined.
As economist Jeffrey Sachs noted:
In 2011, for example, JP Morgan Chase paid $88.3 million in fines in 2011 for violating US sanctions against Cuba, Iran, and Sudan. Yet Jamie Dimon wasn’t grabbed off a plane and whisked into custody.
And JP Morgan Chase was hardly alone in violating US sanctions. Since 2010, the following major financial institutions paid fines for violating US sanctions: Banco do Brasil, Bank of America, Bank of Guam, Bank of Moscow, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Clearstream Banking, Commerzbank, Compass, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, ING, Intesa Sanpaolo, JP Morgan Chase, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, National Bank of Pakistan, PayPal, RBS (ABN Amro), Société Générale, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Trans-Pacific National Bank (now known as Beacon Business Bank), Standard Chartered, and Wells Fargo.
None of the CEOs or CFOs of these sanction-busting banks was arrested and taken into custody for these violations. In all of these cases, the corporation – rather than an individual manager – was held accountable.
The likelihood is that Saab, Mun, or Meng would receive a heavily politicized trial as “fair” as that inflicted on the Cuban 5 or Simon Trinidad.
These are political cases, disguised as criminal cases. The “crime” is the violation of US sanctions – illegal according to the United Nations – by non-US citizens living outside the United States.
The US government is flaunting international law by charging these three individuals for legal business between nations that violates illegal US coercive measures. All three represent the interests of governments that Washington seeks to crush, and the detentions of all three is the equivalent of hostage taking.
These cases open the door for the United States to charge and extradite any person in the world on baseless allegations of “organized crime, money laundering, or financing of terrorism,” if they engage in perfectly legal international trade which the US government declares to violate its unilateral sanctions.
Europe’s heavy industry unlikely to survive Net Zero
GWPF – 30/04/21
It is becoming ever more evident that much of Europe’s heavy industry is unlikely to survive the EU’s unilateral Net Zero policy.
The EU’s carbon price reached a new record high of 45 euros ($54) a tonne on Tuesday.
As the carbon price is expected to increase much further in the next few years, European industrial groups are desperately calling for the introduction of a carbon border tax, hoping that it will save them from international competitors that are able to produce much cheaper.
Even higher carbon prices are coming. BloombergNEF expects carbon prices to hit 100 euros by 2030.
They warn that rising energy and carbon costs will force energy-intensive manufacturing to shut down and relocate to countries with less stringent CO2 targets if the EU does not introduce protectionist carbon protection.
It is rather doubtful, however, whether the EU can afford to introduce a carbon border tax, knowing full well that China, India and much of the rest of the emerging and developing world would simply retaliate in return, threatening to tax European products out of Asian and African markets altogether.
European and American politicians should be reminded that we have been warning for years about this inevitable outcome of unilateral climate policies.
Coming COVID Commission Is a Gates-Led Cover-Up
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | April 27, 2021
Having gone as far as he can with the World Health Organization’s cover-up, Bill Gates takes another bite at the apple with his corporate-funded investigation into the origins of COVID-19 to cleverly cover up this massive conspiracy with an “official” investigation.
While the so-called COVID Commission Planning Group — set up to create and support an investigative commission like that for 9/11 — is advertised as a nonpartisan effort, you really couldn’t come up with a more dangerously biased set of participants.
In short, individuals and organizations with some of the most egregious conflicts of interest, and everything to gain by being in charge of analyzing and writing the history of this pandemic, are leading and supporting this effort. This is a classic fox guarding the henhouse scenario.
According to the Miller Center, the planning group will lay out the plans for nine separate task forces, each focused on one of the following topics, to lay “the foundation for a future commission to investigate”:1
- The origins of SARS-CoV-2 and its prevention
- Threat assessment, including the creation of an international network for detection and warning, “biological intelligence” and other data collection
- National readiness and a review of the initial response
- At-risk communities and how to address gaps in public health capacities, worker safety and the responsibilities of private businesses
- State and local readiness, containment and mitigation, including when and how to use lockdowns, mandates and school closings
- Health care challenges surrounding patient care, including those with long-hauler syndrome
- Diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines, including the regulatory environment that might benefit or stifle innovation and/or global supply chains
- Telling the stories of COVID-19 victims, frontline workers and public health officials (i.e., propaganda generation)
- Solving data issues
Philip Zelikow — Chief Investigator for the Cabal
The chosen leader of this new planning group is Philip Zelikow, former executive director of the 9/11 Commission2 and a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel.3,4 While Gates may not be a physical member of this planning group, he’s certainly involved indirectly. Of that we can be virtually assured.
Zelikow, a former director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, is also a current strategy group member of the Aspen Institute,5 a technocratic hub that has groomed and mentored executives from around the world about the subtleties of globalization.
He also directed the Markle Foundation’s Task Force on National Security in the Information Age,6 the focus of which has been to make information relating to potential security threats discoverable and accessible to officials without breaking civil liberty laws.7 As reported by the University of Virginia:8
“The planning group hopes to prepare the way for a potential National COVID Commission set up to help America and the world learn from this pandemic and safeguard against future threats. ‘This is perhaps the greatest crisis suffered by America, if not the world, since 1945,’ said Zelikow … ‘It is vital to take stock, in a massive way, of what happened and why.
These sorts of civilizational challenges may become more common in the 21st century, and we need to learn from this crisis to strengthen our society … Scholars and journalists will do their jobs, but there is also a role for the kind of massive investigation and research effort that only a large-scale commission can provide.’”
Foundations Backing the COVID Commission
As reported by the Miller Center,9 the COVID Commission Planning Group includes more than two dozen virologists, public health personas and former government officials, and is backed by four charitable foundations — all of whom have histories revealing them to be part of the technocratic alliance that for years, in some cases decades, have been plotting and planning for the wealth redistribution and global power grab we’re now experiencing. These foundations include:
•Schmidt Futures,10 founded by Eric Schmidt, former CEO and executive chairman of Google and Alphabet Inc., which owns the greatest artificial intelligence (AI) team in the world.11
•The Skoll Foundation, founded by Jeff Skoll, a former eBay president, to “pursue his vision of a sustainable world” by catalyzing “transformational social change.”12 It acts as a support organization to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Skoll has funded pandemic preparedness and prevention since 2009 through the Skoll Global Threats Fund, and his movie production company Participant Media produced the movie “Contagion” and Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”13
•Stand Together Foundation, which is part of the Koch Network, founded by Charles Koch. Its primary focus is criminal justice and poverty issues, and it teaches Koch’s “market based management” philosophy to community leaders.14
•The Rockefeller Foundation, which in April 2020 released the white paper,15 “National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan,” laying out a strategic framework clearly intended to become part of a permanent surveillance and social control structure that severely limits personal liberty and freedom of choice. I wrote about this in “Rockefeller Foundation’s Plan to Track Americans.”
The tracking system it calls for is eerily similar to that already being used in China, where residents are required to enroll in a health condition registry. Once enrolled, they get a personal QR code, which they must then enter in order to gain access to grocery stores and other facilities.16 The plan also demands access to other medical data.
Operation Lockstep
The Rockefellers, like Gates, built an empire around health and medicine despite having no medical expertise whatsoever. Their influence is rooted in money, which is spent in self-serving ways. While Rockefeller and Gates are both known as philanthropists, their donations grow their wealth, as the money they spend on “charity” ultimately ends up benefiting their own investments and/or business interests.
In addition to the COVID-19 Action Plan document cited above — which doesn’t even try to hide its draconian overreach and intent to permanently alter life and society as we know it — the Rockefeller Foundation also published a 2010 report17 titled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” in which they laid out their “Lockstep” scenario — a coordinated global response to a lethal pandemic.
While the name and origin of the virus differs, the scenario laid out in this document matches many of the details of our present. A deadly viral pandemic. A deadly effect on economies. International mobility coming to a screeching halt, debilitating industries, tourism and global supply chains. “Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers,” the document reads.
“In the absence of official containment protocols,” the virus spread like wildfire. In this narrative, the U.S. administration’s failure to place strict travel restrictions on its citizens proved to be a fatal flaw, as it allowed the virus to spread past its borders. China, on the other hand, fared particularly well due to its rapid imposition of universal quarantines of all citizens, which proved effective for curbing the spread of the virus.
Many other nations where leaders “flexed their authority” and imposed severe restrictions on their citizens — “from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries of communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets” — also fared well.
These and other reports spell out what the ultimate plan actually is. It’s to use bioterrorism to take control of the world’s resources, wealth and people. It’s to use coordinated pandemic response as a justification for wealth redistribution and the resetting of the global financial system.
What most fail to realize is that the wealth distribution they’re talking about is not distribution from the wealthy to the poor, even though that’s what they want you to believe. It’s to centralize wealth at the top and eliminate private property rights and private business ownership from the lower and middle classes. The “equitable” living standards they’re talking about is poverty for all but themselves. It’s really crucial to begin to grasp this reality now, before it’s too late.
Pieces of a Global Puzzle
The Rockefeller Foundation is also a founding sponsor of The Mojaloop Foundation, set up to “promote digital payments for people outside the financial system, with support from Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”18
Right there we have Google, the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, all in one little nonprofit with a heart set on giving poor people access to digital banking using their cellphones. This is probably the three most dangerous nonprofits on the planet, as they are likely the most powerful and committed to global tyranny.
All-digital banking using a centralized digital currency is a key component of the Great Reset, so this project has little to do with honest philanthropy and everything to do with making sure everyone can be swept into the digital net, which will include round-the-clock surveillance and tracking of physical location and biological data, a digital ID, along with your health data (including but not limited to vaccination status), banking and, ultimately, a social credit system.
All of the pieces needed for the Great Reset are already in place; it’s just a matter of seeing how all the separate pieces fit together. For example, Gavi, the vaccine alliance, set up with funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, partnered with the ID2020 Alliance to launch a digital identity program called ID2020.19
Gates also funded the creation of EarthNow, a project involving 500 satellites equipped with machine learning technology to surveil the entire planet with real-time video.20 As one would expect, AI — a Google specialty — is also a key component of this global surveillance plot.
COVID-19 — A Launch Pad for the Great Reset
Another key player in the COVID Commission Planning Group is the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. As you may recall, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security co-hosted the pandemic preparedness simulation for a “novel coronavirus,” known as Event 201, in October 2019 along with the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum.
The event eerily predicted what would happen just 10 weeks later, when COVID-19 appeared. Gates and the World Economic Forum, in turn, are both partnered21 with the United Nations which, while keeping a relatively low profile, appears to be at the heart of the globalist takeover agenda.
The World Economic Forum, while a private organization, works as the social and economic branch of the U.N. and is a key driving force behind modern technocracy and the Great Reset agenda. Its founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, publicly declared the need for a global “reset” to restore order in June 2020.22
Technocratic rule, which is what the Great Reset will bring about, hinges on the use of technology — in particular artificial intelligence, digital surveillance and Big Data collection (which is what 5G is for) — and the digitization of industry, banking and government, which in turn allows for the automation of social engineering and social rule (although that part is never expressly stated).
Beyond pandemic preparedness and response, the justification for the implementation of the Great Reset agenda in its totality will be climate change. The Great Reset, sometimes referred to as the “build back better” plan, specifically calls for all nations to implement “green” regulations and “sustainable development goals”23,24 as part of the post-COVID recovery effort.
But the end goal is far from what the typical person envisions when they hear these plans. The end goal is to turn us into serfs without rights to privacy, private ownership or anything else. In short, the pandemic is being used to destroy the local economies around the world, which will then allow the World Economic Forum to come in and “rescue” debt-ridden countries. The price for this salvation is your liberty.
The Great Reset
While the New World Order was long derided as a “conspiracy theory” that you’d have to be crazy to believe, the Great Reset, which is simply a rebranding of the same old NWO plan that has been in circulation for well over a decade, is now public fact.
Many world leaders have spoken about it in an official capacity, and in June 2020, Zia Khan, senior vice president of innovation at the Rockefeller Foundation penned the article25 “Rebuilding Toward the Great Reset: Crisis, COVID-19, and the Sustainable Development Goals,” reviewing the “social crisis” necessitating the world’s acceptance of a new world order.
The article was co-written with John McArthur, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, which is one of several technocratic think-tanks. Keeping in mind what I’ve just said about what the Great Reset is really all about, and the justifications used to implement the theft of wealth and freedom, read how they posit these changes as being in your best interest:
“Upheaval can yield new understanding and opportunity. Outdated or unjust norms can succumb to society’s pressing need for better approaches. For example, the need for massive and urgent government intervention has drawn fresh attention to social safety nets and the possibility of dramatic policy enhancements.
Tragic consequences of racial discrimination have catapulted awareness of systemic problems and triggered prospects for much-needed social reforms. Rapid environmental improvements linked to economic shutdown have rekindled consciousness of the profound interconnections between ecosystems, economies, and societies …
Rather than passively allowing norms to evolve through inertia or randomness, we can all pursue actions for Response and, soon enough, Recovery in a manner that improve the odds of a Reset toward better long-term outcomes.
Fortunately, we already have a strong starting point for what the world’s economic, social, and environmental outcomes should be. Five years ago, in 2015, all 193 UN member states agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a common set of priorities to be achieved in all countries by 2030.”
Another article titled “The Great Reset,” written by Jimmy Chang, CFA, for the Rockefeller Capital Management blog, reads, in part:26
“Regarding the post-pandemic reconstruction effort, progressives, led by the so-called Davos elites (of the World Economic Forum fame), are advocating an urgent ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism to ensure equality and sustainability. They also call for harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (i.e., Big Tech) to address health and social challenges.
Their vision for the future could be gleaned from a 2016 article penned by a young Danish politician with the title ‘Welcome to 2030. I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy, and Life Has Never Been Better.’ This title was so controversial that its posting on the World Economic Forum website was changed to a bland ‘Here’s how life could change in my city by the year 2030.’
The pace of the Great Reset will in part depend on the final outcome of the U.S. election as it will determine whether Trump’s ‘America First’ doctrine will be relegated to the dustbin of history. Still, some resets will be unavoidable since COVID-19 has exacerbated some longstanding issues such as the world’s debt dependency and the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.
There will be elevated levels of bankruptcy and debt restructuring. Governments may further increase their leverage to bail out the economy and placate electorates that demand more generous social contracts.
Riccardo Fraccaro, Italy’s Secretary of the Council of Ministers and a close aide of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, even floated a trial balloon on sovereign debt restructuring by suggesting that the European Central Bank consider ‘canceling sovereign bonds bought during the pandemic or perpetually extending their maturity.’
Businesses will also need to respond to lasting behavioral changes caused by the pandemic. In sum, there is no going back to the pre-COVID-19 world, and markets will need to adjust.”
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
The Great Reset is not some wild conspiracy theory but a publicly released agenda that is moving forward, whether we like it or not. I believe the only way to stop it is through our collective responses to the various pieces and parts of the plan that are being rolled out. They want you to believe that none of the things being introduced have anything to do with each other but, in fact, they are all pieces of the same puzzle.
The final image is the inside of a prison cell. It may not be a physical prison. It may be largely digital in nature. It may look like the four walls of your own home. But it’s a prison nonetheless.
I believe it would be a tragic mistake to trust Gates, Rockefeller, Google or any of the other players — including Zelikow — that are being brought before us as the saviors of the day. They’re all wolves in sheep’s clothing.
To learn more about the hidden power structure running this global reorganization toward authoritarian control, see “Bill Gates Wants to Realize Global Vision in His Lifetime,” “The Great Reset and Build Back Better,” “Technocracy and the Great Reset” and “Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?”
Be Part of the Answer
The good news is, Americans now have a brand-new weapon in our fight for freedom. I recently interviewed Naomi Wolf about her new digital platform, Daily Clout, that will allow citizens to lobby bills to their legislators.
Many state legislators are not lawyers, and they don’t have lawyers at their beck and call. Daily Clout has hired an attorney who is busy drafting turnkey bills that protect us against the continued erosion of freedom and reestablish rights and liberties. Citizens can now send these model bills to their legislators, knowing that they’ve undergone legal review and are ready to be passed. You can also go even further than that. As explained by Wolf:
“You can tell us the bill you want. We can upload a campaign for that bill. We can hire our lawyer to draft a model bill and then you can pass it. What we’ve been doing is gathering names and zip codes, so that we can add real voters to this piece of model legislation in real states and send it to real state legislators and say, ‘Look, the supporters are all there. All you have to do is pass this.’
It’s a fantastic intervention in the political process, restoring real democracy. It’s why we founded Daily Clout, but it’s beautiful to see hundreds and hundreds of people from all walks of life rushing to give us support and resources, to become members and give us donations, which we appreciate, so that we can keep our lawyer busy creating these draft bills. It’s not just for this issue.
Once we get our rights and freedoms back, whatever [citizens] want, we can draft a bill for you, and you can [call on your legislators to] pass it.”
To get involved, go to dailyclout.io and sign up to become a paying member or free subscriber. You will then receive an email explaining how to use the Five Freedoms Campaign. Presently, there is a model “no vaccination passports” bill that you can send to your state legislator.
There’s a feature called BillCam, where you can see who your state legislator is by entering your zip code. Once you’re a subscriber or member, you’ll get regular updates about happenings around the U.S. and community events.
The Great Reset is at our doorstep, and your freedom, and that of future generations, hinges on you getting involved and fighting for it. The Daily Clout platform can be a major help in this regard, as using legislation to preserve and protect our rights and freedoms is far preferable to more violent alternatives or resigning ourselves to the fate prescribed by our globalist would-be “overlords.”
Sources and References
- 1, 9 Miller Center, COVID Commission Planning Group
- 2 The Last American Vagabond September 7, 2016
- 3 Source Watch Philip Zelikow
- 4, 6 Miller Center, Philip Zelikow
- 5 Aspen Institute, Philip Zelikow
- 7 Markle.org
- 8 University of Virginia April 14, 2021
- 10 Schmidt Futures
- 11 TechCrunch January 26, 2014
- 12 Skoll Foundation
- 13 Forbes How the Billionaire Behind “Contagion” is working to stop this pandemic
- 14 Influence Watch, Stand Together Foundation
- 15 The Rockefeller Foundation, National COVID-19 Testing Action Plan — Strategic Steps to Reopen Our Workplaces and Our Communities, April 21, 2020 (PDF)
- 16 Berggruen Institute March 6, 2020
- 17 Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development
- 18 Techxplore.com May 6, 2020
- 19 Biometric Update September 20, 2019
- 20 Technology Review April 18, 2018
- 21 Canadian Truths, COVID-19 Bill Gates, United Nations and World Economic Forum
- 22 Technocracy.news June 29, 2020
- 23 Canadian Post, World Economic Forum Wheel of Evil
- 24 Intelligence.weforum.org COVID-19
- 25 Rockefeller Foundation June 19, 2020
- 26 Rockefeller Capital Management December 1, 2020
All of liquified natural gas from Russia’s Arctic for next 20 years sold in advance
RT | April 28, 2021
Russia’s energy giant Novatek said on Wednesday it has inked 20-year agreements with the shareholders of its Arctic LNG 2 project on the sale and purchase of the entire volume of liquified natural gas.
The LNG sales from the plant’s first liquefaction train are planned to commence in 2023, according to the company.
The agreements “provide for LNG supplies from Arctic LNG 2 on FOB Murmansk and FOB Kamchatka basis with pricing formulas linked to international oil and gas benchmarks. The LNG offtake volumes are set in proportion to the respective participants’ ownership stakes in the project,” Novatek said.
The company’s chairman of the management board, Leonid Mikhelson, said that “The long-term offtake agreements between Arctic LNG 2 and its participants ensure the future revenue stream from LNG sales and de-risks the project. This represents one of the most important milestones in attracting the project’s external financing that will be completed in 2021.”
Mikhelson said earlier that the Arctic LNG 2 plant is 39% complete and will be launched as planned.
Arctic LNG 2 envisages constructing three LNG liquefaction trains of 6.6 million tons per annum each, as well as cumulative gas condensate production capacity of 1.6 million tons per annum. The total LNG capacity of the three liquefaction trains will be 19.8 million tons. The first train of Arctic LNG 2 is 53% ready and is scheduled to start operations in two years.
Novatek owns the majority stake (60%) in the project, with minority stakes held by foreign companies. The list of foreign investors includes French oil and gas company Total (10%), Chinese firms CNPC (10%) and CNOOC (10%), and the Japanese consortium of Mitsui and JOGMEC (10%).
Has the new MI6 boss read the Paris Agreement?
Global Warming Policy Forum | April 26, 2021
Richard Moore, the new chief of the UK’s secret service, suggests countries such as China will be watched to ensure climate commitments are kept. What climate commitment? Has nobody at MI6 informed Mr Moore about the Paris Agreement?
After all, under international law, China, India, and all emerging and developing nations are exempt from any CO2 emission cuts until 2030 or later.
The Daily Telegraph – 26/04/21:
Richard Moore, head of the UK’s foreign intelligence service, described climate change as the “foremost international foreign policy item for this country and for the planet” CREDIT: PA
MI6 is placing the climate emergency at the forefront of its international espionage with “green spying” on the world’s big polluters, its new chief has revealed.
Richard Moore, head of the UK’s foreign intelligence service, described climate change as the “foremost international foreign policy item for this country and for the planet”.
It means the big industrial countries will be monitored by MI6 to ensure they are upholding their commitments to combating rising global temperatures.
Mr Moore, known as ‘C’, took charge of the intelligence agency in October and has become the first head of the service to ever give a broadcast interview.
He indicated that British spies will make China the focus of much of their climate-related espionage by pointing out that Beijing is “certainly the largest emitter” of carbon.
“Our job is to shine a light in places where people might not want it shone and so clearly we are going to support what is the foremost international foreign policy agenda item for this country and for the planet, which is around the climate emergency, and of course we have a role in that space,” he told Times Radio.
“Where people sign up to commitments on climate change, it is perhaps our job to make sure that what they are really doing reflects what they have signed up to.”
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UN declares war on ‘dangerous’ conspiracy theories
‘World is not secretly run by elites’
Free West Media | August 5, 2022
UNESCO says it is seriously concerned about the increase in “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories”. And they plan to put an end to it through a network of informants.
“Conspiracy theories can be dangerous,” the UN agency warned. “Often they ignore scientific evidence and polarize society with dire consequences. This has to stop.”
Unesco’s director-general warned that “conspiracy theories” could cause damage to people as well as to their health. “They reinforce misconceptions about the pandemic, reinforcing stereotypes that can fuel violence and violent, extremist ideologies,” said Audrey Azoulay.
The UN agency has launched a campaign to help people identify, debunk and report “conspiracy theories” to prevent them from spreading further.
This campaign is being carried out in collaboration with the European Commission, Twitter and the World Jewish Congress. The UN has created a toolkit to “debunk” such theories and smear anyone who dares to claim that governments are not fair and transparent.
The UN also warned that George Soros, the Rothschilds and Israel should not be linked to “alleged conspiracies”.
World events “are not secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful players with malicious intent,” the UN agency maintained.
And if anyone therefore comes across someone who believes that the world elite is plotting to consolidate power or direct events, then that person needs to take action. According to the UN agency, when meeting a “conspiracy theorist”, under no circumstances should one enter into a discussion. … continue
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- US Approves Sale of 500 Patriot Missiles to Ukraine, Deliveries May Take Years
- German Imperialism: An Urgent Explainer
- Backed by AAP, West Virginia Proposal Would Allow Dental Hygienists to Give HPV Vaccine to 9-Year-Olds
- If Americans Knew
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- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
- US September “Heat” Was No Record…Many Records Set Decades Ago
- Latest European Green Energy Debacle; Portugal’s Largest Flagship Solar Park Insolvent!
