Fear and uncertainty have dominated the media coverage of the Covid-19 epidemic. The novel coronavirus is depicted not as a pedestrian pathogen certain to be beaten into submission by the miracles of modern science any day now, but as an invisible evil lurking everywhere, formidable enough to inspire a respectful terror even in the leading lights of the medical establishment. And in case Americans had any doubt about how they were supposed to regard this new viral threat, the establishment talking heads many rely upon for the self-assured delivery of their news have swapped their usual swagger for apprehension. Amid this ‘confidence vacuum,’ the popular response to the pandemic has taken on a religious cast. Protective measures like masks have taken on a talismanic quality, hand-washing has been elevated to a ritual performance, and a cult built on naming and shaming ‘heretics’ has seized the minds of many – while their rights are quietly stripped away and a paternalistic police state substituted in their place.
Unable to see the microscopic “enemy” they are told threatens the lives of them and their family and deprived of a scientifically proven cure, individuals seeking deliverance from Covid-19 are left with only their faith that the protective measures prescribed by health experts –our scientific priest class– can keep it at bay. If it ended there, the Corona Cult would merely be a curiosity – humans have turned to religion in troubled times since before written history began. But its dark side has already reared its ugly head – those who buck the new orthodoxy are already being blamed for the plague.
We’ve been here before. In the Middle Ages, pious peasants were kept in line by priests who told them God was watching their every move. When a plague appeared, it was interpreted as divine punishment, the wrath of God visited upon a sinful population. Those who wished to stand out as especially devout whipped themselves in public, or wore painful garments called “hair shirts” – in both cases with the aim of ‘mortifying the flesh,’ literally ‘putting to death’ their sinful natures.
It’s no coincidence that self-flagellation reached its height of popularity during the Black Plague. It was assumed by its practitioners that if they underwent penance by inflicting pain on themselves, they would be spared the God-given pain of the plague. Those who publicly refused to participate in the religious rituals of the day were called out as infidels, heretics, witches or other servants of the devil. They might be chased out of town; many were tortured and even killed, often in shockingly gruesome ways, as the centuries progressed and the Inquisition rose to power. The pious were regularly told their misfortunes were due to the presence of a satanic influence among them, with complex problems declared to be solved by simply casting out the offending presence.
While western society may tell itself it has left those Dark Ages far behind, the lure of simplistic explanations and the desire to find fulfillment in shared suffering – inflicted or endured – are as potent as ever.
Mask of the red death
Face masks have become both the visual symbol of the Covid-19 epidemic and the dominant religious fetish for the Cult of Corona. While cities from New York to Laredo, Texas have adopted regulations mandating them in public places and chain stores like Costco have barred unmasked customers from their premises, it’s hard not to notice those individuals so devoted to the mask-wearing ritual that they sport the face-coverings in their own cars (with the windows rolled up) and when running down epidemic-emptied streets. Poor messaging is partly to blame – the Centers for Disease Control has repeatedly changed its narrative on who should wear masks, from “sick people” to “only healthcare workers” to “everyone.” However, the Cult of Corona’s devotion to the mask extends far beyond following the recommendations of a mere public health agency.
The mask has taken on a supernatural significance that far outweighs its utility in disease protection. Even the N-95 masks health authorities have recommended to protect society from virus-positive individuals have been found largely ineffective in protecting the uninfected from carriers in their surroundings, and the flimsy surgical masks that have become ubiquitous for sale on American street corners are next to worthless in stopping virus transmission. Indeed, some doctors have warned that wearing a mask is counterproductive due to the false sense of security it creates, while others suggest it’s actually dangerous due to the risk of hypoxia (lack of oxygen) and hypercapnia (excess carbon dioxide). Yet it’s impossible to walk into a supermarket in many cities without something covering the mouth – even as one’s eyes remain unprotected and ready to receive whatever viral particles are lingering in the air. Mask requirements thus have nothing to do with health and everything to do with religious faith. They provide a way for the faithful to telegraph their virtue at a distance and recognize one another instantly, while flagging the non-compliant as infidels to be avoided.
In the same way that garlic and a cross were supposed to ward off vampires in times past, the face mask is supposed to fend off the “invisible enemy” lurking everywhere at once. One might feel a little silly driving around with a mask on (or stringing a clove of garlic above one’s window), but better safe than sorry – and if you haven’t been infected, or had any vampires show up at your bedside, who’s to say it isn’t working?
Ritual, snitchual
A bevy of rituals has sprung up among Corona Cultists, from the benign if eccentric (swabbing all exposed surfaces with Lysol wipes) to the sinister (reporting neighbors for perceived violations). Even the simplest, most scientifically-sound measures like hand-washing have taken on a ritualistic cast, as the virus-fearing infuse them with a terrified zeal. How else to explain the popularity of the dozens of “hand-washing apps” available for smartphones but that the shock of the epidemic has caused us to question that which we once took for granted? Just as peasants of a previous era might have been spooked into regular church attendance by the specter of the Black Death, their descendants pore over videos of hand-washing on YouTube, determined to live a “cleaner” life.
But another holdover from the Dark Ages has risen its ugly head. While our ancestors might have turned in their oddball neighbor as a “witch,” claiming to have seen the merry old spinster cavorting with Satan under the full moon, modern-day snitches are picking up their smartphones and dialing specially-designated lines to report violations of social distancing orders. These services are disturbingly popular – New Zealand’s snitch site crashed repeatedly within its first week in late March as over 4,000 people scrambled to turn in their neighbors for violating that nation’s harsh lockdown regulations, which separated people into “bubbles” based on their living arrangements and forbid them from interacting with those outside their “bubble.”
Snitches come in several stripes. There have always been busybodies who call the police when their neighbor’s music is too loud rather than knocking on their door and politely asking to turn it down. But in the Cult of Corona, these miscreants are joined by those driven half-crazy with fear, convinced that the act of turning in rule breakers will somehow protect them from contracting the virus. They’d never say such a preposterous thing out loud, of course – if asked, they merely claim to be concerned for the community, or worried their victim’s irresponsible behavior is spreading Covid-19 willy-nilly, perhaps even stating that their decision to turn their neighbor in was “for their own good.” Just as the Inquisitor’s concern for those they tortured on the rack was supposedly for their victim’s “immortal soul,” so does the modern snitch rationalize their betrayal of their neighbors by reasoning that the virus police are concerned only for the health of the heretics they rat out – while secretly breathing a sigh of relief that they aren’t the ones being tortured (or placed on a ventilator), this time. Following orders becomes a source of comfort for the snitch deprived of life’s normal pleasures by the lockdown – providing an avenue for transformation from victim to hero.
Fueling this schadenfreudisch frenzy are media headlines celebrating the karmic punishment of lockdown violators. Whether it’s spring-breakers testing positive for Covid-19 after throwing caution to the wind and partying down on the beach or social-media showoffs boasting about refusing to social-distance, the public smiting of heretics has been a popular topic among Corona Cultists isolated in their homes. John McDaniel, an Ohio man who criticized his governor for shutting down the state, reportedly died in April of coronavirus only for social media mobs to dance on his grave and use his death to attack other “doubters” (including Donald Trump, whose insufficient reverence at the altar of the virus continues to set zealots frothing with rage). CNN’s Jake Tapper claimed that “practically every day” he read about a corona doubter succumbing to the virus, blaming conservative media and politicians for their deaths – heresy, apparently, is as contagious as the virus. The New York Post, which ran a moralizing story free of any identifying details about a nameless Kingston, New York barber who’d caught the virus after supposedly flouting lockdown for several weeks to cut hair, also rushed to connect a spike in coronavirus cases in Kentucky with an anti-lockdown protest a few days earlier – even though the virus’ lengthy latency period (and the fact that a significant chunk of the new cases were in nursing homes) made it next to impossible the two events were linked. And Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, one of the most fanatical government figures in the US’ corona cult, implied in a press conference that protests were more likely to contribute to the spread of the virus than other forms of “congregating.”
UK PM Boris Johnson was perhaps the most public example of the “divine punishment” phenomenon – his conversion to the Corona Cult (after a few days of timidly suggesting herd immunity might be a better path to public health) came too late to keep him out of intensive care at the hands of the NHS his party has so ruthlessly sought to privatize. When actress Miriam Margolyes declared following his recovery that she had wanted to see BoJo dead, some in the media appeared to agree with her – while making a point of casting such agreement as gleefully subversive. Not only do Corona Cultists find a commonality in rooting for the virus against the dissidents who challenge their worldview, but their own adherence to an exhaustingly cognitively-dissonant dogma is affirmed as the correct path by the heretics’ misfortune. Enforced austerity tends to be unpopular with its victims, but when that privation is reframed as a noble sacrifice made by all [except the wealthy] for the common good, it becomes easier to bear the suffering – and much more difficult to tolerate those who refuse to go along.
The real danger comes when zealots feel compelled to “help” the virus smite the heretics (sure, I could wait for God to punish this evildoer in the afterlife, but why not take some of that work off His hands? ). The Daily Mailcheered on an elderly woman who threatened to “kick the ass” of a stranger for merely calling the pandemic a “hoax.” An elderly patient died in a Brooklyn hospital after another patient knocked her to the ground, cracking her head open – supposedly because she “didn’t stay more than six feet away.” The violence need not be physical – a British woman told SkyNews she was “named and shamed” by neighbors on Facebook when she accidentally slept through her town’s weekly “clap for the NHS” ritual, in which participants lean out their windows and applaud at a fixed time every week in a choreographed celebration of the healthcare workers they believe protect them from the virus. Even viral videos of police abuses, which have been a dime a dozen during lockdowns that embolden the worst elements on the force, have been deluged with comments in support of the cops, charging the unarmed man/woman/child being arrested or brutalized “deserved it” because they were out without a mask/protesting/not standing 6 feet away from the nearest human. Never mind that the cops in the videos are almost never masked themselves, or that it’s impossible to maintain six feet of distance while making an arrest – certainly never mind the Kafkaesque paradox of arresting someone for not social-distancing, only to throw them in a jail cell with several other humans – these poor souls have sinned, and they must be punished. Don’t agree? You might end up in there with them.
Gotta have faith
For those whose faith is flagging after two months of lockdowns sapping both their bank accounts and health, polls are being churned out confirming upwards of 80% of Americans and nearly 9 out of 10 Britons support continuing the lockdowns, which combined with social media’s growing censorship of anti-lockdown speech gives the false impression of a universal public consensus that government policies are both popular and lifesaving. Fanatical religious adherence is required to enforce belief in such absurdity, given the appalling track records of the High Priests of Lockdown. Imperial College corona czar Neil Ferguson was caught gallivanting with his mistress in defiance of his own policies after two months lecturing Brits about the importance of staying home, but his wildly irresponsible disease model – produced using a defective computer program that was more glitch than code – lives on, haunting the minds of lockdown-lovers who screech BoJo is letting Brits leave home too soon. Indeed, based on his resumé, Ferguson never should have been allowed near public policy. His terrible miscalculations regarding foot-and-mouth disease in 2001 led to the unnecessary destruction of over 6.5 million livestock, decimating the nation’s farming industry, while a similar but fortunately unheeded prediction in 2002 that mad cow disease would kill as many as 150,000 Britons was shown up by the reality of 178 killed. As the years went on, his apocalyptic visions only intensified – in 2005, he declared bird flu would kill some 200 million people worldwide – when reality saw some 455 people, total, killed over the past 15 years according to the WHO. His hysterical 2009 prediction that 65,000 Brits would die of swine flu encouraged the government to embrace GlaxoSmithKline’s unsafe Pandemrix vaccine, which caused permanent brain damage in thousands of people (mostly children, plus a good deal of NHS workers conned into taking the jab with false claims of its safety and effectiveness) – quite a bit more than the 283 killed by the actual swine flu.
Not that the UK is alone in embracing faith-based “science” as health policy. Trump even appointed the man who led GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine division during the Pandemrix debacle to lead “Operation Warp Speed,” his unhinged program to develop a vaccine by the end of 2020 (a process that normally takes five years being crammed into eight months). Like Ferguson, Anthony Fauci – the face of the US’ pandemic response – has decades of epidemic failures under his belt at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Starting with the thousands of otherwise-healthy HIV positive people who died in the 1980s thanks to Fauci’s shameless advocacy for AZT, which refashioned the toxic drug (too poisonous for terminal cancer patients) into a miracle pill for AIDS, and passing through at least one episode of perjury that saw him deny the existence of encephalitis as a possible side effect of the MMR vaccine (before remembering he was under oath and acknowledging it was “rare”), Fauci has displayed such breathtaking avarice and incompetence at the helm of the NIAID that the US life expectancy has actually declined noticeably under his watch for the first time in history. Yet like the followers of an end-times cult leader who remain loyal even as the appointed date for the end of the world comes and goes, devotees of these public health priests have not dared to learn their lesson. Instead, they ramp up their predictions of doom for heretical countries like Sweden and Belarus that have refused to fall in line with the universal lockdown doctrine.
One level above the public health priesthood is Microsoft billionaire and Pandemic Pope Bill Gates, whose lack of medical credentials or even a college diploma have not stopped the world from hailing him as a prophet based on his “prediction” of a pandemic in 2015 – and his claim to have both the answers and the ability to pay for them. Gates’ deep pockets – he’s the number-one funder of the WHO, ever since Trump pulled US support – have given him the power to almost singlehandedly direct global health policy, steering it into a pharmaceutical iceberg even as real doctors protest his many conflicts of interest. Since diving into the money-pit of “philanthropy,” Gates has more than doubled his fortune; his foundation is heavily invested in the drug companies that make the vaccines that other groups he funds purchase for poor countries. He’s also very, very generous with the media, buying the silence of establishment outlets around the world – big names like the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Financial Times, and National Public Radio – so their journalists don’t recoil when he can barely keep from gibbering and squealing while discussing the economic hurt his lockdown policies are inflicting on hapless populations – or research the trail of suffering his foundation has left through the Global South.
Yet even the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex – vaccine advocates like Peter Hotez, the bowtie-sporting tropical disease specialist who was ubiquitous on TV during the 2018 “measles epidemic” attacking so-called “anti-vaxxers” – have expressed alarm at the decision to scrap the animal-testing phase for the Covid-19 vaccine that is supposed to save the world, noting that “there is a risk of immune enhancement” with vaccines for any coronavirus. During animal trials for an aborted SARS vaccine, mice who got the shot developed a severe version of the virus when exposed to it after they were inoculated, while ferrets similarly challenged post-vaccination with the virus suffered “enhanced liver damage.” Perhaps trying to get around these roadblocks, Moderna, the drugmaker currently leading the vaccine pack, is banking on a totally new kind of vaccine, one which, rather than lob a softball at the immune system in the form of a dead or weakened form of the virus, will attempt to reprogram our genetic material to create the pieces of the virus, so that the immune system can learn to fight them off. That’s how Gates himself describes this “promising” method, at least. Did we mention Moderna has never brought a vaccine to market before? What’s the matter – where’s your faith?
We may not be turning our eyes heavenward and praying for deliverance, but the leaders of the western world have declared society cannot fully return to normal until a magical perfect vaccine arrives from on high, an absurd one-stop solution that carries echoes of the “duck and cover”-type prescriptions for surviving a nuclear blast, drilled into people’s heads during the Cold War. The effect of instilling a powerful capacity for cognitive dissonance – teaching children to hide under their desks even as they were taught the laws of physics, i.e. an understanding that their desks couldn’t protect them – turned Americans into gold medalists in cognitive dissonance. Were it an Olympic sport, no one would even come close.
Omnipotence & Omniscience in the 21st century
The contact-tracing platforms – both digital and human-based – being rolled out around the world have their philosophical roots in religious rites of confession, cross-bred with the police-state logic of the National Security Agency (“if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear”) and coupled with the religious notion of an all-seeing, all-knowing deity. All deviation from lockdown dogma is logged and reported, including consorting with known heretics, and this Panopticon – attacked when it debuted in China as totalitarian police-state control – is now being embraced in western media as the work of benevolent governments concerned with citizen welfare. While this transformation was laid out chillingly in ‘Lock Step,’ a hypothetical future outlined in 2010 in the Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network’s “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” any discussion of predictive programming is off-limits. Indeed, Corona Cultists are encouraged to cut off their “conspiracy theorist” relatives, because, in the words of Canadian broadcaster CBC, “conspiracies can be just as infectious, just as dangerous as a virus – so you have to guard against them.” Parents in Wales are being warned that conspiracy theorists are a greater threat than pedophiles on the internet. Compounding the seriousness of wrongthink, the WHO has popularized the term “infodemic” – implying ideas are as dangerous to one’s health as pathogens – and recommended a “vaccine for misinformation.”
Soon, the Corona Cultist will no longer have to self-report their symptoms on a Facebook survey or confess their sins to a contact-tracer. Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed clothing with embedded sensors to monitor the wearer’s vital signs. Enabled by the 5G networks being fast-tracked while any potential opposition is locked down, these sensors will communicate in real time with surveillance smart grids, pinpointing the offender and alerting others to give them a wide berth, refuse to serve them, and eventually have them “neutralized.” Their bank account may be frozen until they return home, or even debited a certain fine based on the degree of disobedience (“that’ll be 20 Hail Bills… or $20 per minute outside the home, your choice”). Eventually, these sensors will be implanted inside the body – in what sounds like the plot of a science fiction dystopia, Microsoft secured a patent in March for a system that mines cryptocurrency based on physiological signals, theoretically permitting the corporation to ‘reward’ users based on desirable responses to certain stimuli. While the example they gave was banal – a reward for watching an advertisement – it’s no great leap to imagine equivalent punishments for those who respond with disgust to the ruling class’ propaganda. The all-knowing, all-seeing God micromanaging His followers, a religious trope that has been used to keep large populations in line for millennia, has finally been realized in the form of the Covid-19 police state. Big Brother wields technology as both carrot – gently shepherding His flock toward transhumanist perfection by offering a facsimile of freedom in return for downloading an app, accepting a “quantum dot tattoo,” or showing a “certificate of immunity” on demand – and stick, digitally and literally imprisoning those who deviate from His shining future.
A breathtakingly wealthy coalition of billionaires and their pet statesmen have seized their own slice of the divine by appointing themselves Big Brother’s agents on earth. From the messianic glow of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen as she solicits money from cash-strapped European nations, to the aforementioned sweater-vested Gates channelling Nostradamus with predictions of “Pandemic Two,” to second-generation New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (whose PR people have laid it on thick with hashtags like #Cuomosexual and #CuomoForPresident even as his state leads the world in infections and deaths and his policies of mandating nursing homes accept Covid-19-positive patients literally “kill Grandma”) epitomizing “New York Tough” by acting out #resistance to Trump even as his brother was supposedly laid low by the virus, there’s no end of ruling-class Heroes™ basking in the admiration of the Corona Cultists, who offer up their (and everyone else’s) rights on a silver platter, never to be seen again.
Can constant surveillance stop the virus? No more than one-way sidewalks, bleaching the beach, or ratting out your neighbor does. There’s nothing wrong with clinging to ritual in a time of uncertainty – certainly hand-washing doesn’t have a downside, presuming one stops short of wearing the skin off one’s hands. But when that ritual harms others, it must be questioned. Covid-19 zealots would argue that they have science on their side, but the science is far from settled on the effectiveness of social distancing and sweeping economic shutdowns.
Pseudoscience on a rampage
As social media censors tighten the screws on what information is permitted to enter the public sphere, it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend the Cult of Corona is based on science. Actual science relies upon constant inquiry, testing, and hypothesizing, and even those claims generally attested to by its practitioners are considered “theories” as opposed to unchangeable truths. Science-as-religion, on the other hand, denounces those who put forth dissenting theories as heretics, using slurs like “quack,” “charlatan,” and “anti-vaxxer” to marginalize, for example, medical practitioners who heal people without the use of pharmaceutical drugs. The social media platforms’ decision to unilaterally deplatform content that contradicts the WHO’s narrative is anti-scientific in the extreme, sacrificing the spirit of inquiry for the strictures of groupthink. It’s rendered even more Kafkaesque due to continuing shifts in the WHO’s own narrative, which has changed as more is learned about the virus (as scientific understanding tends to do).
The idea that YouTube’s content moderators know better than a medical doctor how to treat Covid-19 would have been considered laughable just six months ago, yet Google’s video platform has repeatedly removed videos of licensed, practicing clinicians discussing their experiences. A pair of “rogue” doctors in Bakersfield, California who held a lengthy press conference laying out their findings and questioning the wisdom of prolonged lockdowns – broadcast on a local network TV station – went viral, only for YouTube to remove nearly every copy while pundits denounced the pair as “coronavirus truthers.” Their video did not attempt to project their own experiences onto the world – indeed, where they did cite statistics outside of Bakersfield, they used “official” statistics from health authorities, in Sweden and elsewhere, to support their claim that the fatality rate was being significantly overestimated because most cases were asymptomatic. Their video was literally broadcast on “mainstream media,” an “authoritative source” in the eyes of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. But its incompatibility with prevailing coronavirus dogma meant it had to be destroyed.
The orthodox narrative also jettisons long-accepted science about immunity. Vitamin D – obtained from sunlight absorbed through the skin – has been proven in study after study to be integral to a healthy immune system, and several recent studies have demonstrated its importance in surviving Covid-19 infection. Likewise, loneliness has been linked to diminished immune function and poor health in general, especially in elderly people (i.e. those most susceptible to Covid-19), and even those who are quite content with being alone are experiencing diminished immune stimulation due to not interacting with other people. The link between isolation and ill health is so strong that even the media establishment has quietly acknowledged it, and solitary confinement is considered cruel and unusual punishment in many countries. No less than the World Economic Forum, co-organizer of the notorious Event 201 simulation that served as a dress rehearsal for Covid-19 itself, has called the stay-at-home orders that have confined more than half the world’s population to their homes “the world’s biggest psychological experiment.” The ruling-class conclave warned “we will pay the price” in a secondary mental-illness epidemic, one which its members – heavily invested in the pharmaceutical companies that are among the biggest winners of the pandemic – are no doubt poised to cash in on with antidepressants, benzodiazepines and antipsychotics aplenty. Nevertheless, questioning the wisdom of prolonged isolation in the form of extended lockdowns is still seen as anathema.
Deprogramming
To begin to free humanity from the influence of the Corona Cult, it’s important to understand how its programming took hold. Guilt – environmental guilt, racial guilt, class-based guilt – is the primary route of attack. The media establishment initiallyattempted to link the coronavirus outbreak to climate change, with even the Pope climbing on board the narrative, though no scientific basis exists to support it and it has since been somewhat de-emphasized. Heretics are repeatedly accused of prioritizing their own convenience over the health of society, especially its most vulnerable members – the elderly, the sick, even poor and non-white populations. Depending on the target audience, anti-lockdown heretics are said to be scientifically-illiterate “covidiots” or heartless monsters consigning the disadvantaged to die for capitalism. Guilt and shame are powerful conversion tools, and even those who remain unconverted are likely to hold their tongues in a sociological phenomenon known as the spiral of silence.
At the same time, humanity’s innate religious tendencies (present in even atheists – millennia of programming don’t vanish just because a person comes to the realization they live in a godless universe) – have been hijacked. It’s no coincidence that governments imposing lockdowns have singled out places of worship for particular animus – anyone attending religious services is presumably content enough with their god(s) that they’re unlikely to ditch their faith for a virus-venerating cult-come-lately. Constantly bombarded with messages of uncertainty and kept from communing with their usual faith, even people normally secure in their religion will reach for the stability the Corona Police State provides – authoritarianism’s flip side is paternalism, and comfort is found in the arms of Big Brother. Among the non-religious, liberal and libertarian populations alike are targeted with the weaponization of medical jargon – a simple “what’s the matter, you don’t believe in science?” sends weak-willed groupthinkers into shameful silence while their freedoms are methodically amputated.
It is supremely ironic that in this Inquisition, the “real” church has been sidelined. Aside from the Pope, who has wholeheartedly embraced the New Normal, a group of Catholic leaders recently issued a statement calling out governments, the media, and public health experts, denouncing the Covid-19 narrative as cover for “infringing on the rights of millions of people around the world.” Cynical scholars of religious history might suggest they’re motivated by jealousy – “stop using dogma to control people, that’s our job!” – but their concerns are no less valid, and the feeling of envy cuts both ways. The single-minded determination of police to break up even those church services scrupulously observing social distancing with worshipers sitting isolated in their cars can only be explained by eschatological jealousy. To truly force the Cult of Corona down the throats of the people, the competition must be eliminated, whether it’s “traditional” religion or logic, reason and the (real) scientific method.
Deprogramming the world from the Cult of Corona cannot be done by force – its backers have too much power, including total control of both establishment and social media. It must be approached strategically. Just as traditional “deprogrammers” will isolate a cult member from the group, reasoning there’s a much better chance of re-awakening the original personality when the person is not experiencing the pressures of groupthink, deprogramming Corona Cultists is best done one-on-one, keeping in mind that cultists will ferociously defend their dogma with thought-stopping techniques which can be extremely irritating to outsiders trying to convey dissenting information. Former “Moonie” Steven Hassan’s BITE model (above) describes how cults exert undue influence and is useful in approaching deprogramming.
The notion of deprogramming entire societies may seem daunting, but it is the only chance humanity has to retain some semblance of freedom and turn back from the dark path down which our species is heading. The ruling class is imposing a comprehensive, multilayered control grid that has been in the works for decades, and when it is complete, revolution will not be an option. Such a future must be avoided at all costs.
There has been a lot of talk in the press and from talking heads claiming that the Covid lockdown has “reduced emissions” (power plants cutting back on power generations, factories closed, populations ordered to stay home, most airplanes grounded) and talk encouraging that government Covid recovery packages, should support only companies and projects “which decouple economic growth from GHG emissions”. The “Build Back Better” movement.
It is true that emissions from human sources – automobiles, factories, power plants, etc. – have been reduced by the multitude of nations that have sacrificed their economies in the [misguided] belief that doing so “saves lives”.
But the idea that the Worldwide Covid Lockdown has had any effect on atmospheric CO2 concentrations is simply not true.
Here is the data, from the world’s most trusted monitor of atmospheric CO2:
Despite the dreams of the anti-human element of the Climate Cabal, which seems to have been hoping that the Covid Lockdown would destroy enough of to human society to allow the Radical Greens to dictate the “post-apocalypse recovery plan” — there has been no apocalypse (there has been an economic downturn… by definition, they turned down the economy), the lockdown hasn’t even made a dent, not even a tiny slowdown, in the growth atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
That is, this year, through May, looks precisely like each of the previous four years. You might be asking: “How can that be?” — factories closed, cars off the road, power plants just ticking over…..
[ If you don’t like this chart, try the Daily and Weekly Chart — it shows the same thing. ]
Maybe, just maybe, anthropogenic emissions just don’t make that big of a contribution to the increase…. Maybe abandoning fossil fuels and all the advantages of modern society isn’t a solution to rising CO2.
Don’t ask me to explain it, I don’t know. But it sure is interesting – even I thought the lockdowns would show up at Mauna Loa.
The focus of US policing is shifting from enforcement to prevention as mass incarceration falls out of favor. ‘Pre-crime’ detection is the hot new thing, accomplished through analysis of behavior and…facial features?
Researchers at the University of Harrisburg announced earlier this week that they had developed AI software capable of predicting – with 80 percent accuracy! – whether a person is a criminal just by looking at their face.
“Our next step is finding strategic partners to advance this mission,” the press release stated, hinting that a New York Police Department veteran was working alongside two professors and a PhD candidate on the project.
That statement had been pulled by Thursday after controversy erupted over what critics slammed as an attempt to rehabilitate phrenology, eugenics, and other racist pseudosciences for the modern surveillance state. But amid the repulsion was an undeniable fascination – fellow facial recognition researcher Michael Petrov of EyeLock observed that he’d “never seen a study more audaciously wrong and still thought provoking than this.”
Purporting to determine a person’s criminal tendencies by examining their facial features implies evildoers are essentially “born that way” and incapable of rehabilitation, which flies in the face of modern criminological theory (and little details like “free will”). While the approach was all the rage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was used to justify eugenics and other forms of scientific racism, it was relegated to the dustbin of history post-World War II.
Until now, apparently. Phrenology and physiognomy – the “sciences” of determining personality by examining the size and shape of the head and face, respectively – are apparently enjoying a comeback. A January study published in the Journal of Big Data made similar criminological claims about its AI “deep learning models,” boasting one program demonstrated a shocking 97 percent accuracy in using “shape of the face, eyebrows, top of the eye, pupils, nostrils and lips” in order to ferret out criminals.
The researchers behind that paper actually named “Lombroso’s research” as their inspiration, referring to Cesare Lombroso, the “father of modern criminology” who believed criminality was inherited and diagnosable by examining physical – specifically facial – characteristics. Nor were they the first to turn AI algorithms loose on identifying “criminal” characteristics – their paper cites a previous effort from 2016, which apparently triggered a media firestorm of its own.
It might be too soon for the public to embrace discredited racist pseudoscience repackaged as futuristic policing tools, but given US law enforcement’s eager adoption of “pre-crime,” it’s not unimaginable that this tech might find its way into their hands.
US authorities have never been more determined to save would-be offenders from themselves, rolling out two pre-crime surveillance programs in the past year alone. The Disruption and Early Engagement Program (DEEP) purports to intervene with “court ordered mental health treatment” and electronic monitoring against individuals anticipated to be “mobilizing toward violence” based on their private communications and social media activity, while the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA)’s flagship “Safe Home” project, uses “artificial intelligence and machine learning” to analyze data scraped from personal electronic devices (smartphones, Alexas, FitBits) and provided by healthcare professionals (!) to identify the potential for “neuropsychiatric violence.” To maximize their effectiveness, Attorney General William Barr has called for Congress to do away with encryption.
The risks of pre-crime policing are enormous. Algorithmically-selected “pre-criminals” are very likely to be set up to commit crimes in order to “prove” the programs work, as has happened with the US’ sprawling “anti-terrorism” initiatives. A 2014 investigation found the FBI had entrapped nearly every “terrorism suspect” it had prosecuted since 9/11, and that pattern has continued into the present.
Meanwhile, facial recognition algorithms are up to 100 times more likely to misidentify black and Asian men than white, and the misidentification rate for Native Americans is even higher, according to a NIST study.
The Harrisburg University researchers attempt to push such concerns aside, insisting their software has “no racial bias” – everyone is phrenologically analyzed on an equally pseudoscientific basis. Surely we can trust an NYPD officer to avoid racism. It’s not like 98 percent of those arrested for violating social distancing in Brooklyn in the last two months were black, or anything – it was 97.5 percent.
Given the frenzy of police-state wish-fulfillment – from babysitter-drones to endless lockdowns – that has accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic, these researchers probably thought they could slip in a sleek modernized version of century-old pseudoscience. Totally understandable!
Still too soon? Wait a few years…
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
Summary:Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) continue to increase with no sign of the global economic slowdown in response to the spread of COVID-19. This is because the estimated reductions in CO2 emissions (around -11% globally during 2020) is too small a reduction to be noticed against a background of large natural variability. The reduction in economic activity would have to be 4 times larger than 11% to halt the rise in atmospheric CO2.
Changes in the atmospheric reservoir of CO2 occur when there is an imbalance between surface sources and sinks of CO2. While the global land and ocean areas emit approximately 30 times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as humans produce from burning of fossil fuels, they also absorb about an equal amount of CO2. This is the global carbon cycle, driven mostly by biological activity.
There are variations in the natural carbon cycle, such as during El Nino (more CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere) and La Nina (more CO2 removed from the atmosphere). Greater wildfire activity releases more CO2, while major volcanic eruptions (paradoxically) lead to greater photosynthesis from more diffuse sunlight and extra removal of CO2 from the air. The most dramatic variations are seasonal, as the land-dominated Northern Hemisphere experiences an annual cycle of vegetation growth (CO2 removal) and decay (CO2 release).
The increase in atmospheric CO2 observed since the 1950s is most likely dominated by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, which are twice as large as that needed to explain the observed rise. As I have shown before, a simple CO2 budget model driven by (1) estimates of global yearly anthropogenic CO2 emissions, (2) El Nino and La Nina activity, and (3) a CO2 removal rate that is proportional to how much “extra” CO2 is in the atmosphere compared to a “preferred baseline” CO2 level, yields an excellent fit to yearly CO2 observations at Mauna Loa, Hawaii.
Fig. 1. Yearly Mauna Loa, HI CO2 observations since 1959 (red) versus a simple CO2 budget model (blue).
But those are yearly measurements, and we are now interested in whether the recent global economic slowdown is showing up in the monthly Mauna Loa CO2 data. If we remove the large seasonal variations (driven by the seasonal growth and decay of Northern Hemisphere vegetation), we see no evidence of the economic slowdown through April, 2020.
Fig. 2. Monthly CO2 data since 2015 from Mauna Loa, HI after the average seasonal cycle is statistically removed.
As can be seen in Fig. 2, there are some pretty large month-to-month jumps and dips around the long-term increase (represented by the dotted line). These are probably natural variations due to fluctuations in the average seasonal variations in vegetation growth and decay, wildfire activity, and El Nino and La Nina activity (which are imperfectly removed in the solid blue line in Fig. 2). Variations in economic activity might also be involved in these fluctuations.
The point is that given the large month-to-month variations in natural CO2 sources and sinks seen in Fig. 2, it would be difficult to see a downturn in the anthropogenic source of CO2 unless it was very large (say, over 50%) and prolonged (say over a year or longer).
Instead, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that the global economic slowdown this year due to the spread of the novel coronavirus will amount to only about an 11% reduction in global CO2 emissions. This is simply too small of a decrease in CO2 emissions to show up against a background of considerable monthly and yearly natural variability in the atmospheric CO2 budget.
That relatively small 11% reduction also illustrates how dependent humanity is on energy, since the economic disruption is leading to U.S. unemployment rates not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Everything that humans do requires access to abundant and affordable energy, and even the current economic downturn is not enough to substantially reduce global CO2 emissions.
ADDENDUM: How much of a decrease in CO2 emissions would be required to stop the atmospheric rise in CO2?
An interesting aspect of the observed rise of atmospheric CO2 is that it indicates the greater the CO2 concentration, the faster the “extra” CO2 is removed by biological activity. The observed annual rate of removal is 2.3% of the excess above a baseline of 295 ppm. The greater the “excess”, the faster the rate of removal.
Because of this rapid rate of removal, the anthropogenic CO2 emissions do not have to go to zero to stop the observed rise in atmospheric CO2. Using my simple model (blue line in Fig. 1, above), I find that a 43% reduction in anthropogenic CO2 emissions in 2020 would — in the absence of natural fluctuations in the carbon cycle — lead to a halt in the observed rise of atmospheric CO2 in 2020 over 2019 levels. This is about 4 times larger than the EIA estimate of an 11% reduction in CO2 emissions for the year 2020.
Copyright 2020 Roy Spencer, Ph. D. – All Rights Reserved
So-called “experts” are too narrow in their focus and too often wrong in their judgments to be able to decide the sorts of life-and-death issues a nation’s political leaders are asked to decide.
If “War is too important to be left to the generals,” as Georges Clemenceau, (France’s prime minister during World War I) claimed, then foreign policy is too important to be left to the intelligence agencies, and public policy is too important to be left to the scientists.
From the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, politicians and media fell over themselves in their rush to defer to the “experts.” Apparently, it was up to scientists to decide whether a country should shut down its economy and keep its citizens locked up in their homes in perpetuity. It was up to scientists to determine whether a country can, if ever, resume normal life. As for the consequences — economic depression, exploding national debt, lost businesses and means of livelihood, growing alcoholism and drug abuse, rise in suicides, spiraling untreated medical problems — those are things the public would just have to live with, because there could be no second-guessing of the scientists.
Science, a mantra against Trump
President Trump has been one of the few political leaders to attempt, on occasion, to question scientists’ judgments, and to suggest that political leaders shouldn’t cede policymaking to unelected experts.
Such temerity elicited spluttering rage from the media. ‘Trump’s Response to Virus Reflects a Long Disregard for Science,’ ran the headline of a typical New York Times story:
“As the nation confronts one of its worst public health disasters in generations, a moment that demands a leader willing to marshal the full might of the American scientific establishment, the White House is occupied by a president whose administration… has diminished the conclusions of scientists in formulating policy.”
‘Pandemic Brings Trump’s War on Science to the Boil’ was the headline of a recent Guardian article. Trump’s political opponents are also on board with ceding policymaking authority to the scientists. Presumptive Democrat nominee Joe Biden urged Trump to “Listen to the scientists. Listen to the doctors. Listen to what they have to say.” A few days later, in response to Trump’s refusal to wear a mask, Biden declared, “It’s important to follow the science, listen to the experts, do what they tell you.”
No one has championed the cause of “science” as fervently as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Science is our key to unlocking our country. The last thing we need is political interference into science,” she announced in a recent tweet. Next day’s tweet stated, “What we must do — what science tells us we must do — is focus on expanding testing & contact tracing. That is the only way we can safely reopen our economy.” Asked by CNBC’s Jim Cramer when Americans could start going back to work, she resorted to what has become her familiar standby: “So, again, data, data, data, evidence, science. That is the answer to when we can go back.” On Fox News, she dismissed Trump as a “weak leader” because, bizarrely, he hadn’t ceded policymaking to the scientists: “And that might have been OK before, but we cannot continue down a path that is, again I’ll come back to science, science, science, evidence, data on how we should go forward.”
Not an exact science
What’s strange about this worship of the scientists is that their track record during the pandemic has hardly been impressive. The Imperial College model had predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States and 510,000 in Great Britain. The supposedly anti-science Trump administration had taken the Imperial College model seriously and, as the New York Times admitted, the model “influenced the White House to strengthen its measures to isolate members of the public.” Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson then reversed himself and announced that UK deaths from the disease may not exceed 20,000. Interestingly, Ferguson cited the UK’s lockdown policy to explain his abrupt reversal. As Alex Berenson pointed out, the UK had instituted the lockdown only two days before Ferguson’s announcement, and lockdowns need at least two weeks to take effect. And ultimately, the UK’s death toll has already topped 30,000, so that prediction was wrong, as well.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s model didn’t fare much better. In early April, when the White House was citing predicted numbers of 100,000 and 240,000 deaths, it predicted there would be 147,000 deaths by August. That estimate has since been revised more than twofold – first to 135,000, and now to 147,000. Downward or upward, the point is that while politicians are incessantly telling other politicians to “listen to scientists,” the scientists are all over the place. Until there is at least universal agreement on how to tally the death numbers, namely, whether deaths with the coronavirus are to be counted separately from, or jointly with, deaths from the coronavirus, many of these numbers will remain in the realm of speculation.
The saints of Russiagate
Let’s take a look at another set of experts whose findings have been allowed to shape public policy. There is no group of experts with a worse record than the intelligence agencies. The catastrophic 2003 invasion of Iraq was in large part based on their finding that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
The intelligence agencies to this day have presented no conclusive evidence to support these claims. Yet politicians (even conservative politicians) and media (even conservative media) accept them as true and denounce as unpatriotic any attempt to call them into question. Any policy toward Russia other than total hostility — including repeated sanctions, provocation and preparation for armed conflict — was deemed unacceptable.
What politicians are for
Serious confrontation with a nuclear superpower is fraught with risk, and any US president would be derelict in his duties if he didn’t do everything in his power to avoid it. At a minimum, he should check whether the intelligence he had been fed was as solidly based as its producers claimed.
In Helsinki, during his July 2018 summit with President Putin, President Trump, acting with the responsibility his office requires, decided it was not in the interest of the US to pursue confrontation with Russia. Rather than accuse Russia of election interference, Trump expressed some skepticism as to the definitiveness of the US intelligence agencies’ findings. Media and political operatives rained denunciations on his head.
“Trump’s statements amounted to an unprecedented refusal by a US president to believe his own intelligence agencies over the word of a foreign adversary,” screamed CNN. “Millions of Americans will continue to wonder if the only possible explanation for this dangerous and inexplicable behavior is the possibility… that President Putin holds damaging information over President Trump,” declared Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). “I wonder if the Russians have something” on Trump, mused former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Former CIA Director John Brennan flatly accused Trump of “treason.”
Since then, of course, the intelligence agencies’ claims have unraveled in spectacular fashion. Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed to “establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” The US government abandoned its two-year-long prosecution of a Russian company that had supposedly orchestrated a social media campaign to interfere in the 2016 election. Recently released House Intelligence Committee transcripts reveal that intelligence chiefs that had shot their mouths off on television about Trump-Russia admitted under oath that they had never personally seen any evidence of it. Most damagingly, Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike, admitted to having no conclusive evidence that it was the Russians who stole the DNC emails.
The Russian interference in the 2016 election story will soon be as discredited as the Iraqi WMDs story. The experts made claims that everyone needed to accept and that policymakers needed to act upon. As with the recommendations of the scientists, political leaders would have been better advised exercising their judgment rather than blindly following the experts. It’s what voters expect their leaders to do.
George Szamuely is a senior research fellow at Global Policy Institute (London) and author of Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia. Follow him on Twitter @GeorgeSzamuely
The emergence of Covid-19 was first reported by the authorities in China on December 31, as acknowledged by the World Health Organization. But that emergence does not necessarily mean the pandemic originated in China.
By January 30, 2020, a WHO situation report cited nearly 8,000 cases of the respiratory disease globally in 18 different countries. The vast majority of the infections at that stage were in China. It has since exploded to four million cases in virtually all 194 nations with the United States hosting by far the majority of infections and deaths (80,000 fatalities as of this week).
The early pattern of the disease spreading may suggest that China and its central city of Wuhan was the origin of the pandemic. It is widely speculated that the novel coronavirus residing in bats or some other mammal infected humans.
However, the report this week that a hospital in France detected Covid-19 in a patient as early as December 27, 2019, raises questions about the global origin. The French man, who went on to recover from the disease, was previously thought to have been suffering from pneumonia. The Paris hospital retested biomedical samples of patients and found that the man had in fact contracted Covid-19.
Curiously, the French patient had not travelled from abroad before he became ill at the end of last year. So, how does this finding square with claims that the disease originated in China? It has been speculated that the man’s wife who worked near Charles De Gaulle international airport may have been exposed. But she did not show symptoms of the disease. Her link as an “asymptomatic” disease carrier and her presumed contact with air travelers from China is therefore tenuous speculation.
French doctors are not certain if the case of the cited man represents that country’s “patient zero”, that is, the first case of Covid-19 in France. But the detection of the disease in France on December 27 is a full month before it was officially recorded as having arrived in France. In other words, the suspicion now is that Covid-19 may been circulating undetected in France and perhaps other European countries, as well as the United States, at the end of last year. Many of these infections and accompanying deaths may have been misidentified as due to seasonal flu or pneumonia.
It is understandable why the Chinese authorities are “defensive”, as the New York Times snidely headlines, about China being described as “the origin” of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This week China was accused of “censoring” an article penned by the European Union’s ambassador to the country. The article was published in news outlet China Daily but mention of “the outbreak of the coronavirus in China, and its subsequent spread to the rest of the world over the past three months…” was edited out. That led to recriminations in Western media about the EU pandering to Chinese state “censorship”.
Yes, the disease appears to have first emerged in large numbers in China at the end of December. But it is not yet determined how and where the virus originated. That will require further scientific study. Thus, for China to bridle at assertions about being “the origin” is not necessarily sinister censorship, but rather prudence to not prejudge.
What we have seen is an unseemly haste to politicize the pandemic with a view to blame China for infecting the rest of the world.
U.S. President Donald Trump is the most vocal in blaming China. But Australia, Britain and the EU have also antagonized Beijing by demanding an “independent” investigation into the origin of the disease. The inference is that China is at fault. Given the way, Western so-called “independent” investigations are prone to political bias to achieve preconceived conclusions (the Dutch-led MH17 airliner crash, for example), one can hardly object to China’s wariness about such calls.
Why should China submit to Western demands for “investigation” into Covid-19 when these Western demands are all one-way?
Why limit it to China? Surely international investigations would be merited for determining the actual appearance of Covid-19 in Europe or North America. The French case of Covid-19 in December misidentified as pneumonia suggests the disease was present contemporaneously with cases in China’s Wuhan.
Then there is the case of unidentified and deadly respiratory disease outbreaks in Fairfax, Virginia, in July 2019. Why shouldn’t international investigators be allowed into the U.S. to determine the precise nature of those disease outbreaks. Were they early incidents of Covid-19, a new unknown disease which happened to be first identified in China only months later?
The Trump administration has made unsubstantiated allegations that Covid-19 may have been released by a laboratory in Wuhan. No evidence has been provided by Trump or his bullish secretary of state Mike Pompeo. International scientific consensus has dismissed Trump’s allegations as a “conspiracy theory”. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has a solid reputation for safeguards over its study of infectious diseases.
The same cannot be said for the United States’ top biowarfare laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland, which was ordered to close last August by the federal Center for Disease Control due to concerns about substandard safety controls and danger of releasing deadly pathogens. Were U.S. army scientists studying novel coronaviruses?
If China’s Wuhan laboratory can be fingered and smeared for no sound reason, then why can’t a Pentagon biowarfare center that had to be shuttered for lack of safety? Chinese officials have already made an accusatory link to American personnel attending the Military World Games in Wuhan in October 2019 as being a possible cause of infection.
The origin of Covid-19 is far from clear. Trump wants to scapegoat China for obvious cynical reasons of distracting from his own disastrous mishandling of the disease. The same scapegoating instinct applies to other Western states where governments have been derelict in protecting the public from tens of thousands of deaths.
Investigations are indeed due. But determining the origin of Covid-19 will not be made by politicized probes that presume China’s fault for the pandemic.
UNITED NATIONS – Russia is conducting its own investigation into alleged chemical attacks in Syria and will share its conclusions with the world, Russian Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia told reporters on Tuesday.
“We are conducting our own expert investigation and we will share its results with you and international community”, Nebenzia said during a video briefing.
In late April, the Russian Foreign Ministry said the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had sacrificed its reputation to serve the West’s geopolitical ambition in Syria, after the body published the first report of its newly created investigation and identification team two weeks ago, blaming the alleged chemical attacks in the Syrian town of Al Lataminah in Hama province in March 2017 on the country’s government.
Russia argued that the investigative body had been set up in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Only the UN Security Council has the right to apportion blame for chemical attacks.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry has slammed the OPCW document as fabricated, adding that it is based on materials provided by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly known as Al-Nusra Front, an offshoot of Al-Qaeda).
Adding insult to the injury of Covid-19 closures, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced that businesses seeking emergency payroll funding will have to demonstrate their compliance with ‘climate charge’ guidelines.
Citing the need to protect “Canadian middle-class jobs and safeguard our economy,” Trudeau on Monday rolled out the expansion of the Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility (LEEFF), intended to provide bridge liquidity to companies unable to meet their payroll due to the shutdown.
There is, of course, a catch. Among the standard safeguards listed in the government announcement – limits on stock buybacks, verification of a company’s tax status, protections for unions and pensions, among other things – there was this as well:
“In addition, recipient companies would be required to commit to publish annual climate-related disclosure reports… including how their future operations will support environmental sustainability and national climate goals.”
Asked whether the aid would be given to oil and gas companies, Trudeau said the government expects them to “put forward a frame within which they will demonstrate their commitments to reducing emissions and fighting climate change,” and that many have already made commitments to net-zero emissions by 2050.
The climate requirement is the only one on the list that has nothing to do with preventing the funding from going to companies that don’t need it, or being abused. The ideological requirement seems particularly onerous given that bridge liquidity is needed in the first place because of government-mandated closures to counter the spread of the coronavirus.
Trudeau’s conditioning of LEEFF funding on climate change compliance closely resembles the measures proposed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in late March, when they scuttled the Senate-approved coronavirus aid bill in favor of their own. US Congressman James Clyburn (D-South Carolina) called the pandemic “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision” at the time.
With a Republican in the White House and the GOP majority in the Senate, they could only do so much, however, and mainly managed to delay the aid by several weeks. Trudeau has no such constraint, and he apparently took Clyburn’s words to heart.
In addition to pushing climate change measures, Trudeau invoked the Democrats’ rhetoric to impose a sweeping ban on “assault-style firearms designed for military use” via the Canadian equivalent of executive orders earlier this month. The list of prohibited weapons is so extensive that it includes an airsoft pellet gun and even a blend of coffee made by the US-based Black Rifle Coffee Company.
Never waste a crisis. A new study from Harvard claims that 1 microgram per cubic meter increase in PM2.5 is associated with a 15% increase in deaths from COVID19. This is totally absurd.
There is no biological plausibility to the notion that PM2.5 causes death.
A change in exposure to PM2.5 of 1 microgram per cubic meter is not significant, discernible or detectable.
If this claim were true, the death toll in Wuhan, China would be astronomical since, for example, the PM2.5 level in Wuhan is 158 micrograms/m3 — about 10 times higher than average US air.
But now that the Harvard fraudsters have made this data available, perhaps they’d be wailing to share their Harvard Six City study data?
For the second month running, the BBC’s Climate Check has failed to find any bad weather to blame on global warming.
The best they could find was some heavy rain which fell in East Africa in February, leading to the locust swarm. Sadly for the BBC, they were unable to provide any evidence that this had anything at all with climate change. Or that such events had not happened regularly in the past.
This month, therefore, they focussed the video on reduced air pollution as a result of lockdowns. Nothing to do with climate or weather, but a good excuse for a bit of propaganda nevertheless!
The presenter, Ben Rich, reckons that emissions of CO2 could drop by 5%, which of course would mean that about 32 billion tonnes of the stuff would be sent up into the atmosphere.
He tells us scientists say the world would need to cut emissions by 7.5% every year for the next decade, to stay on track for 1.5C.
In other words, the world would need to get annual emissions down to 8 billion tonnes by 2030! Fat chance of that.
He then goes on to look at air quality, with some interesting graphics on nitrogen dioxide at about 1.10 mins. Whilst there is clearly a dip in levels of NO2 over China and Italy, there seems little evidence over northern Europe, unless my eyes are getting dodgy.
But back to the locusts. In flat out BBC disinformation mode, Rich warns of biblical famines, as a result of climate change, conflict and economic struggles. This is a reference to East Africa and the locust swarms.
There is simply no evidence that climate change has had any effect whatsoever, and neither does Rich offer any. He just says it, so “it must be true”.
This is typical of the BBC’s disregard for factual reporting, as far as climate change is concerned.
Just in case viewers have forgotten the reason for this monthly series, Rich ends by reminding us that climate change is still a global concern, and that governments will have to think carefully as they look beyond the lockdowns and consider any trade offs between economic recovery and the possible costs to the environment.
When was it a BBC weatherman’s job to attempt to influence government policy?
Over the last several months, Americans have witnessed an increase in media propaganda regarding the “dangers” of “anti-vaxxers,” the “proven science of vaccines,” and the “tragedies” that ensue from the failure to vaccinate. That propaganda blitz has resulted in massive hysteria stemming from similar levels of ignorance.
Also resulting from the push by Big Pharma-funded corporate media outlets is the emotional and panicked campaign of pro-vaxxers, vaccine pushers, and adherents to the relatively recent new religion of “scientism” – the religious belief in anything labeled as science or scientific, regardless of whether or not that concept directly contradicts observable reality and experience or even regardless of whether or not it is actually scientific.
The so-called vaccine debate – which is not truly a debate since a debate requires the participation of two opposing sides – is generally nothing more than a shouting and shaming campaign against parents who have come to the conclusion that vaccines are not safe, effective, or neither.
Indeed, it is the unbridled emotion of the pro-vaccine camp that has been provoked and subsequently harnessed into a powerhouse of vitriol and social pressure that is then presented as a public health crisis. The howling of the trendy masses, glued to their televisions, sitcoms, and NPR, is then presented as an organic public outcry in the media, resulting in the conveniently timed response of politicians and lawmakers.
Of course, with the creation of the false debate, there is also the political polarization of the issue – the left must be pitted against the right – in a typical but tried and true method of divide and conquer strategy.
Originally, holding questions regarding the safety or effectiveness of vaccinations was something that bridged political boundaries. Granted, the individuals who held these views were a minority. However, those numbers were growing and could be found in the midst of liberals and conservatives, libertarians and socialists, and even those completely unaligned to any ideology.
Now, however, that is beginning to change. The Big Pharma companies that fund the mainstream media and the political parasites infecting the federal and state capitols have managed to turn this debate into a partisan issue.
The propaganda campaign has been successful among members of all political denominations, but particularly so among the left. This is because the left is made up of a population that is well-trained to believe anything presented to them under the guise of science in much the same way as the right who are designed to believe anything presented in a religious context.
The result of this massive absorption of indoctrination is that we have the passage of bills mandating that children be vaccinated by force of law in California and even the attempt to force adults to be vaccinated as well.
With mandates coming out of California, North Carolina, and Vermont, clearly there is a nationwide agenda at foot.
But while those on the left continue to attack Koch Industries and ALEC for funding a number of horrific economic policies and divisive domestic campaigns, painting any idea they oppose coming from the Republican camps as a “Koch-funded” program (it often is), the reality is that the leftists are the biggest dupes in the vaccine game.
This is because, while leftists hawk vaccines and pride themselves on their obedience to doctors and “scientists,” they are doing nothing more than falling into line with a massive Koch-funded and ALEC-facilitated propaganda campaign.
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
For those who may not be familiar with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the council is considered a “non-profit organization” made up of Conservative state legislators and corporate private sector “partners.” This mixture of government officials and corporate agents then meet regularly, replete with funding from major corporations all across the world to discuss, plan, write, and submit legislation that is beneficial to the corporations.
In one sense, ALEC is a massive corporate lobbying firm. In another, however, ALEC is much more, since much of the legislation submitted by the attentive congressman is actually written for the Senator or Representative by the agents of the organization. It is an organization that provides funding and direction (marching orders) for Congressmen, particularly those at the state level.
While slimy billionaires like George Soros act as the guiding force behind much of the American left, ALEC and KOCH Industries tend to fill the same void for the right; although, in truth, most of the corporations that make up ALEC are those who also fund Democratic candidates. Presentation, however, in a carefully crafted political theatre like the United States, is paramount.
For decades, the American Legislative Exchange Council has been a force in shaping conservative policies at the state level. Today, its impact is even more pervasive. Its legislative ideas are resonating in practically every area of state government, from education and health to energy, environment and tax policy. The group, which brings together legislators with representatives from corporations, think tanks and foundations to craft model bills, has rung up an impressive score. Roughly 1,000 bills based on ALEC language are introduced in an average year, with about 20 percent getting enacted.
For three decades, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the meeting’s host, has brought together corporations (including Pfizer (PFE), AT&T (T), and ExxonMobil (XOM)) and state legislators to write what it calls model bills—pieces of legislation the industries would like to become law. Often this means protecting favored tax treatment or keeping regulations at bay. ALEC has also approved model bills on social issues, including gun control and voter registration. The bills then get passed around among the 1,800 mostly Republican legislators who are ALEC members. They introduce the model bills about 1,000 times a year in state capitols around the country, the group says. About 200 become law. ALEC pays for the meetings through membership fees (called donations) that corporations pay. The legislators receive travel stipends (called scholarships) to attend the meetings. ALEC is registered with the IRS as a nonprofit that provides a public service, not as a lobbyist that seeks to influence.
This offers two benefits: Corporate members can deduct yearly dues, which run up to $25,000—more if they want to sponsor meetings; and ALEC doesn’t have to disclose the names of legislators and executives who attend. That’s important, because if ALEC operated with complete openness it would have difficulty operating at all. ALEC has attracted a wide and wealthy range of supporters in part because it’s done its work behind closed doors. Membership lists were secret. The origins of the model bills were secret. Part of ALEC’s mission is to present industry-backed legislation as grass-roots work. If this were to become clear to everyone, there’d be no reason for corporations to use it.
While ALEC has pushed a number of bills regarding divisive wedge issues (it has to keep up its conservative veneer), it focuses mostly on economic issues promoting free market, Austrian school, deregulation, free trade, and other policies supported by major banks and corporations.
But ALEC is also a major pusher of laws regarding medical issues – not merely in the context of the American healthcare system, but also in the context of personal choice.
Despite all the rhetoric of ALEC and its puppets in Congress, the position of the organization and its puppets is not necessarily in favor of personal choice. This much has been made clear in the form of mandates and force of law, particularly in the area of vaccination.
Below are a very small few of pharmaceutical companies that are part of ALEC’s operations.
Astellas Pharma Inc.
Bayer
Dupont (Dupont Merck Pharmaceuticals)
Eli Lilly
Endo Pharmaceuticals
Express Scripts
GlaxoSmithKline
Hoechst- Roussell Pharmaceutical Corporation
Hoffman La-Roche
Imperial Chemical Industries Pharmaceuticals
Johnson & Johnson
Mylan Pharmaceuticals
Novo Nordisk
Pharmacia and UpJohn
Purdue Pharma
Pfizer
Solvay Pharmaceutical
Takeda Pharmaceutical
TEVA Pharmaceuticals
TogetherRX Access (made up of ABBVIE, GSK, Janssen, Lifescan, Pfizer, Stiefel, Viiv Healthcare, Vistakon Pharmaceuticals)
The UpJohn Co.
These names are only a small few of the myriad of pharmaceutical companies, vaccine manufacturers, and other interested parties who are listed as members of ALEC. Many of these companies are concealed even further by a veil of umbrella “organizations” acting as front operations.
ALEC And Vaccines
With such a massive list of major pharmaceutical companies amidst ALEC’s ranks, it should come as no real surprise that ALEC would be one of the driving forces behind the recent spate of “mandatory vaccine bills” popping up all across the country. Indeed, its motto should be “Personal Choice For Corporations. Government Enforced Mandates For People.”
Remember, it was ALEC that crafted the “model” legislation “Immunization of Minors On TANF,” legislation that would have required parents on TANF assistance to require proof that their children were fully vaccinated according to the “recommended” levels. If those families did not show proof of their child’s vaccination, those families would lose their TANF benefits.
While exemptions were left intact in this “model” legislation, ALEC has stepped up its attack on parental rights by going after the exemption status in later bills.
For instance, consider the attempt to remove Vermont citizens’ rights to a philosophical exemption to vaccination known as SB 199, a bill that caught many in Vermont by complete surprise. Of course, when one takes a look at the key players and possible motivations, it becomes more obvious as to how this bill came to be and why.
S199 was introduced in the state Senate by Kevin Mullin, who is VT chair of the Pharma-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and was introduced in the state House by Representative George Till, M.D., at the request of Harry Chen, M.D., Vermont’s Health Commissioner. Dr. Chen, who was a Vermont state representative and former chair of the Vermont House Health Care Committee for four years, has publicly downplayed vaccine risks.
S199 was supported by the VT Dept. of Health and state government supported institutions, such as the University of Vermont, as well as medical trade associations that receive money from pharmaceutical corporations selling vaccines in the U.S., including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), March of Dimes, Every Child by Two and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Other organizations endorsing elimination of the philosophical exemption included the Vermont Academy of Family Physicians, Fletcher Allen, Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems, Voices for VT Children, Vermont Pharmacists Association, Rutland Medical Center, and Vermont Medical Society.
Here ALEC’s Vermont chairman, Republican Sen. Kevin Mullin, introduced S.199, a bill seeking to end the “philosophical exemption” in the childhood vaccine laws. A Republican introducing a health care bill, one that removes a parent’s rights, one that obliges all children to participate in a health care plan. … An ugly duckling if ever there was one! Just doesn’t look like all the rest.
The duckling looks even uglier in the light of Vermont’s exemplary health statistics. We rank right up there on general health, low incidence of infectious diseases, and low child mortality. What’s the problem, what motivates such a bill? Well, several corporations have recently publicly cut their ties with ALEC over ALEC’s Stand Your Ground gun laws, underscoring the reality that ALEC is funded by corporations, and we may guess has their interests at heart more than your child’s well-being.
One might be tempted to argue that the vaccine bill submitted in Vermont was merely an anomaly. That is, one would be tempted to make this argument if the Vermont bill was the only such bill submitted and supported by ALEC and its members.
In California, the infamous and fascist SB 277 which unfortunately became law was introduced by another vaccine fanatic and high priest of the religion of scientism, Richard Pan. Ben Allen, however, the second State Senator to introduce the legislation into the California state Senate is himself connected to ALEC. As Maureen Cruise of LA Progressive wrote in regards to Allen’s funding,
Among other wealthy conservative donors are William E. Oberndorf, a California billionaire investor who funds conservative causes such as the privatization of education which he promotes via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). He has contributed to the Karl Rove PAC and to Jeb Bush and the GW Bush Foundation. The Fisher Family of Gap and a dozen other corporations are fans of privatization of the public sector and charter schools.
Oberndorf, the ALEC big wig, is a major donor of Allen.
Cruise also points out that a sizable portion of Allen’s campaign contributions come directly from pharmaceutical interests.
A similar story is discovered in North Carolina, where notoriously arrogant and corrupt Senator Jeff Tarte – in between fits of whining and rage – introduced a bill that would have removed all vaccine exemption rights (except for medical exemptions) from parents and children, including homeschool children.
As if his last name did not accurately describe his disposition, Senator Tarte was one of the main sponsors of the NC bill SB 346, a bill that would have eliminated the “religious exemption” clause in the recommended vaccine schedule for children entering NC public schools. He was also a main contender for the title of worst public relations interaction with a constituent in the state of North Carolina in the last several years.
In keeping with the trend of recent events, however, Tarte is also a member of the ALEC organization, a feather in his cap that he was not shy in advertising in his weekly newsletter. Tarte not only is a member, but an active participant taking part in speaking events and even a seat on the ALEC Education Council.
Conclusion
The goal of forced vaccination has been in existence for quite some time, going back to a number of elite think tanks decades ago and the halls of pharmaceutical companies. Major pharmaceutical companies, for many obvious (or should be obvious ) reasons would also like to mandate vaccination. Increased profits from the vaccine sales and the treatment of resulting disease, as well as the cover-up of vaccine risks by a population free of a control group are but a few of the reasons such corporations are supporting the vaccine mandates.
After all, as Bertrand Russell stated as far back as 1953,
Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. . . .
But, while the push to mandate vaccines for children and adults is by no means an ALEC-centric conspiracy, this recent push for such laws was indeed formulated in ALEC councils.
For this reason, it is highly ironic that the political left should be the half of the paradigm that takes up the charge for mandatory vaccination laws. After all, it is the left (at the lower levels) who seems to live by the motto “If ALEC supports it, we oppose it.” This time, all it took was some clever propaganda, trendy nudging, and social shaming and the left was marching right behind ALEC as militantly as if they were Republicans all along.
The entire vaccine debate can scarcely even be labeled a debate. It is an exercise in social shaming, shouting down opposing views, and religious devotion to television and anyone wearing a lab coat or claiming to be an expert.
With the culprit behind the recent mandatory vaccine/eliminate exemption push now revealed, it is time to begin working toward repealing these laws and making sure that no similar bill is ever politically viable.
Beirut – During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.
Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
The mask has taken on a supernatural significance that far outweighs its utility in disease protection. Even the N-95 masks health authorities have recommended to protect society from virus-positive individuals have been found 
