I’ve been looking again at Covid’s origins and the start of the pandemic. Last time I wrote on it I argued that Italy brought in China-style lockdowns on March 8th and 10th 2020 mainly as a result of panic owing to the leap in the death rate, with it being clear from the hospital situation there were many more deaths to come. I still believe that that was the immediate trigger for imposing lockdowns at the time. However, I now recognise that that is far from the full story. What it leaves out is the backdrop of who was pushing for lockdowns throughout the preceding two months, and why.
Two key pieces of data have emerged in the last few months that help to bring the picture into clearer focus. The first is that with the arrival of Omicron the Chinese have continued fanatically to pursue lockdowns, crippling their economy as they do it. To my mind, this is convincing evidence that the Chinese are sincere about their belief in the radical new disease management strategy they inaugurated on January 23rd 2020 in Wuhan. I initially (in 2020) thought it may be an elaborate ruse to convince the world to do something monumentally and pointlessly self-destructive. But it appears they really do think lockdowns are highly effective and the right way to fight a disease like COVID-19. I’m aware some suggest it could just be a cunning strategy to strengthen the grip of the ruling party on the population, but all the evidence indicates to me that they actually are trying to fight the disease in this way.
If this is accepted then one of the key pieces of the puzzle snaps into place: the global Covid narrative has, both behind closed doors and in front of them, been driven in part by the Chinese Government’s commitment to its extreme suppression strategy and its desire for other countries to adopt it as well. It’s been suggested this derives from a sense of national pride and seeking vindication of their efforts and ideas, and is part of a wider aim of achieving global Chinese cultural supremacy, which sounds plausible to me.
The second key piece of data are emails sent by White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, which reveal that behind closed doors as late as February 26th 2020, Dr. Fauci was still, as he had been consistently up to that point, advising people not to panic. But as of February 27th his approach suddenly changed and, from that moment on, he began consistently pushing restrictions.
On February 26th he wrote to CBS News that Americans should not yield to fear:
You cannot avoid having infections since you cannot shut off the country from the rest of the world… Do not let the fear of the unknown… distort your evaluation of the risk of the pandemic to you relative to the risks that you face every day… do not yield to unreasonable fear.
But by the next day he was writing to actress Morgan Fairchild that the American public should prepare for pandemic restrictions:
It would be great if you could tweet to your many Twitter followers that although the current risk of coronavirus to the American public is low, the fact that there is community spread of virus in a number of countries besides China… poses a risk that we may progress to a global pandemic of COVID-19… And so for that reason, the American public should not be frightened, but should be prepared to mitigate an outbreak in this country by measures that include social distancing, teleworking, temporary closure of schools, etc. There is nothing to be done right now since there are so few cases in this country and these cases are being properly isolated, and so go about your daily business. However, be aware that behavioural adjustments may need to be made if a pandemic occurs.
Interestingly, February 27th was also the day the media narrative in the U.S. shifted, with the New York Times leading the way with its first alarmist piece, by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, and also an alarmist podcast with science and health reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr., which quoted directly from China a 2% mortality rate for the virus.
The context for this shift was a WHO press briefing on February 24th by Bruce Aylward, who had just concluded a WHO-China Joint Mission on COVID-19 and told the world that lockdown worked and “you have to do this. If you do it, you can save lives and prevent thousands of cases of what is a very difficult disease.”
The timing obviously suggests the events are connected, but crucially it also implies that Fauci and those around him were not part of the behind-the-scenes decision of Aylward to throw the WHO’s weight behind the Chinese approach. This leaves, then, the question of why Fauci & Co flipped from their previous position of playing down the threat from the virus and not supporting extreme Chinese-style interventions to going all in with the panic.
The picture being painted here is of at least two ‘conspiracies’ going on – the Chinese one, seeking to push lockdowns as part of Chinese vindication and cultural supremacy, and the Fauci & Co one, the potential motives for which are discussed below. I am pretty confident these are not the same ‘conspiracy’, as I assume that Fauci and Co are not motivated by vindicating China and advancing its cultural supremacy (I’ve seen no evidence this should be the case).
A further element to throw into the mix is that the first Western lockdown occurred three days before the Aylward WHO briefing, on February 21st 2020, in a region of 50,000 people in Lombardy. Oddly, it seems to have been an isolated local initiative in response to the first identified ‘cases’ led by the regional health chief Giulio Gallera, with no clear links to the WHO or any other known lockdown protagonists. It would be interesting to ask Mr. Gallera why he decided to follow such a radical course of action that day.
Italy locked down on March 8th and 10th, a response it seems to the climbing death rate, and most of the rest of the world followed in the ensuing two weeks. The U.S. Government was persuaded by Deborah Birx and others to back lockdowns on March 16th. On March 12th-14th, U.K. Government ministers and officials did a media round promoting the idea of aiming for herd immunity and keeping calm and carrying on. However, that strategy soon collapsed in the face of shifting public opinion and alarmist models from scientists like Imperial’s Neil Ferguson. After March 23rd, Sweden was the only holdout among Western Governments.
Such a mess of uncoordinated action confirms to my mind a picture of different groups driven by different motives and agendas which sometimes overlap, catalysed by groupthink and hysteria, rather than any grand behind-the-scenes conspiracy involving all in a coordinated fashion.
The Chinese Communist Party is a crucial actor, of course. It invented lockdowns and since then has persistently pushed them to the rest of the world, including through an all too willing WHO. However, that doesn’t mean that all who promote panic and lockdowns do so because they are in thrall to China or doing its bidding.
So what was the deal with Fauci & Co – why did they oppose panic and lockdowns until February 27th, then flip to become among their most eager and high-powered proponents?
Fauci’s emails show that, starting at the end of January and into February 2020, he organised a series of secretive video conferences and phone calls because he and his associates suspected the virus may have been genetically modified and leaked from a lab. Yet despite these suspicions, on February 19th the group wrote a letter to the Lancet denouncing the lab leak as a “conspiracy theory”. The organiser of the letter was Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, one of Fauci’s associates who it later turned out had been funding gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology of exactly the kind that was suspected as being responsible for creating COVID-19. Biologist Nick Patterson notes a grant application from EcoHealth Alliance to DARPA (the research agency of the U.S. Department of Defence), of which he says, “as far as I can make out, the plan here was for WIV to collect live virus, ship it to the USA, have U.S. scientists genetically modify the virus, and then ship modified virus… back to China”.
In light of information like this and Fauci and Co’s preoccupation during February 2020 with the origin of the virus, culminating in their cynical effort to suppress the claims of lab leak and genetic modification, I surmise that their major motivation was to cover themselves for the possibility that they and their research fields would be held responsible for the virus. Initially this took the form of suppressing the lab leak theory while also playing down the threat from the virus, which they would have been keen to be as uneventful as possible. But why then the flip to panic mode after February 27th? Did the WHO backing lockdowns on February 24th change the equation, so it was no longer deemed viable or good cover to oppose the new approach? The path of least resistance in other words. A related question is whether they were genuinely persuaded that the measures would be effective or if they retained an unspoken scepticism. If they did retain any scepticism there’s been precious little sign of it since March 2020.
Overall, I see no indication of a grand plan from the earliest days in which all are working from a common script to a common goal. Instead, I see various groups with their own agendas, interests and fears. It’s clear that, following Aylward’s team’s visit, China managed to capture the WHO and bring it on board with championing lockdowns. However, the motives of everyone besides China are largely opaque. Why did Aylward become China’s biggest fan – was he threatened or bribed or just duped and naïve? Why exactly did Lombardy regional health chief Giulio Gallera respond to the first cases in his region by imposing a Chinese-style lockdown even before the WHO had backed them? Why did Fauci flip on February 27th? What about curious figures like Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, highlighted by Michael Senger, who despite being a known China critic, was a major alarmist influence within the White House from the get-go, drawing on mysterious ‘contacts in China’ to call for panic and restrictions as early as January?
What drove each of these people to get behind the closing down of society as the ‘solution’ to a respiratory virus? We can largely see now who did what and when. What’s mainly missing is the why.
July 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | China, Covid-19, United States, WHO |
Leave a comment
In a rare interview recorded some 20 years ago and aired this week, Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah says the resistance movement rejected American offers of money and support that were made in exchange for its elimination from the Arab-Israeli conflict equation.
Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen channel is airing a five-part documentary series dubbed “40 and Beyond” about Hezbollah. The series comes on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the establishment of Hezbollah as well as the 30th anniversary of the election of Nasrallah as the head of the movement. The episodes include an unseen interview of Nasrallah with Ghassan Ben Jeddou, current CEO of al-Mayadeen.
In the third episode of the series, Nasrallah says the United States made several offers to Hezbollah after the liberation of southern Lebanon and western Bekaa in 2000, aiming at neutralizing the movement and eliminating it from the Arab-Israeli conflict equation.
The United States was trying to convince Hezbollah that Shebaa farms were not worth a conflict and that the issue could be resolved through dialogue, Nasrallah said.
According to the top resistance figure, what the United States was offering in exchange for the movement’s neutralization included working out a solution about the issue of Lebanese prisoners in Israeli prisons, recognizing Hezbollah’s political role and its inclusion of Hezbollah into the government, providing the resistance with a significant financial aid to rebuild the liberated areas, and removing Hezbollah from the so-called terror list.
Washington was also asking the Lebanese movement to abandon its military and financial support for the Palestinian Intifada, said Nasrallah.
These offers, he said, were strongly rejected by Hezbollah because the movement sought to help the Palestinians and considered Israel a permanent threat to Lebanon’s security.
American authorities repeated the same offers after 9/11 following its declaring of war against organizations it recognizes as terrorists, added the resistance leader.
Hezbollah was established following the 1982 Israeli invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon. Since then, the popular resistance group has grown into a powerful military force.
The resistance group fought off two Israeli wars against Lebanon in 2000 and 2006, forcing a humiliating retreat upon the regime’s military in both wars. The movement has vowed to resolutely defend Lebanon in case of another Israeli war.
In an interview with Iran’s Arabic-language al-Alam news network in early January 2022, Nasrallah also pointed to the offer by the United States to turn its back on Palestine and end confrontation with the occupying regime.
“Previously, they (the Americans) sent us a delegation on behalf of Dick Cheney to negotiate a halt in our support for Palestine and attacks against Israel. In return, they said that they would pay us billions of dollars and even allow us to have our weapons, an offer which we naturally opposed,” he said.
Lebanon and the occupying entity are technically at war since the latter has kept the Arab country’s Shebaa Farms under occupation since 1967.
“We do not recognize the existence of Israel. This is the land of Palestine,” Nasrallah said.
July 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
Leave a comment
Samizdat – 22.07.2022
Western nations have faced skyrocketing energy prices, creeping inflation, and plummeting growth amid their attempt to “punish” Russia into submission for Moscow’s military op in Ukraine. According to the Russian president, the sanctions’ outcome hasn’t at all been “what the initiators of the economic blitzkrieg against Russia were counting on.”
The current sanctions war against Russia by the European Union and the United States bears striking parallels to Napoleon Bonaparte’s ill-fated early 1800s attempt to institute a blockade against Great Britain, which ultimately culminated in the French Empire’s economic ruin, French economist Olivier de Maison Rouge believes.
In a recent op-ed in Le Figaro, de Maison Rouge pointed out that the EU’s sanctions on Russia in response to the “military aggression on its eastern flank” have so far only led to the appreciation of the Russian ruble, and a stark and unpleasant realization of just how much Europe depends on Russian natural resources for its well-being.
The present situation is not unique, and has a historical parallel in the 19th century, the economist, who teaches at the Paris-based ILERI School of International Relations, and the School of Economic Warfare, explained.
“Take for example the European blockade declared against England by Napoleon I. Although English industry initially faltered, it was ultimately able to forge new commercial partnerships with its vast empire, enabling it to reach the height of its glory, on land and at sea, in the 19th century,” de Maison Rouge wrote.
In a Napoleonic decree penned in November 1806, the British Isles were declared to be in a state of blockade, with all trade prohibited, and all letters or packages with English addresses, or to Englishmen, or written in the English language, banned from being sent at France’s post offices and seized.
A year later, de Maison Rouge recalled, in the decree of Milan of December 17, 1807, Napoleon “ordered any boat anchored in a British port, whatever its nationality, to be considered flying the British flag and therefore confiscated by the customs administration. The direct consequence of this policy for France was the disruption of supplies.”
The professor noted that with each of Napoleon’s European conquests, the restrictions on trade with Britain were extended, with the emperor envisioning a ban on “all British goods from Lisbon to Saint Petersburg.”
With the Treaty of Tilsit of July 1807, Russia and Prussia joined the blockade, and between 1807 and 1810, Sweden and Portugal were also made to join the embargo (Russia would exit from this arrangement in 1810 when the tsar began allowing neutral ships to land at Russian ports, culminating in the French invasion of 1812).
Britain’s response to the restrictions, de Maison Rouge wrote, included its own embargo on the young American republic’s trade with continental Europe, thus disrupting France’s access to the riches of the New World. At the same time, the blockade led to a virtual drying up of major ports in France, Holland, Germany, and Italy.
“England, for its part…was able to forge new commercial relations, particularly with Canada, and then with the United States and Latin America,” the economist noted. In the meantime, in the French-occupied nations, local merchants, sometimes aided by corrupt French officials, were able to organize smuggling routes, “partially wiping out the effects of the blockade” and ultimately forcing French customs to start granting import and export licenses in 1809 to certain shipping companies and for certain goods.
“The Emperor’s wish was to collapse the English economy by cutting off its commercial outlets, and incoming flows of raw materials for the supply of manufactured goods (cereals, weapons, ammunition, cotton, wool, etc.). Indeed, it is estimated that England’s exports fell by 20 percent between 1808 and 1810.”
However, in time, “the effects of the blockade proved counterproductive, because goods like machine tools ran out, while [lost] sales of European goods outside Europe were never compensated. While England knew how to forge an economy turned toward other markets (in particular in Latin America)…and established its maritime power against the continent, creating new outlets which would make its fortune in the 19th century, France, centered on the continent alone, was not able to find alternatives beyond its domestic markets,” de Maison Rouge explained.
In the end, “despite temporary economic crises (in 1808 and 1810) England ultimately emerged strengthened from this ordeal, subsequently enlarging its empire and its clientele and becoming the dominant nation of the 19th century,” the economist concluded.
In recent weeks, Western officials, academics, and media have expressed fears that the West’s push to “punish” Russia for its military operation in Ukraine has backfired on the European Union, shaping up to be the region’s most severe inflationary and energy crisis since the 1970s Arab oil embargo and stagflationary crisis. The US, which had far weaker trade ties to Russia before the escalation of the crisis, has also been affected, with the White House blaming spiking inflation and gasoline prices on Russia and calling the problems “Putin’s price hike.”
Last week, Romanian Deputy Prime Minister Hunor Kelemen warned that as the Ukraine crisis shows no signs of letting up, European countries “will all pay the price” for the restrictions slapped on Russia during the coming winter. “This will be a harsh winter, and possibly the harshest winter in the past 40, 50 or 60 years, and, unfortunately, for the whole of Europe”, he said.
Earlier this month, Putin suggested that the West had already lost its “sanctions war” against Russia, and sparked the start of the “radical breakdown of the American-style world order.” Admitting that sanctions have created some difficulties for the Russian economy, the Russian president stressed that their outcome nevertheless hasn’t at all been “what the initiators of the economic blitzkrieg against Russia were counting on.”
July 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Timeless or most popular | European Union, France, Russia, UK |
Leave a comment
REINER FUELLMICH INTERVIEWING SONIA ELIJAH CIC SESSION 113 – MYCELIUM 15/07/2022
SONIA ELIJAH ON PFIZER VACCINE SAFETY REPORT
Sonia Elijah – Investigative Journalist and Broadcasterat trialsitenews.com , Has a background in Economics and was a former BBC researcher. Her analysis of the Pfizer Covid vaccine safety report, received worldwide attention.
The Corona Committee was founded on the initiative of attorney and economist Viviane Fischer and attorney Dr. Reiner Fuellmich. It is conducting a review of evidence on the Corona crisis and measures.
Learn more about the committee:
https://corona-investigative-committee.com
Anonymous tips to the Corona Committee:
https://securewhistleblower.com
Dr. Reiner Fuellmichs english Telegram channel:
https://t.me/s/ReinerFuellmichEnglish
Tor:
http://2hfjtvg32qm6kjo2esoqu3djhc6xctn2wofnkrpc4vjez47a5wei44qd.onion
Only through your support the work of the Committee is possible:
https://corona-investigative-committee.com/support/
July 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video |
Leave a comment
“The climate crisis is a public health crisis”, that is a tweet by Hillary Clinton’s official twitter account yesterday afternoon.
The tweet included a link to a news story claiming that Spain and Portugal had seen over a thousand people had die in the past week, due to the heatwave (they’ve since amended that number to over 2000).
I don’t want to get into the maths of it, but across two countries totalling around 58 million people, 2000 in a week is not very many at all.
And, as I have pointed out, in a post-Covid world we can’t really be sure what “died due to the heat” even means.
Case in point – we’re already seeing drownings termed “heatwave deaths”… because they wouldn’t have been swimming if it wasn’t so hot.
But we’re not here to fact-check yet more figures or definitions. The point of this article is to highlight the message behind the tweet, and it’s not a new one. It’s all about taking the powers the states have acquired through “covid”, and then applying them to “climate change”
Maybe that means “climate lockdowns”, or “climate passports”, or rationing fuel or banning travel… but whatever terms or phrases they eventually use, it’s definitely some authoritarian fantasy made flesh.
That’s the target, and it has been from the beginning.
Since the earliest days of the “pandemic” there have been consistent (and ludicrous) attempts to try and associate “Covid” and “climate” in the public mind.
They started by directly linking the two, and to this day try and make out that climate change will cause more zoonotic pandemics. But that never really hit home.
The more consistent and pervasive messaging has been an effort to rebrand “climate change”, not as an environmental problem but as a “public health” problem.
This messaging first appeared in March 2020, when the pandemic was less than three months old the British Medical Journal published a paper titled “The WHO should declare climate change a public health emergency”, which argued that global warming was far more dangerous than a simple virus, and should be treated just as seriously.
Nobody really listened. In the two years since they’ve tried to bring it back over and over again, but it never lands.
Just weeks into lockdown we were already being told that lockdowns were healing the planet, and journalists were asking “if we can do this for covid, why not climate?”
By September of 2020 they were talking about “avoiding a climate lockdown”.
March of 2021 saw reports springing up claiming we needed a “covid lockdown every two years” to meet out climate goals.
In summer of 2021 the latest IPCC report prompted talk of “hinging from covid to climate” that never really took off.
This past March the think tank Public Policy Project repeated the demand that the WHO recognise climate change as a “public health emergency”.
And just yesterday, the BMJ was back at it, publishing two articles on the same topic. One warning about “The inconvenient truths of health and climate crises that can’t just be ignored” and another titled Groundhog day: the signs of a climate emergency are with us again
There’s a new push in the works, and the thinking behind it is clear.
After decades of propaganda that saw “global warming” become “climate change” become “global heating” and eventually “climate emergency”, people simply are not scared of it.
Maybe it’s subconscious knowledge that it’s a propaganda campaign, maybe it’s the literal 60 years of failed prophecies, but whichever it is people are not scared, not like they were of Covid anyway.
The powers-that-be have pretty much admitted this themselves, there’s a revealing Sky News article about it from just a couple of days ago, headlined:
Why is it so hard to get people to care about climate change?”
We saw, during Covid, the UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team published a memo which said people were not scared enough of Covid, and the messaging needed to change in order to scare people into compliance:
The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.
That same thinking holds with climate change. They want it to be the new covid, but to get there they need people to feel “an increased level of personal threat”.
That means hitting the dangers of climate change hard. It means fudging death numbers and manufacturing alarming statistics. And it means peppering those headlines with influential figures – like Hillary Clinton – calling climate change a “public health crisis”
That’s why the heatwave is being talked about in such absurd terms. That’s why the UK declared its first ever “heatwave” national emergency, and why Biden is considering declaring a “climate emergency” (whatever that means).
It’s why we’re seeing warnings of “thousands dying”, and suddenly getting “wildfires” (that turn out to be arson).
It’s why doctors have started literally diagnosing “climate change”, as if it were a disease.
They want – and need – to change the climate conversation. It’s not going to be about the environment anymore, it’s going to be about “public health”.
Climate change is being rebranded – it will no longer be a threat to the planet, from now on it is a threat to you.
And as soon as they that message has a grip on people, they will turnaournd and say “so, about those climate lockdowns.
July 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Hillary Clinton |
Leave a comment
Once upon a time, news that a top-level COBRA meeting was held at Downing Street – in the midst of a government re-shuffle – would stir a flicker of alarm or excitement (depending on one’s temperament). Now, when COBRA meetings are called due to a spike in positive tests for a strain of flu, we know that the government is more interested in showing it is responding rather than actually responding or indeed having anything worth responding to.
The reason for the cabinet-level emergency meeting was the arrival of summer. You might have thought that aides could have briefed senior government figures privately on a brief period of warm-to-hot weather that some years occurs over July and August in the British Isles. No doubt the aides had been watching weather maps on television news which have been showing the country seared scarlet, despite the fact that the temperature has been as expected. The establishment, which has been both pushing the idea of a climate crisis and has come to believe its own alarmism, takes the normal heatwaves as evidence of a climate emergency. To be fair, if you consume mainstream television news and radio – plus factual programmes – at high levels, your residual belief in climate emergency will have reached near unbreakable levels.
The Met Office – an arm of the scientific-governmental-media complex – has issued amber and red alerts for sunny days last week. Even GBNews has been running a chyron of dire warnings advising against unnecessary travel. The gleeful doomsayers of the mainstream media have been playing up the dangers of hot weather, adding obligatory comments about anthropogenic global warming. Some exaggerate for tactical effect – to scare people into new types of behaviour – while others simply follow the herd, led by untested assumptions and a climate of fear.
COVID hysteria is not as potent a tool of control and fear as it once was. News reports of a rise in positive tests (caused due to COVID becoming an endemic, mild infection) – which were notably not accompanied by data suggesting increased deaths – generated only a brief uptick in mask-wearing by the “doing their part” crowd. There will be another push to impose a COVID lockdown this winter, but the government, NGOs and international bodies wanting to use lockdown as a tool for restricting the freedom and independence of people are looking for extra excuses. Marburg virus and Monkey Pox have both been pitched as potential reasons to restrict freedom but seem to have been met with muted responses.
So, while authorities worldwide tinker with their systems of control, climate emergency looks like a viable route. It has already been used to promote green policies, lower vehicle emissions, stringent insulation regulations, phasing out of gas boilers. The aim is to restrict means of private travel, monitor energy consumption and use digital identities and social-credit systems to micromanage people, using all-pervading systems to instil fear and obedience. It seems likely that air-quality readings may be used to restrict non-electric vehicle use in cities. Expect this winter to see more “stay at home” advisory notices due to cold weather – essentially for any days with road ice – but a big push next summer for not only advisory notices but action. This may include local or national government imposing fines on businesses which “irresponsibly” remain open during hot weather, as well as more vehicle restrictions.
The government and its medical-environmental partners use fear and coddling to direct a compliant population away from free choice and towards authoritarianism. The exaggerated heat warnings have been a feature of British mainstream news and activist press releases for many years, mainly as a means of reinforcing the necessity of environmental measures. However, the government and its partners have seen how compliant and fearful the population is and are ready to use weather as a tool for population suppression via the means of lockdown.
Be watchful and notice how the mass-media, establishment science, giant corporations and government work together to knit ever tighter the control of the managerial elite in order to remove your ability to judge risk for yourself, travel independently and run your businesses.
July 21, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, UK |
Leave a comment
In a recent TikTok video, the World Economic Forum (WEF) suggested using a “raft” of “space bubbles” about “the size of Brazil” to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.
“MIT scientists say ‘space bubbles’ could help reverse climate change by reflecting the Sun’s heat away from Earth,” the video begins. “Scientists say cutting out just 1.8% of the Sun’s rays would fully reverse global warming.”
The WEF cautions its young audience, though, assuring them this is future tech and that the “task of decarbonizing life on Earth” is no less urgent an issue.
“The bubbles would be manufactured in space by robots. They would form a ‘raft’ about the size of Brazil. This would be placed at a Lagrange point,” the WEF continues. “That is, a point in space where the Sun and Earth’s gravity balance each other out. This would keep the raft fixed in position.”
“This kind of large-scale physical solution to climate change is called geoengineering,” the WEF explains.
“Several such ideas have been proposed, from spraying aerosols into the upper atmosphere to churning up tiny bubbles on the ocean’s surface, all with the aim of reflecting solar radiation back into space.”
The WEF adds that the MIT researchers say it “might be too risky,” though, and have “unintended consequences for the biosphere.”
You think?
Everyone’s favourite pandemic expert Bill Gates has also recommended playing God and blotting out the Sun in the past, positing the aforementioned polluting our atmosphere with chemical aerosols option.
Indeed, Bill Gates ran 300 stratospheric balloon tests in 2019 to see if it was possible to launch devices capable of spraying sun-reflecting particles into the stratosphere, which alarmed many opposed to geoengineering, to say the least.
Besides the obvious concerns over destroying ecosystems around the world, many were critical merely of undertaking the tests, saying that it could only lead to the real implementation of such a plan.
“There is no merit in this test except to enable the next step. You can’t test the trigger of a bomb and say, ‘This can’t possibly do any harm,’” said WhatNext director Nicklas Hällström.
July 20, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | WEF |
Leave a comment
For many years we have been anticipating the implementation of far reaching and transformative restrictions on industry and agriculture in the name of “climate change” initiatives, and now it would seem the time has come for the fight to commence. The first major battleground is clearly Europe, as individual nations follow the emissions dictates if the centralized EU government, crushing their own economies while in the midst of a self induced energy crisis. It seems like madness, but there’s a bigger agenda at play here.
Today, a farmer’s rebellion is rising across Europe as the actual producers of the food that keeps the public alive are being demonized for refusing to work under conditions that would essentially bankrupt them. European emissions rules are not just about carbon, though that is a big focus. Rather, the rules include other natural gases including methane and nitrogen which are a byproduct of large farming operations. The nitrogen restrictions alone are set to destroy most farming operations in the Netherlands, which is one of the largest agricultural nations in the EU. Germany is set to follow the Netherlands with its own emissions rules in the near term.
First, it’s important to ask “why now?” There are a host of reasons. First and foremost, the EU climate agenda closely aligns with the UN climate protocols for the year 2030 and requires a 55% reduction of emissions in less than a decade (and net zero by 2050). If you think these decisions are being made by individual governments then you are mistaken; the 2030 plan was formulated by globalist institutions like the UN and the Club of Rome – Member states are simply following orders. The time-frame for drastic environmental rules was likely set back in 1992 during the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro (also known as Agenda 21).
Why the year 2030? It’s hard to say. There is no scientific basis for the timeline. There is no evidence to support the notion that climate change will make any noticeable environmental impact by 2030. They just really want carbon controls and other measures in place by 2030, and they won’t give a concrete reason for it.
Climate doomsday predictions have been presented by establishment paid scientists and activist hysterics for decades, and not a single one of these predictions has ever come true. For example, in the 1970’s climate scientists predicted a “new ice age” by the year 2000 and this nonsense scenario was spread widely by the media. Then they claimed that “acid rain” would kill off life in freshwater lakes in the 1980s; but that never happened. After that, the climate cult switched over to the global warming narrative, predicting that the ice caps would melt and rising seas would “obliterate nations” by the year 2000. Obviously, this never happened.
In the year 2000, scientists at the Climate Research Unit in Britain stated that snowfall was a “thing of the past” and that the next generation would not know what snow was. In 2008 NASA scientists argued that the Arctic would be “ice free” by the year 2018. The list goes on and on, and it would be hilarious if the people that made all these faulty predictions were not still influencing government policies, but they are.
The following quote from the Club of Rome, a group directly connected to the UN, should illustrate why the public has been constantly bombarded with climate doom mongering for the past few decades. The quote comes from a book titled ‘The First Global Revolution’ published in 1992. In that document they specifically recommend using global warming as a vehicle:
‘In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.’
The statement comes from Chapter 5 – The Vacuum, which covers their position on the need for global government. The quote is clear; a common enemy must be conjured in order to trick humanity into uniting under a single banner, and the elites see environmental catastrophe, caused by mankind itself, as the best possible motivator.
Except, there is no environmental catastrophe, at least not within the narrative the establishment presents. It simply doesn’t exist. There is no evidence to support the theory of man-made climate change. None. Global temperatures have risen only 1 degree Celsius in the past century, and there is no concrete proof that this single degree of temperature was caused by human activity.
The primary argument of climate scientists is one of exclusion: They say that all other potential causes (including the sun) have been proven not to be the cause, therefore, the cause “must” be human industry and emissions. But this is a lie.
Interestingly, the increase in temperatures cited by the NOAA and NASA coincide directly with an increase in solar activity over the course of the past 100 years according to a study released in 2006. Furthermore, scientists have discovered that solar activity in 2022 is OUTPACING previous predictions. Overall solar activity has been increasing at the same time as the earth has been warming – Imagine that.
Climate scientists continue to discount the sun as a cause because they say there’s not enough data to support the idea. Of course, there’s not enough data because all the money goes to scientists that support the man-made theory; there’s no funding to be had for scientists that present alternative theories.
Since the official temperature record used by climate scientists only goes back to the 1880s, there is no way of knowing for sure how often these warming patterns actually occur and how many times the earth has warmed by 1 degree Celsius over the millennia. But it doesn’t matter, because climate science is not about saving the Earth, it’s about creating an excuse to micromanage every aspect of human production and thus human society.
For emissions targets to be met by 2030, drastic society-changing events will have to take place within the next eight years. The very fabric of our current trade system and the global supply chain will have to be torn to shreds and replaced with an exceedingly limited production model. Not only that, but the human population would have to be reduced by billions. This model will be artificially contained within arbitrary climate guidelines set by unelected governing bodies in the name of stopping environmental changes that have not been proven to be caused by human beings at all. What it accomplishes is the formation of an authoritarian framework, one that the globalists will say is “environmentally justified.”
July 20, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | Human rights |
Leave a comment
The top seller on Amazon for books devoted to war and peace as of this writing, Scott Horton’s newest offering, Hotter than the Sun: Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, is a timely must read. As Washington barrels heedlessly along into Cold War II, the American public badly needs educating on the current risks, past close calls, and the utter insanity of an entire for-profit industry built on the flawed concept of thousands of thermonuclear bombs as “weapons” that keep us safe.
With major papers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times now regularly running pieces arguing everything from the need to show the Russians we aren’t afraid to fight a nuclear war—that we can even “win” one—to the idea that a “small” nuclear war can help mitigate climate change, Scott’s book is a vital weapon in the hands of the sane, convincingly making the case that it really is time to get rid of the thousands of nuclear and thermonuclear bombs in existence.
Because the truth about thousands of nuclear and thermonuclear bombs, the overwhelming majority of which are possessed by the United States and Russia, is immutable. Just as Ronald Reagan said forty years ago, a nuclear war cannot be won and can never be fought.
And forget even about launching a life-ending nuclear exchange on purpose, as Hotter than the Sun notes there have been plenty of accidents that could have resulted in exactly the same outcome. From the Air Force accidentally dropping a nuke over North Carolina to absent-minded technicians dropping wrenches down armed missile silos, careless scientists playing with plutonium rods to the Norwegians launching a satellite, the game theoretical strategic calculations that form the basis of US and Russian nuclear postures mean that an apparent threat or actual detonation on their soil would mean an almost immediate escalation to a full-on nuclear exchange.
Apart from documenting such accidents that nearly resulted in the deaths of potentially millions or billions of people, if not every single one of us, over the course of the ensuing nuclear winter, the book revisits past insanities. From the decision to test the first bomb, despite its creators’ real concerns that it would immediately ignite atmosphere and oceans, instantly killing everyone on earth, to deciding to drop the first bombs on Japan only in order to justify their expense, ensure continued funding for making more, and intimidating the Soviets, Scott’s book takes the reader right up to the present day, where Washington, having started an unnecessary new arms race by unilaterally ripping up important arms control agreements in the name of pursuing a first-strike capability and enriching Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman execs, is now in full panic mode because it is apparently losing.
But it is important to note, as Scott does, that “losing” in Washington’s mind is not being able to potentially threaten with virtual impunity anyone it wants: that is hardly a concern most American voters express, if any.
Important as the topic of nuclear arms is, the over fifteen thousand nuclear and thermonuclear bombs in existence being the number one short-term threat to humanity’s continued existence, Scott’s title frankly sells the book’s contents rather short. At over four hundred pages, consisting of several dozen interviews conducted over a period of nearly two decades, Hotter than the Sun is a critical primer on everything from diplomatic history to US Middle East policy to the military-industrial complex, corporate lobbying, and a range of other issues.
From corporate lobbying for North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion to Israeli misinformation about the fake Iranian nuclear threat to how the decision to invade Iraq was made to why any random Pakistani colonel on the border with India could end all life on earth, Scott and his guests never fail to inform, surprise, disgust, and alarm, with Washington’s misguided, corporatist, imperialist, or just plain idiotic policies usually at or near the root of virtually every serious problem facing humanity today.
Featuring interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, Seymour Hersh, Gar Alperovitz, Chas Freeman, Ray McGovern, Doug Bandow, and many others, Hotter than the Sun is a book worthy of your time and money. And this at a moment when any trip to your local bookstore or Barnes and Noble outlet is sure to leave you much poorer and much more badly informed about the world than you otherwise would have been had you not bought anything to read at all.
Joseph Solis-Mullen is a graduate of Spring Arbor University and the University of Illinois, Joseph Solis-Mullen is a political scientist and graduate student in the economics department at the University of Missouri.
July 20, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | United States |
Leave a comment
Vatican’s new 20-euro coin dedicated to a theme very close to Pope Francis’ heart… the need to be vaccinated.
The medical establishment professes to know an awful lot. A few days before lockdown in March 2020, it knew that covid was not a High Consequence Infectious Disease and downgraded it accordingly. Exhibiting an Orwellian capacity for doublethink, it also knew that societies ought to be bludgeoned with lockdowns to prevent the spread of the not so highly consequential, and therefore downgraded, pathogen. In addition, it somehow just knew, without being able to explain why, that a cost-benefit analysis would be superfluous, so none was done. Until July 2020, it knew, based on decades of established science, that masking in community settings was useless in preventing the spread of respiratory illnesses. Then, with no new science to support a 180-degree turn, it just knew that masks had to be mandated.
It was so certain that mass vaccination with the experimental injections was the only course of action to take in the face of the not so highly consequential covid disease that it suppressed alternative cheap, safe and effective treatments. It was also quite sure that it had to censor and threaten doctors like Sam White with debarment because he expressed concerns about mass vaccination with the shoddily tested and hastily marketed novel ‘vaccines’. It somehow reasoned that doctors expressing genuine concern for patient safety was a threat to patient safety and that the only way to guarantee patient safety was for every single doctor, journalist and media outlet to sing from the same Big Pharma-sponsored hymn sheet.
Granted, the medical establishment’s stance during covid has not been underpinned by rational considerations, but that is precisely what has given it so much latitude to respond to ‘the crisis’. There is no limit to what you can know and do when you don’t have to prove rationally how you came to know it. Life is a never-ending carousel of trade-offs. You can either plod through things methodically and get it right or you can blast ahead at Warp Speed with the misplaced confidence of Joe Biden on a bicycle.
So, given the medical establishment’s boundless knowledge in times of crisis, it’s more than a little odd that it does not know why young and apparently healthy adults all over the world are dying in unprecedentedly large numbers. It is uncharacteristically stumped: it professes that there are simply no clues whatsoever to this disturbing phenomenon.
It is in the grip of such uncharacteristic knowledge paralysis that it seems incapable of exploring obvious lines of enquiry, such as asking questions like: when was the last time that governments all over world put a jackboot on the neck of every adult citizen to inject them with novel ‘vaccines’ employing an experimental gene-based technology tested under quality control conditions that would have run-of-the-mill crack dealers shaking their heads in disbelief?
What’s in a name?
Once you unlock the mystery of the medical establishment’s peculiar brand of epistemology, you begin to understand that how it comes to ‘know’ things is directly related to how it defines the problems it is trying to solve. For people who think in straitjackets, the problem of young people dying inexplicably is a medical problem. But, for the unbounded thinkers in charge of the medical establishment, it is a Public Relations problem. Through that lens, the obvious line of enquiry into experimental mass vaccination gets ruled out because it is too rational, too much of a threat to its reputation and too unprofitable.
The solution to this PR problem is to repackage it in such a way that it is seen as an insoluble medical mystery, as insoluble as the mystery of life itself – a mystery that one can debate in philosophical terms but never get to grips with in any practical way. The most insoluble mysteries are those that have been around since the dawn of time and yet continue to evade unravelling. This is axiomatic to the quality of insolubility – Plato, Seneca, Aquinas, Voltaire and Heidegger will have all given it their best shot and yet here we are today, none the wiser. The seed must be sown in the public mind that this is not a new problem that arose coterminously with mass global experimental covid vaccination but has been ‘a thing’ since the dawn of medical things.
The key to all successful narrative management is naming the problem. When Edward Bernays, the father of propaganda, was tasked by the tobacco industry in the early 20th century with breaking the taboo against women smoking cigarettes, he didn’t call them cancer sticks. He called them torches of freedom. With one ingenious stroke of the naming pen, the tobacco industry doubled its market overnight and women won the right to lung cancer.
In a similar vein, society must understand that young adults inexplicably dying before their time is the result of a bona fide disease of unfathomable cause – a mysterious and yet proper medical thing – and not a possible crime against humanity.
At first glance, the name they’ve hit on does not fill you with confidence that the best medical minds were enlisted in the brainstorming session. But it certainly has an air of does-what-it-says-on-the-tin. It is partly for that reason that Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (“SADS”) is a stroke of marketing genius. It’s got an easy acronym that chimes flippantly with the tragic outcome and yet is also readily accessible to authoritative tones after three pints in the pub. This is 90 per cent of the battle in getting the public to understand in no uncertain terms that SADS is ‘a thing’. A serious thing. It trips off the tongue very easily and yet is not so silly that it sounds like the lead-in to a crazy story developed by a contestant in an episode of BBC One’s Would I Lie to You.
As far as the medical establishment is concerned, the perception that SADS on this scale is a recent global phenomenon must be resisted on the grounds that it could become associated with a big new event – like mass global experimental covid vaccination. So no, SADS is not new. It’s been a thing for eons. And for sure, a Google search seems to suggest that SADS has been around for as long as cancer. But Allan Stevo’s investigation using his “8.6 pound Webster’s Encyclopaedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language from 1992” – which is impervious to algorithmic re-engineering – reveals that the term did not exist in 1992. But who are you going to trust – the colourful, digital pages of Google or the crumbling ancient parchments of Webster’s Encyclopaedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language?
I’m not saying there have never been mysterious unexplained deaths of young and apparently healthy adults. They were just so rare that they weren’t on the radar, even of dictionaries whose job it is to define all things known to the vast bulk of humanity. Surely this merits delving into a little deeper?
Whatever you do, don’t solve the problem – autopsies die a sudden death
One way to solve the apparently insoluble problem of sudden adult death would be to conduct autopsies on as many sudden adult deaths as resources will allow. It turns out that the Chief Pathologist at the University of Heidelberg, Dr. Peter Schirmacher, was doing just that very thing. In the summer of 2021, his team had just finished conducting 40 autopsies on people who had died within two weeks of vaccination and concluded that 30-40% of them died from the vaccine. He was pushing for many more autopsies of vaccinated people.
His claims were naturally dismissed by the German Government. From Dr. Schirmacher’s perspective, the dismissal by bureaucrats of his professional autopsy findings must have felt like being an army private in the battlefield reporting by radio to a lieutenant that he’d just been shot in the leg, only to have the lieutenant ask, “How can you be sure?”. But the powerful bureaucrats must have had good reason to dismiss his professional work although these reasons weren’t made clear.
Calls by the Federal Association of German Pathologists pushing for more autopsies of vaccinated people were also treated with disdain. No other autopsies have been performed apart from 15 done by Dr. Arne Burkhardt towards the end of 2021, which found “clear evidence of vaccine-induced autoimmune-like pathology in multiple organs” in 14 of 15 cases, all of which were ignored by all health authorities and mainstream media. No further autopsies have been reported and Dr. Schirmacher and his colleagues have gone quiet, after being so emphatic about the risks and the need for as many autopsies as possible.
On the face of it, the only way to prove what is causing the uptick in mysterious sudden deaths has died a sudden death. But the sensible and mature conclusion to draw from the silence of the autopsy doctors is that they have realised they were wrong and that the powerful bureaucrats and MSM journalists, who know nothing about autopsies, were right. Only a ‘conspiracy theorist’ would think there was a cover-up going on, right?
Public Relations – The Mail Online takes a proper gander at SADS
In any case, why bother with autopsies when, according to this article in the Mail Online, the best medical minds in Australia are getting to grips with the problem by “opening up a new national register”. Yes, that’s right, they’re at the cutting edge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) in which all our problems will be solved by data, algorithms, AI and registers. We’re leaving behind the grime of autopsies, post-mortems and diagnosing diseased patients by prodding them with stethoscopes and asking them time-wasting questions. We’ve got registers now.
Now, at first glance it might seem that the article would not be out of place in The Onion or the Babylon Bee because of idiotic tautologies like this one:
But pointing out that SADS, a death syndrome, is fatal is not cheap satire. It is a reminder that contained in SADS is both the disease and its inescapable prognosis of death.
Another reason why SADS is more of a thing than any other medical thing is that a diagnosis of SADS can never be wrong. It can only be given after death has occurred and only three boxes need to be ticked – did the deceased die without warning; was the deceased an adult in the prime of life and, crucially; do we intend to follow 4IR protocols to establish cause of death by doing nothing other than entering some data in a register? Yes, to all three? Job done. The clever cardiologist who is quoted extensively in the article jokes that SADS is a “diagnosis of nothing” but, once she has taken her tongue out of her cheek, I’m sure she is only too aware of how clever a diagnosis this is.
After correctly informing the reader that this particular death syndrome is fatal, the article recounts how a typical sudden death unfolds. The victim doesn’t come down for breakfast, but no one is concerned because we (white-collar workers at least) all work from home these days so having a lie-in is par for the course. The whole tone of the description of the tragic death of a young person in the peak of life is bizarrely deadpan. Again, you would be wrong to interpret this apparently tasteless approach as cheap satire. The banal tone is deliberately intended to drive home the point that SADS is just another puzzle in the countless puzzles that the universe, with its twisted sense of humour, flings at humanity on a regular basis.
The article contains pictures of very young actors clutching at their hearts with distressed expressions. Again, you would be wrong to think this is cheap and tasteless. How else are we to understand that SADS really is a thing? I think the visual message here is that if you’re under 40 and find yourself clutching at your heart while out jogging, be appropriately but not overly distressed because, while your heart may stop beating and no-one will ever know exactly why, SADS is definitely a thing. And the national register will never forget you.
Because the article is intended to be as informative as possible, it shares some very helpful warning ‘signs’ of SADS. Top warning sign number one is a family history of a SADS diagnosis. The happy smiley cardiologist who was selected to educate the public about SADS advises that your SADS clock might be silently ticking down if any of the following things have happened to you: fainting from exercise, over-excitement or just being ‘startled’. If you are one of those people who faints at the mere thought of exercise, you would have obviously been on the SADS register a very long time ago, had it been in operation. Your continued existence is actually more of a mystery than SADS itself, but let’s not complicate things any further. Suffice to say your clock is ticking down and your housemates should not be too surprised if you don’t come down for breakfast in the next couple of weeks. At least the Mail Online has prepared them. And you, come to think of it.
If you are wondering why I refer to the cardiologist as “the happy smiley doctor”, click the link to the article and it will be as clear to you as her sparkling eyes and teeth. There is a photo of her beaming as though she has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine when in fact, she is being quizzed about the grizzly business of young people dying for reasons that cannot be fathomed by the best brains in medicine. Why is she happy and smiley instead of sombre and uneasy? Is this another tactless error by the Mail Online inadvertently making the whole article look like cheap satire? Not at all. World War II propaganda used the very same technique to placate the masses in times of great uncertainty. Here is a WWII poster of a woman exuding the same brand of devil-may-care insouciance in the face of adversity:
Ok, so I’ve chosen a Nazi propaganda poster to compare with the happy smiley Australian doctor. Is this in bad taste? Personally, I don’t think so. Today’s brave new world of forced masking, forced lockdowns and forced medical experimentation must be met head-on with bold comparisons. Yesterday’s Nazis weren’t big on bodily autonomy and nor are today’s Australians (or Canadians, or Austrians, or French for that matter). Am I saying, rather unsubtly, that the Western world is becoming the very thing it fought 75 years ago? Only if you believe that people were robbed of the human right to voluntary informed consent by being coerced into taking the ‘vaccines’. ‘Vaccines’ which, let’s be clear, have absolutely nothing to do with the current spate of sudden adult deaths all over the world.
Am I unsubtly hinting that the Mail Online’s proper gander at SADS is actually propaganda for the medical establishment? Only if you believe that the responsible thing to do would be to show a picture of a doctor holding her head in her hands, tears of shame flowing from her eyes for failing to at least consider one potential and obvious cause of the mysterious deaths. I think we’re all in agreement here – that would not be responsible journalism. Far better to show a happy beaming doctor exuding the confidence of someone who is certain that SADS really is a thing, that it’s been a big thing for quite some time and that, while getting a ‘diagnosis’ of SADS is indeed the end of the world for you, you will die knowing that we are getting on top of this very real thing because we’re fighting it with a register and not with futile autopsies.
There’s a mention in the article about the role of genes because you can’t have a totally mysterious and fatal death syndrome (if the Mail Online can get away with this clever tautology, why can’t I?) without genes playing a role. Of course they haven’t, and never will, find a SADS gene, but that’s beside the point when proffering genes causality. Genes are the building blocks of life; your life ends suddenly without warning, ergo there must have been something wrong with your building blocks.
The ‘best advice’ the happy smiley cardiologist can give is: if you’re related to anyone who’s had an unexplained death, ‘it’s extremely recommended you see a cardiologist.’ Which seems pointless because a SADS diagnosis rests entirely on you having no detectable condition right up to the point you clutch your heart in desperation and keel over. If the condition was a recognised detectable one, mitigation strategies would likely kick in pre-heart clutching and, even if you ended up dying from that condition, your death would be labelled something other than SADS by virtue of its having been detected. SADS is the ultimate catch-22 – the doctors don’t know what’s wrong with the patient before they die and there’s no way of knowing afterwards (autopsies now being off the table) so the patient gets a posthumous SADS ‘diagnosis’, and is successfully entered on a register.
The Mail Online article is perfect except for that flawed bit of advice which seems to fail to recognise the complex circular nature of SADS. Telling people to have a thorough check-up before SADS threatens the very existence of SADS. Being cynical, I would say this advice is a ruse to give a boost to the happy smiley doctor’s billings.
July 19, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
Leave a comment
Media. It surrounds us. We live our lives in it and through it. We structure our lives around it. But it wasn’t always this way. So how did we get here? And where is the media technology that increasingly governs our lives taking us? This is the story of The Media Matrix.
Part 1 — The Gutenberg Conspiracy
Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee or Download the video or audio
TRANSCRIPT
In the beginning, there was the word. The spoken word, that is.
This word, the written word, didn’t come along for countless generations.
And this word, the printed word, didn’t come along for thousands of years after that.
In fact, we’ve only had the movable type printing press for about 600 years, but without it our world would be unrecognizable.
From the Renaissance to the Reformation, from the fall of feudalism to the rise of capitalism, from the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial Revolution, from the way we order our thoughts to what we choose to think about, nothing survived the printing revolution intact.
Our world is the world that the printing press has created.
And that world started with this. [Holds up mirror.]
VOICEOVER: Media. It surrounds us. We live our lives in it and through it. We structure our lives around it. But it wasn’t always this way. So how did we get here? And where is the media technology that increasingly governs our lives taking us? This is the story of The Media Matrix.
PART ONE: THE GUTENBERG CONSPIRACY
You see, in the Middle Ages, mirrors—especially curved mirrors—were fiendishly difficult to make.
And pilgrim badges—elaborately designed lead or pewter plates with a curved mirror in the middle—were even more difficult to make. But in fifteenth-century Germany, they were in hot demand.
It all goes back to the year 800, when Emperor Charlemagne gifted four holy relics from Jerusalem to the Cathedral in Aachen in modern-day Germany: the swaddling clothes and loin cloth of Jesus, Mary’s robe, and the cloth that held John the Baptist’s decapitated head. The relics were thought to have miraculous restorative powers. And so, after the Black Death of 1349, they were removed from the Cathedral’s golden shrine and put on display for the public once every seven years, attracting tens of thousands of pilgrims from across Christendom.
Soon, the belief developed that a curved mirror could be held up to the relics to capture their miraculous powers and bring them back to the pilgrims’ home in whatever far-flung land they hailed from.
Now, the mirror was not a mirror like the ones we’re used to today. It was a pilgrim badge and it was one of the few mass-manufactured items of the Middle Ages. They were lucrative products to make. So lucrative, in fact, that the goldsmiths and stamp cutters of Aachen couldn’t keep up with the demand.
Enter Johannes Gutenberg. Born around the turn of the fifteenth-century to a wealthy family in Mainz, in modern-day Germany, Gutenberg—whose father was a companion of the ecclesiastical mint—had a background in goldsmithing, coinmaking and metalwork.
Arriving in Strasbourg in 1434, he thought to put his skills to work on a profitable venture: creating badges for the next Aachen Pilgrimage in 1439. There was only one problem: he didn’t have the capital to make the badges himself. So he entered into a cooperative with three business partners, each of whom ponied up a portion of the money required for Gutenberg to start producing the mirrors.
But just as the pilgrimage approached and it looked like the inventor was going to make a tidy profit for himself and his business partners, the Black Death struck again. An outbreak of the plague ravaged the Upper Rhine Valley in 1438, postponing the pilgrimage by a year. Gutenberg had already produced a number of the mirrors, but his capital was running out. And so he set his sights on a new venture—one so audacious, so revolutionary that he made his partners sign a contract swearing them to secrecy before he would let them in on it.
In fact, so secret was this project that the only reason we know anything at all about it is because one of the business partners died and his brother tried to take his place in the cooperative. But after the surviving partners refused to let him in on the plot, the would-be co-conspirator sued Gutenberg in Strasbourg court.
The court documents that survive are themselves cryptic—referring to the “adventure and art” of “the work” that Gutenberg and his partners were engaged in, but never specifying what that work was, exactly. We know that it involved presses fastened with screws and engraved “forms” supplied by a local goldsmith, that some quantity of metal had been purchased for the venture, that the work was expected to take five years and—above all—that the object of this undertaking be kept a secret.
Gutenberg and his partners had quite literally entered into a conspiracy.
And that conspiracy, resulted in this. Now this may not look like much to you . . . and you’d be right. This is a pencil sharpener. But the Gutenberg movable type printing press that it’s modeled after? Now that truly was a work of art. In fact, there’s a solid argument to be made that it was one of the most important inventions in human history.
There were many existing ideas and technologies that went into Gutenberg’s creation: the screw press, the manufacture of paper, the idea of woodblock printing, the development of ink. But it took years of careful experimentation to solve the puzzle of how to create a perfect print every time.
At first glance, it seems straightforward. The type is arranged in a rectangular container and then beaten with ink balls. The paper is placed in a leather-covered frame called a “tympan” and covered by a frisket. The tympan is then laid on the type and fed into a screw press, which is turned to press the type onto the paper.
Simple, right? Hardly.
In fact, every part of the printing process involved years of laborious experimentation: finding the right paper to print on, finding the right moisture levels for the paper to absorb the ink, finding the right way to dry the paper, finding an ink that wouldn’t run off the metal type, finding the right alloy for casting the type, and on and on and on. Each problem tested the limits of medieval technology and the limits of Gutenberg’s own skill and ingenuity.
And the result was nothing short of a revolution.
How so?
Here, look at this manuscript. What do you see?
If you lived before Gutenberg, you saw a page of text. A totality. A clump of information. But Gutenberg saw something different. His core insight was that a page of text was not a thing in itself, but a collection of letters that could be broken apart and rearranged into any other collection of letters.
From that deceptively simple observation came this. The printed page. Mechanically produced, perfectly identical characters that could be arranged into any configuration the printer desires to create any text imaginable.
And that insight birthed the modern world.
It birthed the era of mass communication. Pre-Gutenberg, there were no books, no pamphlets, no newspapers. In fact, in the 50 years before Gutenberg, all the scribes in all of Europe struggled to produce 20,000 laboriously hand-copied manuscripts. In the 50 years after Gutenberg? The printers that sprung up around the continent churned out 12 million printed books.
It birthed mass manufacture. Beyond pilgrim badges, there were very few mass-produced items in medieval life. Clothes, tools, shelter, manuscripts—everything was handmade. The book accustomed the medieval mind to the idea of identical, mechanically produced objects. And the printing press—with its mechanically perfect type—prefigured the advances of industrial production.
It birthed the Scientific Revolution. The widespread publication of data, the collection of knowledge in widely available reference books, the ability to exactly reproduce illustrations—things that we take completely for granted today—were a revelation when they appeared in the fifteenth-century and created the conditions for the rise of the empirical method.
It birthed the Reformation. We all know it was Luther and his 95 theses nailed to the church door that launched the Reformation, but it was the printing press that allowed Luther’s ideas to spread so far, so fast. (And, bonus fact: Those theses were addressed to the Archbishop of Mainz, birthplace of Gutenberg’s press.)
The printing press even birthed the nation-state.
INTERVIEWER: Yes, now how would you describe the the impact of the invention of the printing press? Give us some instances of what happened as a consequence of this
MARSHALL MCLUHAN: It created almost overnight what we call a nationalism, what in effect was a public. The old manuscript forms were not sufficiently powerful instruments of technology to create publics in the sense that print was able to do. Unified, homogeneous reading publics.
Everything that we prize in our Western world in matters of individualism, separatism and of a unique point of view and private judgment; all those factors are highly favored by the printed word and not really favored by other forms of culture like radio or earlier even by manuscript.
But this stepping up of the fragmented, the private—the individual, the private judgment, the point of view—all in fact our whole vocabularies underwent huge change with the arrival of such technology.
SOURCE: Marshall McLuhan 1965—The Future of Man in the Electric Age
The world that Gutenberg was born into was this world: the real world. If you learned anything at all about this world, you probably learned it from experience, or at least from someone who had that experience.
But the world that Gutenberg left behind was a world of mass communication. Books were no longer a rare and valuable thing, and it was increasingly likely that your information about the world came from someone you never met, someone who may have been long dead.
The movable type printing press didn’t just change the way people communicated; it changed what they communicated about.
In a very real sense, the printing press invented “the news.”
Before Gutenberg, “the news” was whatever you managed to gather from your neighbours, what you learned from travelers passing through your village, what you heard the town crier yelling through the streets or, at best, what you yourself read in the occasional proclamation or edict from the authorities.
But after the printing press, the news was for the first time collected, organized, printed on a regular basis and distributed far and wide.
In 1605, the world’s first newspaper was published in Strasbourg—the same city where Gutenberg was making his mirrors for the Aachen pilgrimage a century-and-a-half prior—and soon everyone and their dog was printing a newsletter or a pamphlet or a newspaper or a tract. And these ideas were spreading around the world like they never had before.
For the first time, someone could be reading the exact same news as someone in the next town over . . .
JAMES EVAN PILATO OF MEDIAMONARCHY.COM: . . . or someone on the other side of the planet . . .
. . . at the exact same time.
The printing press united people like never before and the result was an explosion in the spread of ideas, the likes of which would not be experienced again for centuries.
But not everyone was excited about this free flow of information. Entrenched power structures of medieval society—the crown, the church, the feudal lords—had persisted for centuries by controlling information and suppressing dissent. But as the barriers to new ideas collapsed, so did the old feudal order.
It’s no surprise, then, that wherever the printing press traveled, wherever the new cadre of printers and booksellers set up shop, the censors were not far behind. When Lutheran books began appearing in England in 1520, Cardinal Wolsey was quick to declare that anyone caught with the texts would be subject to heresy laws. Not to be outdone, King Henry VIII’s proclamation “Prohibiting Erroneous Books and Bible Translations” of 1530 afforded him the power to try readers of these “blasphemous and pestiferous” books in his own dreaded Star Chamber.
Parliament dissolved the Star Chamber in 1641, but they weren’t about to give up censorship of the press. They just wanted to take the power for themselves, and that’s exactly what they did. The Licensing Order of 1643 outlawed the printing, binding, or sale of books, except by persons licensed under authority of Parliament.
This prompted John Milton to write the Areopagitica, still recognized today as one of the most influential and passionate defenses of freedom of speech in history:
“Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.”
But even the loftiest language of Milton had little effect in swaying the censors. The Licensing Order was not overturned for half-a-century, when the Parliament chose not to renew the act.
Those in positions of power had good reason to fear the printing press. Gutenberg’s invention turned their world on its head. Suddenly, people who had been kept apart and largely in ignorance of the world around them had been brought into a community of readers; a gigantic societal conversation began, empowering radicals who sought to overturn the order that had existed for centuries and helping them to spread their dangerous new ideas faster and farther than they ever could have with pen and paper.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that these new ideas would come to their dramatic fruition in one of the most literate places on the planet: colonial America.
By the end of the 18th century, literacy rates in the colonies were upwards of ninety percent, and there were 180 newspapers being published on the Eastern Seaboard, twice as many as in England, a country with twice the population.
The colonists’ appetite for books and learning was celebrated far and wide. In 1772, the Reverend Jacob Duché wrote of the colonies: “Almost every man is a reader. [. . .] The poorest laborer upon the shores of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentlemen or scholar [. . .] such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind.”
Just four years later, in 1776, Thomas Paine would publish Common Sense, a 47-page pamphlet that was to take those colonies by storm. In the first three months of its publication, a staggering 120,000 copies of the book had been sold; by the end of the year, it had sold 500,000 copies, or one pamphlet for every five men, women and children in the colonies. To put that in perspective, adjusted for population, Common Sense would be the thirteenth best-selling book of all time.
But this wasn’t any ordinary bestseller. This was a revolution.
At the beginning of 1776, before Common Sense, the average colonists believed themselves to be Englishmen engaged in a civil war; after Common Sense, they were revolutionaries engaged in a War for Independence. And that war was waged on the power of the printed word. That is the power of print.
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the printing press is mightier than entire armies.
By the end of the nineteenth century, a new creature had emerged to capitalize on this new instrument of power: the press baron.
In America, William Randolph Hearst . . . that is, William Randolph Hearst inherited the San Francisco Examiner from his wealthy father, built it up into the biggest paper in town and plowed the profits into the purchase of the New York Journal. With the Journal and a growing number of dailies across the country under his belt, Hearst became a full-fledged press baron, taking on Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in a circulation war, pioneering the eye-catching layouts and sensational stories that would come to define his brand of yellow journalism, and helping to gin up support for the Spanish-American War, among many other dubious causes.
In England, Alfred Harmsworth picked up the yellow journalism idea from Hearst and Pulitzer and used it to build his own press empire around The Daily Mail. From a lower caste of British society, Harmsworth found himself in the center of political power in Britain, using his influence to gin up public hatred of the Huns ahead of World War I, becoming director of propaganda for the government in 1918 and earning himself the title of Lord Northcliffe in the process.
In a sense, the Lord Northcliffes and the William Randolph Hearsts and the other press barons of that era were the end stage of the Gutenberg Revolution. The invention that had given a voice to the masses and started a conversation that would topple institutions, dethrone monarchs and reorder empires had now catapulted people at the fringes of power into its very heart. With the power of the press, these men were able to sway the minds of entire nations of people.
Naturally, the old tension between the ruling elite and the masses, empowered by the press, was still there. But censorship hadn’t proven to be an effective tool for keeping the masses in ignorance. There had to be another way.
That way, it turned out, was another conspiracy.
On February 9, 1917, Oscar Callaway, a US Representative from Texas’ 12th District, exposed that conspiracy in the Congressional record:
“In March, 1915, the J. P. Morgan interests, the steel, ship-building, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States. [. . .] They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.”
The news was extraordinary, but it almost didn’t get reported at all. Callaway had not been given time to make his charges on the floor of the House; instead, they were “buried in the Record.” It wasn’t until another congressman demanded a full congressional investigation into the charges that the newspapers even bothered to cover the story at all.
Perhaps it is no surprise that the Gutenberg conspiracy ended up here, at the Morgan conspiracy. That a revolutionary step toward freeing man from the bonds of ignorance was met with a revolutionary counteraction designed to place those chains around him all the more tightly. That, at the zenith of the print revolution, the oligarchy finally found a way to control the free flow of information.
Ironic, then, that within the space of a few short years, the print revolution that Gutenberg had started was about to be overturned by another technology.
The Media Matrix
Part 1: The Gutenberg Conspiracy
Transcript and links: corbettreport.com/media
Next week: What Hath God Wrought
July 19, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video |
Leave a comment
This particular note spoke loudly to me and this lovely person gave me permission to share her words
“Dear Jessica,
I have been following your work for some time now. I thank God for you and your truth telling during this dark day of medical experimentation.
I’m sending this email to you to add colour to your work analyzing data. I know the trends and the data are vitally important but so are anecdotes and stories.
I have a 3 year old daughter and gave birth to my son in November. He’s almost 8 months now and, thank God, very healthy. I live in Fort Warrior.
[JUST FOR CONTEXT] I am unvaccinated (or un-injected is maybe what we should say). I knew I wanted to get pregnant in early 2021 and decided in advance that I wouldn’t take the jab based on the precautionary principle. I tend to be more skeptical of doctors and pharma than most — I favour nutrition and lifestyle interventions first but I know a lot of people feel “safe” going to their doctor for a pill/pharmaceutical that ails them. I kept a lot of my opinions to myself.
Fast forward to my first OB appointment in June of 2021. They were all over me about getting the COVID-19 jab at my appointment. I never brought it up, they did. The nurse practitioner fielding intake questions advised me of the following:
– the vaccine was highly recommended by the College of Obstetrics and Gynecology;
– the vaccine stays in the arm, and generates an immune response through antibodies that will also protect the baby (and do cross the placenta);
– pregnant women are at an especially high ICU risk and there have been bad outcomes;
– I’m at higher risk of infection because I have a child in daycare;
– they don’t have “long-term” safety data but they have no reason to believe that the vaccine is unsafe;
– pregnant women have priority on the vaccine.
I am a rule-follower so even though I had made the decision in advance to not take this death jab, it was a rattling appointment. It honestly caused me so much stress throughout the pregnancy because I felt they made it seem like you were doing something wrong if you didn’t get this death jab. Every doctors’ appointment had me so stressed and worried. You have this guilt about not doing “as the doctor told” and then worrying that if you got COVID and something did happen, they’d all be rolling your eyes and treating you like shit. I gave birth in a mask, but thank God everything went well and my son is healthy.
Since these jabs rolled out, I know of one woman who had a stillbirth a month before her due date. Devastating. I also have a good friend whose baby is having many health problems. Her first baby was born the same time as my first and didn’t have any of these problems. I notice too that doctors are not connecting the dots. One of the issues my friend’s baby has is a heart murmur. I’m no expert on this but she said to me that the cardiologist told her that up to 1/3rd of babies have murmurs and they just go away on their own. That didn’t sound right to me but I don’t know. She also said the baby had to go to physio and had a virus (and got COVID). It just seemed like there were so many issues and she never even raised the possibility that it might be related to taking the vax during pregnancy. Another colleague of mine who got the jab and booster while she was breastfeeding said her daughter had green poop for a week after the booster and that she lost her supply. She actually took her baby to Sick Kids and they told her she was basically crazy.
My cousin also didn’t get the jab and gave birth around the same time as me. Her baby is doing good. Got Covid at 2 months old and recovered faster than my cousin’s whole family who got it at the same time. Seems to fit the trend in the data.
I have so much rage and anger over this because I was so close to putting my baby at risk because of intense pressure from the OB office and from the mandates they rolled out at my work. I was able to get an “accommodation” because I started the job in March and had been working entirely from home and was about to take a leave. But it was gross listening to the head of HR at my job talking about the news related to “pregnant people” (ugh) and how vulnerable they were as she condescendingly implied that I was a moron for not doing more to protect my son.
Babies are being maimed; harmed. Women are being gaslighted. Breastmilk, which is literally medicine for a growing baby, is contaminated and causing harm because of these disastrous injections. This is evil. My heart is breaking every day. Every time I breastfeed my son with my milk I am so emotional. I want more kids but I’m terrified of the medical system. They doctors are in on this crime and are deliberately ignoring obvious data. I don’t even want to take my son back to the doctors for anything. It feels like going to a crime scene. I think of all the women I know who got this shot but want kids one day. They don’t even know what they’re in for and for their sake I hope I’m wrong, but damn.
I still don’t get the feeling people are waking up in Fort Warrior. I have a few friends who are aware, but they oppose all vaccines (and the more I read, so do I) so they were already for sure never going to get this experimental one. It feels really repressive here. People want to forget the medical tyranny and apartheid rolled out in the fall and pretend like we can just move on from the darkness.
I don’t know where things will go from here, but I’m so very grateful for your courage. I also appreciate the way you explain scientific findings in interviews. It’s really helpful.
Sending you so much love, mental, physical and spiritual health as you do this work. I am sure it’s so taxing to comb through these tragedies, but you are performing a vital human service.”
In gratitude, I stand. With mighty power.
July 18, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
Leave a comment
Aletho News
Aletho News 