I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had… Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What are relevant are reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period. – Michael Crichton, Lecture at the California Iinstitute of Technology, Pasadena CA, Jan 17 2003[1]
Within a few months of the SARS-Cov-2 vaccines being injected into millions of people, numerous types of adverse reactions were reported throughout the world. Information about adverse events became an object of intense denial and obfuscation by government agencies and state-funded and corporate-sponsored media, whether the information was in the form of rumors, amateur speculation, or serious scientific inquiry by qualified academics.
However, in 2023, government registries of vaccine injuries now reveal serious deficiencies of the vaccines designed to combat SARS-Cov-2. In a report published in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, the authors analyzed data from regulatory surveillance and self-reporting systems in Germany, Israel, Scotland, the United Kingdom, and the United States “to find long-term adverse events of the COVID products that cannot be captured during the expedited safety analyses.”This extract from the abstract goes on to state[2]:
Our data show, among other trends, increases in adverse event reports if we compare COVID products to influenza and pertussis vaccines and statistically significant higher numbers of hospital encounters in military personnel, as well as increases in incidences of thromboembolic conditions, such as menstrual abnormalities, myocarditis, and cerebrovascular events after the implementation of COVID injection mandates, compared to the preceding five years… Our meta-analysis of both national and international vaccine adverse events emphasizes the importance of re-evaluating public health policies that promote universal mass injection and multiple boosters for all demographic groups. In combination with informal reports from reliable witnesses, limitations of the safety trials, and the decreased lethality of new strains, our research demonstrates that the cost (both monetary and humanitarian) of injecting healthy people, and especially children, outweighs any claimed though unvalidated benefits.
In this late phase of the event that started in 2020, governments and their various propaganda platforms cannot hide these adverse events and are now engaged perhaps in what can be called the “cooling the mark out” phase of the pandemic. An article in The New Yorker in 2015 discussed this sociological phenomenon[3].
The term was used in a 1952 study by Erving Goffman to describe an important element of con artistry, but it also describes generally any social mechanism that is needed to help people adjust to material losses and humiliation. When a victim is forced to acknowledge he has been conned or ripped off, the perpetrators have to make some effort to help him adjust. Otherwise, he may do something “irrational” such as pursuing violent revenge, media exposure, criminal charges, or a lawsuit. He needs to be reminded that he still has precious things he could lose, so he has to just accept the loss and humiliation and go back to his wife and children. Governments are doing the same now: “Yes, there have been some rare adverse events. Get in line and fill out this form to apply for your legally entitled compensation. We will be with you shortly.”
Some of the adverse events are mild reactions such as fainting, dizziness, fatigue, and flu-like malaise lasting a few days—just like the viral infection itself, ironically enough. People under age seventy who had a 99.9% chance of recovering quickly from the infection chose instead to suffer this malaise, going along with the social coercion and accepting the unknown risks of vaccination[4]. As if it were a scheduled elective surgery, they were simply choosing the timing of when they were going to feel horrible—i.e. “I should get this over with now before my vacation.”
The less mild reactions are myocardial infarction, myocarditis, pericarditis, tachycardia, stroke, blood clots (embolism), aneurysm, tinnitus, Bell’s Palsy, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, transverse myelitis, cancer, heavy bleeding, menstrual irregularities, miscarriage, neurological symptoms, immune system disorders, skin rash, intense pain and numbness, memory loss, “brain fog,” and “inexplicable” sudden death. These conditions can be transitory or, like the last one on the list, permanent.
One can easily find peer-reviewed research papers that confirm the increased rates of these adverse health events after vaccination, yet a curious thing about them is that they often end very tentatively, including a phrase such as the one found in the extract below[5]:
The number of reported cases is relatively very small in relation to the hundreds of millions of vaccinations that have occurred, and the protective benefits offered by COVID-19 vaccination far outweigh the risks.
This tendency was also found in the recent Cochrane review on the efficacy of wearing masks[6]. Instead of stating emphatically that in numerous studies there is no evidence to show a benefit in wearing masks, the authors concluded by stating all the ways that the studies they reviewed might contain some undiscovered flaws. It was like they were afraid of having made an important discovery that should change government policy.
MINIMIZATION, EXAGGERATION, DIVERSION AND DISTRACTION IN MASS MEDIA AND SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS
Example 1: Putting a Positive Spin on Vaccine-Induced Cancer
Another such example, this one in the popular press, was the story told about the immunologist Dr. Michel Goldman in The Atlantic in September 2022[7]. As an advocate of many vaccines during his career, and in particular as a believer in the salutary effects of the mRNA vaccines, he was confronted with the images on a CT scan that showed lymphatic cancer spreading aggressively in his body soon after his mRNA shots, both after the first two shots and then again after a booster shot a few months later.
The cancer connection to the shots was hard to deny because the aggressive growth was extremely rare and also because the first shots were in the left arm and the cancer appeared on the left armpit. The booster was injected in the right arm, then the cancer appeared on the right side.
If the subject matter were not so dark, the article would appear to be a satire of people who can’t think logically or change their views when confronted with new facts. The author, Roxanne Khamsi, goes to extreme lengths to describe the struggle she had to write the story in a way that would not lend support to those who spread “anti-vaccine disinformation.” Dr. Goldman was just as determined, willing to see himself as one of the rare unfortunate ones who must suffer so that so many others may be saved by these supposedly miraculous new drugs.
As Piers Robinson’s lessons on propaganda have taught us, the propagandist doesn’t lie directly. Propaganda operates through exaggeration, omission, incentivization and coercion, and these are in evidence in The Atlantic, in this article, and in all of its coverage of the pandemic[8].
Roxanne Khamsi selectively focuses on the most hyperbolic reactions from the “fearmongers [who] have made the problem worse by citing scary-sounding data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System… with insufficient context.” She also had to mention that a vaccination center was set ablaze in Poland. Nowhere in the long article is there any mention of less radical reactions such as the hundreds of scientific papers describing adverse events—studies written by non-fearmongering sober-minded scientists. Such exaggeration and omission move the reader toward an acceptance of the necessity of mass vaccination.
Another facet of this propaganda is its use of what could be called “The New Yorker” genre of journalism. It is a “long read” piece (4,000 words) of narrative storytelling that uses the methods of fictional literature. It dramatizes the story arc of one individual, going deep into his biographical details, thoughts, and feelings. This is the genre that is natural and expected by the educated professional class of people who wake up on Sunday mornings and look for something serious to read, something that will make them feel smart before going back to the grind the next day. It is also a genre used by documentary filmmakers. They may have an important social problem to expose, but they have to find a person at the center of it and tell a story. Otherwise, the audience will tune out. The TED talks tell us it is hardwired in our brains. Humans are storytellers.
The New Yorker genre makes the educated class feel informed and serious: 4,000 words, a deep read, not the superficial stuff that the deplorables read in the New York Post! The length of the piece makes it likely that readers won’t be using their time to read anything else. Most importantly, the use of this genre diverts attention away from the need for an objective understanding of a phenomenon that involves billions of victims. The writer and the subject, Dr. Goldman, say much about the need to understand the science and not inflame radical reactions from the so-called low-information types, but this genre is itself un-scientific, subjective, sentimental, and narrow in its scope.
The most stunning omission in the article is that neither the author nor Dr. Goldman makes the obvious logical conclusion that, considering both the apparent and the still unknown risks, mandatory or coerced vaccination is unethical, especially for a viral infection that 99.9% of people under age seventy can survive. After learning of what happened to Dr. Goldberg, persons in good health, if not propagandized to think otherwise, would logically decide in favor of taking their chances with an infection that will pass in a few days. This is especially true for people who, unlike Dr. Goldman, don’t have a brother who is head of nuclear medicine at a university hospital and may not have timely access to the high quality of health care that Dr. Goldman had.
The article concludes thus:
And as a longtime immunologist and medical innovator, he’s still considering the question of whether a vaccine that is saving tens of millions of lives each year might have put his own in jeopardy. He remains adamant that COVID-19 vaccines are necessary and useful for the vast majority of people.
Many would disagree and say that the vaccines are, at best, only for the non-vast minority of high-risk individuals who accept them with informed consent. Despite his own experience of suffering vaccine-induced aggressive lymphoma, Dr. Goldman believes that a vast majority of people should subject themselves to the risk of suffering the same fate. In September 2022, the time of publication, it had been officially acknowledged that the mRNA shots had not stopped the spread of the virus, had not induced lasting immunity, and may not have lowered the fatality rate of the illness. Other possible explanations:
(1) The virus harmed most of the vulnerable population before the vaccines arrived.
(2) Doctors learned how to treat the disease without resorting to deadly practices such as delayed treatment, ventilators and Remdesivir.
(3) The virus evolved into less deadly variants.
The purported benefits of the vaccines remain unprovable, and explanations (1)-(3) remain as matters of controversy.
Example 2: The Feint After Post-Vaccination Fainting
Other examples of this genre applied to the Covid-19 event are plentiful and easy to find in the media that have been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or sponsored by Pfizer and other hidden hands. I will describe just one more that shows that it was still being used in April 2023, three years on as the official narrative becomes untenable.
On April 10th, 2023, NBC News published a 3,400-word piece on the “fainting nurse” social media frenzy that occurred in December 2020 when frontline healthcare workers in the US started to receive the mRNA shots (9). The vaccination of nurse Tiffany Dover was recorded by a local television news crew because it was the big day when the savior vaccines had arrived to supposedly end the pandemic. Unfortunately, the cameras recorded her fainting shortly after receiving her injection.
The article describes how “conspiracy theorists” created an episode of “participatory misinformation” as they circulated her story on social media, exaggerated what the fainting meant, spread rumors of her death, and engaged in a campaign of harassment (a.k.a. doxing)[10]. Tiffany remained steadfastly supportive of the vaccination program and believed that her fainting was inconsequential, yet she was traumatized by the doxing and chose to remain silent for two full years. Unfortunately, this choice only intensified the rumors of her death or of her enforced silence.
My critique of this article includes no support for the people who engage in doxing and wild speculation. My criticism is that this genre of journalism consistently associates all disagreement with the official narratives as the work of wild-eyed, deplorable bullies. It consistently ignores the hundreds of scientists who are publishing peer-reviewed articles on vaccine injuries and questioning the abandonment of standard public health policy that started in 2020.
Brandy Zadrozny, the author of this article about Tiffany Dover, felt it was necessary to associate Tiffany’s story with other instances of unhinged conspiracy theory such as the 2020 election being stolen from Donald Trump and the denial of the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Thus, the very intentional implication here is that if you are concerned about the accumulation of medical journal articles describing a long list of vaccine-related injuries, think twice. You don’t want to be dismissed as one of those cruel and deranged fools who have lost touch with reality. Your family, friends and colleagues are all being trained to ostracize you for wrongthink, so forget about it. You are the mark that needs to be cooled out.
Instead of treating the “participatory misinformation” campaign as a problem of the deplorables that the righteous must struggle to solve, the writers of such articles could start to wonder if there is some legitimate anger driving such regrettable phenomena. There were very sound reasons to worry about a pharmaceutical product being rushed to market in less than a year, especially one that was based on a novel biotechnology.
Additionally, fainting, after all, is not always a minor incident, and it is rational to be concerned about it happening so soon after a medical treatment. Furthermore, it would not be unreasonable for a healthy person to decide he would rather risk infection with the virus than suffer side-effects from an unproven vaccine. Not everyone has the good fortune to faint “into the arms of two nearby doctors” (as the fainting was described in the article). Some people break bones and sustain skull fractures. Some people have their adverse reaction after they leave the clinic and are driving home. Some have it months later.
After more than two years since vaccinations began, it should have been clear that, because the mRNA treatments were not as safe and effective as promised, no one should have ever been coerced into taking them. Their heavy promotion, backed by well-funded propaganda campaigns of half-truths and bold lies, was unethical, as was the gaslighting, shaming and shunning of the people who demanded bodily autonomy.
However, at this late date, after so much has been officially admitted about the adverse effects, including death, the author claimed that Tiffany’s story became a rallying point for those “who falsely believe that vaccines are killing and injuring people in droves.” (italics added) Those last two words were probably chosen carefully because without them one could not say they “falsely believe.” It is a fact that they are killing and injuring people, but “in droves” may be ambiguous enough to make the statement passable for a quibbling fact checker. The sentence is now “partially true” if one wants to see it that way.
One can denounce the campaign of coercion and still let Tiffany have her proclaimed “belief” in the vaccines. The issue that should be discussed is the failure of medical ethics in public policy that led to the vilification of people who had a different belief. They did not want to submit themselves to a medical therapy that had been rushed to market with no long-term safety data to support its use. Despite the facts, this issue remains utterly invisible to the writers who specialize in this genre.
The final thing to mention about this article is that, like the article in The Atlantic, it uses the devices of fiction. It focuses on the emotional and physical condition of the subject and thus leads the reader to an engagement with her story. Her eyes are “wide and bright and terribly blue.” They are described again at the end of the article as “electric blue.” The writer emphasizes this because a post-vaccination photo of her was not lit well and her eye color was not visible, and this is what set off rumors that it was not really her in the photo. Nonetheless, the descriptions are unnecessary embellishments.
Readers don’t need to know her hair dye choices, either, but these too were described. This news article about a controversial pharmaceutical product could also be reported without the accompanying glamor photos of the very photogenic victim. There are, after all, less glamorous and less fortunate victims of vaccination who suffered fates worse than fainting[11]. Tiffany is alive and healthy, and she did not refuse to be filmed on the day of her vaccination. This isn’t really about a story about her fainting and its aftermath, however. The purpose of this genre is the feint—the fake out and distraction from what the public should really be paying attention to.
Example 3: Minimization in Scientific Journal Articles
Let’s return to the scientific journal articles. Concluding statements in scientific papers are not always about objective findings. They are interpretations and opinions by the authors, and they often seem to go in the direction of minimizing the problems revealed by the study. It has always been standard practice for researchers to be humble about the impact of their work, for their conclusions may be disproven by subsequent research. Nonetheless, when it comes to any research related to Covid-19, excessive hesitancy and even fear are evident.
For some reason, the medical specialists authoring these papers never express alarm or suggest a halt to vaccination of individuals who are at low risk of suffering serious harm from the viral infection. Recall that the infectious mortality rate was found to be about 0.1%, more or less, depending on one’s age. It is this low for healthy individuals and higher for the elderly and the unhealthy. As mentioned above, the rate became lower as doctors learned how to treat the infection and abandoned dangerous interventions. Another factor was the virus itself becoming less deadly.
Readers might respond that I am ignoring the millions of cases of “long covid,” but my response is that there is no clinical definition for it, and it may be no different than the post-viral syndrome associated with influenza—a phenomenon which never aroused alarm in society before 2020. The alleged symptoms of long covid also overlap with adverse reactions to the vaccine, so if we must be concerned about long covid, we also have to object to the continued use of therapies that use the spike protein to induce immunity. Doctors are developing treatments for reactions to the spike protein, whether they came from the virus or the mRNA jabs. It is also likely that “long covid” is a side effect of “long type 2 diabetes” and various other chronic (i.e. long duration) illnesses that are the root causes of death by SARS-Cov-2.
The ritualistic minimization of vaccine injuries in the scientific reports is obviously an essential bow of fealty to the scientific priesthood. It is the modern equivalent of Galileo in the 17th century affirming the existence and greatness of God in order to, hopefully, have heliocentrism taken seriously. These researchers may feel privately that the matter is urgent, but they know that in order to shine any light on the issue in a respected medical journal, they will have to bow down to the official doctrine.
They justify it as the only way to shine some light on the problem and change the system from within. If they really thought the matter was so trivial, they wouldn’t study it. Medical personnel could just treat their patients without worrying about the speculative role vaccines might have played in their illnesses. A doctor treating a cancer rarely worries about whether it was caused by fallout from nuclear weapons testing because identifying this cause would make no difference in the treatment. Her job is to treat the patient. However, in the late 1950s, some doctors saw a reason to speak out and create the political pressure that halted nuclear tests in the atmosphere in 1963.
The paper cited in the appendix below, to conclude this long essay, was chosen as an example of this minimization. It is concerned with liver diseases following vaccination. I found this one because recently I took note of the 15th mRNA-jabbed person in my social circles to suffer a severe health crisis since January 2021. In the two years before then, I knew of only one medical emergency among friends, family, and colleagues. In the 15th person’s case, it was a pyogenic liver abscess that put him in the ICU and almost killed him.
In studies like this that conclude by minimizing the problem, there is an obvious problem in saying the number of cases is “very small in relation to the hundreds of millions of vaccinations.” When one considers all of the research on adverse events in all other organ systems, one starts to think, as Yogi Berra said, “Little things are big.”
Yogi Bear was smarter than the average bear, and Yogi Berra, the “dumb” sage of baseball legend, was, it seems, far smarter than the average immunologist. Little things do start to add up. One case of lymphoma, or fainting, or liver disease may seem insignificant when seen is isolation, but when all the adverse events are seen together from a distance, along with a sharp rise in all-cause mortality, we can start to ask the right questions[12].
They are similar to the questions we should ask about the compounding effects of numerous environmental toxicants and pollutants humans are exposed to. One chemical might be declared safe at a certain exposure, but what is the combined effect of hundreds of such chemicals? It looks like the harms are extremely rare only when cases and types of injuries are studied in isolation and the victims are also kept isolated.
We could also add Yogi Berra’s other gems of wisdom that apply to the entire Covid phenomenon. When we find that not much has changed since Galileo’s time, recall that Yogi Berra said, “it’s like déjà vu all over again,” and when you think about all that has happened since March 2020, remember he said, “the future ain’t what it used to be.”
Background:Liver diseases post-COVID-19 vaccination is extremely rare but can occur. A growing body of evidence has indicated that portal vein thrombosis, autoimmune hepatitis, raised liver enzymes and liver injuries, etc., may be potential consequence of COVID-19 vaccines.
Objectives: To describe the results of a systematic review for new-onset and relapsed liver disease following COVID-19 vaccination.
[…]
Results: Two hundred seventy-five cases from one hundred and eighteen articles were included in the qualitative synthesis of this systematic review. Autoimmune hepatitis (138 cases) was the most frequent pathology observed post-COVID-19 vaccination, followed by portal vein thrombosis (52 cases), raised liver enzymes (26 cases) and liver injury (21 cases). Other cases include splanchnic vein thrombosis, acute cellular rejection of the liver, jaundice, hepatomegaly, acute hepatic failure and hepatic porphyria. Mortality was reported in anyof the included cases [sic]* for acute hepatic failure (n = 4, 50%), portal vein thrombosis (n = 25, 48.1%), splanchnic vein thrombosis (n = 6, 42.8%), jaundice (n = 1, 12.5%), raised liver enzymes (n = 2, 7.7%), and autoimmune hepatitis (n = 3, 2.2%). Most patients were easily treated without any serious complications, recovered and did not require long-term hepatic therapy.
Conclusion: Reported evidence of liver diseases post-COIVD-19 vaccination should not discourage vaccination against this worldwide pandemic. The number of reported cases is relatively very small in relation to the hundreds of millions of vaccinations that have occurred, and the protective benefits offered by COVID-19 vaccination far outweigh the risks.
* * *
Special mention to Dr. Denis Rancourt for bringing the work of Erving Goffman to my attention.
NOTES:
[1] J.R. Barrio, “Consensus science and the peer review.” Molecular Imaging and Biology. April 2009, 11(5): 293. doi: 10.1007/s11307-009-0233-0. PMID: 19399558; PMCID: PMC2719747 [back]
[3] Louis Menand, “Crooked Psychics and Cooling the Mark Out,” The New Yorker, June 18, 2015. “The classic exposition of the practice of helping victims of a con adapt to their loss is the sociologist Erving Goffman’s 1952 article ‘On Cooling the Mark Out.’ … ‘After the blowoff has occurred,’ Goffman explained, about the operation of a con, ‘one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team-mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.’ What happened stays out of the paper.”[back]
[4] Angelo Maria Pezzullo, Cathrine Axfors, Despina G. Contopoulos-Ioannidis, Alexandre Apostolatos, John P.A. Ioannidis, “Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly informed from pre-vaccination national seroprevalence studies,” Environmental Research, January 2023. This study found that Covid-19’s infection fatality rate (IFR) by age was under 0.1% for those under 70. The breakdown by age was 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.003% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at 30-39 years, 0.035% at 40-49 years, 0.129% at 50-59 years, and 0.501% at 60-69 years.[back]
[5] S. Alhumaid et al., “New-onset and relapsed liver diseases following COVID-19 vaccination: a systematic review.” BMC Gastroenterology, October 2022; 22(1):433. doi: 10.1186/s12876-022-02507-3. PMID: 36229799; PMCID: PMC9559550. The abstract states, “Mortality was reported in any of the included cases.” Was the erroneous use of any in this sentence a typographical error or a deliberate ambiguity put into the abstract? There are three options for a correct interpretation: 1. Mortality wasnot reported inany of the included cases… 2. Mortality was reported in many of the included cases… 3. Mortality was reported in all of the included cases. It is difficult to know the authors’ intended meaning regarding this significant finding from their research. The sample sizes (six figures indicated as sample sizes, n=x) total 41 cases out of the 275 cases studied. This is a fatality rate of 15%, but it is difficult to know what the intended meaning of the 32 authors is, due to the ambiguity described above. One can conclude that any of, many of, all of, or not any of the authors read the abstract carefully before it went to press. In any case, even if there were no deaths, one could take issue with the statement that “patients were easily treated without any serious complications, recovered and did not require long-term hepatic therapy.” Many patients would not feel so optimistic about having had such damage inflicted on a vital organ which is, considering the contemporary food supply and environment, already exposed to enough harm.[back]
[10] It is important to note that this phenomenon has many precedents that occurred long before social media existed. The Dreyfus Affair (1890s) and the death of Azaria Chamberlain in Australia (1980) are just two examples one could refer to. The latter one was the butt of several jokes in poor taste broadcast on mainstream media outlets (referencing the apocryphal phrase “A dingo ate my baby!”) Back then, the incident was referred to benignly by the mass media as a regrettable “media circus.” The panic in the mainstream media about the new panics is interesting in the way it views professional journalism as beyond reproach and “participatory misinformation” as an urgent new threat posed by irresponsible, out-of-control social media platforms and a monstrous new type of people that apparently did not exist in the past.[back]
[12] Ed Dowd, “Cause Unknown”: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 (Skyhorse, 2022). Website: https://www.theyliedpeopledied.com/: “Between March of 2021 and February of 2022, 61,000 millennials died excessively above the prior 5-year base trend line… The relative timespan and rate of change into the fall of 2021 is a signal that a harmful event occurred to this 25-44 age group. This means that millennials started dying in large numbers at the same times when vaccines and boosters were rolled out. The vaccine clearly had a role, as many previously hesitant folks were forced into compliance.” Or see Aubrey Marcus, “Why Are Healthy People Dying Suddenly Since 2021? w/ Ed Dowd,” January 5, 2023. (31:40~).[back]
Dennis Riches studied French language, history and literature, and language pedagogy and applied linguistics during his undergraduate and graduate studies. Since 2004, he has taught English and modern history at Seijo University in Tokyo. In recent years, he has done translations and written extensively on his personal blogs, and some of those articles have been published in the online journals Global Research and The Greanville Post. He authored the book Sayonara Nukes: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Energy and Nuclear Weapons, which was published in 2018 by the Center for Glocal Studies at Seijo University.
The quest to develop and refine technologically advanced means to commit mass homicide continues on, with Pentagon tacticians ever eager to make the military leaner and more lethal. Drone swarms already exist, and as insect-facsimile drones are marketed and produced, we can expect bug drone swarms to appear soon in the skies above places where suspected “bad guys” are said to reside—along with their families and neighbors. Following the usual trajectory, it is only a matter of time before surveillance bug drones are “upgraded” for combat, making it easier than ever to kill human beings by whoever wishes to do so, whether military personnel, factional terrorists, or apolitical criminals. The development of increasingly lethal and “creative” means to commit homicide forges ahead not because anyone needs it but because it is generously funded by the U.S. Congress under the assumption that anything labeled a tool of “national defense” is, by definition, good.
To some there may seem to be merits to the argument from necessity for drones, given the ongoing military recruitment crisis. There are many good reasons why people wish not to enlist in the military anymore, but rather than review the missteps taken and counterproductive measures implemented in the name of defense throughout the twenty-first century, administrators ignore the most obvious answer to the question why young people are less enthusiastic than ever before to sign their lives away. Why did the Global War on Terror spread from Afghanistan and Iraq to engulf other countries as well? Critics have offered persuasive answers to this question, above all, that killing, torturing, maiming, and terrorizing innocent people led to an outpouring of sympathy for groups willing to resist the invaders of their lands. As a direct consequence of U.S. military intervention, Al Qaeda franchises such as ISIS emerged, proliferated, and spread. Yet the military plows ahead undeterred in its professed mission to eliminate “the bad guys,” with the killers either oblivious or somehow unaware that they are the primary creators of “the bad guys.”
Meanwhile, the logic of automation has been openly and enthusiastically embraced as the way of the future for the military, as in so many other realms. Who needs soldiers anyway, given that they can and will be replaced by machines? Just as grocery stores today often have more self-checkout stations than human cashiers, the military has been replacing combat pilots with drone operators for years. Taking human beings altogether out of the killing loop is the inevitable next step, because war architects focus on lethality, as though it were the only measure of military success. Removing “the human factor” from warfare will increase lethality and may decrease, if not eliminate, problems such as PTSD. But at what price?
Never a very self-reflective lot, war architects have even less inclination than ever before to consider whether their interventions have done more harm than good because of the glaring case of Afghanistan. After twenty years of attempting to eradicate the Taliban, the U.S. military finally retreated in 2021, leaving the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (as they now refer to themselves) in power, just as they were in 2001. By focusing on how slick and “neat” the latest and greatest implements of techno-homicide are, those who craft U.S. military policy can divert attention from their abject incompetence at actually winning a war or protecting, rather than annihilating, innocent people.
For decades now, military officers have expressed outright disdain toward those who dare to broach the topic of civilian casualties. When asked about the Iraqi death toll after the 1991 Gulf War, General Colin Powell infamously muttered, “That’s not really a number I’m terribly interested in.” General Tommy Franks, when asked a version of the same question after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, similarly quipped, “You know, we don’t do body counts.”
Once a war has been waged, “rules of engagement” are specified by military officers themselves, which is one of the reasons why the killing of civilians seen throughout the “War on Terror” has occurred wherever and whenever wars have been fought. In the twenty-first century, however, the problem of designating who is “fair game” for slaughter is far more serious, for the assassination of suspects has been rebranded as targeted killing and claimed by the highest authorities of the U.S. government, including the Department of Justice, to be perfectly permissible, even in “areas outside active hostilities,” i.e., beyond war zones. That the Barack Obama administration somehow persuaded nearly the entire nation to believe that it was not only acceptable but in fact laudable to execute U.S. citizen suspects located outside a war zone without so much as an indictment, much less a court trial, was a remarkable accomplishment, and in some ways unbelievable.
Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden followed the precedent set by Obama in radically expanding the use of lethal drones to target suspects on hit lists drawn up by their own administrations. The normalization of assassination achieved by the Obama administration was well illustrated by Trump’s authorization of the intentional and premeditated execution of an Iranian general located in Baghdad, General Qasem Soleimani (on January 3, 2020), as though this were a matter of business as usual. Indeed, Trump gleefully bragged about having executed a high-profile public figure using a lethal drone, effectively asserting the right to target named foreign officials at the pleasure of the U.S. president. By openly assassinating General Soleimani, Trump essentially put any leader who dares to demur from U.S. policy on notice that they, too, can be eliminated through the push of a button at the caprice of the U.S. executive.
Most of the thousands of victims of drone strikes have been unnamed persons (of unknown identity at the time of their demise) located in areas where “unlawful enemy combatants” were said to hide. After having claimed that they had killed yet another “senior Al Qaeda leader” in northwest Syria on May 3, 2023, officials at the Pentagon emended their report, acknowledging that the victim, identified by locals and his family as Lotfi Hassan Misto, a 56-year-old shepherd, may not have been the “bad guy” they had been pursuing after all. To soften the blow, a Pentagon spokesperson suggested that Misto was nonetheless somehow “associated” with Al Qaeda, a vague assertion backed by no evidence and in fact denied by area residents and effectively refuted by terrorist experts who noted the highly significant absence of jihadist group chatter in the aftermath of the event.
It is most plausible that on May 3, 2023, the “savvy” techno-killers destroyed yet another family like that of Zemari Ahmadi, who, along with nine other people, including seven children, was annihilated by the U.S. military in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 29, 2021, in a drone strike initially touted by the public relations team at the Pentagon as the successful neutralization of a terrorist attack. Ahmadi, an aid worker, had the misfortune of driving a white Toyota Corolla, which someone in the “intelligence” community had determined was being used by a “bad guy” to plan and perpetrate an attack on the airport. The usual confirmation bias kicked in as Ahmadi was followed around all day by surveillance drones while he performed actions interpreted as “suspicious” by those looking to “get some.”
After the fact of their demise, the victims of U.S. military interventions are essentially fictionalized in the minds of those who ended their lives. This tendency is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than by Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s response to a question (posed by Errol Morris in his 2003 documentary film, The Fog of War) about “mistakes made” by any commander during the prosecution of a war:
“He has made mistakes in the application of military power. He has killed people, unnecessarily, his own troops or other troops, through mistakes, through errors of judgment.”
Note McNamara’s stunning omission of civilians among the possible victims of commanders’ mistakes.
The fictionalization of civilian victims of drone strikes is especially troubling in cases where the U.S. government offers no explanation of what transpired when named persons such as Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and Mamana Bibi are erased from existence. Abdulrahman was the 16-year-old son of suspected Al Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, and Mamana Bibi was a 68-year-old grandmother “taken out” by a U.S. drone while picking okra all alone in her family’s fields. In many cases there has not even been a report of any U.S. missiles having been fired when incinerated corpses are discovered by locals on the ground.
The capacity for high-level decision makers in the military to deny any and all responsibility for what have been decried by the public as war crimes has been amply illustrated in case after case. For example, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison was blamed on a handful of “bad apple” low-level grunts, when in fact they were acting in accordance with their interpretations of what they were asked to do. The problem in such cases is two-fold. First, low-level soldiers are required to obey the orders of their superior officers. Second, when officers or bureaucrats redefine key terminology, such as the use of the neologistic “enhanced interrogation techniques” in place of “torture,” which most everyone seems to agree is wrong, then no one should be surprised when atrocity ensues. Similarly, “rules of engagement” said to permit the targeting of any person present (as in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004) will naturally generate civilian deaths. Again, when Reuters journalists were killed in 2007 by soldiers in an Apache helicopter hovering above New Baghdad, film footage of the event made public by Wikileaks (Collateral Murder) was met with the horror and outrage of people all around the globe. The Pentagon concluded its investigation of the killings with the expected announcement that no crimes were committed on that day.
The CIA ran drone operations outside areas of active hostilities for years (most likely to avoid congressional oversight), and it appears that they continue to do so in places such as Somalia, where seven civilians, including three children were killed by a “suspected” U.S. drone strike on January 30, 2023, not claimed by the Pentagon. This is a case where irrefutable evidence of homicide, dead people destroyed by a missile and discovered by bereft family members and friends, has not prompted U.S. administrators to accept any responsibility whatsoever for their actions, no doubt under the “get out of jail free” (a.k.a. “state secrets privilege”) pretext according to which the publication of facts somehow undermines national security.
What facts undermine are spurious claims by warmakers to be accomplishing anything worthwhile for anyone but death industry profiteers in running this nonstop killing machine. Originally the marketing line for unmanned rather than manned combat planes was that the new technology would save troops’ lives. But by using lethal drones, and expanding their use to places where there were no U.S. military personnel on the ground to protect, the presumption against killing civilians was weakened to the point where, today, in many cases, only civilians’ lives are being risked by missiles launched from drones. The victims of drone strikes are labeled “collateral damage,” just as they have been for decades in combat theaters, but according to the lethality maximizers, so long as the killers “intend” to kill bad guys, they never do anything wrong. They may have curtailed the lives of innocent men, women, and children who never posed a threat to anyone, but it was all part of a good faith effort to defend the nation.
This normalization of assassination as a standard operating procedure of warfare not only endangers civilians in order to protect combat soldiers but also flouts widely accepted conventions regarding the proper conduct of war. According to longstanding international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions, soldiers are to be provided with the opportunity to surrender before they are killed. In drone strikes, the targets (usually unarmed) are summarily executed without warning under the assumption that they are guilty until proven innocent, which is of course impossible for them to do ex post facto.
What the military knows how to do is perpetrate mass homicide, and this they will continue to do, if they are not somehow reined in. The revolving door between government administrators and military industry makes it difficult to see how this might be accomplished. The problem is not only one of corruption, although that is a part of the problem. Even more intractable is that the persons who rise in the ranks of the military are precisely those who wholeheartedly agree that conflicts are to be resolved through homicide. (It turns out, felicitously for many of them, that the death industry is also highly lucrative.) It matters little whether military leaders such as current secretary of defense and former Raytheon board member Lloyd Austin are profoundly self-deceived or willfully ignore the carnage and misery which their policies have sown for people far from U.S. shores. They occupy positions of power and advise the president on matters of foreign policy.
Not everyone who joins the military rises in the ranks to become an administrator, having bought into the company line. Certainly drone operators are not always happy to learn that they have been transformed into contract killers, required to execute strangers at the request of “the customer,” and expected to deal with their reservations and guilt for what they have done through dosing themselves with psychiatric medications. Happily for war entrepreneurs, however, machines will solve all of the problems of hesitation to kill and critical thinking about what exactly the guiding strategic objective is supposed to be in “whack-a-mole and all of their family” missions conducted by soldiers at no risk of death when they terminate the lives of fellow human beings.
When computer algorithms have replaced human judgment in decisions about when and where to launch missiles from drones, it will become even more difficult to hold anyone responsible than it already is. When an automated program determines that a swarm of drones should be sent out to kill suspected “bad guys” located in an area inhabited by many civilians, no one will be held accountable when some of those civilians are stripped of their lives. Those who wrote the algorithms will continue to shirk personal responsibility by muttering the usual shibboleths: “Mistakes were made.” “Stuff happens.” Note the absence of an active subject in these sorts of reflexive responses to the military’s commission of war crimes. The move from evading responsibility through the use of passive verbs to the outright denial that any agent of the U.S. government has ever done anything wrong will be seamless once lethal drone missions are computer programmed, for there will be no identifiable moral agent behind any specific decision at all.
It is a single-minded obsession with maximizing lethality which has created the perpetual motion drone killing machine, and the problem will only grow worse with automation. The “drone warriors” have amply displayed their insouciance toward the thousands of innocent victims whom they have already killed, so it falls on people who do not serve as cogs in the machine to pose legal and moral objections to what has been going on now for more than twenty years. This is easier said than done, for citizens have become inured to the atrocities funded by them as a result of the military’s effective management of the mainstream media. With the U.S. government engaged in the suppression and outright censorship of counternarratives, the problem of profligate killing has become even more challenging to address, for citizens and politicians alike are largely ignorant of the crimes committed in their name.
Indeed, the Pentagon exerts such control over the narrative transmitted to the populace today that whistleblowers and others who expose war crimes, such as Julian Assange, are ruthlessly criminalized and persecuted as a direct result of highly effective discreditation campaigns. When the government labels even nonviolent dissidents in the homeland as extremists, then the next logical step will be to “neutralize” them, too, by all means necessary. With artificial intelligence already being used to identify so-called extremists, and the looming specter of automated lethal drones ready to deploy, it has never been more dangerous to defy the government. Nonetheless, we must find a way to turn off this killing machine while it is still possible to do.
Laurie Calhoun is the Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. She is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters. Questioning the COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical Times will be published by the Libertarian Institute in 2023.
Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance President, Dr. Pierre Kory, discusses his new book ‘The War on Ivermectin,’ launched in partnership with ICAN Press. The War on Ivermectin is the personal and professional narrative of Dr. Kory and his crusade to recommend a safe, inexpensive, generic medicine as the key to ending the pandemic.
‘The War on Ivermectin’ marks the launch of ICAN Press, a new division of The Informed Consent Action Network. Order your copy directly from ICAN, at ICANDECIDE.SHOP, today!
As Europe appears to be falling apart. Germany is now officially in recession as de-industrialisation follows its green energy policies and the catastrophic damage to the Nord Stream pipelines. As Bloomberg put it last week: ‘Europe’s economic engine is breaking down’. France remains in uproar as protests continue nationwide. And any idea that that it is trying to free itself from the shackles of carbon neutrality is wishful thinking at best, naïve at worst. Dutch farmers are still under attack from their own government after the EU approved a farm buy-out plan to meet their climate goals.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the European Parliament hosted an event a couple of weeks ago titled ‘Beyond Growth‘, as that is the clear direction of travel for much of Europe.
What is surprising, however, is that this EU event in Brussels expressed so little concern about the impact on its citizens, let alone for the economic prospects of the Union. Bizarrely, the event even appeared to be celebrating the decline of European economies which had previously brought growth and prosperity to their citizens. It was as if the European Parliament has been captured by eco-terrorists who regard industrialisation as a cancer which requires removal. They seem to have all fallen under the spell of a doom cult which repeats the mantra that we live on a planet of finite resources, and so economic growth based on consumption is not only unethical but ultimately doomed.
The EU president and High Priestess of this cult, Ursula von der Leyen, reminded the EU conference of an earlier iteration of this mantra when in 1972 the Club of Rome published its ‘Limits to Growth’ report. What she failed to mention is that this belief in limited resources, which has been drip-fed into the minds of the masses for more than 50 years, is based on the erroneous assumptions of the Rev Malthus in the 18th century that population growth would inevitably outstrip food supply. But both the Club of Rome and Malthus have been proved wrong: the planet has shown that it is more than capable of feeding its current population of eight billion.
Yet the belief in overpopulation runs deep, with tragic consequences as a ghostly infanticide now infects the planet. A new documentary, Birthgap, reveals that because so many women have denied themselves children, at some point global population levels will collapse dramatically. Which means that those who have consciously chosen not to have children to ‘save the planet’ have made a pointless gesture. This is a message that eco-terrorists do not want to hear. Indeed, students in Cambridge recently tried to prevent the Birthgap documentary from being screened.
Whatever eco-terrorists might claim, the Earth has plenty of resources. Even oil isn’t running out any time soon. A problem for the West is that much of the raw materials on the planet (the oil, the rare earths etc etc) happens to be in the ‘wrong’ hands. It is not without irony that those countries which the West has shunned, banned and sanctioned are the ones with the raw materials.
There was another but much less reported European economic conference last week. It was held in Moscow and brought together the Eurasian economies. By contrast with the earlier Brussels event, this gathering will have taken growth as an a given, and therefore looked at ways to boost the prosperity of their populations. Amongst the topics considered were ensuring energy and food security, technological and financial independence, speeding up digital transformation, eliminating trade barriers, and transport infrastructure development. Furthermore, there will be a meeting of 81 nations in St Petersburg this month to discuss a gold-backed alternative to the dollar. All these countries can look forward to rising living standards, while we in the virtue-signalling West have a bleak future. Trapped in our 15-minute cities, if Just Stop Oil and the other eco-fascists have their way, we won’t even be allowed out to collect wood while it is more than probable that wood burners will be banned in urban areas – to save the planet, of course. ‘Beyond growth’ is not a welcome prospect if you want to stay alive on planet Earth.
There are signs, nevertheless, that a backlash in the West is beginning. In the last few weeks a group of state attorneys from 23 states in the US have threatened members of the UN’s Net Zero Insurance Alliance (NZIA) with legal action because they risk violating US anti-trust laws. As a consequence many high-profile members, including Lloyd’s of London, have pulled out of the alliance. Is common sense is beginning to return? We have to pray it is.
Lucy Wyatt is an author based in Somerset. Her book Approaching Chaos: Could an ancient archetype save C21st civilisation? is available on Amazon.
Freedom of Information request by Dr Busby to Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston UK showed increased level of Uranium in all the environmental measurement filters. He discusses the health implications of this for Europe in an interview, where he outlines what his research found in Iraq, increases in cancer and congenital birth defects in Fallujah. His paper on the Ukraine Uranium in UK is at: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat…
Nobody believes in Remdesivir anymore. How can you possibly make a case for it? Remdesivir is so lethal it got nicknamed “Run Death Is Near” after it started killing thousands of Covid patients in the hospital. The experts claimed that Remdesivir would stop Covid; instead, it stopped kidney function, then blasted the liver and other organs.
As word got around, some patients started showing up in the emergency room with signs saying, “NO REMDESIVIR” and refusing to take it. (Not that their refusal helped: many were given it anyway, often without their knowledge.)
When I heard that Remdesivir is still being used, I couldn’t believe it. How could hospitals be so brazen as to push this killer drug, even after the lawsuits started flying? Fourteen California families are now suing three hospitals, claiming their loved ones suffered wrongful deaths from what they call “the Remdesivir protocol.” Expect other lawsuits to follow, because the Remdesivir carnage was nationwide.
I began to poke around to see if hospitals are still giving Remdesivir and I think I’ve found the smoking gun. Two smoking guns, in fact. First, it’s still listed on the NIH web site as its standard of care for Covid. Second (and in my opinion, more importantly), the CMS.gov official website says, “The COVID-19 public health emergency (PCE) ended at the end of the day on May 11, 2023.” Two sentences later, it states, “The enhanced payments described on this page will end on September 30, 2023.” And there it is, listed in bold: Remdesivir.
Allow me to translate the bureaucratese. “Even though we acknowledge the Covid emergency is over, the federal government will continue to pay lavish bonuses to hospitals who kill their patients with Remdesivir through the end of the fiscal year.”
Money; it all comes down to money. There’s SO much money in the Covid con game. The CARES Act of 2020 slathered $2 trillion across the country to deal with Covid, and lots of it went to hospitals. The 20 largest hospitals enjoyed a 62 percent increase in their combined net assets during those glorious Covid years, providing many top executives with a $10 million salary or more.
Alas, the federal government insisted that if hospitals wanted to get paid, they had to treat Covid patients with Remdesivir. The fact that this drug was made by their good friends at Gilead Science and everybody was getting rich from the deals they cut had absolutely nothing to do with it, of course. It was all done for love of the people. But just to make sure that Remdesivir could attain its current billion-dollar status, the feds incentivized hospitals with a 20 percent boost to the entire hospital bill of patients treated with Remdesivir.
And here’s the kicker: the feds did not allow hospitals to even consider using safe, cheap drugs like ivermectin.
“Remdesivir caused a lot of renal failures,” Ralph Lorigo told me. Mr. Lorigo is a lawyer in Buffalo who spent last year helping families rescue loved ones who were trapped inside hospitals that were killing them. “If you got Covid, the hospital put you on this government protocol and didn’t even check if you have kidney disease. There was a real lack of monitoring.”
“I was surprised when the FDA approved it, even though The World Health Organization (WHO) had advised against using it. But Big Pharma had the strength to push it through.”
He added, “Hospitals had stopped doing elective cases, which is how they made money. So now they made money giving people Remdesivir and putting them on ventilators, which the government also paid big bonuses for. Every day you’re on a vent, it’s damaging you. When I managed to get people out of the hospital and off the vent and they got ivermectin, they lived. When I couldn’t get into court or lost the case, they died.”
It’s way past time for there to be a hard stop on the use of Remdesivir. And we must work fast to save the children. “In late April 2022, the FDA even approved remdesivir as the first and only COVID-19 treatment for children under 12, including babies as young as 28 days, an approval that boggles the mind, considering COVID-19 is rarely serious in children while remdesivir is ineffective and carries a risk of serious, and deadly, side effect,” writes Dr. Joseph Mercola.
In all my reporting on the Hospital Death Protocol, I’ve never heard a single person say, “You’re wrong. My mother perked right up when they gave her Remdesivir and the ventilation made her bounce out of bed. They saved her life!”
Instead, my inbox and Twitter feed are filled with messages that would make you break down and cry. The Bereaved Army in America needs an investigation into exactly who shattered their lives and why.
Stella Paul is the pen name of a writer in New York who has covered medical issues for over a decade. In 2021, she lost her husband in a locked down nursing home in New York City where he had been brutally isolated for almost a year. He died one week after getting the vaccine. Stella is focused on exposing the Hospital Death Protocol to honor her husband’s memory and to support thousands of bereaved families.
US Senator Lindsey Graham’s name has been trending on social media in recent days. As exposed in a video circulating on the internet, on May 26, during a trip to Ukraine, the Republican allegedly said that killing Russians was a good investment. Obviously, the statement generated controversy and all sorts of reactions, including state measures on the part of Russia. However, the lack of clarification on the case leaves many questions unanswered.
In the aforementioned video, the senator seems to say: “And the Russians are dying… it’s the best money we’ve ever spent.” At the time, Graham was personally speaking to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky. It is known that Lindsey led an American delegation on an official trip to Kiev, in which topics of interest to both countries in the context of the current conflict would have been discussed. The meeting at which the controversial phrase was allegedly voiced took place during this trip.
There are no means to prove the veracity of the video. Some analysts have claimed that there is a media editing connecting Graham’s words. According to some experts, the mention of the death of Russians and the comment about money were not originally in the same sentence. However, as well as there is no proof to believe in the edited version that circulates on the networks, there is also no full and official version to verify what was actually said by the Senator. Therefore, there is no certainty about what happened at the meeting.
Graham responded to the allegations circulating on the networks by classifying them as “Russian propaganda“. He said in a letter to Reuters that he told Zelensky that “it has been a good investment by the United States to help liberate Ukraine”, with no mention on the murder of Russians. However, despite possible video editing, it is evident that at some point in the conversation there was such a mention, and Graham failed to clarify what he really thinks about killing Russians.
Regardless of the veracity of the video, Graham’s accusations that the case is related to some kind of “Russian propaganda” are absolutely unsubstantiated. The edited video was shared on the internet precisely by Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office. So, if there is any propaganda intent around the case, it is on the part of Kiev, not Russia. Russians just reacted to something that was posted on social media and generated outrage among netizens and ordinary people.
In addition to the strong responses on social networks, the US senator also suffered state sanctions for his possible declaration. Moscow’s authorities have added the politician to a list of wanted international criminals due to his Russophobic behavior. It is necessary to emphasize that the case comes amid a serious wave of anti-Russian intolerance fomented by the Collective West as a reaction to the special military operation on the borders with Ukraine. Moscow has done its best to combat anti-Russian mentality around the world, and, in this regard, measures are needed to sanction Russophobic hate-based behavior on the part of foreign officials.
In fact, there are two possibilities around the topic. On the one hand, it is possible that Graham was unconsciously used by Ukrainian propaganda. As well known, the Kiev regime maintains open neo-Nazi and anti-Russian rhetoric, publicly promoting every type of attack against Russian citizens. The government’s propaganda sectors, in this sense, could have deliberately edited the video, without the senator’s authorization, and published it to boost their racist campaigns and fuel the West’s Russophobic frenzy.
On the other hand, it is possible that the Americans themselves were involved in the case and consented to the misuse of Graham’s words for propaganda purposes. Considering that the politician failed to provide concrete clarification on the matter, limiting his response to vague accusations against Russia, the hypothesis of his direct involvement definitely cannot be ignored.
Furthermore, it is necessary to remember that Graham is already highly known for his Russophobic pronouncements, having even suggested the assassination of Vladimir Putin in March 2022. Being a fanatical supporter of American interventionism, advocating the death of Russians would not be something really new for him.
So, in order to clarify the situation once and for all and enable Moscow to reconsider its decision to include Graham on the wanted list, the Republican should make a public statement denying American interest in the death of Russians. Otherwise, even if there is video editing, the accusations against him will continue to be appropriate, given his omission.
Lucas Leiroz is an journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.
As Washington increasingly inflates the China threat, a few pieces of sly propaganda to sell that conflict are coming more into focus. Recent speeches devoted to China by key figures in the Biden administration largely rested on falsehoods that conveniently erase decades of mistakes by the American elite and therefore shift all the blame onto China.
Both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and national security advisor Jake Sullivan recently engaged in this rewriting of history that claims the Chinese stole American jobs and similarly that Beijing nefariously took control of the “clean” energy industry and will now use its position to coerce other nations, potentially slowing climate action.
One can see why it’s an attractive talking point for DC officials as it helps sell the conflict to working class Americans and environmentalists, but it’s simply not true.
The blame for American industry (green or not) relocating to China was caused by the greed of American elites who reaped massive profits in the process. Now they claim taking on China will bring back jobs and help tackle climate change. Nevermind that much of the American industry now being relocated out of China is going to other “low-cost” countries or that the US war machine is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter.
How are Yellen and Sullivan portraying the US as an innocent bystander that never could have foreseen the loss of US manufacturing to China?
Here’s Yellen speaking on April 20 at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:
Over the past few decades, China has experienced an impressive economic rise. Between 1980 and 2010, China’s economy grew by an average of 10 percent per year. This led to a truly remarkable feat: the rise of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. China’s rapid catch-up growth was fueled by its opening-up to global trade and pursuit of market reforms. … China has long used government support to help its firms gain market share at the expense of foreign competitors.
…The actions of China’s government have had dramatic implications for the location of global manufacturing activity. And they have harmed workers and firms in the U.S. and around the world…. China’s unfair economic practices have resulted in the over-concentration of the production of critical goods inside China.
And here’s Sullivan in his big speech about the new US international economic policy speaking at the Brookings Institution last month:
The so-called “China shock” that hit pockets of our domestic manufacturing industry especially hard—with large and long-lasting impacts—wasn’t adequately anticipated and wasn’t adequately addressed as it unfolded.
First off, to the point of government support. China no doubt provides subsidies for firms largely in fields deemed strategic. The US also does so (see: Inflation Reduction Act, oil, agriculture, auto, etc.).
No doubt that China has bent and broken WTO rules, but that was working just fine for US officials until it wasn’t. Now that officials like Sullivan have woken up to the fact that offshoring everything to China was a disastrous long-term security plan, they say it’s Beijing’s fault for the “China shock.” But contrary to Sullivan’s claim such an outcome couldn’t have been foreseen, it was “adequately anticipated.” Here’s a piece from the New York Times back in 2000 titled “Unions March Against China Trade Deal”:
Thousands of steelworkers, truck drivers, auto workers and other union members rallied on Capitol Hill and swept through the halls of Congress today in a show of muscle intended to block a trade agreement with China.
Their message, conveyed by union leaders and rank-and-file members who came from as far away as Michigan and Nebraska, was that trade was working for American corporations but not for American workers.
… [the union members] said, they are only opposing a deal with a country that does not respect workers’ rights and would stop at nothing, in their view, to steal the jobs that are the backbone of the American middle class.
It was obvious at the time what was happening; the real story is well-known, but just to recap: it was American elites’ greed that caused the American working class to lose 3.7 million decent paying jobs from 2001-2018.
Matt Stoller and Lukas Kunce tell the story from a national security perspective in a 2019 piece at The American Conservative. Using old US telecom equipment company Lucent Technologies as a starting point. In 1996, AT&T spun off Bell Labs into Lucent, which began to buy up companies in an effort to keep its stock price high. Lucent also lended money to risky startups who would then buy Lucent equipment. Then came the dot-com bust, and the company, already dealing with accounting scandals, began massive layoffs. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Stoller and Kunce write:
In the early 2000s, the telecom equipment market began to recover from the recession. Lucent’s new strategy, as Mottl put it, was to seek “margin” by offshoring production to China, continuing layoffs of American workers and hiring abroad. At first, it was the simpler parts of the telecom equipment, the boxes and assembly, but soon contract manufacturers in China were making virtually all of it. American telecom capacity would never return.
Lucent didn’t recover its former position. Chinese entrants, subsidized heavily by the Chinese state and using Western technology, underpriced Western companies. American policymakers, unconcerned with industrial capacity, allowed Chinese companies to capture market share despite the predatory subsidies and stolen technology. In 2006, French telecom equipment maker Alcatel bought Lucent, signifying the end of American control of Bell Labs. Today, Huawei, with state backing, dominates the market.
The erosion of much of the American industrial and defense industrial base proceeded like Lucent. First, in the 1980s and 1990s, Wall Street financiers focused on short-term profits, market power, and executive pay-outs over core competencies like research and production, often rolling an industry up into a monopoly producer. Then, in the 2000s, they offshored production to the lowest cost producer. This finance-centric approach opened the door to the Chinese government’s ability to strategically pick off industrial capacity by subsidizing its producers. Hand over cash to Wall Street, and China could get the American crown jewels.
Can you blame Beijing? If the US wants to sell off their industry, wouldn’t it be crazy not to take it? The fact is the Chinese used the system Washington built against them, and now the likes of Sullivan and Yellen cry foul.
Long Yongtu, China’s chief negotiator for WTO accession has defended Beijing’s role in the country’s economy, saying “when we promised to adopt a market economy, we made it absolutely clear that it would be a socialist market economy.”
The loss of US manufacturing decimated the country’s research capacity. It means the US relies on components made in China for aircraft carriers and submarines. It means a trillion dollars in defense spending helps enrich China – the very country which is supposedly behind the increased defense spending in the first place.
Of course, Yellen and Sullivan admit no mistakes by the US ruling class. It was impossible to know this would happen, they say, despite warnings at the time that this very situation would arise.
Not surprisingly, when Politico did a 20-year-anniversary story on China’s accession to the WTO, most US lawmakers didn’t want to talk about their vote to normalize trade relations with China in 2000 (which paved the way to the WTO).
But four American “experts” who did the planning and negotiating of the normalization of trade ties with China have zero regrets. That’s hardly surprising as it seems the number one qualification to become an expert is the ability to never admit being wrong. It also probably didn’t hurt that all these experts were rewarded with better positions and often cashed in afterwards.
***
Yellen and Sullivan also play up how confronting China is part of their newfound focus on minerals critical for a green economy, but what they’re really doing is disguising another lack of foresight by American elites. Sullivan says critical minerals are “the backbone of the clean-energy future” and that “clean-energy supply chains are at risk of being weaponized in the same way as oil in the 1970s, or natural gas in Europe in 2022.”
Many of these minerals are controlled by China and are also critical for the US defense industry. Who could have foreseen? Here’s another tidbit from that 2000 New York Times article:
In an effort to counter the unions’ message, the administration released a Commerce Department study showing that every state would benefit from increased trade with China. And Gen. Colin L. Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, endorsed the agreement, saying that among its other benefits it would be in the nation’s security interests.
How has that worked out? Well, it’s now unclear. As Army Technologypoints out:
The US Department of the Interior released a list of 35 minerals it deems essential to the economic and national security in 2018 (updated in 2022), amongst them many REEs. The problem for the US is that the local production of these materials is hugely limited.
The extent of reliance on imports varies from mineral to mineral. Beryllium is mainly used to create lightweight material used in fighter jets, lithium is essential for modern battery production and tin is used in electronics, including soldier semiconductors, a sector that is projected to reach a value of $17.5bn by 2030.
Whereas the US produces some of the minerals mentioned above, it entirely relies on China and other countries for many other supplies. Cerium is used in batteries and in most devices with a screen and magnets forged from neodymium and samarium are impervious to extreme temperatures that are used in fighter jet fin actuators, missile guidance, control systems, aircraft and tank motors, satellite communications and radar and sonar systems.
Here again, it was the US that moved rare earth and other mineral processing to China, that sold off mining operations to Chinese companies, and reaped the rewards for doing so. As Stoller and Kunce describe:
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Defense Department invested in the development of a technology to use what are known as rare-earth magnets. The investment was so successful that General Motors engineers, using Pentagon grants, succeeded in creating a rare earth magnet that is now essential for nearly every high-tech piece of military equipment in the U.S. inventory, from smart bombs and fighter jets to lasers and communications devices. The benefit of DARPA’s investment wasn’t restricted to the military. The magnets make cell phones and modern commercial electronics possible.
China recognized the value of these magnets early on. Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping famously said in 1992 that “The Middle East has oil, China has rare earth,” to underscore the importance of a rare earth strategy he adopted for China. Part of that strategy was to take control of the industry by manipulating the motivations of Wall Street.
And now as the US presses the situation in Taiwan and enacts chip controls (and pressures other countries to do the same), how is China considering retaliating? From Nikkei Asia:
China is considering prohibiting exports of certain rare-earth magnet technology in a move that would counter the U.S.’s advantage in the high-tech arena.
Japan specializes in making high-performance magnets from rare earths while the U.S. produces products that use the magnets… Washington has since moved to forge a rare-earth supply chain on U.S. soil. China’s share of all rare earths produced globally dropped to roughly 70% last year from about 90% a decade earlier, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
At the same time, China still holds a tight grip on processing rare earths. Most rare earths extracted in the U.S. go to China for refining before being shipped back to the U.S.
The CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act have added roughly 77,000 jobs so far, according to Jack Conness who does a neat job tracking the investments. That’s still a far cry from the 3.7 million jobs sent to China from 2001 to 2018, and it doesn’t look like many more will be returning despite the push to move production out of China as ties deteriorate. There’s the problem of automation, which FiveThirtyEight noted back in 2016:
Because of rising wages in China, the need for shorter supply chains and other factors, a small but growing group of companies are shifting production back to the U.S. But the factories they build here are heavily automated, employing a small fraction of the workers they would have a generation ago.
And there’s always the pesky issue of American workers asking for decent wages. Both Yellen and Sullivan waxed on about “friendshoring” – relocating from China to friendly countries, which also happen to below-wage. This is evidence of more short term thinking and prioritizing profits. Recall that China was initially thought of as friendly, and the selling point was that gifting it American industry would only make it friendlier.
Companies from China are already out in front of the friendshoring trend and are increasingly setting up shop in Mexico in order to be closer to their biggest market in the US.
Sullivan and Yellen don’t touch on that or just how difficult this reorganizing of supply chains will be. A 2020 Bank of America study found that it would cost American and European firms $1 trillion over five years to shift all the export-related manufacturing that is not intended for Chinese consumption out of China.
Additionally, China remains the main player in East Asian production networks, which makes manufacturing electronics products, for example, without Chinese parts and components increasingly unrealistic. Meanwhile, the US is still the largest source of inward foreign direct investment flows into ASEAN. From The Diplomat :
These different roles played by the U.S. and China in the East Asian economic system are a result of the distinct fundamentals of their domestic economies. China has pursued a production – and investment – based growth model in the past few decades, while the United States is a post-industrial, heavily financialized economy, sustained by high consumption and its central position in the global financial order. These fundamentals will prove to be harder to shape than unilaterally altering trade policies.
On the one hand, this means that attempts at isolating China are limited by the economic realities. “Friend-shoring,” “nearshoring,” and newfound industrial policies in the United States (and Europe) could very well lead to the diversification of U.S. imports, lessen the perceived national security risks associated with import dependence, and provide economic benefits to ASEAN countries by shifting some manufacturing activity from China to Southeast Asia. However, these policies are unlikely to fundamentally challenge China’s central position in regional trade and production networks in the mid-term. As Apple’s struggles in diversifying the production of the iPhone show, China-centered production networks are not easy to replicate in other countries, as Chinese logistics and suppliers possess significant advantages.
With that in mind, it’s likely this ends up as another situation similar to the purchasing of Russian oil via India:
When you look into it, "Made in India" is really "Assembled in India with China-made components". I suspect that's what most of those increasing imports are. https://t.co/YuHDGliAbo
If you have an hour to spare, I highly recommend reading this document, which summarizes and debunks many of the false and counterproductive “mandates.” This 22,000-word paper was produced by authors from the Isle of Man of all places.
It is divided into five sections including in-depth treatment of virus origins, iatrogenic deaths,lockdowns, mandated masking and “vaccines.” I think it might be the most impressive and persuasive piece of Covid writing I’ve read.
After reading the document, I was struck by the sheer number of massive scandals that have overlapped and cascaded – like a series of tsunamis – on the world in the past three-plus years.
By orders of magnitude, every one of these scandals dwarfs Watergate. As the authors point out, all are “horrific” and “nightmarish.”
Building upon the author’s arguments and adding a few of my own “scandals” that weren’t highlighted in this paper, I’ve identified 10 of these scandals. Again, each one by itself would probably qualify as the greatest scandal and outrage of our lifetimes.
When listed one after the other, readers are left with overwhelming evidence that our world must have gone completely mad. These scandals, roughly in chronological order, include:
(Mad) Scientists – funded and encouraged by our own government – probably created this virus.
The above possibility is not discussed in the document. However, from my perspective, I see only three virus-origin possibilities:
The virus crossed over into the human population via bats and then other animals.
The virus was created or modified in a lab and either accidentally “escaped” or was intentionally released.
… And a theory that is embraced by a growing number of people … there was no new novel coronavirus.
The latter two possibilities should, of course, qualify as massive, historic scandals.
If government-funded scientists (in America and China and perhaps other countries) created this virus, all they did was turn the world upside down and kill and sicken tens of millions of people (either from said lab-created virus and/or from the response to the alleged pandemic.)
Similarly, if one is convinced there was no new novel virus, our scientific experts and authorities would have perpetrated the Mother of All deadly scams on the world (somehow no virus ended up causing tens of millions of deaths).
(I happen to think there is a novel coronavirus and it probably was created in a lab, but it’s not any more lethal than the common flu.)
“Early spread” was either completely missed by the experts or, once certain officials realized this was happening, they covered up evidence of widely-circulating early transmission.
The authors of the Isle of Man document do address this possibility and even twice cite an article that I wrote on this topic.
As mega scandals go, “missed early spread” probably doesn’t register on the radar of 99 percent of the population.
However, I still think this might be the most important unreported story as, if this was known, the world should not have had to endure lockdowns and experienced mass panic. People would have realized there was no way to “slow” or “stop” the “spread” of this virus as the virus horses had already galloped across the globe.
This theory would also tell us that the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of this virus was minuscule as millions of people had already been infected with no noticeable spike in all-cause deaths. So the necessity of rolling out a new mRNA “vaccine” to “save millions of people” would have been viewed as a nonsensical head-scratcher to far more people.
The question would have become why do we need a possibly dangerous and rushed vaccine to save people … who weren’t dying or who faced no real risk from this virus.
The scandal here would have two components: Either our trusted public health officials didn’t know early spread was happening; or at least some did know this and went to great extremes to cover up this knowledge.
The bottom-line is the same with all these scandals: The public should NOT trust the experts. In fact, large numbers of alleged experts and government officials should be arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned or at least disgraced and charged with professional malfeasance, a result that would make sure these people could never “serve” (harm) the public again.
Lockdowns were a public health, economic, psychological, sociological and civil-liberties-eviscerating disaster. Any benefit from this unprecedented mitigation strategy was dwarfed by massive harms.
The authors excel in their effort to expose this particularly mind-boggling scandal.
Iatrogenic deaths almost assuredly killed far more people than Covid proper.
Faulty medical protocols and guidance – coupled with (unnecessary) mass panic in the population and among health-care professionals – killed untold numbers of people and, by themselves, account for the massive spike in deaths in some cities.
Said differently, the surge in deaths that largely explains the ramped-up panic and justified all the draconian mandates probably had little or nothing to do with this virus.
This outstanding section includes many first-hand testimonials from witnesses to (arguably) mass murder that will leave readers irate. Iatrogenic deaths is perhaps the least-publicized massive Covid scandal.
Mandatory masking was a scientific farce and the masks caused far more harm than has been fully acknowledged.
The authors note that mask mandates perhaps seem “trivial” compared to other Covid scandals. However, the authors then proceed to make readers better appreciate the harm caused by these unnecessary mandates. They also do an excellent job showing how the alleged “science” on masks rapidly flipped.
I’ve been reading Covid stories for three-plus years and hadn’t seen some of the compelling arguments the authors make about masks. The document is worth reading just for the excellent points made about iatrogenic deaths and masks.
Vaccines are not safe and effective, weren’t needed and are causing untold numbers of deaths and serious medical conditions.
The authors dive into politically-incorrect waters by providing contrarian history on vaccines and questioning the conclusion that other well-accepted vaccines produced the positive health results they are widely considered to have made possible.
In my opinion, the authors could have included far more evidence and anecdotes about the obvious harm the Covid “vaccines” have produced, but the items they do include are compelling and worth the read.
Accurate Covid data is being concealed, spun or obfuscated by public health agencies.
This header is not included as a separate category in this document, but every section provides evidence this is occurring to a scandalous degree.
Genuine transparency does not exist with important Covid data. Indeed, the authors show that officials charged with reporting important health data seem to be going out of their way to conceal this data from the public. This by itself should be another major scandal and has already eroded “public trust” in public officials and our medical/science community.
The following are my own contributions to any inventory of massive societal scandals.
Censorship is out of control. We now live in a world where genuine free speech is considered a threat to the state and the world’s real rulers.
It should be noted that censorship is not yet all-encompassing. The Isle of Man document proves this good news by citing hundreds of articles and studies that did reach the attention of the authors.
However, most of these citations are from the “alternative press” (including plenty of independent Substack authors).
The important studies the authors cite – FWIW, studies produced by “real” scientists – never or rarely received significant coverage from the corporate or mainstream press. Many of these contrarian authors or dissident voices have indeed been censored, attacked, de-platformed, bullied and even lost their jobs.
It could be argued that every scandal itemized in this document might not have happened if censorship did not exist. The authors make clear that the promulgation of false fears is the root of all totalitarian mandates. It should be obvious that this level of requisite fear would have been much lower if the public had received fair and balanced coverage of true, off-limits facts.
The mainstream press is 99.9 percent captured.
The “gatekeepers of the news” have become stenographers of virtually every dubious or false public health narrative. Nobody (who really matters in the Big Picture) is challenging the never-ending lies, manipulated data and false narratives.
If this lack of skepticism persists, it seems almost a certainty that all the important organizations in the world will continue to be led by people who either aren’t intelligent enough to challenge false narratives or know the narratives are false and simply don’t care.
Big Tech and social media companies are actively censoring real debate and genuine free speech.
Furthermore, many of these companies seem to be working in concert with government officials and agencies to target individuals who are not afraid to dissent from the various “authorized” narratives.
The above points make it far more likely that past scandals will not be exposed and that future society-damaging agendas will be more likely to be brought to fruition.
In sum, these waves of over-lapping and cascading scandals produce a tale that does qualify as a real-world horror story.
The greatest horror might be the realization that most citizens are still unaware they’re living through an unfolding nightmare. Hopefully, excellent and important documents like the one just described will open more eyes.
“Vaccine hesitancy and the spread of misinformation on social media have been recognised by the World Health Organization as an urgent threat to public health, with potentially lethal consequences.”
Well that’s settled then. Being recognised by the unelected, pharma-funded, supranational organisation that is the WHO does not lend any credibility to the article’s claim.
They go on to say:
“US president Joe Biden concluded that misinformation on social media was “killing people”.
If this Biden quote is the best they can find to lend support to their hypothesis, it may be time for the authors to go back to the drawing board.
A final excerpt (we recommend reading the whole piece):
“Although doctors are typically among the most trusted professionals, during the covid-19 pandemic some medical credentials were used to peddle fake cures and outright misinformation about vaccination.”
Given the well-established, proven vaccine (in)efficacy, and the military grade coercion that was employed to get people to take them, it’s hard to know where to start in critiquing this particular sentence.
HART felt compelled to write a Rapid Response to the BMJ pointing out that there may in fact be a more pressing need to address the glaring holes in current vaccine trial methodologies, rather than ‘studying’ those raising valid questions.
HART Rapid Response (which unsurprisingly the BMJ chose not to publish):
Dear Editor,
Rather than working out rules for gold standard RCTs on how to reduce online misinformation and vaccine hesitancy, maybe the best thing would be to re-address the golden rules for RCTs of vaccines in the first place.
The Covid-19 vaccine trials provide a classic example of how to increase vaccine hesitancy.
Firstly, the clinical trials were commenced before any human pharmacokinetic and biodistribution studies of all the components were carried out let alone published.
Secondly, they allowed unblinding to take place and many of the control arm then received the vaccine, making the longer term safety assessment from the Phase 3 trials meaningless.
Thirdly they looked at mortality only from the disease in question rather than looking at all cause mortality.
Fourthly, they failed to provide raw anonymised data so that readers could check the results. The dangers of lack of transparency have been highlighted before.[1]
Fifthly, there was no clear separation of the authors from the drug company sponsors, which has its own dangers.[2]
Sixthly, the manufacturers required unlimited indemnity, which tends to make the public ask why.
Seventhly, many studies are underpowered. The children’s trials in particular were too small to elucidate safety – their efficacy was largely based on the concept of ‘immunobridging’.
Eighthly, use of saline placebo. Some vaccine trials used other unrelated vaccines as a control rather than a saline placebo, which is a problem if the comparator vaccine also has under-reported side effects.
It is time to return to proper independently conducted RCTs in which the trial organisers are genuinely in ‘equipoise’, previously the ethical basis for any trial. It is also time to ensure that ‘all cause’ morbidity/mortality are used as end points rather than allowing the investigators to decide whether an individual SAE was or was not related to the vaccine under investigation and use a double-blind placebo-controlled methodology with a minimum 12 month follow-up as recommended by the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA)[3]
Such an approach could go a long way to restore faith in the whole process of approvals.
Dr Rosamond Jones, retired consultant paediatrician
[1]Doshi, P. (2018). Pandemrix vaccine: why was the public not told of early warning signs? BMJ, 362:k3948. doi: 10.1136/bmj.k3948
[2]Jureidini J, McHenry L B. (2022).The illusion of evidence based medicine BMJ 2022; 376 :o702 doi:10.1136/bmj.o702
How many people, I wonder, have thought about the sheer quantity of raw material required to deliver Net Zero by the end of this century, let alone by 2050? How many are aware that Tesla alone may consume most of the associated raw materials in the world to make a few million electric vehicles (EVs)? Tesla are making around a million a year but more than 1,500million internal combustion engine (ICE) cars will need to be replaced in the great renewables utopia. Will there will be enough minerals and other raw materials to go round to allow ICE cars to be phased out by 2035 and for Net Nero to be delivered by 2050?
The key materials range from copper to rarer metals such as lithium, the refinement of which involves the release of CO2.
One specialist study reports that by 2050 Europe’s plans for producing clean energy technologies will require annually 4.5million tonnes of aluminium (an increase of 33 per cent on today’s use), 1.5million tonnes of copper (35 per cent), 800,000 tonnes of lithium (3,500 per cent), 400,000 tonnes of nickel (100 per cent), 300,000 tonnes of zinc (10 to 15 per cent), 200,000 tonnes of silicon (45 per cent), 60,000 tonnes of cobalt (330 per cent) and 3,000 tonnes of the rare earths metals neodymium, dysprosium and praseodymium (700-2,600 per cent). And currently the primary sources are in Russia and China.
Global copper production alone (unsurprisingly given the huge government subsidies behind renewable technology) has risen from around 16million tonnes in 2010 to more than 22million tonnes in 2022. Renewable energy plant requires on average eight to 12 times more copper than fossil-based power generation, and EVs three to four times more copper than ICE vehicles.
Perhaps the most challenging demand is for lithium, used to make batteries, including those in electric vehicles (EVs) which each take 63kg. So around 95million tonnes of lithium will be needed to make batteries for 1,500 million EVs globally. But only 130,000 tonnes came from mines in 2022, at which rate it would take more than 700 years to make enough batteries. If those EV batteries have to be replaced on average every ten years (assuming no increase in the number of EVs) the continuing demand will average around 9.5million tonnes pa, which is around 70 times the current rate of mining.
On that basis alone, the plan to replace ICE cars by 2035, 12 years hence, is pie in the sky.
The possible use of sodium-ion batteries is being explored but it is inconceivable that development will be complete or that sodium mines will be producing at the capacity needed by 2035.
Another alternative would be the use of hydrogen engines, which Toyota and others are pursuing, assuming that there will be enough H2 available. But the government plans to bring only 10,000MW of H2 production onstream during the 2030s, when the grid system alone will need several times that to keep the lights on when there is little sun or wind. A doubled maximum demand capacity will also be needed to carry the load of 300,000 new EV chargers in service stations on the strategic road network, plus 10million heat pumps.
If there are 30 petrol pumps per service station and it takes around ten times longer to charge an EV battery than to fill an ICE car, then 300 chargers (probably at 100kW each) would be needed per station. That would require a local grid substation capacity of 30MW, enough to supply a town of 30,000.
So the UK’s 2035 target for phasing out ICE cars looks unachievable because we will have neither the materials, the money nor the skilled resources needed to deliver Net Zero this century. Legislating to phase out ICE cars before affordable alternatives were available is not the way to run a country. Destruction of our ICE-making capacity will take us back to a pre-industrial era.
What prize might we miss out on by failing to eliminate the UK’s 0.00048 ppm contribution to current CO2 levels at a cost of over £5trillion, or over £200,000 per household? It would take 3,000 years for the UK to add 1.6ppm (the average annual rise over 60 years) to current CO2 levels. Bear in mind that the greenhouse gas impact of each ppm rise declines rapidly, and that the sun is the main driver of the 97 per cent of natural CO2 emissions.
Without a referendum, we are being subjected to taxation without representation. The government won’t risk giving us a choice and causing them to have to stand up against the UN, IEA and WEF. Sadly, none of the mainstream parties has the backbone to confront these issues.
All are happy, too, to accept the horrific exploitation and abuse of children in Congolese cobalt mines (and no doubt in other countries too), sacrificed to the ‘clean’ energy revolution.
I’ve been wondering for quite some time about whether we are in a War and the resolution of my thoughts on the subject has recently improved.
Oddly enough, I have some standing on the subject.
I lived in Iraq between 1981 to 1991, a period that covered almost all of the Iraq/Iran War and all of the Gulf War, the original, not the sequels.
It was an old school type of war, with two parties fighting over territory and trying to redraw a border. A lot of people died over 8 years and the border stayed the same. But weapons were sold, and internal power was consolidated.
That’s really what war is about, territory. You have something that I want, and I will fight you for it.
So, if this is a war, who are the warring parties and what is the fight over?
The war is between “the state” and “the citizen”. The latter is YOU and ME and it’s easy enough to understand (sort of), but THE STATE is not straightforward anymore and I’ll cover that later.
The border between these two parties is being redrawn. The relationship between the State and the Citizen is being RESET.
When you hear about The Great Reset, that is what “Reset” really means.
Think back to your life, last year in Feb 2020. Think back to how you thought, what you did, what degree of intrusion the State had in your life and what level of control you had over your life and choices.
In Feb 2020 there was a border, a fairly large circle that you stood in the centre of. Everything within that circle was your domain, your freedoms, and your sovereignty.
Now, reflect on your life today, but more importantly reflect on the size of that circle. It obviously is much, much smaller today. The border between you and the State has been Reset.
Within that circle is a second circle that is much smaller, and it surrounds you almost like a second skin. Within this second circle, you have what is your “bodily sovereignty”. What is within your body is YOURS and not the State’s.
If you have acquiesced to the State’s injection, you have surrendered your bodily autonomy to the State. There is no border anymore between you and the State. It’s a depressing conclusion but true.
Your rationalisation for taking it is irrelevant, you wouldn’t have taken it but for the State’s lies and threats. Unless you took the flu vaccine every year religiously, to “protect yourself and others”, you have surrendered to the State. You may have had no choice because you need to make a living and feed your family, so it was a calculated surrender, but a surrender, nevertheless.
But for almost everyone else, you surrendered your bodily autonomy (let alone your current and future health) so that you could go to the pub, go to the hairdresser, go to the gym, see your parents, travel, plus a laundry list of other reasons that the world has used to rationalise its surrender to the State.
It is worth noting, that if you have surrendered your bodily sovereignty to the State, and there is no longer a border between you and the State, what would you ever say no to in the future. If you were not prepared to stand up for your bodily sovereignty, what would you ever stand up for?
But as a friend of mine said the other day, people just don’t know. They haven’t spent the time (for some hundreds of hours) necessary to figure out what is true and what is a lie.
They think the jab is safe (without understanding the meaning of the word).
They think it is effective (that it will protect them from getting Covid or giving it to parents, grandparents and others).
They think the State is truthful (why would they lie?).
They think the disease is exceptionally deadly (because they were told it is).
They think that masks work (when hazmat suits are necessary to protect against respiratory viruses).
They think that lockdowns work and are worth the cost.
They think that social distancing works.
They think that healthy people can spread the deadly disease.
They think that test results are real.
They think that contact tracing works (so they keep checking in, even when nobody is watching or cares).
And they think many other things that all form the framework for the biggest lie ever told to the world.
You need a lot of time to dismantle each one of these falsehoods and unravel the matrix that has been built.
I now would add another leg to this line of thinking.
They think there is no war.
This is a vital point, and I draw on my time in Iraq to understand it.
We knew there was a war. We knew who the warring parties were. We knew there was a border being fought over. We knew that our wants and needs needed to recalibrate to the reality of the war we were in. I don’t remember anyone ever complaining about missing out on all of life’s “nice to haves”. Our wants had recalibrated very tightly around our needs, there wasn’t a gap really. If we and our loved ones were fed and safe for the night and we had a job in the morning that allowed us to be fed and safe for the night, then we were generally happy. To survive war, you need to recalibrate psychologically to it. Of all my friends during those years, I don’t remember any of them being depressed. They had psychologically adapted to the reality of war, and to a climate of having and doing less. Within that recalibration, we were content.
We bunkered down and got through it.
The Iraq-Iran War went on for 8 years. Early on people thought it would be over in a few months, that was just normal human optimism. But after a couple of years most understood that thinking in terms of timeframes just created false hope and wasn’t helpful to having a robust and resilient War mindset. So, we accepted that it would be a long war and stopped trying to guess it’s end. Basically, for our own psychological well-being we settled in for the long haul.
I recommend that you do the same here, start settling in for the long haul. This War is not ending any time soon.
Learn to live with less.
I wrote this short piece many years ago, mainly so that I wouldn’t forget the stories and that my kids would get a glimpse into their history. It was a time where we learned to live with less.
The Generator
The first thing the Americans did was take out most of the infrastructure. They took out the bridges, they took out the TV stations and they took out the power plants. We lost our electricity on the first night of bombing in January 1991.
The war lasted for about three months, 100 days to be precise, and then it took another three months before the lights came back on, so all in all about six months without electricity.
Six months!
I’ve heard it said that society falls apart and anarchy sets after a couple of weeks without electricity. Well, that didn’t happen. Maybe we had other things on our minds.
A lot of things changed quickly when the power went out on that first night of bombing. Sleep cycles for one, no more TV and some candle use initially but that quickly changed to mainly a kerosene gas lantern that we had. It looked something like this.
It had a pump that you would use to pressurise the tank, it would then spray a kerosene mist onto a ball shaped net that burned brightly. It made a sssshhh sound that I still remember. I don’t recall anyone else having one and I don’t remember how we got it but it was our main source of light in the living room during those dark months. It burned white and bright and had a constant, soothing pressured burning sound.
One day a friend and neighbour, Abu Bashar (Father of Bashar), managed to get his hands on an old broken down generator. He asked me if I wanted to have a look at it. Having never before seen a generator in my life, let alone fixed one, I announced my intention to resurrect the machine.
I was asked the question because over the years I had built up a reputation as a fixer, helper and general handyman. I had no idea how to “fix” a generator, especially seeing I didn’t know what was wrong with it. But I loved taking things apart, so I did just that.
It was about the size of a large esky and I spent most of the day dismembering the unfortunate machine. I carefully cleaned every piece and when there was nothing left to take apart, I started to put it all back together again. As evening fell the now cleaned generator was pieced together with only a small collection of “extra” bits and pieces left in my pocket.
It was evening by now, Abu Bashar, his family and the occasional neighbour had been casually keeping an eye on me all day. Anyway, the thing was back together by late evening, it was filled up with petrol and now the moment of truth had arrived. As I was about to pull the starter cable, I remember thinking I had no idea why I thought it might work. I knew that all I had done was take it apart, clean it and put it back together again. I hadn’t “fixed” anything. So, any hope that it might work was clearly without basis. Put simply, it was a Hail Mary.
So, I pulled that cable, hailing Mary… and that beautiful two stoke started first time!! The bloody thing was working! And it was loud. As loud as any two stroke, angry at being silent for years, making up for lost time.
It was late, around nine or ten pm and the whole neighbourhood could hear this monster roaring, but no one seemed to care. There was electricity in the street!
The first thing everyone wanted to do was watch a video of an old Egyptian movie. Anything to take their mind off the misery and drudgery that was their daily life. And so there we were, family, friends and neighbours crammed together in a small living room, watching an old favourite movie, barely hearing a word over the roar of the machine outside. But happy that a little bit of joy and normalcy had returned despite the contrived and temporarily nature of the whole affair.
If you don’t know that you are in a war, and “just want your old life back” then taking a “safe and effective vaccine” to “protect you and your loved ones” from a “deadly disease” seems entirely reasonable. But unfortunately, none of that is true, including the bit about getting “your old life back”.
So, to summarise.
Yes, there is a war.
It is being fought over the Territory and the Border between The State and YOU The Citizen. It’s a land grab.
The State has been winning since March 2020.
The injection is the final step in that War and dissolves the last Border surrounding our Bodily Sovereignty.
In War, a War Mindset is required to survive.
War is a battle between two parties over territory
The state is in open warfare to reset its relationship with its citizens. To move the border
Passports not only move the border but then permit the state to keep moving that border as they see fit
One year ago today: WHO officially declares COVID-19 a pandemic.
Director-General Dr. Tedros: “We’re deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction.” pic.twitter.com/D0k0wOuYa2
Now, watch this through the lens of War. This was a declaration of War on The Citizen.
It was not clear to most, certainly not to me, back then. It is as clear as daylight today.
What’s interesting about this War, is that REGULAR Compliance is the end game. Not just today’s compliance, but ONGOING Compliance.
Please understand, there is no such thing as “fully vaccinated”.
There is now only non compliant and temporarily compliant.
The unjabbed are the Resistance.
But, not getting the jab, is among other things just a proxy for non-compliance.
So, in truth the non-compliant are The Resistance.
And what’s interesting about that is that if you have surrendered to date, you can Un-surrender.
If you QR Code to check-in everywhere, you could stop doing that. You can deploy a range of evasion tactics.
If you have taken one dose, you can choose to not take the second.
If you have taken two doses, you can choose to not take the “booster”.
If you were “enjoying your freedoms” you can choose to adopt a War mindset.
You can choose at any moment to stop complying with The State and reclaim some of your lost territory.
And while we are on the subject of surrender; just as you can un-surrender at any time, you can also surrender at any time, so do you need to surrender today?
If you have not taken the jab so far, do you need to give in today?
Why not leave your surrender for another day or another week?
I have written extensively about my D.A.D Strategy and a Waiting for Novavax Strategy so why surrender today, wait until tomorrow and then ask yourself the same question. In War, taking things one day and one week at a time makes a lot of sense.
Stuart Lindsay, an Australian retired Federal Circuit Court Judge wrote this wonderful piece:
Strictly speaking, we fell in March 2020 when COVID arrived in earnest, but I date it from my acceptance that my fellow citizens would never stir. You cannot wake someone who is pretending to be asleep. The truth is that whether through cowardice or prolonged conditioning the vast majority of Australians, including many of my close friends and even family members, have manifested since then the absence of any kind of allegiance to their country or their heritage.
Most of those I live among have no desire at all to recover the freedom to speak or to assemble which has been taken from them. What would they have to say anyway? The only public utterances to which they now aspire are those to be roared as part of a crowd at the bread-and-circuses events, such as the football, which they are occasionally granted permission to attend. Then they replace their masks for the drive home past empty shops on patrolled and near-deserted streets.
Stuart has some wonderful turns of phrase, such as this one describing the acquiescing (surrendered) masses:
Netflix, full bellies and a warm place to defecate. That is all most want these days, is it not?
Stuart understands the mindset required for these times, and the years ahead:
I show you the times. Look out of your window if you need corroboration. I show you what you must do to get yourself in order if you want to be of any value in the fight to preserve what is left of your heritage. Here are some other ways to ready yourself for that fight.
Relinquish all of that unseemly longing for the return of unregulated visits to the theatre or the cinema and those beloved restaurants. Accept that never again will such things be free of petty invigilation and that on the worst case outcome they will only be possible if you keep having mRNA booster jabs — now the case in Israel, where three shots are now required even as officials moot lifting it four. If you are wary and reluctant to be inoculated with treatments whose long-term effects remain unknown, as am I, you need to accept that governments intend to make you a pariah for not having a “COVID passport” and be prepared to forfeit such pre-Fall pleasures as dining out. Keep your self-respect instead. Read that long-neglected Cervantes or C.S. Lewis on your bookshelf, help out at a refuge for the homeless or visit your sick grannie. Australia is teeming with sick grannies, so I’ve heard.
Here is a wonderful recent speech by Dr. Julie Ponesse.
She references War a few times, here are the War references:
But it is not only information that is being weaponized, in this WAR; it is a person’s right to think for herself.
… we are in a kind of moral WAR.
But the WARS of the past have had clear and distinct boundaries: the east and the west, patriots, and government.
The WAR we find ourselves in today is one of infiltration instead of invasion, intimidation instead of free choice, of psychological forces so insidious we come to believe the ideas are our own and that we are doing our part by giving up our rights.
As a wise colleague recently said “This is a WAR about the role of government. It is about our freedom to think and ask questions, and about whether individual autonomy can be downgraded to a conditional privilege or whether it remains a right. It is a WAR about whether you are to remain a citizen or become a subject. It is about who owns you, you or the state.”
As someone born in the 70s, I never thought THIS would be a WAR I would have to fight, that the right to bodily autonomy, to the free and transparent exchange of information would be at risk.
Ok, I think it’s time we talk about The State. What does that word mean?
Well, let’s start off by saying that it doesn’t mean what it used to mean, and it doesn’t mean what you think it means.
It used to mean that your government, acting independently of other governments, independently of business and independently of media would try to increase its territorial footprint while reducing the citizens territory. Sometimes they would win and sometimes they would lose and there were checks and balances within the system that worked to reduce the speed and scale of the government’s land grabs.
Well, does that sound like what it is going on today?
If all 200 countries around the world are pretty much all doing the same thing, do you think they are acting independently?
Do you think that business is acting with the government or with you? Do you think business is a check against the government or is business aiding and abetting The State?
Do you think that Media is acting as a check against the government, or is it helping the government disseminate its misinformation and disinformation?
Is the legal profession standing up for you or aligning itself with the government?
Is the medical establishment acting honestly to protect its patients or supporting the government in its campaign?
The State is now a NETWORK and it’s borderless. It’s a Global Network on a scale never seen nor imagined before.
Several months ago, I described it as The MGM Triad
I was saying to my wife last night that in the past the “collapse” of a society happened within contained borders. The institutions of that particular country decayed to the point of collapse and/or takeover by nefarious actors (those that want to dominate others, look after others, “fix” the world’s problems because they know best etc., it is a very real personality type and is always a percentage of the population and they climb the poles of business and government).
Because of the way the globe has been rewired over the last 50 years and especially the last 20 years with ever more powerful global institutions and a communication grid with central points of influence and control, the collapse we are witnessing at the moment is “post-national”, its far higher upstream, all the way at the source of the river, which is why it’s happening everywhere.
Today I can say that I was on the right track, but I don’t think The MGM Triad even does this Global Network justice. It’s a good introduction to the question of “Why is this happening?” to someone just waking up, but there are even more layers to understand.
You will need to use a web translator to read it from the Norwegian website.
Within the article you will find a link and reference to this 169 page document, that does a deep dive into this global network. The document:
… shows connections between the Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, WHO, GAVI and other NGOs and Big Pharma. It contains round about 6,500 objects including like Persons, NGOs, Companies, Documents, etc. It also includes more than 7,200 links between them.
A great passage in this essay highlights the immense power of these networks. They have shown that they are able to get the largest governments in the world to heel.
The incredible power of the networks
To give an example of how much power these NGIs and actors have, I would like to show a current example that has hardly been mentioned in the media (nor in the alternative media), but which Mr.X immediately noticed, as he keeps an eye on the “right” NGIs.
On August 3, 2021, an open letter to the Biden administration was published. In this letter, the important NGOs, who – after what we have concluded – have been planning a pandemic since 2017, demanded. We will now take a closer look at these requirements from 3 August 2021.
Global Summit on Vaccinations
In the open letter, for example, one could read the following requirements:
” to host a global presidential-level summit on vaccinations, before the UN General Assembly in September, bringing together leading forces from the public and private sectors from around the world (…) and commits to taking the necessary measures to close gaps in vaccine supply and correct deficiencies in funding and capacity in the distribution and distribution of vaccines, as well as to create demand.”
It took only six weeks for Biden to comply with the claim. In parallel with the United Nations General Assembly, President Biden is currently hosting a virtual summit with representatives from 100 countries, where the president announced just that. And he urged the other countries to follow the example of the United States, as reported by Die Tagesschau, for example.
Do you now understand the power of these actors, when all it takes is for them to write an open letter to the president, and he complies with their demands within six weeks?
Vaccinate 70% of the world’s population
Furthermore, in the open letter it was demanded:
“To get the heads of state and government in the world, before or during the summit, to commit to achieving the goal of vaccinating 70% of the world’s population by mid-2022.”
«As an organizational framework, Biden introduced a transatlantic vaccination partnership. ‘Today we are launching a partnership between the EU and the US for a global vaccination offensive,’ he said, in order to have closer cooperation. The goal is to have vaccinated 70% of the world’s population by September next year.”
Within six weeks, Biden (and also the European Union) pledged to fully comply with the requirements set out in the letter.
This is another good piece fleshing out the role of the WEF (World Economic Forum) network and the many people involved.
What a co-incidence, the World Economic Forum outlines a vision in 2018 for Digital Identity and in 2021 the Australian Government is about to finalise its laws making it a reality.
A wonderful Australian writer fighting the good fight is Alexandra Marshall.
Make no mistake, vaccine passports are a domestic Social Credit System created under the watch of the federal Liberal Party. It is a sprawling government entity that denies rights based upon compliance in the hope that you will obey rather than exercising your democratic right to resist.
Citizens accepted vaccine passports because the government made them a condition of release from unlawful detention. As a population, we have been emotionally damaged to the point that people cheer on the discrimination of their neighbours. Ethics have been replaced by the intense fear of being sent into lockdown.
We are not witnessing a casual overreach of power – vaccine passports and QR check-ins are a complete abandonment of the Western democratic system. They are a threat to the liberty of our children and the survival of Australia’s laid-back spirit.
CJ Hopkins is a wonderful writer; he has written eloquently about his new War.
He describes the core desire of Totalitarianism as wanting:
… to remake the world in its paranoid image; to replace reality with its own “reality”
He goes further:
We are right in the middle of this process currently, which is why everything feels so batshit crazy. The global capitalist ruling classes are implementing a new official ideology, in other words, a new “reality.” That’s what an official ideology is. It’s more than just a set of beliefs. Anyone can have any beliefs they want. Your personal beliefs do not constitute “reality.” In order to make your beliefs “reality,” you need to have the power to impose them on society. You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific “experts,” academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine.
What I call The State he calls here Supranational Global Capitalism:
And, yes, it is all one ideology, not “communism,” or “fascism,” or any other nostalgia, but the ideology of the system that actually rules us, supranational global capitalism. We’re living in the first truly global-hegemonic ideological system in human history. We have been for the last 30 years. If you are touchy about the term “global capitalism,” go ahead and call it “globalism,” or “crony capitalism,” or “corporatism,” or whatever other name you need to. Whatever you call it, it became the unrivalled globally-hegemonic ideological system when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. Yes, there are pockets of internal resistance, but it has no external adversaries, so its progression toward a more openly totalitarian structure is logical and entirely predictable.
Naturally, there would be one official reality that you would force everyone to rigidly conform to at any given moment in time, but you would change the official reality frequently, and force everyone to conform to the new one (and pretend that they had never conformed to the old one), and then, once they had settled into that one, you would change the official reality again, until people’s brains just shut down completely, and they gave up trying to make sense of anything, and just tried to figure out what you wanted them to believe on any given day.
He coins the term GloboCap, which is his version of my MGM Triad.
But the goal of GloboCap’s War on Reality isn’t simply to deceive the masses and divide them into opposing camps. Rulers have been deceiving the masses and dividing them into opposing camps since the dawn of human civilization. This time, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
And depressingly this paragraph:
You could experimentally “vaccinate” millions of people whose risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from your apocalyptic virus was minuscule or non-existent, and kill tens or hundreds of thousands in the process, and the people whose brains you had methodically broken would thank you for murdering their friends and neighbors, and then rush out to their local discount drugstore to experimentally “vaccinate” their own kids and post pictures of it on the Internet.
We have watched as the New Normal has done precisely what every totalitarian movement in history has done before it, right by the numbers. We pointed all this out, each step of the way. I’m not going to reiterate all that again.
I am, however, going to document where we are at the moment, and how we got here … for the record, so that the people who will tell you later that they “had no clue where the trains were going” will understand why we no longer trust them, and why we regard them as cowards and collaborators, or worse.
Yes, that’s harsh, but this is not a game. It isn’t a difference of opinion. The global-capitalist ruling establishment is implementing a new, more openly totalitarian structure of society and method of rule. They are revoking our constitutional and human rights, transferring power out of sovereign governments and democratic institutions into unaccountable global entities that have no allegiance to any nation or its people.
That is what is happening … right now. It isn’t a TV show. It’s actually happening.
Whereas 20th-Century totalitarianism (i.e., the form most people are generally familiar with) was more or less national and overtly political, New Normal totalitarianism is supranational, and its ideology is much more subtle. The New Normal is not Nazism or Stalinism. It is global-capitalist totalitarianism, and global capitalism doesn’t have an ideology, technically, or rather, its ideology is “reality” When you are an unrivalled global ideological hegemon, as global capitalism has been for the last 30 years or so, your ideology automatically becomes “reality,” because there are no competing ideologies. Actually, there is no ideology at all … there is only “reality” and “unreality,” “normality” and “deviations from the norm.”
Few others have written as well as CJ Hopkins on how to deal with this New Normal “Reality”.
So we need to adopt a different strategy. We need to make the monster show itself, not to those of us who can already see it, but to the New Normal masses, the Covidian cultists. We need to make Jim Jones drop the peace-and-love crap, move into the jungle, and break out the Kool-Aid. We need to make Charles Manson put down his guitar, cancel orgy-time, and go homicidal hippie. This is how you take down a cult from within. You do not try to thwart its progress; you push it toward its logical conclusion. You make it manifest its full expression, because that it when it implodes, and dies. You do not do that by being polite, conciliatory, or avoiding conflict. You do that by generating as much internal conflict within the cult as you can.
In other words, we need to make GloboCap (and its minions) go openly totalitarian … because it can’t. If it could, it would have done so already. Global capitalism cannot function that way. Going openly totalitarian will cause it to implode … no, not global capitalism itself, but this totalitarian version of it. In fact, this is starting to happen already. It needs the simulation of “reality,” and “democracy,” and “normality,” to keep the masses docile. So we need to attack that simulation. We need to hammer on it until it cracks, and the monster hiding within in appears.
That is the weakness of the system … the New Normal totalitarianism will not work if the masses perceive it as totalitarianism, as a political/ideological program, rather than as “a response to a deadly pandemic.” So we need to make it visible as totalitarianism. We need to force the New Normals to see it as what it is. I do not mean that we need to explain it to them. They are beyond the reach of explanations. I mean that we need to make them see it, feel it, tangibly, inescapably, until they recognize what they are collaborating with.
Here is a good example of the tools now available to assault reality and create a new “reality”.
The global assault on reality and the creation of a new “reality” has created a Mass Psychosis, described by Dr. Mattias Desmet as Mass Formation.
John Waters, writes beautifully about a recent Desmet interview.
You cannot extract the Mass Psychosis from the New Totalitarianism. They are two sides of the same coin. Here are some extracts that help explain the phenomenon:
Le Bon it was who observed that the consciousness bestowed by membership of a crowd can be transformative, possessing individual members with ‘a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think and act in a manner quite differently from that in which each individual would feel, think and act were that person in a state of isolation.’ In such a ‘psychological crowd’, individual personality disappears, brain activity is replaced by reflex activity: a lowering of intelligence, provoking a complete transformation of sentiments, which collectively may manifest as better and worse than those of the crowd’s constituent members. A crowd may just as easily become heroic or criminal, but is generally disposed towards destruction.
‘The ascendancy of crowds,’ wrote Le Bon, ‘indicates the death throes of a civilisation.’ The upward climb to civilisation is an intellectual process driven by individuals; the descent is a herd in stampede. ‘Crowds are only useful for destruction.’
–
He says there are four conditions that need to be in place to enable mass formation to occur in a society. The first is the presence of large numbers of socially isolated, atomised, people. The social bonds between people need to have been weakened. This is the most important, and the other conditions follow from it. Secondly, there will be large numbers of people who experience lack of sense-making in their lives and work — people who feel that their jobs are senseless, meaningless. Thirdly, there requires to be ‘a lot of free-floating anxiety’ — i.e. anxiety that is not connected to a mental representation so that the sufferer doesn’t know why he is anxious and afraid. And fourthly, there needs to be a lot of ‘free-floating psychological discontent’ — anger and frustration at, again, apparently nothing in particular.
And you also need mass media — without which mass formation would be impossible. Desmet does not explicitly say so, but of course it is also essential that these media be biddable and readily prone to corruption.
These conditions, he says, existed in Western societies long before the Covid crisis. There was, he says, ‘an epidemic of burnout’. He says something between 40 and 70 per cent of people in modern societies experience their jobs as senseless. He points also to the escalating use of psycho-pharmaceutical medicines to treat anxiety and depression.
–
There are, in situations of mass formation, says Desmet, three distinct groups that manifest themselves. Only 30 per cent, he says, are really hypnotised, and cannot be reached in any way. In addition, however, there are about 40 per cent who usually follow the crowd, and from the outset go along with that 30 per cent of total believers. There is another cohort of about 30 per cent who are not hypnotised, who try to speak out and resist. This group, he says, is extremely heterogeneous and disunited. If these people could unite, he says, they could bring the whole thing quickly to an end, but this seldom proves possible.
–
Totalitarianism in its full-blown form, then, is something that comes after, but ‘after’ what? It comes after a lengthy ‘preparation’, not necessarily planned with malign intent, in which human beings become isolated, atomised, alienated and lonely — conditions for which the totalitarian has ready solutions in the promulgation of bogus community and imagined bonds of mutual hatreds. The negative undertones of these processes suggests some form of prior error, and this may well have been present, perhaps in the pursuit of greed or exploitation, but this is not any longer admissible. Totalitarianism is like a secondary condition that descends on a society that has first of all been subjected to certain processes of modernity: technologisation, industrialisation, individualisation, atomisation. It is, in a sense, like the lung cancer that ensues from a lifetime of smoking, or the type 2 diabetes that results from an excessively sweet tooth. But it is not ‘secondary’ in the sense suggesting ‘lesser’ or ‘minor’ or ‘subordinate’: When it arrives, totalitarianism announces itself as the actual purpose and destination-point of the entire historical process, the discovery of the actual meaning of history. It follows, but is not collateral to, the events which preceded it. Indeed, its arrival announces a coherence to those previous events that had not hitherto been perceived: It ‘makes sense’ of the drifts and apparent randomness of the past, and in doing so turns common sense on its head and compels man to admit his prior errors of understanding and accept that the true direction of history has now been revealed.
Paul Collits has done incredible work all throughout the scamdemic, and I was lucky enough to come across him early. Here he writes about August Landmesser (look him up):
Two excuses might be proffered for going along with tyranny – we didn’t know what was going on, and I thought I personally would be safe from the tyranny if I played along.
Take the first excuse. Dr Robert Malone, an inventor of the mRNA vaccine, has noted, “… if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention”. He was speaking of the hideous truths about the jab. Malone’s accusation implies the first excuse. We didn’t know. We perhaps suspected something, but we excused the political class for mere “mistakes”. We made a choice, not to think too deeply about the emerging “new normal”. We didn’t try very hard at all to comprehend what was going on. We found excuses to justify our own compliance. Going against the crowd is too much like hard work. People will think I am … an anti-vaxxer! Thinking hard about difficult issues will only give me the guilts, and make my life complicated, so I will park it.
Here he talks about “strategic obeyers” and how they sustain The State:
Some of this behaviour might be termed “strategic obeying”. This is self-regarding conduct whose aim is to protect the things that are important to us while ceding minor freedoms to the Covid State. Anyone who hates mask mandates but obeys them in order to get the shopping done, rather than risk a fine or risk getting spat at by angry CovidManiacs, is a strategic obeyer. A reluctant obeyer, perhaps, but an obeyer nonetheless. If I just do this, maybe they won’t come for me. If they come for the unvaccinated, maybe they won’t come for me. Strategic obeyers sustain the Covid State. They form a key part of the group that remains silent, and no doubt all the various Nudge Units will have figured this all out.
And:
Those who go along to get along enjoy what Levant terms “the peace of surrender”.
I retweeted this yesterday & now again, so nobody misses it. One of those speeches that might get recorded in history as an important event on its own, because it captured the exact inflection when things started to turn around. 🥊pic.twitter.com/ixtRWGpz0l
This article went viral recently, written anonymously by Spartacus. Personally, I think that Dr. David Martin wrote it as it covers a lot of ground that he is very familiar with. I recommend reading the whole thing as it is a great summary of the story to date.
What is the purpose of all of this? One can only speculate as to the perpetrators’ motives, however, we have some theories.
The Elites are trying to pull up the ladder, erase upward mobility for large segments of the population, cull political opponents and other “undesirables”, and put the remainder of humanity on a tight leash, rationing our access to certain goods and services that they have deemed “high-impact”, such as automobile use, tourism, meat consumption, and so on. Naturally, they will continue to have their own luxuries, as part of a strict caste system akin to feudalism.
Why are they doing this? Simple. The Elites are Neo-Malthusians and believe that we are overpopulated and that resource depletion will collapse civilization in a matter of a few short decades.
Head of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab wrote a Harvard Business Review piece titled, ‘Power and Policy: The New Economic World Order’ where he detailed his belief that the industrialised world has been going through an economic revolution. Keep in mind, the article is written in 1994. He correctly lusts after [he] points out the rise of Asia, commenting, “One consequence of the new parity is that the West can no longer hope to dictate the rules of the game.”
In this, he is only partially right. The circumstance he prophesied has only manifested because organisations like the World Economic Forum and the United Nations have trained Western leaders to be weak. It was not an inevitability of trade structures, but rather a matter of ideological infestation. The constant infiltration of socialist rhetoric into the once free world via endless champagne conferences has left it unable to work out what gender it is, let alone present a strong front against the rise of Asia.
By 2018, the World Economic Forum was publishing articles insisting that we must all work together to hasten the rise of Asia and teach ourselves to embrace the New World Order. The United Nations have a similar song sheet. Before Covid, they spoke of the New World Order in the context of a green revolution and the dismantling of old industrialised nations in favour of empowering the third world.
Most of the propaganda coming out of the United Nations these days talks about sustainability, mass-migration, climate goals, and Covid as a singular item – an omini-shambles apocalypse with only one solution: world socialism disguised as environmentalism.
And lastly here is Iain Davis writing about the “global commons”. It’s a good way of further understanding the “territory” this War is fighting over.
While we have been distracted and transitioned by the alleged global pandemic, or pseudopandemic, the Global Public Private Partnership (GPPP), who orchestrated the chaos, have been very busy. They have created the asset rating system that will afford them total, global economic control. This is based upon Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and utilises Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics (SCM).
This new global economic system is what the politicians mean by “build back better.” It is the essence of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.
–
Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics – SCM – were devised by the World Economic Forum, who describe themselves as the international organisation for public-private cooperation. When combined with the SDGs outlined in the UN Agenda 21 and 2030 frameworks, SCM enable the GPPP to seize the entire Earth, all its resources and everything on it, including us.
In order to control us we are being transitioned into a technocracy with the biosecurity state acting as the central control mechanism. Public health is the new focus for global security and centralised control of the entire system has been established during, and as a result of, the pseudopandemic.
–
Again we see the recurrent themes of the GPPP. The planet must be saved from us, we are a pestilence that must be controlled; Covid-19 is, as ever, an opportunity to transform the global economy; our survival and GPPP stewardship of the global commons are one and the same and everything must be transformed.
Put simply:
If the world is being destroyed by humans doing whatever they want (climate catastrophism)
And these humans are grouped together within pesky democracies and pesky borders
Then to save the world we need to build a system that keeps people from doing whatever they want
By changing the democracies and dissolving the borders
It has been a long term project that is coming to fruition today
The role of the CCP within this network is both very real and complex. I’m not going to spend time on it here, god knows this piece is long enough, but you could do worse than follow Michael Senger’s work on the subject.
I will say this though, as long the the Network is useful to the CCP, they will play along. If the Network helps to diminish and destabilise its strategic adversaries, then why not help it along. But if the Network stops being useful, the CCP will simply devour it.
All the players in this Network will one day be long gone, but the CCP will still be around. They are playing the longest game in town.
Media interest in Saudi Arabian connections to the crimes of 9/11 has centered on calls for the release of the 28 missing pages from the Joint Congressional Inquiry’s report. However, those calls focus on the question of hijacker financing and omit the most interesting links between the 9/11 attacks and Saudi Arabia—links that implicate powerful people in the United States. Here are twenty examples. … continue
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The global assault on reality and the creation of a new “reality” has created a Mass Psychosis, described by Dr. Mattias Desmet as Mass Formation.
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