ROME – Former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato has alleged that France and its US allies were likely responsible for the mysterious passenger plane crash off Sicily in June 1980, and that the incident was the result of a plot to assassinate late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
“The most credible version is about the responsibility of the French Air Force with the complicity of the Americans and those who participated in the air war over our skies on the evening of June 27,” Amato said in an interview with Italian newspaper la Repubblica on Saturday, recounting the June 27, 1980 crash of Itavia Flight 870, in which all 81 passengers and crew onboard were killed.
“A plan had been launched to hit the plane on which Gaddafi was flying,” Amato said, referring to reports of a dogfight taking place in the area between French and Libyan jets on the day the Italian passenger plane went down, and rumors that Gaddafi was on board one of the Libyan Air Force MiG jets.
The plan was to “simulate NATO drills involving many aircraft” during which a missile would have been fired – passed off as an accident – at the plane carrying Gaddafi, Amato said. However, Gaddafi got a warning from then-Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, Amato’s former rival, and never boarded the jet, with the French missile allegedly intended for him ending up hitting the Itavia plane instead.
The Itavia McDonnell Douglas DC-9 passenger jet crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea off the western Italian coast, between the islands of Ponza and Ustica en route from Bologna to Palermo.
In 2015, the Palermo Court of Appeal ruled that the crash was caused by a missile hitting the DC-9, and that the missile was fired by another aircraft that crossed the passenger plane’s route. The court ruled out previously claimed versions about a bomb being planted on board the civilian airliner.
In his interview on Saturday, Amato said the Elysee should admit its responsibility, so that it can “wash away the shame that weighs down on Paris.”
“After forty years, the innocent victims [of the crash] have not received justice. Why continue to hide the truth? The time has come to shed light on this terrible state secret. [French President Emmanuel] Macron could do it. And NATO could do it,” he said.
France and its US allies have long denied any involvement in Itavia Flight 870’s crash.
Commenting on Amato’s allegations, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called on the politician to disclose any materials he may have related to the incident.
“Taking into account that the materials concerning the DC-9 tragedy are not classified, and that the judicial authorities and parliamentary commissions have done a lot of work over decades, I ask Amato to understand whether, in addition to his conclusions, he has other elements that allow him to review the decisions of the judiciary and the parliament, and possibly to make them available, so that the government can take all possible and consistent steps,” Meloni was quoted as saying in a statement released by her office.
Artificial intelligence can’t be trusted to auto-correct emails, much less make civilization-altering decisions about the use of lethal force, a peace activist told Sputnik on Wednesday. Putting autonomous weapons into high-risk situations only risks triggering a war nobody can back down from.
The US Department of Defense has unveiled a new AI drone program designed to close the gap with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Called “Replicator,” the program aims to introduce thousands of cheap and disposable – “atrittable” in Pentagon parlance – autonomous drones over the next two years.
“Replicator will galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of US military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap and many,” US Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said on Tuesday at an industry event.
Noting that China’s core advantage is mass – “more ships, more missiles, more people” – Hicks said the US would “counter” the PLA’s mass “with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat.”
Michael Wong, the national vice president of Veterans for Peace, co-chair of the Veterans for Peace China Working Group, and co-founder of Pivot to Peace, a coalition of Chinese and peace communities, told Radio Sputnik that giving AI the power to both trigger and escalate military conflicts “poses a great danger to all of humanity.”
“We should be very concerned. Let me make three main points. First, China does not want an arms race. They’ve spoken at the UN about this and they’re very much against having such a race in the first place. And my second point is, if there is an arms race, if the United States is foolish enough to force it on China, China will win. And my third point is, these AI, sometimes called killer robots, are a danger to all of humanity because they interact with each other, they could conceivably interact with our nuclear systems, and it risks decisions being made by AI without the oversight of humans or controlled by humans that will escalate situations out of control,” he said.
“Zhang Jun, who is the China representative to the UN, spoke at the UN recently, and he urged the UN to lead in advocating for a peaceful use of AI, regulations and rules to control the development of AI and to direct AI for peaceful use, not for weapons. And he felt that standards need to be made to regulate and control AI. And UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres also said that interaction between AI, nuclear weapons, biotechnology, neurotechnology and robotics is deeply alarming,” Wong explained.
“And yes, if China were to have an arms race forced on them on AI, China’s actually slightly more advanced in some ways in AI than we are. They also are able to mass produce things in general much faster than we are. For example, here in California, we’ve been trying for over a decade to build high speed rail just from San Francisco to Los Angeles. We have not been able to do that. China has built thousands of miles of light rail all across the country, networking every major city in China in just about ten years. So in terms of mass producing anything, China will win if we engage in a race with China.”
Wong then pointed out a very practical example of why giving computers such authority is dangerous: they can’t even get things like spell-checking and auto-correcting text right.
“How much trouble do you have with your computer? Would you trust your computer to make life and death decisions for you?” he asked. “You know, I have trouble with my smartphone auto-correcting my email, making mistakes, and making them wrong. Yeah, you know. So do we want autonomous robots, killer robots out there deciding which humans to kill and when and why?”
“And also if two automated nationwide systems are fighting each other, they will be geared and programmed to win, which means that if they can’t win, they will escalate. And that means that escalation could easily spiral out of control. We could end up in a nuclear war. So this is very foolish. There is actually an organization I discovered called Stop Killer Robots dot org. If anybody wants to go to their website, they can get involved.”
For years, the US and its allies have engaged in so-called “freedom of navigation operations” (FONOPS) in which they deliberately flout the territorial claims of other nations that they consider to be “excessive” by sailing US warships through those waters. In the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait, such demonstrations have become commonplace, although China takes them seriously and has at times met FONOPS with a stern response, sending their warships and aircraft to within a few dozen feet of the violating US ship or plane.
Wong noted that the Pentagon’s “Replicator” program would increasingly put AI into such flashpoints.
“For Americans to understand how China feels, just imagine if China or Russia were doing freedom of navigation patrols up and down our coast. And when I say freedom of navigation patrols, I’m not even just talking about sending a cruiser or a destroyer through these waters every every few months, I’m talking about entire aircraft carrier battle groups, a whole armada of ships patrolling up and down China’s coast. And that’s very provocative. Just imagine if China or Russia were doing that to us. How would we feel? That would be a very obvious threat. The Americans, when they read the mainstream news, they hear China’s being aggressive, China’s being a threat. China is not on our borders, that China’s not running battle groups up and down our coast. We’re doing it to them,” he said.
“And we say, well, we’re defending our allies in the Pacific. Our allies are not under threat. China’s not threatening Japan. China is not threatening South Korea, China is not even threatening Taiwan.”
We keep saying China intends to invade Taiwan: China’s very clear they’ve been saying the same thing now that they’ve been saying for 50 years, which is ‘We want peaceful reunification with Taiwan eventually, no time frame named, and that we would only consider use of force if Taiwan were to declare independence.’ The United States keeps trying to push that red line. And if you look at polls in Taiwan, the polls always say a majority of people in Taiwan want to maintain the status quo. And the status quo is working for both sides just fine right now. You know, there’s been billions of dollars in trade that goes back and forth each year between the mainland and Taiwan, there’s thousands of tourists and businesspeople that go back and forth every year, the economies are thriving on both sides. The status quo is working just fine. So the United States is the one that keeps pushing the red line and trying to provoke a war just like we did in Ukraine,” Wong said.
“There’s no need for this. The United States basically is trying to stop China from its peaceful economic rise because they don’t want a large segment of the world not being under the thumb of US domination. It’s basically exploitation and imperialism of the Third World, of which China is still a part.”
“The US elite, especially right now, is composed of people who have a very arrogant and unrealistic view of America and the world. They keep introducing new weapons systems into Ukraine and thinking that that’s going to turn the tide of war. And each time they’re proven wrong, because whatever they do, the Russians will counter it,” he said. “And they’re applying that same logic to China, that they can come up with some new gimmick that can somehow defeat China.”
“This magical thinking is very, very dangerous. You know, there’s always been talk about pushing the edge of nuclear escalation in Ukraine, and they’re doing the same thing with China, they’re pushing the edge, constantly, of escalation. They’re introducing new systems, they’re getting more and more desperate and they’re engaging in more and more magical thinking, which is extremely dangerous. And once we have all these AI killer robots running around the planet – because not just China, but, you know, many countries can develop them – we’ll have something that we don’t have control over. It almost looks like the ‘Terminator’ series of movies that Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in.”
In the new era of biosecurity totalitarianism when authorities actively seek to silence even the most qualified dissenting voices, perhaps nothing could be more corrosive to public confidence than finding that a leading research institute participated in a deliberate fraud. The scientific misconduct in question is the intentional selection of an inappropriate animal model for a pre-clinical study and its subsequent concealment. Intentional scientific misconduct for financial gain is fraud.The organisation in question is the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest public funder of biomedical and behavioural research in the world, which describes itself as ‘the driving force behind decades of advances that improve health, revolutionize science, and serve society more broadly’. In this case, the interests served were the NIH’s own finances and those of a private company, Moderna.
The NIH was implicated by Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, in an April 1, 2020 webcast hosted by MIT Sloan Business School Finance Professor Andrew Lo and co-hosted by the Laboratory for Financial Engineering. Bancel’s presentation, ‘Accelerating mRNA medicines to patients’, was about the company’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate mRNA-1273 developed jointly over the course of a pre-Davos January 2020 weekend with the NIH’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), led by Dr Anthony Fauci. Investor interest in the company and its vaccine was high. Moderna was leading the race for a Covid-19 vaccine with the NIH not long having announced that it had dosed the first human volunteer with mRNA-1273 in a Phase 1 clinical trial expected to run for six weeks.
An excited Bancel said, ‘What I want to share with you is just one set of data, but I think it is important. It is data that we published in our S-3 in February. This is the pre-clinical data on a related coronavirus MERS, the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, that many of you will recall happened in the Middle East, in Saudi, a few years ago and a few years later again in South Korea. So what you see here is a rabbit model.’
Bancel showed his audience graphs of data from a pre-clinical study conducted on rabbits and concluded: ‘We are very excited to see this data that was realised with the NIH, with the team of Dr Tony Fauci.’
One of the graphs showed antibody levels over time in a placebo group injected with saline and in single and double dose vaccine groups. But the antibody levels induced by the vaccine doses should have been compared with the levels of antibodies produced by exposure to the MERS virus itself, as a vaccine response must be shown to be superior to antibody levels induced by natural infection to be beneficial. Alongside was a second graph showing viral loads in the nose, throat and lungs following a challenge test in which the animals were exposed to ‘much higher doses of virus’ than during a natural infection. A caption on the slide claimed ‘We observed an induction of neutralising antibodies (my italics) that reduced viral load in the nose, throat and lungs of vaccinated animals’.
The rabbit study was not intended to fool drug regulators, who require an explanation of the relevance of the chosen animal model to the human disease the vaccine is meant to be protecting against. Customarily, before drug regulators permit clinical trials to begin with human volunteers, the efficacy of the candidate vaccine in preventing symptomatic clinical disease and/or pathologies associated with the disease must be demonstrated in a suitable animal model. The induction of antibodies is evidence of immunogenicity but in and of itself is not evidence of efficacy. Antibodies can be either neutralising or non-neutralising, the latter meaning that they fail to prevent reinfection following exposure to the targeted virus.
The choice of animal model for pre-clinical trials is an important one and consequently animal models must be validated. The scientific evidence that rabbits are an unsuitable model for testing the efficacy of a MERS vaccine had been in the public domain for years. In July 2019, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) hosted a workshop and subsequently commissioned IAVI (International Aids Vaccine Initiative) to prepare a report, ‘MERS-CoV standards, assays and animal models vaccine development landscape analysis’, which was funded by the NIAID, NIH, and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). So far as rabbits are concerned it concluded: ‘Despite the fact that rabbits shed MERS-CoV from their URT [upper respiratory tract], it appears that the New Zealand white rabbit model is neither suitable to study MERS-CoV transmission, nor is the model appropriate for studying clinical disease progression, given that rabbits remained asymptomatic after MERS-CoV inoculation.’
The CEPI report states: ‘Since concerns over SARS-related pathology led to a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clinical hold on vaccine studies, investigation of MERS-CoV vaccine candidates to induce virus-enhancing antibodies and harmful immune response in animal models could be informative before human clinical trials are initiated.’
The FDA ‘hold’ followed the October 2014 gain of function research moratorium on SARs, MERS and influenza ordered by the US government. However some research on MERS continued. As some people were believed to have asymptomatic MERS infections and rabbits were known to be asymptomatic when infected with it, researchers from the NIAID studied the phenomenon in rabbits. The NIH declared the experiments ‘were determined by the NIH to be urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security and as such, were exempted from the US Government Research Funding Pause on Selected Gain-of-Function Research Involving Influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses.’
The results of this asymptomatic study were published in 2017. The findings were not positive: ‘The rabbits developed antibodies against viral proteins that lacked neutralizing activity and the animals were not protected from reinfection (my emphasis).’ Further, the study found that even without an increase in viral RNA titers, reinfection resulted in increased inflammation of the lungs. The researchers warned: ‘Our data from the rabbit model suggests that people exposed to MERS-CoV who fail to develop a neutralizing antibody response, or persons whose neutralizing antibody titers have waned, may be at risk for severe lung disease on re-exposure to MERS-CoV.’
Bancel told the webinar audience that mRNA mimics natural infection without introducing the actual virus. But if exposure to the virus itself does not produce antibodies that protect against reinfection, there is no mechanism by which artificially stimulated antibodies can, thus rendering the company’s specific claim that the MERS vaccine induced ‘neutralizing antibodies’ untrue. The company repeated the claim in the S-3 referred to by Bancel, which was a $500 million supplementary stock offer made in February 2020, where investors were told: ‘We have demonstrated the ability to induce neutralizing antibodies that confer protection against viral challenge with a related coronavirus, MERS.’
Bancel said that Fauci’s team at NIAID helped Moderna realise the data, raising the question of why NIAID would accept the use of a model their own researchers who conducted the 2017 study knew to be unsuitable?
The week before the Phase 1 human clinical trial started in March 2020, STAT News reported on Moderna’s pre-clinical animal studies. None of the interviewees mentioned the MERS rabbit study that Moderna presented to investors and the US Patent Office the previous month. STAT News reported that they had been told by NIAID by email that ‘Virologists at NIAID tried the new vaccine [mRNA-1273] on run-of-the-mill lab mice, on the same day that the [phase 1] trial began enrolling participants’. They quoted Dr Barney Graham, the now retired Director of the NIAID Vaccine Research Centre, as saying that those mice showed the same sort of immune response generated by a similar mRNA vaccine against MERS, another coronavirus. ‘That level of immune response was sufficient to protect mice from MERS CoV infection,’ he wrote. Graham also said that mice susceptible to SARS-CoV2 ‘are being bred so that the colony can be enlarged’ adding that they ‘will be available for experiments within the next few weeks’.
Humanised mice are a validated study model for MERS, whereas rabbits are not, so if data from a mouse study of the mRNA-MERS vaccine was available, as Graham claimed, why wasn’t it used in Moderna’s February prospectus and the patent application?
Under the Research Collaboration Agreement between Moderna and NIAID, which has an effective date of July 19, 2019, NIAID was to conduct immunogenicity studies on Moderna’s mRNA-MERS vaccine in animals. During 2020, Dr Kizzmekia Corbett, the NIAID researcher assigned to run these studies for Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine mRNA-1273, wrote two papers: a June 11, 2020 preprint article entitled ‘SARS-CoV2 mRNA vaccine development enabled by prototype pathogen approach’ and a second peer reviewed paper published in the journal Nature on August 5, 2020 entitled ‘SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine Development Enabled by Prototype Pathogen Preparedness’. In addition to mice studies on mRNA-1273, both papers cite the mRNA-MERS mouse study that Graham told STAT News about. Neither mentions an mRNA-MERS rabbit study. Oddly, neither is the mRNA-MERS vaccine’s alpha-numeric identifier given.
Heavily redacted copies of Moderna’s contracts with NIAID were released following a freedom of information application by AXIOS News. On December 17, 2019, Moderna signed a material transfer agreement (MTA) transferring ‘mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates developed and jointly owned by NIAID and Moderna’ to Dr Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), directing him to perform animal challenge studies. The research programme is redacted. More suspiciously, so is the animal model stipulated in paragraph 3. Dr Baric did not respond when he was asked by me if he was commissioned to run the mRNA-MERS rabbit study.
Dr Baric is widely regarded as the world’s leading coronavirus researcher. He was a member of the World Health Organization working group on animal models to accelerate the development of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics. So too was Dr Graham who signed the MTA on behalf of NIAID. Given their expertise, the selection of a suitable animal model should have been a straightforward matter rather than a contentious one requiring concealment. One possible explanation for why experts would choose an inappropriate model is that they were in a hurry and suitable mice were not available. As per a 2015 paper in Virology, the first transgenic mice for MERS research were bred by Dr Agarwal at the University of Texas. Laboratory mice specially bred such as those developed by Dr Baric for his research into the original SARS are not susceptible to MERS. Baric certainly has the expertise to breed his own, given sufficient time. In 2020, he filed an invention report with UNC-CH (UNC ref 18752) for a mouse adapted model to test SARS-CoV-2 countermeasures.
On December 16, 2019, the day before Moderna signed the Baric MTA for the jointly owned Moderna/NIAID mRNA coronavirus vaccines, the company signed an amendment to the July 2019 NIAID research collaboration agreement. This amendment was countersigned by Vincent Feliccia, the branch chief of NIAID Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Office, on January 13, 2020, the day the design of Moderna’s SARS-CoV-2 vaccine was finalised.
Intentional scientific misconduct for financial gain is fraud. In addition to publishing the mRNA-MERS rabbit data in its supplementary stock offer, Moderna used it to apply for a patent for an mRNA-betacoronavirus vaccine on February 28, 2020. The same patent covers Spikevax, its Covid-19 vaccine. The US Patent Office is notoriously poor at detecting scientific fraud in patent applications even when it is in the public domain. In 2014 it astonishingly issued a patent to Dr Hwang Woo-suk for a technique to clone human embryos although the associated journal paper had been retracted in 2005 due to the data having been faked. Unlike drug regulators, the Patent Office apparently does not require the use of validated animal models, or a justification for the selection of a given model.
As was widely reported in 2021, Moderna and NIAID became embroiled in a dispute over the NIAID’s ownership interest in mRNA-1273. The company omitted to include Dr Kizzmekia Corbett, Dr Barney Graham and his boss, Dr John Mascola, when it filed for its patent. An NIH spokesperson told CBS news: ‘Omitting NIH inventors from the principal patent application deprives NIH of a co-ownership interest in that application and the patent that will eventually issue from it.’
As of the end of February 2023, Moderna is reported to have earned $36billion from Spikevax. Despite the ongoing patent dispute with NIAID, following negotiations in December 2022 the company gave NIH a $400 million ‘catch-up royalty payment’.
Under the provisions of the Bayh-Dole Act, US government researchers are also entitled to receive up to $150,000 in royalties annually if their inventions are commercialised. Meanwhile, despite Bancel’s initial enthusiasm for sharing the mRNA-MERS rabbit data, it soon disappeared. Perhaps that’s because it’s hard to see how their indemnity shield under the US Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act stretches that far.
The Vietnam War tormented and tore the societies who saw fit to participate in it. It defined a generation culturally and politically in terms creative and fractious. And it showed up the rulers to be ignorant rather than bright; blundering fools rather than sages secure in their preaching. Five decades on, the political classes in the United States and Australia are still seeking to find reasons for intervening in a country they scant understood, with a fanatic’s persuasion, and ideologue’s conviction, a moralist’s certainty. Old errors die hard.
Leaders are left the legacy of having to re-scent the candle, hoping that no one notices the malodorous stench left by history. Errors can be ignored in the aromatic haze. Broadcasters and producers of celluloid scutter about to provide softening programs explaining why soldiers who had no valid reason fighting a conflict, could find themselves in it. The ABC in Australia, for instance, released their series called Our Vietnam War, narrated by Kate Mulvany, whose bridge to the war was via her father. The very title is personal, exclusive, and seemingly excludes the Vietnamese who found themselves pawns, rebels, collaborators and insurgents.
The production also received the approval of the Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs. “The series provides a unique opportunity for viewers to gain insights into the personal stories of veterans and the broader impact of conflict on Australia’s history and identity.”
The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has made 2023 a calendar year for reminding Australians about the Vietnam experience, albeit in a most slanted way. On March 29, he acknowledged veterans visiting Canberra in an address to parliament. The words “courage”, “sacrifice” and “bonds of camaraderie forged under fire, and cruel realities of loss”, were noted. Adversaries are not mentioned, nor was, curiously enough, opposition to the war that was expressed at the time from a number of brave Labor Party stalwarts, Arthur Calwell being foremost among them.
The speech continued in a more plangent tone.
“Let us stand in this place, in this Parliament, and speak – loudly and clearly – about those who were sent to war in our name, who did their duty in our name, but whose names we did not hold up as proudly as we should have.”
On Vietnam Veterans’ Day (August 18), Albanese gave another speech, this time in Ipswich, Queensland, where he again apologised to the veterans. “We should have acknowledged you better as a nation then. But the truth is, as a nation we didn’t.” The platitudes are piled up, and merely serve to blunt the nature of Australia’s involvement in a brutal, rapacious conflict. “You upheld Australia’s name. You showed the Australian character at its finest.”
This distraction serves to cover the tracks of those who erred and bungled, not merely in committing the troops, but in ignoring the consequences of that deployment. The mistreatment dished out to the returnees was as much a product of civilian protest as it was a conscious effort on the part of veterans from previous conflicts to ignore it. It was a war never formally declared, conducted in conditions of gross deception.
A half-century on, it is striking to see the apologetics gather at the podium. The New South Wales branch of the Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL), for instance, went out of its way to issue one for the way thousands of defence personnel were treated in the aftermath of the conflict. “RSL NSW acknowledges a generation of veterans who are still healing and we publicly recognise our charity’s past mistakes this Vietnam Veterans Day,” came the statement the organisation’s president Ray James.
In the making of war, those behind the policies for waging it tend to escape culpability. The Australians in this affair were, to put it politely, compliant, featherbrained creatures upset by the Yellow Peril north of Papua New Guinea and easily won over through invocations of the “Red Under the Bed”.
Canberra went out of its way to send material and aid to South Vietnam not merely to fight Asiatic atheists of a red hue, but to impress their increasingly bogged-down US allies. To aid the enterprise, the Menzies government introduced national service conscription in November 1964, a policy that became the source of much parliamentary acrimony, notably from the Labor Party.
In July 1966, on an official visit to Washington, Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt emetically appropriated the Democratic Party’s own campaign slogan by declaring that Australia was “All the way with LBJ”. At the National Press Gallery that same month, Holt declared that, “When it comes to American participation and resolution to see the war in south Vietnam through, Australia is undoubtedly all the way”. Spinelessness and crawling in a military alliance became political virtues, or what Albanese might like to call “values”.
Australia’s commitment was marred by problems of strategic worth, something which officials were well aware of as early as April 1967. As a government paper titled “Australia’s military commitment to Vietnam” documents, requests for a larger Australian commitment by US military sources in Saigon and Washington were made despite the open-ended nature of the conflict. The planners lacked certitude on basic objectives, not least on the issue of victory itself. The views of US Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara, as expressed in meetings with his Australian counterparts, are expressly mentioned in all their obliqueness. The secretary “had no doubt that America could no longer lose the war, but they still had the problem of winning and that could be long and hard and there was no easy way which could point directly to victory.”
Add to this the fantastic delusion that the Vietnamese communist movement was a Peking-directed affair rather than an indigenous movement keen to remove foreign influence, and we have a conflict not merely futile on the part of Canberra and Washington, but wasteful and criminal. Fifty years later, and officials from both countries have the chance to make another round of potentially graver, more calamitous decisions.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
In the first 2024 Republican presidential debate last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis touted his time in Iraq. “I learned in the military, I was assigned with U.S. Navy SEALs in Iraq, that you focus on the mission above all else, you can’t get distracted,” he declared. Later in the debate he stated, “I’m somebody that volunteered to serve, inspired by September 11 and I deployed to Iraq alongside U.S. Navy SEALs in places like Fallujah, Ramadi…”
Some viewers had the impression that DeSantis was a Seal, but he was actually a Harvard Law School graduate who was a Judge Advocate General Corps (JAG) alongside the Seals. DeSantis was deployed to Iraq in 2007 and 2008, during President George W. Bush’s “surge” (intended to postpone the obvious failure of the war until after Bush’s second term ended).
The American troops that Bush sent to Iraq were injected into a conflict where it was often nearly impossible to distinguish friend from foe—what author Robert Jay Lifton labeled “atrocity-producing situations.” Invoking his time in Fallujah, DeSantis may be confident that few Americans recall the carnage that preceded his time there.
Fallujah was hammered by two U.S. assaults in 2004. The first attack was launched in April 2004 in retaliation for the killings of four contractors for Blackwater, a company that became renowned for killing innocent Iraqis.After their corpses were dragged through the street, the Bush administration demanded vengeance.
President Bush reportedly gave the order: “I want heads to roll.” He raved at Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez during a video conference,“If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell!…Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out!”
U.S. forces quickly placed the entire city under siege. The British Guardian reported;
“The U.S. soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or they would be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were stopped at the U.S. military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.”
The city was blasted by artillery barrages, F–16 jets, and AC–130 Spectre planes which pumped 4,000 rounds a minute into selected targets. Adam Kokesh, who fought in Fallujah as a Marine Corps sergeant, later commented: “During the siege of Fallujah, we changed rules of engagement more often than we changed our underwear. At one point, we imposed a curfew on the city, and were told to fire at anything that moved in the dark.”
The Bush administration decided to crush the city—but not until after Bush was safely reelected. In the weeks after Election Day, U.S. Army soldiers and Marines smashed the city of Fallujah, Iraq, killing an unknown number of civilians and leaving the city a burnt-out ruin. Marine Col. Gary Brandl explained the U.S. holy mission: “The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He’s in Fallujah and we’re going to destroy him.”
Up to 50,000 civilians remained in Fallujah at the time of the second U.S. assault. At a November 8, 2004 press conference, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that “Innocent civilians in that city have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble.” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard B. Myers said three days later that Fallujah “looks like a ghost town [because] the Iraqi government gave instructions to the citizens of Fallujah to stay indoors.”
Supposedly, Iraqi civilians would be safe even if when American troops went house to house “clearing” insurgents out. However, three years later, during the trials for killings elsewhere in Iraq, Marines continually invoked the Fallujah Rules of Engagement to justify their actions. Marine Corporal Justin Sharratt, who was indicted for murdering three civilians in Haditha (the charges were later dropped), explained in a 2007 interview with PBS:
“For the push of Fallujah, there [were no civilians]. We were told before we went in that if it moved, it dies… About a month before we went into the city of Fallujah, we sent out flyers… We let the population know that we were coming in on this date, and if you were left in the city, you were going to die.”
The interviewer asked, “Was the procedure for clearing a house in Fallujah different from other house clearing in Iraq?” Sharratt replied, “Yes. The difference between clearing houses in Fallujah was that the entire city was deemed hostile. So every house we went into, we prepped with frags and we went in shooting.” Thus, the Marines were preemptively justified in killing everyone inside—no questions asked. Former Congressman Duncan Hunter admitted in 2019, “I was an artillery officer, and we fired hundreds of rounds into Fallujah, killed probably hundreds of civilians…probably killed women and children.”
The U.S. attack left much of Fallujah looking like a lunar landscape, with near-total destruction as far as the eye could see. Yet, regardless of how many rows of houses the United States flattened in the city, accusations that the United States killed noncombatants were false by definition. Because the U.S. government refused to count civilian casualties, they did not exist. And anyone who claimed to count them was slandering the United States and aiding the terrorists.
The carnage the U.S. forces inflicted on Fallujah was supposedly not massive retaliation but the well-disguised triumph of hope and freedom. Bush announced on December 1, “In Fallujah and elsewhere, our coalition and Iraqi forces are on the offensive, and we are delivering a message: Freedom, not oppression, is the future of Iraq… A long night of terror and tyranny in that region is ending, and a new day of freedom and hope and self-government is on the way.” But it is tricky for corpses to be hopeful.
During DeSantis’ first campaign to become Florida’s governor in 2018, his first words in his first televised advertisement were, “Ron DeSantis, Iraq War veteran.” TheSt. Augustine Record noted in 2018, “DeSantis was responsible for helping ensure that the missions of Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets in that wide swath of the Western Euphrates River Valley were planned according to the rule of law and that captured detainees were humanely treated.”
Most of the details of DeSantis’ time in Iraq have not been disclosed. But he was deployed into an area where stunning detainee abuses by the U.S. Army had previously been reported. In September 2005, Americans learned that three 82nd Airborne Division soldiers complained about Army cooks and other off-duty troops, for amusement and sport, routinely physically beating Iraqi detainees being held near Fallujah. One sergeant explained, “We would give [detainees] blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day.” The sergeant said that there were no problems as long as no detainees “came up dead… We kept it to broken arms and legs.” Captain Ian Fishback of the 82nd Airborne repeatedly sought to get guidance from superiors on the standards for lawful and humane treatment of detainees. He, like other officers, never received clear guidelines. Fishback publicly complained, “I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment.”
It would be most helpful to American voters to learn more about what exactly Ron DeSantis did during his time in Iraq. Prior to his time in Iraq, he volunteered to be a legal advisor at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. In a 2018 interview for CBS Miami, he stated that one of his tasks was to clarify “the rules for force feeding detainees.” He also stated, “What I learned from [Gitmo] and I took to Iraq—they are using things like [false charges of] detainee abuse offensively against us—it was a tactic, technique, and procedure.”A Vice documentary that covered DeSantis’ role at Gitmo was scheduled for broadcast on Showtime but the May 28 air date was canceled on the day after DeSantis announced his presidential campaign.
The Pentagon’s records on DeSantis’ years as a JAG could help voters judge his candidacy for the presidency. But Americans would be damn fools to expect transparency from the feds or from most political candidates.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chairman on leave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CHD Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker, Ph.D., join forces in their new book, “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak,” to share authentic, peer-reviewed scientific studies that show the direct health outcome comparisons of vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals.
“Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak” will be released on Tuesday by CHD Books, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing. The first of its kind, this book is a compendium of over 100 true vaccinated-unvaccinated studies with easy-to-read graphics to inform scientific scholars and laypersons alike. The preponderance of studies outlined in “Vax-Unvax” are indexed in PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s vast database of biomedical scholarly research.
The clinical vaccine trials performed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rarely involve comparisons to control groups receiving a truly inert placebo. In the limited instances that they do, the control group is later given access to the experimental vaccine, eliminating the ability to identify non-acute reactions and any possibility of long-term safety studies. Kennedy and Hooker wrote “Vax-Unvax” to apprise the public of the pitfalls of vaccination and the potential for long-term detrimental health effects in children and adults.
“This book is essential reading for parents, practitioners, and anyone concerned about the health effects of vaccines and the vaccination schedule,” said Hooker. “This resource should be kept at hand for understanding the differences in health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated children and adults.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is sitting on a vast data repository called the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD). It includes comprehensive medical records for over 10 million individuals, including 2 million children. The VSD also contains records for numerous unvaccinated children, yet the CDC refuses to compare the health outcomes of vaccinated children to completely unvaccinated children. The CDC also prohibits outside researchers from accessing VSD data to undertake such studies.
“For decades, the CDC has kept a tight grip on the Vaccine Safety Datalink, concealing vital vaccine safety information from the public,” said Kennedy. “This data is particularly important for parents making healthcare decisions for their children. The suppression of this information and the government’s steadfast refusal to conduct basic research on long-term health outcomes following vaccination is a scandal that has taken a tremendous toll on the health of our nation’s children.”
In 2019, Kennedy and Hooker began sharing highlights of studies published in the scientific literature that compare vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals on Kennedy’s Instagram account. In 2021, after over 60 scientific studies were featured in his posts, Kennedy was censored and deplatformed on Instagram. This led to the creation of “Vax-Unvax,” as he and Hooker continued their compilation to ultimately include over 100 scientific studies that juxtapose the health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.
“Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak” is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online booksellers.
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Children’s Health Defense® is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Our mission is to end childhood health epidemics by working aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures, hold those responsible accountable and establish safeguards to prevent future harm. We fight corruption, mass surveillance and censorship that put profits before people as well as advocate for worldwide rights to health freedom and bodily autonomy.
Temperatures in cities have been known for a long time to be much warmer than surrounding rural areas. Instead of eliminating the Urban Heat Island contaminated data, NASA and NOAA use it contaminate surrounding rural stations as well.
For several weeks I have been messaging the scientific community and the public about an approach addressing the burden of SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein in tissues and organs in the human body that is largely responsible for post-COVID and vaccine injury syndromes.
No therapeutic claims can be made since large, prospective, double-blind randomized, placebo-controlled trials have not been completed on any of the compounds mentioned in this paper. I checked clinicaltrials.gov and no such trials have been planned. The Biden HHS US Action Plan for Long-COVID Research has pumped a billion dollars into long-COVID research and no new therapies have emerged. HHS, NIH, CDC, FDA have not recognized the larger issue of vaccine damage to the body.
At three and one half years into the pandemic and two and a half years into the COVID-19 vaccine debacle, myself and my clinic partners formulated a baseline regimen upon which additional drugs or agents can be added. We believe the Spike protein and the inflammation caused by it and its proteolytic fragments are at the heart of the pathophysiology we are observing.
We searched the literature for all available sources of evidence for products that can aid the human body in breaking down and catabolizing the Spike protein. We found two compounds, nattokinase and bromelain. Both of which additionally have fibrinolytic properties which are advantageous in the prothrombotic milieu induced by the persistent Spike protein. Curcumin was added for its anti-inflammatory properties in the setting of post-COVID and vaccine patients. The main safety caveats are bleeding and allergic reactions, both of which are manageable. It is our experience that both nattokinase and bromelain can be used in addition to antiplatelet and anticoagulant drugs with physician monitoring.
The empiric regimen can be continued for 3-12 months or more and be guided by clinical observation:
-Nattokinase 2000 FU (100) mg orally twice a day without food
-Bromelain 500 mg orally once a day without food
-Curcumin 500 mg orally twice a day (nano, liposomal, or with piperine additive suggested)
McCullough PA, Wynn C, Procter BC. Clinical Rationale for SARS-CoV-2 Base Spike Protein Detoxification in Post COVID-19 and Vaccine Injury Syndromes. Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Volume 28 Number 3 Fall 2023, 90-93.
The full manuscript is linked and serves as your reference. While we are seeing case examples of improvement, we aim to collaborate with others as we did with the McCullough Protocol, to demonstrate clinical effectiveness of Base Spike Detoxification as a fundamental strategy for a large number of individuals who have suffered long-term consequences from SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination.
The Times’ Juliet Samuel points out that “climate change belief should be tempered by scepticism of dramatic predictions of what’s coming, theories rolled out with great fanfare and based upon massive simplifications”. Iain Martin, in a piece entitled “Naive net zero groupthink misses the point of rising geopolitical dangers“, wonders “who will be the first mainstream party leader to stop telling us fairytales and test whether the electorate can handle the truth of our situation?”.
In a hard-hitting polemic, Gerald Warner expounds on the “great fallacy regarding climate change”, namely “the assumption that because the perceived threat was global, it required a supranational, one-size-fits-all response”. From the Left, Thomas Fazi writes for UnHerd that “nightmares and elitist fantasies” have replaced “the actual material conditions of people as the basis for politics – ‘saving the planet’ becomes more important than saving actual human beings”. Similarly, Ralph Schoellhammer (“The human cost of Net Zero”) highlights the “dangerous, infantile outlook” of the climate alarmist lobby who “indulge in fantasies about the energy transition”.
One wishes that these voices had been raised before today, as the UK is committed via the Climate Change Act 2008 to rapidly decarbonising itself. The purported aim of this is to fast-track our society’s transformation into some sort of mythical evergreen carbon-free nirvana. This single-minded demonisation of carbon (and carbon emissions) brings to mind various possible fallacies – what if we are missing the woods for the trees?
It is an inconvenient and unfortunate truth that the momentum of a speeding juggernaut requires more energy and time to slow down. If only we could attach the Net Zero juggernaut to a generator to feed the grid. Ironically enough, in the wonderfully credulous world of the woke warriors against warming, it seems that such real-life parodies exist.
Resistance to Net Zero groupthink has to date been limited to a lonely chorus of diehard sceptics who have been quietly and systematically removed from the public square. This is all the more surprising when one considers the extent to which history has been rewritten, and past misdemeanours forgotten. The 2009 story of “climategate” has been almost completely erased from the national consciousness. A reminder: the efforts of key players in the climate alarmist camp to produce data that supported the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) hypothesis were shown to be somewhat irregular. Computer code that was used to produce temperature models required the application of copious quantities of “fudge factors” to produce the temperature hockey sticks that were needed to scare the populace.
Don’t take my word for it: even George Monbiot remarked at the time that the behaviour was “unscientific”. He also pointed out that one of the key protagonists “seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity” when suggesting that emails subject to an FOI request be deleted. Monbiot then lapsed – true to form – back into the language that we are used to hearing from such commentators about “deniers” who deserve everything coming to them due to uttering heresies that challenge the state religion.
Rare as it may be for me to agree with Monbiot on anything, he did claim to be someone who has “championed the science” and stated that “we should be the first to demand that [the science] is unimpeachable”. I agree with this last statement. However, and here is where we disagree, the science he is promoting is most certainly not settled and, therefore, not unimpeachable, despite what the tellybox might be telling you.
One of the entities that controls this narrative is the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, a UN body. Through various working groups, this supranational religious order regularly publishes papal decrees that update the liturgy to be distributed to the masses by the priestly orders, such as the Behavioural Insights Team, aka the Nudge Unit. One of the fundamental tenets of this religion is that “one of the defining challenges of the 21st century [is] human-induced climate change”. Specifically, there is an irreversible “tipping point” of warming due to the anthropogenic influence of greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, etc.) being released into the atmosphere.
As I have written about previously, heretics who speak out against the priesthood’s wishes get quite rapidly closed down. In fact, it seems that the priesthood wishes to make such wrongspeak a criminal offence. To limit the chances of any questioning plebeian masses going off-piste, the UN works with popular search engines to ensure that top search results align with their orthodoxy. Thankfully, the flailings of the Monbiots and ludicrous talk of “global boiling” from old men in suits have provoked some modest pushback from certain quarters. The new head of the IPCC, Jim Skea, has struck a different tone from his predecessor: “The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees”. Such words are in marked contrast to recent claims about man-made climate catastrophes and fatally undermine the justification for our aggressive Net Zero policies.
But the underlying articles of faith remain, as yet, unchanged. Apparently, we must still “battle against climate change”. The “short-term focus should remain expanding renewable electricity to reduce emissions from fossil fuel electricity generation and from internal combustion engine vehicles”. Hmm. Forgive my scepticism about throwing perfectly functioning vehicles into landfills to be replaced by a completely new technology. A new technology with a supply chain based on raiding the earth’s crust for rare elements with an as-yet untested post-processing/reuse/recycling infrastructure.
It is high time that the heretics get to say their piece. It is an article of faith for the IPCC that reducing CO2 (and other greenhouse gas) emissions can somehow effect a reversal of recent climate changes. This is a sacrament upon which rests the whole Net Zero edifice. Sub-sacraments are threefold. Firstly, CO2 emissions have gone up materially over the last few hundred years. Secondly, this is primarily due to human activity since the industrial revolution. Thirdly, there is a direct causal link that these emissions have created most – if not all – global warming/boiling/climate change. These all have to be true to justify the breakneck pace of decarbonisation efforts.
The first point, that CO2 emissions have definitely increased, is generally accepted even though the absolute increase of CO2 in the air has gone up over the last 100 years or so from 0.03 per cent to just over 0.04 per cent. This level is substantially lower than the optimum for plant growth – just ask anyone involved in food production, but evidence for the subsequent points is by no means clear-cut.
Going into specifics, CO2 is often a lagging indicator of temperature (both in the short, medium and longer-term), or seems disconnected from temperature variations. Moreover, if it is taken as read that CO2 levels are unprecedented in the current Holocene (i.e. since the last ice age), then we have a somewhat unsatisfactory scenario whereby the existing literature – both scientific and of professional historians – regarding the Medieval Warm Period (1 degree warmer, a millennium ago) and the Climatic Optimum (2.5 degrees warmer, 5-8 millennia ago) flatly contradicts recent alarmist claims that July 2023 was “quite likely the warmest month on Earth in 10,000 years”.
To overcome doubters, much work has been put in by adherents of IPCC doctrine to simplify the message and eviscerate previously published data that conflicts with the various sub-sacraments. For example, the Medieval Warm Period and Climatic Optimum have been dubbed the “Holocene Temperature Conundrum”, a thorn in the side of the faithful, as they fundamentally undermine the obsession with emitted CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
The solution? Models! A recent Nature paper was able to erase the troublesome Conundrum by relaxing a previously stricter requirement on data points in the (vast) Southern Ocean “to increase coverage in this data-poor region” and smooth out temperature gradient over the last 10,000 years. All this despite recognising that their model has a fundamental limitation that it is based on “priors from a single model … which are inevitably biased by model deficiencies, resolution and uncertainties in boundary conditions”.
Another attempt to discredit the historic literature is to claim that these periods of higher temperatures were actually localised events. But this is hardly the killer argument that IPCC adherents think it is. It only highlights the current cherry-picking approach favoured by the media of highlighting isolated warm temperatures as being due to the climate, but ignoring low temperatures in other areas as being due to the weather. This is something that climate alarmists would do well to note.
The NASA analysis of the Maunder Minimum is another problem for the “global boiling” narrative. This analysis of the period from 1650 to 1710 when “temperatures across much of the Northern Hemisphere plunged when the Sun entered a quiet phase”, emphasises that in periods of overall lower temperatures, some particular geographies – such as the Atlantic and the Arctic – can in fact exhibit relative warming. So a milder Arctic could, of course, be consistent with stagnating, or even falling, global temperatures.
There are other problems for the simplistic sub-sacraments that undergird the IPCC’s creed. Water vapour is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. What of the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption that spewed over 165 million tons of water vapour – not 50 million tons as initially thought – into the atmosphere? A combination of observations, including the earth’s recent waning magnetic field, warm localised patches of suddenly hot sea to the West of areas of subsea volcanism, lagging jumps in CO2 air concentration and the recent slowing of the earth’s rotation by unexpected microseconds (a non-trivial issue as angular momentum must be conserved – where did the energy go?), point to the conveyance of heat from the earth’s core, up through the mantle and to the surface. The different heat capacity of air versus that of water discount the atmosphere as a source of this warming on such a rapid timescale.
These are fascinating observations. A burning desire to explain the hugely complex interactions of our natural world should be driving a deep scientific urge to come up with creative hypotheses.
However, the strictures of the dominant religion are not conducive to open-minded research. The peer review process is broken. We desperately need a “blue team” grouping of sceptical investigators that are not in the pockets of those who have pre-decided the outcome of such research. Quoting Gerald Warner: “The government should assemble a panel of genuine climate experts who have not taken the IPCC shilling, discounting computer ‘modelling’, when the result is dictated by the data fed in, in favour of empirical evidence… we need authentic, unbiased scientific information, not the extravagant propaganda of climate alarmists”.
Our current de facto accelerated Net Zero trajectory is going to be a bumpy ride. More worryingly, it seems that its proponents do not really want to discuss whether the sacrifice is worth it. Can we discuss whether it is just an almighty boondoggle? It may be worse. It could be a set of policies that will destroy society as we know it, and make our children’s futures incalculably worse.
We owe it to future generations to pause the current madcap pace of change and engage in an adult conversation to win over the rank and file. There are very, very good reasons to invest in sustainable and non-polluting clean energy, but as pointed out by sensible centrist commentators, there is no need for coercion.
Let’s remember, CO2, the IPCC’s sworn enemy, is a life-giving substance that is present in trace quantities in the atmosphere and is contributing to the greening of our planet. It would be an unmitigated disaster if we back the wrong horse(s) by rushing to enforce a flawed doctrine derived from a mistaken demonisation of carbon dioxide.
In 1983, Michael Barkun, today a professor emeritus at Syracuse University, wrote an incredible essay, presciently identifying the rise of a “New Apocalypticism” in American political discourse. Today I share some excerpts from that 40-year-old essay — Divided Apocalypse: Thinking About The End in Contemporary America — and connect them to today’s public discussions of climate change.
Barkun defined the “New Apocalypticism,” as follows;
The so-called “New Apocalypticism” is undeniably religious, rooted in the Protestant millenarian tradition. Religious apocalypticism is, however, not the only apocalypticism current in American society. A newer, more diffuse, but indisputably influential apocalypticism coexists with it. Secular rather than religious, this second variety grows out of a naturalistic world view, indebted to science and to social criticism rather than to theology. Many of its authors are academics, the works themselves directed at a lay audience of influential persons — government officials, business leaders, and journalists — presumed to have the power to intervene in order to avert planetary catastrophe.
Barkun observed that intellectuals were fulfilling a societal function previously served by religious leaders, even though these intellectuals did not always view science and religion to be compatible:
. . . however uninformed or unsympathetic these secular prophets may be concerning their religious counterparts, they clearly recognize the presence in their own work of religious motifs. Their predictions of “last things” generate the feelings of awe that have always surrounded eschatology, even if in this case the predictions often grow out of computer modelling rather than Biblical proof-texts.
For many, science has come to replace religion in its perceived ability to identify the root cause of our existential crisis and scientists have replaced religious leaders as holding the unique ability to offer guidance on how we must transform in order to stave off catastrophe:
Ironically, just as religious apocalyptic literature has begun to de-emphasize the natural world, the new secular literature has made it more prominent. By concentrating upon the capacity of human action to destabilize natural rhythms, the secular writers have made nature more important while acknowledging the potency of human act . . . The religionists’ transformation of the world, to be accomplished in the Last Days, would now occur gradually as the consequence human intervention. This confident, redemptionist view of science carried the corollary of the necessity and desirability of human mastery over the natural world — precisely the sin most uniformly attacked in the secular apocalyptic literature of today. Where this mastery over nature was once viewed as the road to greater happiness and fulfillment, it now appears to be the route to doomsday.
For the secular millenarian, extreme events — floods, hurricanes, fires — are more than mere portents, they are evidence of our sins of the past and provide opportunities for redemption in the future, if only we listen, accept and change:
Where the religious view regards events as signs, the secular position is far more apt to view them as direct causes: the future will occur because of actions taken in the past and the present, but the future may be changed by making different present choices. At one level, this shifts causal efficacy from an external deity to human beings. At another level, by opening the possibility that The End might be averted by timely action, the change introduces a measure of indeterminacy, as opposed to the fundamentalist emphasis upon inevitability. The opportunity for preventive action makes the secular scenarios appear more hopeful, because, in principle, destructive actions by human beings might be prevented — intentional acts might be forestalled by pointing out their likely consequences, while human error might be reduced by more closely monitoring the conduct of those in positions of responsibility. Nonetheless, this approach can only hold out the hope of minimizing risks, which leaves some ineradicable possibility of danger, because evil, ignorant, or inadvertent behavior can never be eliminated.
When we hear oft-quoted climate scientists warning that our calamitous times are the consequence of our misguided past actions and that the route to a different future is transformation — For instance, “urgency and agency” in the sloganeering of popular climate scientist Michael Mann, above. We can understand these dynamics as those of today’s priests of the secular apocalypse, explaining our predicament and offering the hope of salvation.
Barkun argues that secular apocalyptic worldviews are also compatible with a Manichean perspective on good and evil:
. . . secular apocalypticists tend to adopt two strategies. On the one hand, they may ascribe the suffering to the machinations of small but powerful groups, whose control of economic, military, or other resources permits them to place the fate of others in jeopardy. This view has the advantage of establishing a Manichean order, but it is, unfortunately, also a strategy that readily slides towards despair if the forces of good appear weak.
We’ve all heard the sermon — it is the fossil fuel companies, Republicans, the Koch Brothers, deniers and other shadowy forces who have conspired to thwart the climate movement for many decades. If only they could be defeated, transformation would occur and the apocalypse would be avoided.
Not surprisingly, the secular apocalypse is also interpreted as partly the consequence of ignorant or uncaring normal people, who have failed to heed the warnings of the experts. Despite the warnings, normal people continue to fly in planes, drive cars, eat hamburgers, use air conditioning and refuse to change:
On the other hand, world destruction may be viewed as the unintended consequence of human actions that are ill-informed, ill-timed, or inept. According to those who hold this view, the victims of world destruction are at least partially to blame for their fate, since had they behaved differently, they might have prevented it. The first position, the conspiratorial view, preserves the appearance of moral order by secularizing the Armageddon myth, in which good and evil contend, yet retains an element of indeterminacy not found in the religious version. The second position, ascribing inadequacies to the victims, attempts to reestablish moral order by implying that the suffering may not be wholly unmerited – the victims may somehow deserve their fate because they acted unwisely.
How might the contemporary New Apocalypticism evolve in the future? Barkun offers three possibilities:
One possibility, of course, is that either the religious or the secular apocalypticists are correct, and that history will indeed end within the lifetime of individuals now living.
We might indeed be in the latter stages of an existential climate crisis, fail to change and learn the end is nigh.
A second possibility, borne out in past instances of religious prediction, is that vague forecasts will give way to more precise predictions as expanding audiences seek the progressive reduction of ambiguity. Where this occurs the stage is set for prophetic disconfirmation, for a particular moment when a specific prediction is publicly discontinued, and the movement associated with it rapidly contracts to a hard-core of the most committed believers.
What happens when the world passes the 1.5 Celsius temperature target and the world does not end? Or then 2.0 C? On the other hand, there will always be sufficient numbers of extreme weather events across the planet to long sustain the idea that doom is just around the corner. Barkun explains that apocalyptic beliefs have been present in societies for centuries, and thus probably won’t be going away anytime soon.
A third possibility is that the number of believers may become so large that their very numbers and influence produce a fundamental change in the social order. The rise of Christianity during the late Roman Empire and the disillusionment of the Russian population immediately before the Russian Revolution are cases in point. Here, dire predictions can become, or can closely resemble, self-fulfilling prophesies.
This of course is the “all in” strategy of many climate activists — force the desired global transformation to happen and then take credit for the avoided Armageddon. I’ve argued that the global population crisis ended with a declaration of success with claims made that raising alarm saved billions from starvation — even though this view does not actually square with history. If we rapidly decarbonize, then the apocalypse will remain real, just unrealized — we already see this dynamic at play in discussions of the outdated RCP8.5 scenario.
Barkun’s 1983 essay is remarkable when read in the context of the 2023 climate movement. Climate change is of course real and important, but it is not (according to the IPCC) the apocalypse. The near-term future of climate policy will almost certainly be a struggle between pragmatism and the New Apocalypticism. How that turns out is anybody’s guess.
For those who have access here is the cite and link to Barkun’s remarkable essay:
I read today that a new RSV vaccine has just been approved by the FDA for expectant mothers. I know from previous articles I’ve written that an RSV vaccine for children is also on the fast track to get on the all-important childhood immunization schedule.
I’m sure we’ll all read about how RSV is one of the greatest killers of children … and thus we have yet another vaccine that’s a Godsend. (The above-linked Wall Street Journal story tells us approximately 300 children under the age of 5 die from RSV each year).
Who knows if this data is true or not?
Speaking for myself, I haven’t forgotten how the Covid vaccine was pushed with the the extremely-dubious assertion that Covid was one of the “Top 8” killers of children.
I knew that statement was brazen disinformation because I’d researched actual children’s mortality from Covid while writing this story for uncoverDC.com.
In this article, I simply highlighted the key findings from the “most comprehensive” study of its kind on Covid mortality among children. The study, produced by a team of prestigious academics in the UK, found that only 25 children in the entire UK died “from” Covid in the fist year of the pandemic.
However, the headline that should have gone viral to parents across the world is that only six “healthy” children in the entire UK died “from” Covid.
Today, I’m going to revisit the findings of that study as this might cause a few mothers to question the pronouncements of our so-called public health experts, none of whom have seen a vaccine they don’t want every child to get, regardless of how unnecessary or what the long-term negative health effects might be.
The study’s key information and findings …
Approximately 12 million children (age 0 to 17) live in the UK.
The UK researchers were able to look at hospital diagnostic codes and find out how many children died “from” or “with” Covid in the first 12 months of the pandemic.
Here’s what study authors found and reported (CYP = “Children and Young Persons.”)
N = 61 – UK children who died in the first 12 months of the pandemic after testing positive via a PCR test.
Significantly, researchers subtracted 36 “Covid deaths” from this figure because they found these children actually died from some other cause. Language from the study:
“This is the first study to differentiate between CYP who have died of SARS-CoV-2 infection rather than died with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test as a coincidental finding. Our result is 60% lower than the figures derived from positive tests thereby markedly reducing the estimated number of CYP who are potentially at risk of death during this pandemic.”
N = 25 – UK children who actually died “from” Covid in the first 12 months of the pandemic.
But researchers looked even harder and found that 19 of these 25 Covid victims suffered from severe “life-limiting” medical conditions.
N = 19 = Children who died from Covid but had other major medical issues.
Subtracting the deaths of children who suffered from serious co-morbid conditions left researchers with …
N = 6 – “Healthy” children in the UK who died from Covid in the fist 12 months of the pandemic.
I made some additional assumptions/extrapolations …
To be very conservative, I assumed that 500,000 children (approximately 4 percent of the UK’s children) do suffer from serious “life-limiting” medical conditions (the real percentage is no doubt lower than 1 percent).
This would give us …
N = 11.5 million – Approximate number of “healthy” children in the UK.
We can now calculate the mortality risk for healthy children in the UK.
Covid Mortality Math: Six (6) Covid deaths divided by 11.5 million “healthy” children = Covid mortality of 0.000052 percent.
According to this extremely thorough (albeit ignored) study, the odds a healthy UK child would die from Covid in the first 12 months of the pandemic were 1-in-1.92 million. (Math: 11.5 million healthy children/6 Covid deaths).
I decided to do some politically-incorrect analysis …
To wander into politically incorrect territory, one can also calculate mortality risk by the race of children.
For some (undeniable) reason, Covid kills a much higher percentage of Blacks and Hispanics. This is true with children and adults.
Here’s a story from April 2020that proves that the disproportionate deaths among African Americans was already known (even though the authors of this article suggest that the CDC was already covering up these racial statistics).
The authors of the UK study also point out the racial differences in mortality rates:
“CYP >10 years, of Asian and Black ethnic backgrounds, and with co-morbidities were over-represented compared to other children.”
The authors also stressed that the absolute numbers of minority children who died from Covid was also minute. Still, the figures are strikingly minute for white children.
From further extrapolations, I concluded that only two, perhaps three, healthy white children in the entire United Kingdom died “from” Covid in the first 12 months of the pandemic.
Since there are more than 10 million healthy white children in the UK, I concluded the chance a healthy white child would die from Covid were approximately 1-in-5 million. As a percentage, this mortality risk is 0.00002. (One has to go out to the fifth decimal point to find a “risk” that is not zero.)
Why I did this research …
One reason I embarked on this research is that I was simply trying to ascertain accurate Covid information to inform any decision I made on whether my two young children should get the Covid vaccine.
I was doing my own research and did not automatically trust the proclamations of the CDC or the pediatrician groups. I know I’m not supposed to question my betters (the experts), but I did it anyway because my own children’s lives might be at stake.
I happen to be Caucasian, just like my two children. Thankfully our children are healthy and do not suffer from some terrible “life-limiting” medical condition.
Again, I was simply looking to find the mortality risk of my own two children if they didn’t get this “vaccine.” Thanks to this bold study, I found the answer I was seeking.
The data shows that my children might indeed die from Covid … but if they did they would be the one person in a cohort of 4,999,999 children who did.
To provide a little context, the odds a random person would get struck by lightning in a given year are about 1-in-750,000. The odds I might hit the lottery jackpot in neighboring Georgia are probably 1-in-3-million.
Anyway, you won’t be surprised to learn that I chose to not get my children vaccinated.
For me, becoming an “anti-vaxxer” was a no-brainer especially when I know the odds my children might contract potentially fatal myocarditis (or other serious vaccine injuries) might be as low as 1-in-3,000 (perhaps lower).
(The headline from the above-linked article notes that cases of myocarditis from vaccines are “rare” in children. If “rare” = a “1-in-3,000 risk,” how should one label a “1-in-5-million” risk?)
Even today, I occasionally read that the risks to children from Covid is “rare” or “small” or not as high as for, say, very old people or the morbidly obese.
But that’s poor word-smithing – intentionally so in my opinion.
When the risk of death for the largest population of children in America is 1-in-5 million, maybe journalists should consider more accurate risk modifiers, such as:
“virtually non-existent” … “almost unheard of” … “the rarest of anomalies” … “certainly nothing for parents to worry about” …. “for all practical purposes … zero.”
Anyway, when I kept reading that Covid was the “Top 8” killer of children in America, my go-to thought was, “That’s what they say.”
I guess the same pediatrician groups and the UK’s version of the CDC were spreading the same fear-mongering COVID disinformation as in America.
I’m sure Catherine, Princess of Wales was worried to death about getting her children vaccinated because she knew that Covid was one of the “top 8 killers of children in the UK.”
It probably never occurred to the princess to ask, “six deaths is enough to make the Top 8?” (Actually, I’d bet 100 pounds Princess Kate, just like 99 percent of UK mothers, never saw this study.)
I’m tempted to finish this column by saying, “none of this matters.” The narrative – as bogus as it was – worked as intended. Hundreds of millions of parents rushed out to get children vaccines they didn’t need.
After a year and a half of seeking but not finding SARS-2 in any wildlife anywhere (apart from domesticated or zoo animals that appear to have caught it from humans) is it time to say, yes, it didn’t just escape from a lab. It was created, built, assembled in a lab. Or many labs
Coronavirus scientists have been constructing new viruses out of bits and pieces of other viruses for a long time.
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