A county prosecutor in Michigan has warned that he may criminally indict Governor Gretchen Whitmer for reckless endangerment after she forced nursing homes to accept Covid-19 patients last year, allegedly causing more deaths.
“If we find that there has been willful neglect of office, if we find that there’s been reckless endangerment of a person’s life by bringing them in, then we would move forward with charges against the governor,” Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido said Monday in an interview on Detroit ABC affiliate WXYZ. “Of course we would. Nobody’s above the law in this state.”
Lucido said patient confidentiality laws prevent him from gathering medical information on Covid-19 victims, but he said Macomb County residents who lost loved ones in nursing homes should gather information about the circumstances of their deaths and file a wrongful-death complaint with local police.
Whitmer’s office issued a statement to WXYZ, calling Lucido’s comments “shameful political attacks based in neither fact nor reality.” The administration’s policies “carefully tracked CDC guidance on nursing homes, and we prioritized testing of nursing home residents and staff to save lives.”
But Lucido has been clashing with Whitmer over Covid-19 policies since last spring, when, as a Republican state senator, he called for state and federal prosecutors to investigate the governor’s directive on nursing homes. Like New York’s Andrew Cuomo and three other Democrat governors around the country, Whitmer came under fire for orders requiring nursing homes to accept patients infected with Covid-19.
Those orders were blamed for causing more Covid-19 deaths, and Cuomo is under FBI investigation for his handling of the pandemic, including an alleged cover-up of nursing home deaths. New York has had more than 15,000 nursing home residents die from Covid-19, and until a month ago, it had been undercounting the death toll by about 6,500. Cuomo aides reportedly doctored a Covid-19 report last July to undercount nursing home deaths by using a misleading methodology.
Michigan still hasn’t released enough nursing home data to satisfy some observers, including Republican lawmakers in the state. Investigative journalist Charlie LeDuff told Fox News last week that he’s suing Whitmer after trying for months to get accurate statistics on the Covid-19 death toll in Michigan nursing homes.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office is reportedly looking into requests to investigate Whitmer’s order on nursing homes, but Nessel said she needs to see evidence of a crime to launch a full-fledged probe.
At first glance, bioethics might seem like just another branch of ethical philosophy where academics endlessly debate other academics about how many angels dance on the head of a pin in far-out, science fiction like scenarios. What many do not know, however, is that the seemingly benign academic study of bioethics has its roots in the dark history of eugenics. With that knowledge, the dangers inherent in entrusting some of the most important discussions about the life, death and health of humanity in the hands of a select few become even more apparent.
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TRANSCRIPT
Bioethics is the study of the moral issues arising from medicine, biology and the life sciences.
At first glance, bioethics might seem like just another branch of ethical philosophy where academics endlessly debate other academics about how many angels dance on the head of a pin in far-out, science fiction like scenarios.
PAUL ROOT WOLPE: Imagine what’s going to happen when we have a memory pill. First of all, you don’t have to raise your hand but let’s be honest: who here’s going to take it?
MICHAEL SANDEL: I’ve read of a sport—it’s a variant of polo that is I think played in Afghanistan if I’m not mistaken—where the people ride on horses. Is it horses or camels? I don’t know which. And they use a—it’s a dead goat or something—to, I don’t know, whack the polo ball or whatever it is. Now it’s a dead—I think it’s a goat. Maybe someone knows who studies sociology about this. So it’s not that the goat is experiencing pain. It’s dead already. And yet there is something grim about that practice, wouldn’t you agree? And yet it’s not that the interests of that goat are somehow not being considered. Let’s assume it was killed painlessly before the match began.
MOLLY CROCKETT: What if I told you that a pill could change your judgement of what is right and what is wrong. Or what if I told you that your sense of justice could depend on what you had for breakfast this morning. You’re probably thinking by now this sounds like science fiction, right?
But the bioethicists cannot be dismissed so lightly. Their ideas are being used by governments to assert control over people’s bodies and to enforce that control in increasingly nightmarish ways.
ARCHELLE GEORGIOU: Lithium is a medication that in prescription doses treats mood disorders in people with bipolar disorder or manic-depressive illness. And what these researchers found in Japan is that lithium is present in trace amounts in the normal water supply in some communities and in those communities they have a lower suicide rate. And so they’re really investigating whether trace amounts of lithium can just change the mood in a community enough to really in a positive way without having the bad effects of lithium to really affect the mood and decrease the suicide rate very interesting concept.
GATES: You’re raising tuitions at the University of California as rapidly as they [sic] can and so the access that used to be available to the middle class or whatever is just rapidly going away. That’s a trade-off society’s making because of very, very high medical costs and a lack of willingness to say, you know, “Is spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient—would it be better not to lay off those 10 teachers and to make that trade off in medical cost?” But that’s called the “death panel” and you’re not supposed to have that discussion.
Even a short time ago, talk about medicating the public through the water supply or enacting death panels for the elderly still seemed outlandish. But now that the world is being plunged into hysteria over the threat of pandemics and overburdened health care systems, these previously unspeakable topics are increasingly becoming part of the public debate.
What many do not know, however, is that the seemingly benign academic study of bioethics has its roots in the dark history of eugenics. With that knowledge, the dangers inherent in entrusting some of the most important discussions about the life, death and health of humanity in the hands of a select few become even more apparent.
This is a study of Bioethics and the New Eugenics.
On November 10, 2020, Joe Biden announced the members of a coronavirus task force that would advise his transition team on setting COVID-19-related policies for the Biden administration. That task force included Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
JOE BIDEN: So that’s why today I’ve named the COVID-19 Transition Advisory Board comprised of distinguished public health experts to help our transition team translate the Biden-Harris COVID-19 plan into action. A blueprint that we can put in place as soon as Kamala and I are sworn into office on January 20th, 2021.
ANCHOR: We’ve learned that a doctor from our area is on the president-elect’s task force. Eyewitness News reporter Howard Monroe picks up the story.
THOMAS FARLEY: I know he’s a very bright, capable guy and i think that’s a great choice to represent doctors in general in addressing this epidemic.
HOWARD MONROE: Philadelphia health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley this morning on Eyewitness News. He praised president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team for picking Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel to join his coronavirus task force. He is the chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
That announcement meant very little to the general public, who likely only know Emanuel as a talking head on tv panel discussions or as the brother of former Obama chief of staff and ex-mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. But for those who have followed Ezekiel Emanuel’s career as a bioethicist and his history of advocating controversial reforms of the American health care system, his appointment was an ominous sign of things to come.
He has argued that the Hippocratic Oath is obsolete and that it leads to doctors believing that they should do everything they can for their patients rather than letting them die to focus on higher priorities. He has argued that people should choose to die at age 75 to spare society the burden of looking after them in old age. As a health policy advisor to the Obama administration he helped craft the Affordable Care Act, which fellow Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber admitted was only passed thanks to the stupidity of the American public.
JONATHAN GRUBER: OK? Just like the people—transparency—lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really critical to getting the thing to pass.
During the course of the deliberations over Obamacare, the issue of “death panels” arose. Although the term “death panel” was immediately lampooned by government apologists in the media, the essence of the argument was one that Emanuel has long advocated: appointing a body or council to ration health care, effectively condemning those deemed unworthy of medical attention to death.
ROB MASS: When I first heard about you it was in the context of an article you wrote right around the time that the Affordable Care Act was under consideration. And the article was entitled “Principles for the Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions.” I don’t know how many of you remember there was a lot of talk at the time about [how] this new Obamacare was going to create death panels. And he wrote an article which I thought should have been required reading for the entire country about how rationing medical care—you think that that’s going to start with with the Affordable Care Act? Medical care is rationed all the time and it must be rationed. Explain that.
EZEKIEL EMANUEL: So there are two kinds of “rationing,” you might say. One is absolute scarcity leading to rationing and that’s when we don’t simply don’t have enough of something and you have to choose between people. We do that with organs for transplantation. We don’t have enough. Some people will get it, other people won’t and, tragically, people will die. Similarly if we ever have a flu pandemic—not if but when we have a flu pandemic—we’re not going to have enough vaccine, we’re not going to have enough respirators, we’re not going to have enough hospital beds. We’re just going to have to choose between people.
When the debate is framed as an impersonal imposition of economic restraint over the deployment of scarce resources, it is easy to forget the real nature of the idea that Emanuel is advocating. Excluded from these softball interviews is the implicit question of who gets to decide who is worthy of medical attention. Emanuel’s various proposals over the years, and those of his fellow bioethicists, have usually supposed that some government-appointed but somehow “independent” board of bioethicists, economists and other technocrats, should be entrusted with these life-and-death decisions.
If this idea seems familiar, it’s because it has a long and dark history that harkens back to the eugenicists who argued that only the “fittest” should be allowed to breed, and anyone deemed “unfit” by the government-appointed boards—presided over by the eugenicists—should be sterilized, or, in extreme cases, put to death.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: [. . .] But there are an extraordinary number of people whom I want to kill. Not in any unkind or personal spirit, but it must be evident to all of you — you must all know half a dozen people, at least—who are no use in this world. Who are more trouble than they are worth. And I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board, just as he might come before the income tax commissioner, and, say, every five years, or every seven years, just put him there, and say: “Sir, or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence?”
This is the exact same talk of “Life Unworthy of Life” that was employed in Nazi Germany as justification for their Aktion T4 program, which resulted in over 70,000 children, senior citizens and psychiatric patients being murdered by the Nazi regime.
MODERATOR: So we’ll do the same format. It’ll be three minutes and then time for questions. We’ll start with Mr. Chaitkin.
ANTON CHAITKIN: [My name is] Anton Chaitkin. I’m a historian and the history editor for Executive Intelligence Review.
President Obama has put in place a reform apparatus reviving the euthanasia of Hitler Germany in 1939 that began the genocide there. The apparatus here is to deny medical care to elderly, chronically ill and poor people and thus save, as the president says, two to three trillion dollars by taking lives considered “not worthy to be lived” as the Nazi doctors said.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel and other avowed cost-cutters on this panel also lead a propaganda movement for euthanasia headquartered at the Hastings Center, of which Dr. Emanuel is a fellow. They shape public opinion and the medical profession to accept a death culture, such as the Washington state law passed in November to let physicians help kill patients whose medical care is now rapidly being withdrawn in the universal health disaster. Dr. Emmanuel’s movement for bioethics and euthanasia and this council’s purpose directly continue the eugenics movement that organized Hitler’s killing of patients and then other costly and supposedly “unworthy” people.
Dr. Emanuel wrote last October 12 that a crisis, war and financial collapse would get the frightened public to accept the program. Hitler told Dr. Brandt in 1935 that the euthanasia program would have to wait until the war began to get the public to go along. Dr. Emanuel wrote last year that the hippocratic oath should be junked; doctors should no longer just serve the needs of the patient. Hoche and Binding, the German eugenicists, exactly said the same thing to start the killing.
You on the council are drawing up the procedures to be used to deny care which will kill millions if it goes ahead in the present world crash. You think perhaps the backing of powerful men, financiers, will shield you from accountability, but you are now in the spotlight.
Disband this council and reverse the whole course of this nazi revival now.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Emanuel emerged last year as the lead author of a New England Journal of Medicine article advocating for rationing COVID-19 care that was later adopted by the Canadian Medical Association. The paper, “Fair Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in the Time of Covid-19,” was written by Emanuel and a team of prominent bioethicists and discusses “the need to ration medical equipment and interventions” during a pandemic emergency.
Their recommendations include removing treatment from patients who are elderly and/or less likely to survive, as these people divert scarce medical resources from younger patients or from those with more promising prognoses. Although the authors refrain from using the term, the necessity of setting up a “death panel” to determine who should or should not receive treatment is implicit in the proposal itself.
In normal times, this would have been just another scholarly discussion of a theoretical situation. But these are not normal times. As Canadian researcher and medical writer Rosemary Frei documented at the time, the declared COVID crisis meant the paper quickly went from abstract proposal to concrete reality.
JAMES CORBETT: Let’s get back to that question about hospital care rationing, which is such an important part of this story. And it’s one of those things that when you read it at a surface level at first glance sounds reasonable enough, but the more that you look into it I think it becomes more horrifying.
And you quote, for example, specifically a March 23rd paper, “Fair Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in the Time of Covid-19,” which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, which calls for “maximizing the number of patients that survived treatment with a reasonable life expectancy.” Which, again, I would say sounds reasonable at first glance. Yes, of course we want to maximize the number of patients that survive. What’s wrong with that?
So what can you tell us about this paper and the precedent that it’s setting here.
ROSEMARY FREI: Well it’s all of a sudden changing the rules in terms of saying, “Well, the most important thing is that it’s the older people get a lower place in terms of triaging.”
And I point out in my article, also, that Canadians have a lot of experience with SARS because we had that—there were a significant number of deaths in Ontario because of it. And there were people from Toronto who had direct experience with SARS—which of course is (ostensibly, at least) a cousin with the novel coronavirus—who wrote triaging guidelines, or at least an ethical framework for how to triage during a pandemic—this was in 2006—they didn’t mention age at all. And here we are 14 years later, every single set of guidelines, including this really important New England Journal of Medicine paper say, “Well, age is an important criterion.” And this is what’s interesting.
So this paper is really important because—and also the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is the official organ, I would say, of the American Medical Association says the same thing: it’s age. So they’re all stepping in line and then the Canadian Medical Association said, “Oh, we don’t have time to put our own guidelines together so we’ll just use this one from the New England Journal of Medicine.” To me, that’s astonishing.
When I was a medical writer and journalist, I did some work helping various—one particular organization: the Canadian Thoracic Society, which does, you know, chest infections and stuff. I helped them put together guidelines. There’s a whole big set of organizations for every single specialty for creating guidelines. Yet, “Oh!
We don’t have time to put together this—” And also, I mean Canada had a lot of experience with SARS, so we had a lot of this background. Yet, “Oh, we can’t do so it!” So they gave totally—they, quote, they said we have to go with the recommendations from the New England Journal of Medicine.
That bioethicists like Emanuel are writing papers that are changing the rules for rationing health care in the midst of a generated crisis should hardly be surprising for someone whose brother infamously remarked that you should never let a good crisis go to waste.
RAHM EMANUEL: You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
But from a broader perspective, it is not at all surprising that the concept of “death panels” has been effectively smuggled in through the back door by the bioethicists.
In fact, when you start documenting the history of bioethics, you discover that this is exactly what this field of study is meant to do: Frame the debate about hot button issues so that eugenicist ideals and values can be mainstreamed in society and enacted in law. From abortion to euthanasia, there isn’t a debate in the medical field that wasn’t preceded by some bioethicist or bioethics institute preparing the public for a massive change in mores, values and laws.
That research into the history of bioethics leads one to the doorstep of the Hastings Center, a nonprofit research center that, according to its website, “was important in establishing the field of bioethics.” The founding director of the Hastings Center, Theodosius Dobzhansky, was a chairman of the American Eugenics Society from 1969 to 1975. Meanwhile, Hastings cofounder Daniel Callahan—who has admitted to relying on Rockefeller Population Council and UN Population Fund money in the early days of the center’s work—served as a director of the American Eugenics Society (rebranded as The Society for the Study of Social Biology) from 1987 to 1992.
As previous Corbett Report guest Anton Chaitkin has extensively documented, there is a line of historical continuity connecting the promotion of eugenics in America by the Rockefeller family in the early 20th century to the creation of the Hastings Center in the late 20th century. The Center, Chaitkin points out, was fostered by the Rockefeller-founded Population Council as a front for pushing the eugenics agenda—including abortion, euthanasia and the creation of death panels—under the guise of “bioethics.”
CHAITKIN: Eugenics practices that we saw and discussions and preparations for eugenics, which were going on in the United States in the early 1920s and earlier going back to the late 19th century—those discussions were carried over—and the same discussions and preparations in England—were carried over into Nazi Germany. After the war—after World War II—people who had participated in these movements wanted to keep the eugenics idea alive and with the backing of particularly the Rockefeller Foundation—which had backed Nazi eugenics before World War II in Europe—they set up a population control movement that overlapped with the Eugenics Society and with eugenics ideas. And out of that combination of eugenics and population control was born the institutes and programs which are today at the heart of what’s called “bioethics,” where you decide—so, supposedly decide—ethical questions in a medical practice based on supposedly limited resources.
So it’s a completely phony and morally disgusting field in general. It’s ill-born at the root of it and it’s a practice which has never confronted—in the medical community and in the academic community that has this as part of its, you know, its practice—they’ve never confronted the basis for the existence of this “bioethics.”
The history of bioethics connects the Rockefeller funding behind the first wave of American eugenics, the Rockefeller funding behind the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes and the Nazi-era German eugenics program, and the Rockefeller funding behind the Population Council, the Hastings Center and other centres for post-war “crypto-eugenics” research. As a result, it is perhaps not surprising to find that many of the most well-known and most controversial bioethicists working today are associated with the Hastings Center.
Take Ezekiel Emanuel himself. In addition to being a senior fellow at the John Podesta-founded Center for American Progress—which was accused in a 2013 expose from The Nation of maintaining “a revolving door” with the Obama administration and running a pay-for-play operation for various industry lobbyists—Emanuel is also a Hastings Center fellow. In fact, Emanuel’s career as a bioethicist was kickstarted by a November 1996 article in The Hastings Center Report, which—after praising Daniel Callahan’s attempts to inject a debate about the goals of medicine into the discussion of health care—highlighted a point on which both liberals and communitarians can agree: “services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed.” For “an obvious example” of this principle in action, Emanuel then cites “not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”
Just last year, The Hastings Center hosted an online discussion about “What Values Should Guide Us” when considering COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in the United States, during which Emanuel opined that big tech was not doing enough to share data about users’ movements with governments and researchers:
EMANUEL: I have to say I’ve actually found Big Tech totally unhelpful so far in this. It’s hard for me to see that they’ve done something really, really helpful in this regard when it comes to COVID-19. They have lots of capacity. Believe me: Facebook already knows who you interact with on a regular basis; how close you’ve gotten to them; when you leave your house; which stores you go into. Google does the same. And they have not used this data. Maybe they’re afraid that people are going to be all upset, but they haven’t even been willing to give it to someone else to use in an effective manner. And I think either they’re going to become irrelevant in this process or they’re going to have to step up and actually be contributory to solving this problem.
Or take Hastings Center fellow and University of Wisconsin-Madison bioethics professor Norman Fost, who, in addition to questioning whether it is “important that organ donors be dead” in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, made the case for involuntary sterilization—the hallmark of the now universally denounced American eugenics program—at a 2013 panel discussion on “Challenging Cases in Clinical Ethics.”
NORMAN FOST: On the sterilization thing, if his sexual behavior can be attenuated so that he’s not a risk of impregnating anybody that would be the best thing. But I don’t think we should rule out sterilization as being in his interest also, as well as potential victims of his sexual assault.
I think sterilization has a bad reputation in America because of the eugenic sterilization of a hundred thousand or more people with developmental disabilities, most of them inappropriate. But the overreaction to that . . . and Wisconsin leads the way at overreacting to that. We have a Supreme Court decision that says you can never sterilize a minor until the legislature gives us permission to do it and they never will and that’s not in the interest of a lot of kids with developmental disabilities for whom procreation would be a disaster—that is pregnancy or inflicting a pregnancy.
So if it’s the case that this fella is never going to be capable of being a parent . . . and I can’t tell quite that from the limited history here and it may not be the case—but I just want to say that the country’s overreaction to sterilization—like it’s wrong, it’s always terrible to involuntarily sterilized somebody—is not true and it ought to be at least on the table as something that might be in his interest.
But these discussions are not limited to the ranks of the Hastings Center.
Take Joseph Fletcher. Dubbed a pioneer in the field of biomedical ethics by both his critics and his apologists, Fletcher was the first professor of medical ethics at the University of Virginia and co-founded the Program in Biology and Society there. In addition to his position as president of the Euthanasia Society of America and his work helping to establish the Planned Parenthood Federation, Fletcher was also a member of the American Eugenics Society. In a 1968 article in defense of killing babies with Down’s syndrome “or other kind[s] of idiot[s],” Fletcher wrote:
“The sanctity (what makes it precious) is not in life itself, intrinsically; it is only extrinsic and bonum per accident, ex casu – according to the situation. Compared to some things, the taking of life is a small evil and compared to some things, the loss of life is a small evil. Death is not always an enemy; it can sometimes be a friend and servant.”
Or take Peter Singer. If there is any bioethicist in the world today whose name is known to the general public it is Peter Singer, famed for his animal liberation advocacy. Less well known to the public, however, are his arguments in favor of infanticide, including the notion that there is no relevant difference between abortion and the killing of “severely disabled infants,” positions which have driven his critics to call him “Son of Fletcher.”
Although Singer is extremely careful to frame his argument for infanticide using the least controversial positions when speaking to the public. . . .
PETER SINGER: . . . So we said, “Look, the difficult decision is whether you want this infant to live or not.” That should be a decision for the parents and doctors to make on the basis of the fullest possible information about what the condition is. But once you’ve made that decision it should be permissible to make sure that the baby dies swiftly and humanely, if that’s your decision. If your decision is that it’s better that the child should not live, it should be possible to ensure that the child dies swiftly and humanely.
And so that’s what we proposed. Now, that’s been picked up by a variety of opponents, both pro-life movement people and people in the militant disability movement—which incidentally didn’t really exist at the time we first wrote about this issue. And they’ve taken us as, you know, the stalking horse—the bogeyman, if you like—because we’re up front in saying that we think this is how we should treat these infants.
. . . his actual writings contain much bolder assertions that would be sure to shock the sensibilities of the average person if they were plainly stated. In Practical Ethics, for example, intended as a text for an introductory ethics course, Singer dispenses with arguments about severe handicaps and birth defects and talks more broadly about whether it is fundamentally immoral to kill a newborn baby, noting that “a newborn baby is not an autonomous being, capable of making choices, and so to kill a newborn baby cannot violate the principle of respect for autonomy.”
After conceding that “It would, of course, be difficult to say at what age children begin to see themselves as distinct entities existing over time”—noting that “Even when we talk with two or three year old children it is usually very difficult to elicit any coherent conception of death”—we could provide an “ample safety margin” for such concerns by deciding that “a full legal right to life comes into force not at birth, but only a short time after birth—perhaps a month.”
Singer is by no means alone in his profession in discussing this subject. In fact, he’s just part of a long line of bioethicists musing about exactly where to draw the line when discussing infanticide.
Take Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, two bioethicists working in Australia who published a paper titled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” in The Journal of Medical Ethics in 2012. In that paper, they explicitly defend the practice of infanticide on moral grounds, claiming that “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus,” and thus “the same reasons which justify abortion should also justify the killing of the potential person when it is at the stage of a newborn.” Lest they be mistaken for forwarding the same old argument on killing severely handicapped newborn babies that bioethicists have been making for decades, the two are careful to add that their proposal includes “cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.”
Seemingly taken aback by the strong negative reaction to a scholarly article about the moral permissibility of killing babies, the authors of the article responded by accusing the general public of being too ignorant to understand the complex arguments made in the highly academic field of bioethics:
When we decided to write this article about after-birth abortion we had no idea that our paper would raise such a heated debate.
“Why not? You should have known!” people keep on repeating everywhere on the web. The answer is very simple: the article was supposed to be read by other fellow bioethicists who were already familiar with this topic and our arguments. Indeed, as Professor Savulescu explains in his editorial, this debate has been going on for 40 years.
Whatever else may be said about the researchers’ response, this was not a dishonest defense of their work. Julian Savulescu, the editor of The Journal of Medical Ethics that published the article, did point out in his own defense of the publication that the scholarly debate about when it is permissible to kill babies goes back to at least the 1960s, when Francis Crick—the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and an avowed eugenicist who proposed that governments should prevent the poor and undesirable from breeding by requiring government-issued licenses for the privilege of having a baby—proposed that children should only be allowed to live if, after birth, they are found to have met certain genetic criteria.
Indeed, the pages of the medical ethics journals are filled with just such debates. From Dan Brock’s article on “Voluntary Active Euthanasia,” published in The Hastings Center Report in 1992, to John Hardwig’s 1997 article in the pages of The Hastings Center Report asking “Is There A Duty to Die?” to Hastings Center Deputy Director Nancy Berlinger’s 2008 pronouncement that “Allowing parents to practice conscientious objection by opting out of vaccinating their children is troubling in several ways,” these ethics professors toiling in a hitherto unknown and unremarked corner of academia are having a greater and greater effect in steering the policies that literally mean the difference between life and death for people around the world.
Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptionable. Those who pause too long to ponder troubling questions along the way are likely to be told that “the profession has already passed that point.” In truth, the profession is usually huffing and puffing to catch up with what is already being done without its moral blessing.
Indeed, bioethicists are not, generally speaking, trained doctors, researchers or medical workers. As academics, they are forced to take the word of doctors and researchers at face value. But which doctors? Whose research? Inevitably, it will be that of the WHO, the AMA and other organizations whose work—as even those within its ranks admit—is not solely dictated by medical need, but by the arbitrary whims of the organizations’ billionaire backers.
We are feeling the effects of this now, when these bioethics professors are held up as gurus who can not only provide medical advice, but actually lecture the public on which medical interventions they are morally obligated to undergo regardless of their own feelings about bodily autonomy.
JULIAN SAVULESCU: It’s important to recognize that mandatory vaccination would not be anything new. There are many mandatory policies, other coercive policies—taxes are a form of coercion. Seatbelts were originally voluntary and they were made mandatory because they both reduce the risk of death to the wearer by 50% and also to other occupants in the car. But importantly some people do die of seat belt injuries, but the benefits vastly outweigh the risks.
Some countries in the world already have mandatory vaccination policies. In Australia the “no jab, no pay” policy involves withholding child care benefits if the child isn’t vaccinated. In Italy there are fines. And in the US children can’t attend school unless they’re vaccinated. All of these policies have increased vaccination rates and have been implementable.
KERRY BOWMAN: Some form of vaccination passport is almost inevitable. With travel it’s virtually a given. And you look at countries like Israel is now introducing the green card. And all this is going on the assumption that people that have been vaccinated are not going to be able to spread the viruses easily, meaning they can’t transmit it and it’s kind of looking like my read on the science is it’s looking like that is the case with most of the vaccines. So that would be the question.
Now some people say we absolutely can’t do it, like, it’s just not fair in a democratic society because there’s people that refuse—don’t want vaccines—and there’s people that can’t have vaccines. But here’s the other side of the argument: Is it really fair to the Canadians that have been locked down for a year when they are vaccinated—they’re no longer a risk to other people—is it really fair to continue to limit their freedom?
So you’ve kind of got those two sides of it colliding.
From its inception, the field of bioethics has taken its moral cue from the card-carrying eugenicists who founded its core institutions. For these academicians of the eugenics philosophy, the key moral questions raised by modern medical advances are always utilitarian in nature: What is the value that forced vaccination or compulsory sterilization brings to a community? Will putting lithium in the water supply lead to a happier society? Does a family’s relief at killing their newborn baby outweigh that baby’s momentary discomfort as it is murdered?
Implicit in this line of thinking are all of the embedded assumptions about what defines “value” and “happiness” and “relief” and how these abstract ideas are measured and compared. The fundamental utilitarian assumption that the individual’s worth can or should be measured against some arbitrarily defined collective good, meanwhile, is rarely (if ever) considered.
The average person, however—largely unaware that these types of questions are even being asked (let alone answered) by bioethics professors in obscure academic journals—may literally perish for their lack of knowledge about these discussions.
All things being equal, these types of ideas would likely be treated as they always have been: as a meaningless parlor game played by ivory tower academics with no power to enforce their crazy ideas. All things, however, are not equal.
Perhaps taking a page from the notebook of his brother, Rahm, about the utility of crisis in effecting societal change, Ezekiel Emanuel declared in 2011 that “we will get health-care reform only when there is a war, a depression or some other major civil unrest.” He didn’t add “pandemic” to that list of excuses, but he didn’t have to. As the events of the past year have borne out, the public are more than willing to consider the previously unthinkable now that they have been told that there is a crisis taking place.
Forced vaccination. Immunity passports. The erection of a biosecurity state. For the first time, the eugenics-infused philosophers of bioethics are on the verge of gaining real power. And the public is still largely unaware of the discussions that these academics have been engaged in for decades.
At the very least, Bill Gates can relax now: We can finally have the discussion on death panels.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office on Monday supported the charges against Peru’s former President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) for the forced sterilizations of at least 1,300 Indigenous women.
Besides Fujimori, the imputations include former Health Ministers Marino Costa, Eduardo Yong, Alejandro Aguinaga, and the ex-officials Ulises Aguilar and Segundo Aliaga.
The accusations are for the crime of “serious injuries followed by death” against five women and serious injuries against the victims.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office claims that the first cases of forced sterilizations took place 22 years ago when the procedure was performed on 1,307 Quechua-speaking women in Ayacucho, Cusco, Piura, and other regions.
The forced sterilizations were carried out as part of the National Program of Reproductive Health and Family Planning (1996-2000) whose purpose was to apply the surgical intervention as a contraceptive method.
One of the first cases to be publicly denounced was that of Victoria Vigo, an Indigenous woman who underwent contraceptive surgery without her consent when she went to the Piura Hospital to give birth to her third child.
After several proceedings, the Prosecutor’s Office decided to include Fujimori and his ex-ministers in the investigations in 2013. A formal accusation was filed against them in November 2018.
Hundreds of thousands of Indigenous women and men were the victims of forced sterilizations in the 1990s. At least 18 of them died during the surgery.
Peru’s Congress this week passed a law that will allow the compensation of victims of forced sterilizations that occurred during President Alberto Fujimori’s administration (1990-2000).
The law, which was promoted by Indigenous activist Tania Pariona, is part of the 2006 Integral Reparation Plan (PIR) created to compensate victims of human rights violations.
“We have fought for many years to demand justice, truth, and reparations,” said Esther Mogollon, the advisor of the Peruvian Women Affected by Forced Sterilizations’.
“The new law is a big step, although there is still a long way to go to achieve justice,” she pointed out adding that the news comes to light just days before Fujimori faces justice over forced sterilizations.
On March 1, a judge will decide whether he will open criminal proceedings against Fujimori, who is currently in prison for crimes against humanity.
Over 350,000 women and 25,000 men were sterilized against their will during his administration as part of a plan to reduce the birth rate in the country’s rural and Indigenous communities. At least 18 people died during the surgery.
For these crimes, authorities will also bring to Justice former Health Ministers Eduardo Yong, Marino Costa, and Alejandro Aguinaga.
John writes in to ask how a global conspiracy can function and how it can be kept under wraps. Good question. Join James for this week’s edition of Questions For Corbett where he tackles the most common objections of the skeptics and their fallacious counter-arguments against the global conspiracy.
The now former mayor of Colorado City, Texas, Tim Boyd, has resigned after two Facebook posts telling people needing help and without electricity that they are on their own.
“No one owes you are your family anything; nor is it the local government’s responsibility to support you during trying times like this! Sink of swim it’s your choice!” Boyd said in the now deleted post, which was riddled with grammatical errors.
Unusually cold weather conditions in the state of Texas have left millions without power and over 20 people dead.
For those without electricity, Boyd encouraged them to “step up and come up with a game plan to keep your family warm and safe.”
No water? The mayor told his constituents to “deal without and think outside the box.”
“If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy is direct result of your raising,” he wrote.
Boyd said only the “strong will survive” the storm, the “weak will parish,” by which he apparently meant “perish.”
The mayor resigned from his position on Tuesday and made another post backing off on his earlier statements, saying he would “never want to hurt the elderly or anyone that is in true need of help to be left to fend for themselves.”
Boyd said his statement was directed at those folks that are too lazy to get up and “fend for themselves.” Those people, according to Boyd, do not deserve a “handout.”
He also revealed his family had received “undeserved anger and harassment” following the post and even claimed his wife was laid off based on her association with him.
“I admit, there are things that are said all the time that I don’t agree with; but I would never harass you or your family to the point that they would lose there livelihood such as a form of income,” Boyd wrote.
With more than four million homes and businesses without power in some of the worst weather Texas has seen in decades, Boyd’s statements haven’t found all that much support on social media.
Since being forced out of his senior role in No.10 Downing Street, Dominic Cummings has largely disappeared from the public spotlight. However, frustration over his repeated breaching of the COVID-19 lockdown still lives on among many Brits.
Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, will not be prosecuted following his breaching of the COVID-19 lockdown back in March, according to revelations by The Mirror.
Mr Cummings, who was ultimately forced out of No.10 by Boris Johnson in November 2020, came under heavy public fire after making a trip to a family home in county Durham in April 2020, during the height of the UK’s first nationwide COVID-19 lockdown. He had also taken a separate 60-mile journey from Durham to the town of Barnard Castle, despite admitting that he had coronavirus symptoms.
Subsequently, the former prosecutor for northwest England, Nazir Afzal, submitted a 255-page dossier of evidence of Cummings’ lockdown breach to detectives in Durham, and urged them to investigate and take action against against him for breaking the law.
According to The Mirror, however, Durham Police Deputy Chief Constable David Orford has now written to lawyers representing Mr Afzal to inform that they “will be taking no further action”.
“We do not consider the relevant tests are made out in relation to any potential offences raised within your submission”, the letter seen by The Mirror reportedly elaborates.
Mr Afzal is reported to have provided the police with detailed allegations against Mr Cummings, which included location data from number plate recognition of his car filmed by CCTV camera footage, as well as footage of the former government adviser wandering around Barnard Castle. Mr Afzal later claimed that the “legal test” for prosecution against Mr Cummings had been met, given the substantial evidence proving his breaking of the legally mandated COVID-19 lockdown.
Since learning that Durham police will not be acting against Mr Cummings, Mr Afzal told The Mirror that he found it “hugely disappointing”.
“I am considering with my legal team what further avenues to pursue because millions of people would want us to. This is also going to form part of my recent decision to examine the legal implications of the whole extent of the government’s failures on COVID”, he added.
In his own defence, following the revelations that he had breached the COVID-19 lockdown in April, Mr Cummings gave what was widely seen as an unrepentant press conference in May, in which he claimed that he had always behaved “reasonably and legally”.
Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak is trying to lure high-tech firms into his state with an offer to allow them to effectively form independent governments at the county level, capable of levying taxes and even forming courts.
Companies with an “innovative technology” are being offered a chance to try their hand as miniature sovereign states, according to new state legislation seen by the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Wednesday. While Sisolak hinted at the idea during his State of the State address last month, few details have been made public until now.
These so-called “Innovation Zones” are being marketed to lure tech companies – perhaps those struggling with the high taxes and lockdown fetishism of Silicon Valley – with wide open spaces and the freedom to do whatever they like on their own land.
“The Board may establish a justice court,” the legislation draft obtained by LVRJ stipulates. In addition, with a few exceptions for real estate, fuel and tangible personal property, “the Board may impose any taxes or fees authorized to be imposed by a county.”
That’s not an exaggeration, either – companies that pull up stakes and move to Nevada will be able to form their own local governments with the equivalent authority of a county. They will be able to levy taxes, form courts and school districts, provide government services, and essentially act as sovereign entities. The zones will be overseen by three-member supervisory boards similar to county commissioners, and the company owners would maintain the balance of power over who sits on the board.
“The exercise of any power or duty by the Board supersedes the exercise of that power or duty by the county in which the Innovation Zone is situated.”
The proposal deems the traditional government model to be “inadequate” for attracting big-time tenants, and the state has a very particular type of company in mind for the new program. Companies would have to own at least 78 square miles of undeveloped and uninhabited land, falling within a single county without overlapping any currently-owned area. Applicants would require $250 million in assets and plan to invest at least $1 billion in their new site over the next decade.
Blockchains LLC, located in Sparks, is one company planning to take advantage of the package and has reportedly committed to building a “smart city” east of Reno. Other blockchain companies, autonomous technology and AI, internet of things, robotics, wireless, biometrics and renewable energy are some of the industries for which Sisolak is rolling out the welcome mat.
While the ‘company town’ model might call to mind the abusive labor practices of the late 19th and early 20th century – with workers paid in company ‘scrip’ unusable outside the town and sometimes even fenced in, supposedly for their protection – companies like Facebook (Menlo Park) and Google (Mountain View) appear to be hard at work renovating the company town’s image.
Nevada has been having relatively good luck poaching California megacorporations, becoming the site of Tesla’s giant Gigafactory 1 to manufacture the electric cars’ lithium ion batteries. The company even obtained the rights to mine its own lithium in the state. CEO Elon Musk is also opening a factory outside Austin, Texas, after quibbling with the state of California over its lockdown mandates (and presumably its high taxes, which Texas does not have). While Tesla received a $1.3 billion tax break to open its factory in Nevada, Sisolak appears to be counting on sovereignty as a superior incentive for expanding tech companies.
CRISPR gene-editing expert Eric Lander, Biden’s director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, is awaiting Senate confirmation to serve in a new Cabinet-level position in the Biden administration. Jeffrey Epstein, the eugenicist pedophile and sex trafficker, bragged about funding Lander’s research and was photographed taking part in at least one meeting with him.
Shortly before he took office, [proclaimed] President Joe Biden announced that he would be elevating the director Office of Science and Technology Policy to a cabinet-level position, meaning that his nominee to lead that office, geneticist Eric Lander, would require confirmation by the US Senate. Lander is currently serving as director of that office, but has yet to serve in cabinet-level capacity as he awaits confirmation.
Mainstream media reports described Biden’s move to place Lander in his cabinet as “meant to highlight his commitment to science,” which has been used to contrast his approach with that of Trump, who was accused of second-guessing “authoritative” voices from academia and the medical establishment. Lander is deemed to be one such “authoritative” voice, having previously served as external co-chair on former President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
However, Biden placing Lander in this role begs the question of exactly what type of science he will promote in his new position, as eugenicist and intelligence-linked pedophile Jeffrey Epstein bragged on his website about having “had the priviledge [sic] of sponsoring” Lander’s research via the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation. Lander’s spokesperson told the New York Times in 2019 that “Mr. Epstein appears to have made up lots of things and this seems to be among them,” regarding whether or not Lander had indeed received funding from Epstein.
In addition to the issue of funding from Epstein, Lander, who is also a biology professor at MIT, is known to have met with Epstein at least once, as he was pictured taking part in a 2012 meeting with Epstein at the office of Harvard’s Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist who received millions in funding from Epstein. After Epstein’s 2019 arrest, Lander claimed that he had been invited to the meeting by Nowak and had been unaware of who was set to attend the event. He additionally stated that he “later learned about [Epstein’s] more sordid history” and denied having had a relationship with Epstein.
Yet, there remains the issue that Epstein himself included Lander in a list of scientists he sponsored, with the other scientists on that list having indeed been supported by Epstein in some fashion. If we are to believe Lander, it remains unclear why Epstein, before he became so infamous, would falsely claim to fund Lander and why Lander would wait to deny any association until only after Epstein’s arrest. Given that the other scientists listed alongside Lander on Epstein’s website did receive funding from his foundation, it seems unlikely that Epstein would deceptively throw in Lander’s name among a list of several other scientists he was funding at a time, particularly when he was not yet publicly controversial and did not present such a grave risk to his associates’ reputations.
However, Lander’s denials seem to have been more than sufficient for some mainstream media outlets following his nomination to serve in the Biden administration, with some outlets now claiming that Lander was not reported to have received funding from Epstein, despite Epstein’s own claims to the contrary. For instance, BuzzFeed wrote on January 19, 2021 that Lander “has not been reported to have received any money from Epstein”.
The Broad Institute, Silicon Valley and Intelligence
Despite Lander’s denials of a personal relationship, Epstein also had very close ties to Lander’s employer, MIT. Epstein donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the institution and Epstein was also used as a channel for making donations to MIT by billionaire Bill Gates. Gates has yet to explain why he would funnel his donations through Epstein as opposed to publicly donating via his well-known “philanthropic” foundation. Epstein’s funding of the MIT Media Lab in particular led to the resignation of its former director Joi Ito in September 2019 following Epstein’s arrest and subsequent “suicide.”
In addition, Epstein was particularly close to one of the biggest names at MIT, the late artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky. Minsky once organized a two-day symposium on artificial intelligence at Epstein’s private island in 2002 and Epstein victims have alleged that they were forced by Epstein to engage in sex acts with Minsky. Both Minsky and Eric Lander were corporate fellows of the Thinking Machines corporation, a DARPA contractor that made supercomputers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That company’s various components were acquired by a web of intelligence-linked companies like CIA-linked Oracle and IBM while many of its former engineers left for Sun Microsystems, where future Google CEO Eric Schmidt was then serving as Chief Technology Officer.
Lander, more recently, has again become closely associated with tech companies deeply tied to the US national security state as the founding director of the Broad Institute, an independent genomic research institution partnered with both MIT and Harvard. Incidentally, MIT and Harvard are the two academic institutions most closely linked to Epstein’s “philanthropy,” particularly in the field in which the Broad Institute specializes.
The Broad Institute depends heavily on “private philanthropy” according to its website and its board of directors includes Apple chairman, Arthur Levinson; chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute, James Manyika; current chairman and former CEO of IBM, Louis Gerstner Jr; and former Google CEO and current chair of the National Security Commission on AI, Eric Schmidt. Also on the board is Seth Klarman, owner of the Times of Israel and a major donor to the DNC in the last election cycle. Klarman’s family foundation has donated heavily to the Broad Institute. In addition, Klarman announced his rejection of former President Trump in a coordinated PR push alongside Leslie Wexner, Epstein’s main backer who was integral to his intelligence activities and sex trafficking operation, in 2018. More recently, he was outed as the main financing source for the dysfunctional Iowa Caucus app in the most recent DNC primaries.
Right before Lander joined the Biden administration, the Broad Institute announced a new partnership with tech giants Microsoft and Google subsidiary Verily, further reflecting the Broad Institute’s ties to Silicon Valley. As part of that partnership, Microsoft and Google will share the companies’ cloud data and AI technologies with a “global network of more than 168,000 health and life sciences partners” to accelerate the Terra platform. Terra, originally developed by the Broad Institute and Google’s Verily, is an “open data ecosystem” focused on biomedical research, specifically the fields of cancer genomics, population genetics, and viral genomics. The biomedical dataTerra amasses includes not only genetic data but also medical-imaging, biometric signals, and electronic health records.
In the case of Google, the data accessed via this partnership will likely inform their obvious AI healthcare ambitions, some of which are being pursued in partnership with the US military. Google recently announced a partnership with the Pentagon to “predictively diagnose” cancer and COVID-19 using AI. Google’s ties to the US military have become overt in recent years and the company is well represented on the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI), which is chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In the case of Microsoft, the company was recently awarded the massive JEDI cloud contract by the Pentagon, though litigation may soon change that. Microsoft also recently launched a new “secret” cloud service for US intelligence and classified government data systems and, like Google, are also well represented on the NSCAI.
In addition, Microsoft as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have ties to Israeli intelligence, particularly Israel’s Unit 8200. Microsoft’s ties to Start-Up Nation Central, Unit 8200 fronts, and Isabel Maxwell (Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister) have been discussed at length in previous articles. Eric Schmidt, among other connections, helped finance and launch Team8, the start-up accelerator for Unit 8200 alumni set up by the unit’s former commander Nadiv Zafrir. Team8 controversially hired Mike Rogers, former director of the US intelligence agency the NSA, and is also associated with the private company IronNet Security of another former NSA director, Keith Alexander.
These US-Israel intelligence ties are notable given the Epstein connections explored earlier in this article, as many of Epstein’s activities – from sex trafficking and sexual blackmail to money laundering – were done on behalf of both US and Israeli intelligence agencies, specifically factions within both intelligence communities that share ties to the same organized crime syndicate.
Those same factions are as intimately involved in the activities of Silicon Valley, making it no coincidence that, following his first arrest in 2007, Epstein attempted to rebrand as a hi-tech investor and patron of “transhumanist”-related sciences, showing that the interest of his benefactors had moved from sexual blackmail and human trafficking to the electronic forms of blackmail and the trafficking of data.
Just months before his 2019 arrest, Epstein would brag about having blackmail on prominent Silicon Valley figures and is known to have entertained LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Epstein’s close associate Ghislaine Maxwell had similarly directed her attention at Silicon Valley following Epstein’s first arrest and her sisters, Isabel and Christine, have been intimately involved in Silicon Valley and hi-tech contractors for US intelligence for decades.
Praising Eugenicists for “pushing the frontiers of science”
Aside from the intelligence connections via Silicon Valley and Jeffrey Epstein, Lander has also courted controversy for a controversial toast he led in honor of eugenicist James Watson in 2018. On Watson’s 90th birthday, Lander praised Watson for “inspiring all of us to push the frontiers of science to benefit humankind.” Watson, though best remembered as the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix structure, was also a notorious eugenicist who stated his belief that people of African descent have genetically inferior intelligence on numerous occasions. Watson first began to retreat from public life in 2007, when he told the BBC that Western government projects in Africa were likely to fail because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really”.
After offering the toast, Lander was later forced to apologize for his public praise of James Watson. Yet, since his nomination to serve in the “diversity-focused” Biden administration, some former critics of Lander’s praise of Watson have now warmed up to the MIT geneticist, citing the fact that his deputy, Alondra Nelson, is an African American woman.
Lander’s relationship with James Watson goes back to Lander’s extensive work as part of the Human Genome Project, a project in which Watson was also intimately involved. Though the Human Genome Project is normally credited to three scientists that “independently” all had the same idea in 1990, the original call for the Human Genome Project was first published in 1986 by geneticist Walter Bodmer. Bodmer joined the Eugenics Society, today called the Galton Institute, as a young man back in the 1960s and soon after went to work with Stanford biologist/geneticist Joshua Lederberg. Lederberg was a key scientific advisor to US presidents and the US military during the course of his decades-long career. Bodmer then served as the Eugenics Society/Galton Institute president from 2008 to 2014. One of the organization’s current officers, David J. Galton, wrote that the Human Genome Project that Bodmer originally proposed had “enormously increased . . . the scope for eugenics . . . because of the development of a very powerful technology for the manipulation of DNA.”
Once the Human Genome Project was underway, James Watson was placed in charge of the US government-funded effort backing the project, via National Center for Human Genome Research. Watson would use that position to fund seven genome centers involved in large-scale gene mapping projects, including at MIT. Much of the sequencing for the Human Genome Project was done by the MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute, where Lander worked on the gene sequencing project and other projects up until the Broad Institute was spun off from the Whitehead Institute’s Center for Genome Research and formally launched in 2004.
The Whitehead Institute was co-founded by David Baltimore, who served as its founding director and went on to be President of Rockefeller University. Baltimore is currently on Lander’s Broad Institute. As an aside, Joshua Lederberg was another past President of Rockefeller University and Jeffrey Epstein had previously served on the university’s board after being personally appointed by David Rockefeller. The Rockefeller family’s ties to eugenics are discussed at length in this documentary and Epstein’s obsession with eugenics has been detailed in several reports since his 2019 arrest and “suicide”.
Given the associations with eugenicists like Jeffrey Epstein and James Watson, it is essential to spread awareness of these ties as Lander awaits Senate confirmation, as the Senate could be pressured by the public to raise these issues at Lander’s upcoming confirmation hearing. Yet, the fact that Lander was even nominated for this position at all, particularly following the Epstein scandal, is stunning as he should have been investigated and, at minimum, blacklisted from serving in public office. Lander’s nomination to such a prominent post is unsettling confirmation of the continued influence and power of the network that not only created Jeffrey Epstein, but financed and protected his nefarious activities, for decades.
US climate czar John Kerry defended his choice of taking a private jet to Iceland to receive an environmental award in 2019, pointing to his importance in the battle against carbon and suggesting that he had no other options.
“If you offset your carbon, it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle,” Kerry said in an interview with Iceland’s RUV news outlet when he visited Reykjavik to collect his Arctic Circle Prize. Footage of the previously little-known interview was exposed by Fox News on Wednesday.
Kerry, now a cabinet-level official as President Joe Biden’s climate envoy, went on to justify his use of private aircraft, saying he has played an important role in efforts to address climate change, including negotiating on behalf of the US in the Paris accord.
“I’ve been involved with this fight for years,” he said. “I negotiated with President Xi to bring President Xi to the table so we could get Paris. And, I believe, the time it takes me to get somewhere, I can’t sail across the ocean. I have to fly, meet with people and get things done.”
Kerry apparently neglected to think about the option of flying commercial, rather than traveling by sailboat. After all, Icelandair was among the sponsors of the October 2019 Arctic Circle conference, where he was the keynote speaker and received his award.
But Kerry’s argument seemed to be not that he would offset his carbon through his personal behavior; rather, his crucial achievements as a world environmental leader would outweigh his necessarily high emissions. He and his wife, ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz Kerry, own five homes. They reportedly sold their 76-foot yacht in 2017 and owned at least nine cars when Kerry ran for president in 2004.
Kerry will need to plant a lot of trees and recycle a lot of refuse to offset his carbon footprint. Flying by private jet emits about 40 times as much carbon dioxide per passenger as a commercial airliner, according to a study by Lund University. The Kerry family’s Gulfstream GIV-SP emitted an estimated 116 metric tons of carbon in the past year, about 25 times the emissions of a typical passenger car.
“Kerry explanation condensed: I’m so important that I have to fly private,” Fox News senior analyst Brit Hume said.
Kerry was unapologetic when concerns were raised about his private jet in Iceland. “What I’m doing, almost full time, is working to win the battle of climate change, and in the end, if I offset and contribute my life to do this, I’m not going to be put on the defensive,” he said.
Just last week, Kerry sounded a tone-deaf note when he said the thousands of oil and natural gas workers who lose their jobs because of Biden’s policies can simply “make the solar panels” instead.
John Kerry, as Joe Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, is back in the news telling Americans we urgently need to reduce our travel and our carbon dioxide emissions to avert an imminent climate catastrophe. Like many climate activists, however, Kerry personally lives under a different – more carbon-promiscuous – set of rules than he seeks to impose on everyone else.
Kerry continues to double-down on more stringent climate restrictions, saying this past week that the United States and the world need even more restrictions than the controversial Paris Climate Treaty, including the imposition of a new tax on carbon dioxide. Climate activists have long called for such a tax to apply especially forcefully to airplane travel. As the climate-activist David Suzuki Foundation asserts, “Emissions from flights stay in the atmosphere and will warm it for several centuries. Because aircraft emissions are released high in the atmosphere, they have a potent climate impact, triggering chemical reactions and atmospheric effects that heat the planet.” Also, as the title of a 2019 New York Times article asserts, air travel emissions are “Worse Than Anyone Expected.”
One appalling example of “Do as I say, not as I do,” is Kerry’s personal sightseeing tour of Antarctica in his final days as Secretary of State, in November 2016. Recall that in November 2016, Kerry was Secretary of State for the lame-duck Obama administration just before President Trump’s inauguration. Even before November 2016, Kerry’s State Department was bragging about Kerry’s total miles flown, as Kerry broke the record for most miles flown (and most carbon dioxide emitted) by any Secretary of State. Yet, in late November 2016, there was little reason for a lame-duck Secretary of State to fly to Antarctica – that is, unless personal climate tourism counts as a good use of taxpayer dollars and carbon dioxide emissions.
Photo: John Kerry stepping off the large Air Force jet he flew thousands of miles to Antarctica. Source: U.S. State Department.
Kerry’s Antarctica jaunt likely cost taxpayers more than $1 million, while emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide and depositing all sorts of traditionally defined pollutants (soot, etc.) on the otherwise-pristine Antarctic landscape. There were no diplomats from any other countries for Kerry to meet with – according to his Secretary of State duties – but he sure seemed to enjoy the airplane-and-helicopter sightseeing.
Photo: John Kerry taking a personal helicopter tour of Antarctica, emitting pollutants in the Mount Erebus region. Source: U.S. State Department.
Kerry’s narcissistic Antarctica trip is not a one-off outlier, either. Fox News reported this morning that Kerry flew on a private jet to Iceland in 2019 to, ironically, accept a prize for being a climate warrior. Asked about the appropriateness of spewing several thousand miles of private-jet carbon-dioxide emissions for a personal round-trip flight, Kerry replied that flying by private jet to accept awards is, “the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.”
Um, sure.
Photo: John Kerry stepping out of an SUV he used for his personal tour of Antarctica. Source: U.S. State Department.
When an Icelandic reporter asked Kerry about the apparent hypocrisy of flying a private jet – not even airline first-class – to accept his climate prize, Kerry morphed into a full “Do you know who you are talking to?” moment
“I negotiated the Paris Accords for the United States,” Kerry lectured the reporter.
He also may hold the record for largest carbon footprint of any American citizen.
“John Kerry has never been known to pass up an opportunity to fly thousands of miles when it suites his ego or curiosity,” Marc Morano, Director of Communications for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and publisher of the website Climate Depot, told Climate Realism. “Why should a trip to Antarctica be any different? In Kerry’s world view, he is one of the chosen ones who get to fly private jets and government planes unlimited miles while the rest of us will have to ‘morally justify’ our commercial airline trips.”
James Taylor is the President of the Heartland Institute. Taylor is also director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy.
There are probably multiple reasons why coronavirus cases in the US are down nearly 50% in the US in the last month.
Could be seasonal. Could be the vaccine. Could be herd immunity from natural infection.
Could be the post-holiday default to endemicity. Could be a change in the cycle threshold of PCR that generates fewer positive cases. Could be data tweaks in light of political changes.
Anyone who says he knows for sure which is dominant is pretending to know the unknowable.
The New York Times, which obliquely reports the case decline, is still certain that you should still live in isolation, fear, and disease panic. They offer every county in America a tool in which you can discover what you should do to protect yourself from the pathogen, as if the only way to deal with a respiratory virus is to hide. Their tool is extremely manipulative.
For example, they have this category called “very high risk level.” Red is in the text. Scary! But what is it? It means 11 or more people per 100,000 have generated a positive PCR test for the coronavirus.
Not deaths. Not hospitalizations. Not even symptomatically sick. (Yes, I know the term “sick” is old fashioned.)
We are talking about 11 positive PCR tests. This is an infection rate of 0.01%. Consider too that the NYT reports that these tests in the past have generated up to 90% false positives. In addition, the infection fatality ratio for those under 70 could be as low as 0.03%.
Once you add all that up, you end up with a very long string of zeros followed by some number (I’ll let someone else do the math; in any case, all these data are mostly based on illusion). In any case, we are talking about a vanishingly tiny chance of severe outcomes for the population at large, depending almost entirely on demographics.
Still, the Times says you may not live a normal life. True, people in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Texas, South Dakota, and many others states are living happy normal lives. But they are all doing it wrong, according to the New York Times.
Let’s look at their life advice for anyone living in a “very high risk” area.
No haircuts, no manicures, no gatherings, no travel, no friends, no bars, no restaurants, and no singing! BE VERY AFRAID…CONSTANTLY!
To me, all of this sounds like insanity defined. And look at how they tip their ruling-class hand. People should not go to the store but rather have their groceries delivered. Delivered by whom? Apparently not readers of the New York Times.
To the Times, there is only us and them: the clean people vs. the dirty people who get to travel to deliver to “us” our groceries and essential services. Our job is to sit in a perpetual state of disease avoidance while they operate as sandbags to create the herd immunity from which we will benefit. It’s the new feudalism.
Now look what we must do for “extremely high risk” which pertains for as low as 20 PCR positives per 100,000 people.
Notice any difference between “serious” and “extreme” risk? That’s right. There is none. They are identical. And if you look at the map above you can see that right now most of the country is in extreme risk, according to the Times. According to this preposterous map, there are only two counties in the US at low risk.
Let’s look at Prairie County, Montana. It’s one of the two places you can live without the terrifying prospect of dropping dead from disease. There are 1,300 people living there. If one person tests positive, that immediately shifts the entire county into extreme risk. So the trajectory since November 1 looks utterly hilarious, toggling between low and extreme risk with a total of 70 cases in three months with most daily cases at exactly 0.
So what according to the Times should the good people of Prairie County do? They should be grateful to be relatively safe but try to their best to stay put! Do not go anywhere near the scary places elsewhere! They should stay in their bubble!
Look, at some point, the media is going to have to admit complicity in the creation of this extremely unscientific, pathological, unwarranted, and deeply destructive disease panic. They created it, starting with the now-discredited Donald McNeil’s February 27, 2020, recommendation that we “go medieval” with the coronavirus.
This whole paradigm amounts to a rejection of public health, which is always not just about one pathogen but all threats to human health and not just for the short term but the long term. The defining mark of 20th century public health as distinguished from the Middle Ages is that we recognized that pathogens are all around us and need to be managed rationally. Oh also the paradigm rejects human rights and freedom.
We do not need to destroy society, lock people in their homes, tear down businesses, close schools, traumatize kids, drive people to alcoholism and drug abuse, divide society between the clean ruling class and the dirty working class, ban travel, close churches, abolish choirs, close the arts, and whip up the population into a frenzied psychological meltdown in order to deal with a new strain of a respiratory virus. But tell that to the New York Times.
A recently declassified CIA document prepared in 1983, and released on 20 January 2017, shows that the United States had at the time encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Syria, which would have led to a vicious conflict between the two countries, thus draining their resources.
The report, which was then prepared by CIA officer Graham Fuller, indicates that the US tried adamantly to convince Saddam to attack Syria under any pretense available, in order to get the two most powerful countries in the Arab East to destroy each other, turning their attention away from the Arab-Israeli conflict. … continue
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