By Todd Hayen | OffGuardian | September 17, 2022
The Queen is dead, long live the King. In another world I used to know, and can still access at will, I would be interested in such an event. I would be a bit sad and reverent; thinking of an amazing life lived, thinking of all of the people who loved her so much.
In that other world I would binge watch The Crown, and be anxious to watch the plethora of documentaries showing up on Netflix for the occasion. I would be anxious to watch the pomp and spectacle of her funeral and the coronation of the man who now would be king.
Sure, even in that world there is bitter-sweetness, there are things about Elizabeth and Charles that are not perfect. The biggest crime against the Queen was probably, in this older (in my experience) world, is the way she treated Diana.
Charles would be accused of the same, as well as other stupid things that made him a rather unsavoury character. But that’s about it.
In that world.
Now, in the other world, the newer world in my experience, Queen Elizabeth II is at times called Queen A-Lizard-Beast. The Now-King Charles is suspected by some of being a pedophile and was involved with his brother’s association with the Isle of Epstein Evil.
Although both of these accusations are found to originate in the QAnon movement and not shared by everyone occupying World B, it is still a part of it. Both Queen Elizabeth and King Charles are/were members of the WEF group-of-goons-club positioned to take over the world.
In this other world they both, including the whole of the Royal Family, are guilty of so many other atrocities and horrors it would take volumes to present. The Queen’s death is certainly something that should not be mourned, on the contrary, it is an event that should be celebrated, and Charles taking on the throne of one of the most powerful nations on earth (at least historically) should send a shiver up everyone’s spine.
World A and World B—to keep it simple—will be what I use to differentiate between these two “realities” in this article.
World A is the world I used to know, and what would now be considered all a lie.
World B is, to me, the “new” world, although it is anything but new. This is the world where truth resides, the world that exists behind the wizard’s curtain. And it is really, really, dark. Now, World B does contain truth, and it really is the only place to find most of it.
But not everything in World B is true. It contains obvious things (if you pull aside the curtain) such as blatant Government corruption, censorship, medical terrorism, the unelected elite running the world, tyranny, totalitarianism. Simple stuff like that. But it also contains stuff that is way out there, like some of the things mentioned above.
Is it all true? I doubt it, or I should say, I hope not. If so we are in bigger trouble than we know.
Worlds A and B apparently have always existed. I have not given that claim a whole lot of serious consideration, but I would be fine to believe these two worlds co-existed for quite some time. At the very least they have been around for 200 years or so.
I do believe that World B was, at one time, not as prominent, and maybe there was a bit more reality to World A. But at the moment, it is rather clear, even to a guy that spent most of his life happily in World A, that World B is here, clearly and obviously.
I think the last three years has been the primary curtain pull, certainly for me. A reveal that quite a few people “got,” but then quite a few people didn’t. There have been numerous curtain pulls before that, but I have to admit that yours truly was just as blind as a blissful sheep back then.
I questioned a bunch of things along the way, but never saw the whole picture, nor realized the extent of the implication. I scratched my head with various historical events, Viet Nam, Watergate, The Gulf War, Saddam Hussein and WMDs, Kennedy’s assassination, and particularly 9/11.
But nothing revealed the whole extent of the Wizard behind the controls, behind the curtain, than Covid. Finally, I saw it all, or most of it, or maybe not most of—it is a deep rabbit hole, and as my toes curl, I resist seeing it all.
To restate, not everything in World B is true, of course.
World A folks don’t think any of it is. However, much of World B is true—a whole lot of it. Anyway… World B definitely exists for me now, but World A is still very seducing. I was happy back when World A was my world—then in my ignorance. Now, I no longer am happy.
Right at this moment I am sitting on my deck in my backyard. The weather is sublime. I am watching the birds at our feeders, and feeling the amazingly comforting breeze as it wafts over the deck. My wife, who manages to live exclusively in World A, suggests we go out to a local festival tonight and have a nice “date night.”
World A is so seductive. Why not?
Why not ignore World B entirely, follow all the protocols and demands of World A, and just “be happy”?
We’ve heard that one before, right, “you’ll own nothing and be happy”?
Honestly, I know my wife would. She says when hearing that Herr Klaus statement, “What’s the big deal?”—the title of a recent article. Yeah, really, what’s the big deal?
Another interesting point about this idea, is that anyone who lives most of his or her life in World A, and has some sort of inkling of a World B, believe that everything in World B is a lie.
The other way around is true as well. If you live in one world, the other world is not reality.
This is easier to do if you live in World A most of the time because it has most of the persuasive power and support behind it. The media is there supporting its illusion, and nearly everyone in power supports its reality.
World B is dark and dank, it is filled with shadows and uncertainties, and it is, by design, very evil. No one wants World B (just like no one except truth seekers wanted to live outside of the illusion of the Matrix). So the illusion of World A is easier to maintain for people who really don’t think about it.
Most of the time, though, people in World A don’t even know about World B.
People in World B know everything about World A though, obviously.
There is something about following the truth, though, that is too compelling to just dismiss, along with all its accompanying pain, and say, “Forget that, I don’t need it, I’m going to live the happy life, even though it is entirely made up of lies.” I have brought this up before in previous articles.
During this current insanity I have thought often about a Star Trek episode (from the ‘60s series) where Capt. Pike (the first Enterprise Captain from the pilot) is stuck on a planet where the inhabitants have him imprisoned. These strange beings can read their prisoners’ minds and create incredible realistic environments based on their prisoners’ memories.
Pike ends up in a place with horses, beautiful natural surroundings, and a super fox partner who could not have been more alluring (especially for my pubescent sensibilities). All this was pulled from his memory banks, and as I watched this when it first aired in the ‘60s I said to myself, “Dude, this is a no brainer! Take the girl and the horse and be happy!” (Needless to say, I more than likely did not say “dude” since that was not yet popular… creative license, forgive me.)
Of course, Pike would have nothing of it. “No way,” he said, “these beings are not going to take away my freedom!” The girl, and I, shouted, “Stupid! You are crazy!!”
There is a similar situation in the first instalment of The Matrix series. “Wouldn’t you rather have this (World A) than that?” The choice in that example was the wrong one.
You should always choose truth (real) over lies (unreal). Every time.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not considering choosing the “fake good” side. But I am confused by it. As I said, it is seductive. And although it does not “lure” me into untruth, it confuses me. Living this double life is indeed a serious example of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance can cause all sorts of problems: depression, anxiety, and disorientation being just a few of them.
I think one odd thing that comes from all this, at least for me, is a desire for World B to fill my reality. I am tired of living in this “eye of the storm”… this world of ambiguity. As awful as I know that would be, it seems that this would break the cognitive dissonance and the appearance of the world around me would not be a mixture of the two worlds, but only one world, the real one.
World A is difficult to give up. It is filled with familiar things and familiar rituals. It is a bitter-sweet world, but for the most part filled with happy stuff. Vacations, sporting events, happy people in happy television and internet advertisements. Happy people on talk shows, newscasts, etc. All dressed up, all pretty for the camera.
Celebrities we love, and swoon over, movies we love, TV series we love; a The Truman Show reality that is filled mostly with good things.
When someone famous dies we mourn, cry, think about their wonderful life, or about their miserable life and thank God our life is not as miserable. We don’t see much that is happening in the world where it isn’t so pretty. Most of that is at arm’s length.
In World A we trust our leaders. We trust our medical professionals, our Universities and hospitals. We trust institutions like the UN, the WHO, and NATO. We trust famous people like the Pope, Bill Gates, and Tom Hanks. Maybe some of these people are good, maybe not. In World A we don’t care, we trust.
But I do often wonder if the reality, THE reality, is not categorically World B, but a mixture of A and B. Maybe reality is not as bad as it seems to be, but until everyone is on board, and the lies of World A take a back seat to truth, we will find that things are not so unconscionably evil.
This is a hope and a dream, but I have an uncomfortable feeling that it is just a pipe dream, and more than likely things we discover will be worse.
But even so, there will be no temptress of World A tugging at my heart. I will finally be living only the truth where my wife, and most other loved ones, and the rest of the world are not telling me I am a dolt and a conspiracy theorist.
Then I will not be tempted to slip into a dream world of untruths, no matter how nice it once looked.
Todd Hayen is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here.
September 17, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | SEPTEMBER 15, 2022
In the Russian journal Natsionalnaya Oborona (National Defence), the chief of Russia’s foreign intelligence Sergey Naryshkin has written a riveting essay on the 75th anniversary of the Central Intelligence Agency, which falls on Sunday. It is an unusual gesture, especially in the middle of the hybrid war in Ukraine.
Probably, it serves a purpose? Most certainly, it serves to remind the Russian people and foreigners alike that nothing has been forgotten, nothing forgiven.
The title of the essay — 75 candles on the CIA Cake — is somewhat misleading, as Naryshkin’s concluding remark is that “Anniversary congratulations and wishes there will not be. As there can be no compromise in assessing its (CIA’s) role in history and ‘merits’ to humanity.”
Naryshkin’s essay will be closely studied by the western intelligence for any “clues.” Indeed, what is he messaging? Naryshkin and President Vladimir Putin go back some 40 years. Naryshkin had just graduated from one of Moscow’s most prestigious institutions, the Felix Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB and Putin was already working in the foreign intelligence department of the Leningrad KGB when they bumped into each other in the corridors of the Big House (as KGB’s regional headquarters in Leningrad was known).
Unsurprisingly, Naryshkin writes about the CIA with an easy familiarity. As he put it, “The CIA was created at the beginning of the Cold War era in order to conduct intelligence activities around the world as a tool to counteract the existence and strengthen the role of the USSR in the world, the formation of a bloc of socialist states, and the rise of the national liberation movement in Africa, Asia, and South America.”
Funnily enough, nonetheless, the CIA began with a colossal intelligence failure when it predicted on 20th September 1949 that the first Soviet atomic bomb would appear in mid-1953, when, actually, 22 days before the publication of that forecast, the Soviet Union had already conducted its first test of a nuclear device.
The CIA was once again clueless when Putin announced in March 2018 in an address to the Russian Parliament that Russia had developed a new hypersonic missile system, which “will be practically invulnerable.” US officials and analysts were taken aback. The CIA has a history of getting Russia all wrong, including about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But the CIA had its successes too — for example, the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1951 after his move to nationalise Iranian oil fields. By the 1950s, CIA already turned into a “multi-disciplinary monster” when besides traditional intelligence activities, it was also “tasked with tracking and suppressing any political, economic, military processes in all parts of the planet that could threaten the world hegemony of the United States and its allies.” Naryshkin gives credit to Allen Dulles for this metamorphosis. Dulles introduced “aggressiveness and lack of morality into the activities” of the CIA. He was just the man to do so, having been station chief of the OSS (CIA’s predecessor) in Bern in 1942-1945, who had clandestine dealings with the Nazis behind the back of the US’ Soviet ally.
Naryshkin takes us through the chronicle of CIA’s “coups d’etat, direct military interventions, provocations of all kinds, assassinations of objectionable politicians, terror, sabotage, bribery” and all that cloak and dagger stuff, which prompted President Lyndon Johnson’s famous condemnation of the agency as the “damn murder corporation.” Like in Banquo’s ghost scene at Macbeth’s banquet table in Shakespeare’s play, the victims appear — Patrice Lumumba, Salvador Allende …
There are chilling references to the CIA’s practice of using cancer spreading technology to eliminate “objectionable” Latin American leaders — Argentina’s Kirchner (thyroid cancer), Paraguay’s Lugo (lymphoma), Brazil’s Lula da Silva (laryngeal cancer) and D. Dilma Rousseff (lymphoma) — and, of course, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (tracheal cancer). According to Naryshkin, “In 1955, the CIA attempted to eliminate Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, who was perceived by the Americans as “a maniacal fanatic seeking to take over the world,” but failed miserably. Agents blew up the plane on which Zhou was supposed to fly to a conference of Asian and African leaders in Indonesia.” Thereupon, Dulles developed a plan to poison Zhou but gave up fearing that CIA’s involvement might get exposed!
A US Senate commission in 1975 uncovered and confirmed CIA involvement in contract killings and coup d’état. It counted 8 cases of assassination attempts by CIA agents and mercenaries on Fidel Castro during 1960-1965 alone. Havana later revealed the full tally — from 1959 through 1990, CIA planned 634 assassination attempts on Fidel. To quote Naryshkin, “With maniacal persistence, the CIA officers developed simply exotic ways to eliminate the Comandante. They tried to kill him with the help of suicide pilots, paratrooper agents, recruited agents from the inner circle, shelling cars and yachts from ships, boats and subversive saboteurs, with the help of scuba gear with a tubercle bacillus brought there, poisoned cigars, poisonous pills for food and much more.”
“The CIA used every opportunity to inflict maximum damage on the Soviet Union, including economic damage. CIA director W. Casey personally addressed the king of Saudi Arabia and persuaded him to sharply increase oil production, which caused world prices for the most important export resources for the USSR to fall by almost three times. For the budget of the Soviet Union, this was a huge loss, which seriously influenced further political events in the USSR.”
Naryshkin throws some riveting insights into the saga of Ukraine in the 1948-1949 period when the CIA “actively used the experience of Hitler’s special services for launching subversive work against the USSR with recruits in the camps of displaced East Europeans who included quarter of a million Ukrainians. “Almost all the leaders and top functionaries of the Ukrainian nationalists were in one way or another bound by cooperation with the Nazis and therefore were completely controlled” by the CIA and British intelligence. In November 1950, the head of the CIA’s Policy Coordination Office, Frank Wisner bragged that CIA was capable of deploying up to 100,000 Ukrainian nationalists in case of a war with the Soviet Union.
The U2 incident — shooting down the CIA spy plane — in the Urals on May 1, 1960 was a dramatic incident when Washington accused the USSR of destroying a scientific aircraft and a pilot-scientist, but was profoundly embarrassed when Moscow presented not only the wreckage of the aircraft and spy equipment to the media, “but also the living pilot Francis Gary Powers, who frankly told what he was doing in the sky over the USSR and on whose instructions.”
On the other hand, the masterstroke of a South Korean Boeing entering Soviet airspace and getting shot down in 1983 provided just the “propaganda basis” for President Reagan “to announce another ‘crusade against communism.’ The policy of detente was thrown aside, and a new round of the arms race began.”
Naryshkin’s final reflection is calm and collected with no trace of hyperbole: “Evaluation of the effectiveness of any special service is always relative. The US Central Intelligence Agency, entering its 76th year of existence, has been and remains a zealous executor of the will of the ruling circles of its country. Despite the significant changes taking place, they continue to imagine themselves as the only hegemon in the unipolar world. The organisation is intelligence, based on its name, but with a sensitive focus on conducting subversive actions against sovereign states.”
To Indians, CIA has become a benign creature, no longer feared. Having links with the CIA carries no stigma among Indian elites. They regard “CIA phobia” as a legacy of the Indira Gandhi era. And they thrive as mainstream columnists, think tankers and opinion makers. Naryshkin’s essay is a sobering reminder that history has not ended — and it never will.
The essay (in Russian) is here.
September 17, 2022 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, Iran, Latin America, Russia, Ukraine | Leave a comment
BY DAVID BELL | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | SEPTEMBER 14, 2022
“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities.” ~ Voltaire.
Something is fundamentally wrong with global public health. More accurately, something is fundamentally wrong with the mindset of global health professionals, particularly those in positions of leadership. It has become normal to speak, repeat, and defend complete absurdity, as if illusions and fantasies are real. There are no sanctions for operating in this way – indeed it is proving highly successful. Statements of demonstrable stupidity are becoming prerequisites for career advancement and the approval of peers. It is like living within a fantasy, except those it kills are real.
The world at large struggles to understand that they could be fed falsehoods on this level. Most people still consider the experts quoted in the media to be credible, serious people. They believe that those leading the health professions would not habitually lie. For professionals to act like this, they would have to be deeply troubled, insecure people, or they would have to be quite malevolent. This does not fit the popular image of global health experts.
Beyond individuals, we now have entire institutions mocking reality. They lie to each other and the public, repeat these lies, and applaud each other for doing so. They can state obvious stupidity with impunity as a once critical media now sees its role as backing them unquestioningly, disseminating their pronouncements and suppressing any information to the contrary for a perceived public good. The emperor’s obvious nakedness has become proof that he is clothed. Acknowledging the evidence of one’s eyes as he parades his wares is tantamount to the crime of Galileo and must be treated accordingly.
The Opportunity of COVID-19
Over the last two years, the world’s premier health institutions pretended that humans were unlikely to develop effective clinical immunity in response to coronavirus infections, despite experience with the four common seasonal coronaviruses and the SARS-1 confirming that we do. Despite established understanding of mucosal immunity and T-cell function, the public were asked to believe that antibody titers against a single highly-variable pharmaceutically-induced protein were the only valid measure of effective immunity. The leaders and staff within these health organizations knew this was frankly silly, and that the evidence on COVID-19 was showing otherwise.
All these institutions knew that, in time, the relative effectiveness of post-infection immunity would become obvious to all. But this did not stop them from stating that vaccines were ‘the only way out of the pandemic,’ as if established fact, denigrating those who thought differently and ignoring the natural resolution of prior pandemics. Despite accumulating evidence that the obvious is indeed obvious, this position of fallacy still drives the COVAX global vaccination program. Current evidence that post-infection immunity is more effective than vaccination is of no value– truth simply does not matter to these people anymore.
In 2019, the term ‘genetic medicines’ referred to pharmaceuticals based on introduction of genetic material into a body for therapeutic purposes. It is standard industry terminology for mRNA formulations such as those that induce SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) spike protein production. In 2020, institutions that previously used this term for COVID-19 vaccines decided that continuing to do so would equate to promoting a ‘conspiracy theory’ – a particularly severe transgression. These mRNA medicines work by inserting synthetic genes into a person’s cells, using the host’s intracellular machinery to translate the genetic sequence into a foreign protein that is expressed by the cell. These cells are then recognized as foreign by the host’s immune system and killed. While this change to the definition of vaccine can be justified by the end result (an immune response), mRNA vaccines are indeed, as the pharmaceutical industry notes, genetic medicines.
It was considered necessary that the public consider such medicines to be indistinguishable from conventional vaccines that present proteins or other antigens to the immune system through an entirely different mechanism. The fallacy was formed to support the claim that if one type of vaccine was safe and effective, then the other must be.
The entire pharmaceutical industry knows this is an absurdity; mRNA injections may well be safe and effective, or they may not, but they are no more like injecting a protein or attenuated virus than riding a bicycle is to riding a train. If the department of transport told us that railways prove that bicycles are safe and effective, we would laugh. Except we wouldn’t anymore.
We would, apparently, signal our agreement because to identify differences between bicycles and trains would be evidence of incorrect thinking (misinformation, or a conspiracy theory). Similarly ‘incorrect’ thinking regarding COVID-19 has been characterized in the Journal of the American Medical Association, with a nod to Nazism, as a neurodegenerative disorder.
Tedros Perfects the Art
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and the World Health Organization (WHO) he leads have perfected the art of mainstreaming the ridiculous through COVAX. With a budget several times higher than any prior international health program, it aims to vaccinate billions of already-immune people in age groups barely affected by COVID-19. WHO is aware that the vaccines do not significantly reduce spread, that post-infection immunity is effective, and that vaccinating people with post-infection immunity will provide minimal additional clinical benefit.
WHO promotes COVAX under the banner “No one is safe until all are safe.” WHO thus wants the public to believe that vaccinating an individual does not protect them until everyone else is vaccinated, whilst simultaneously believing, as WHO insists, that vaccination against COVID-19 is highly protective for all those who are vaccinated.
The complete incompatibility of these claims, together with the absurdity of claiming that a vaccine that does not stop transmission could protect others and ‘end the pandemic,’ does not matter. The writers and designers of WHO’s speeches and brochures know these opposing claims cannot simultaneously be true. They have found that stating absurdities is rewarded, and that if a young boy points to the emperor’s nakedness he can simply be denigrated and excluded, while the emperor swaggers on.
A Pox On Us All
Tedros recently proclaimed monkeypox, a virus that had then killed 5 people globally, to be a public health emergency of international concern. His organization’s last such pronouncement contributed to an increase of about 45,000 added malaria child deaths in 2020, over 200,000 additional dead children in South Asia in the same year, rising tuberculosis, millions of girls forced into child marriage and sexual slavery, and the decimation of global education that will entrench future poverty for billions. Yet this man managed to concentrate the world on monkeypox, an outbreak of such tiny impact that annual mortality from bungee-jumping will likely be higher.
Whole countries followed his lead, global media ran headlines on how many people had this chicken pox-like disease, and the world pretended the emergency was real. Once this man would have been laughed out of office, but the world of 2022 considered this blatant absurdity normal and acceptable. It no longer expects or requires rational discourse from people in authority. Stupidity is expected and its dictates adopted.
The purpose of pointing out the above is not to single out the WHO. WHO’s fantasy statements are repeated and supported by its peer health organizations. Gavi (the vaccine alliance), CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), UNICEF (the UN agency that once concentrated on vaccinating children but now leads mass vaccination against a disease targeting the elderly) all apparently agree that ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe.’
This needs to be understood as an entire industrial culture – global health is a business and its primary role is to support itself. Its members know their pronouncements are false or illogical, but dishonesty has become an important tool to achieve their goals. It fuels income and expansion, and therefore must be good. Many private corporations would act similarly if advertising standards were not enforced. These international health agencies operate outside of national jurisdictions, and so have no enforceable standards. The media, once a check on such malfeasance and misgovernance, has ceased to value truth.
The COVID-19 event has opened the gate to a new era in public health, and the absurdity of the monkeypox ‘emergency’ is an example of what is coming. A pandemic industry that has formed around these agencies, now with the weight of the World Bank behind it, is asking us to believe that pandemics are becoming more frequent, and that the world’s diminishing wildlife poses an ever-increasing threat.
WHO’s own publications may tell us that pandemics have occurred just 5 times in 100 years, with overall reducing mortality, but this is of no consequence. Fantasy, when repeated sufficiently in a matter-of-fact manner, can displace objective reality as a driver of policy. The removal of employment, disruption of supply lines, increase in mass poverty and the economic wreckage of the COVID-19 response is used to justify a call for repetition of the same, more easily and more often, by the same people who orchestrated it.
Killing by Killing Truth
Most health professionals, given a few minutes to sit down and think this through, can see that something is wrong. However, it is hard to hold onto this reality if the lie opposing it is repeated widely and frequently, echoed by all one’s peers. People who understand infection control can still put on a mask at a restaurant door to remove it at a table just meters away. Humans are fully capable of living a lie, of embracing absurdity in life and work, just to get along. We now have an entire international industry fully reliant on acceptance of such absurdity for its survival. Despite the risks, it works.
COVID-19 showed us how willing many people are to join the harming and denigration of others to defend positions they know are illogical and untrue. To see one’s own profession indulging in such behavior is difficult to reconcile, when that profession is in some ways entrusted with the welfare of others. But we should not be surprised, we are all human and this promotion of global harm will continue as long as it reaps local rewards. People do not easily tire of wrong – they get accustomed to it.
This institutional self-delusion would be of little consequence, even humorous, if it only involved an emperor walking the streets of a children’s tale. But many of the children in this tale are now dead from malaria and malnutrition, millions of girls are enduring nightly rape and tens of millions denied education will spend their lives in poverty. They did not ask these people in Geneva, Washington, or Brussels to remove their food security, education and healthcare to ostensibly protect elderly elsewhere from COVID-19.
They are not asking for a growing pandemic bureaucracy to gorge itself whilst entrenching further inequality. Our response to this level of institutional dishonesty and absurdity must not be one of amusement but rather of disgust, and concern for what could happen next.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is the former Program Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland.
September 15, 2022 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CEPI, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, GAVI, WHO | Leave a comment
By David Craig | TCW Defending Freedom | September 12, 2022
Our government is imposing draconian limitations on our lifestyles, our economy and our finances to save the planet from supposed catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW), now renamed ‘climate change’. Probably one of the most repeated arguments you’ll hear in support of the need to achieve ‘net zero’ is that ’97 per cent of scientists agree CAGW is happening’.
President Obama is just one of many who have made this claim: ‘Ninety-seven per cent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.’
So did President Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry, when he warned of the ‘crippling consequences’ of climate change and said: ‘Ninety-seven per cent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.’
Yet, in spite of the damaging effects reaching ‘net zero’ will have on Western economies, not a single politician or mainstream journalist seems to have made the effort to find out where this ‘97 per cent’ figure came from and how accurate it is.
The main author of the paper which came up with the figure was John Cook, an Australian former web programmer and blogger who later gained a PhD in philosophy at the University of Western Australia and founded what could be seen as a climate alarmist website.
He assembled a group of volunteers recruited via the website as part of a ‘citizen science’ project and tasked them with examining the abstracts of 11,944 climate papers from 1991-2011 matching the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’. Note that the volunteers didn’t speak to any scientists and didn’t read the scientific papers. They just looked at the abstracts – a summary paragraph or two. The volunteers classified the abstracts into one of seven categories according to their opinions of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW):
1. Explicit endorsement of AGW with quantification
2. Explicit endorsement of AGW without quantification
3. Implicit endorsement of AGW
4. No position or Uncertain
5. Implicit rejection of AGW
6. Explicit rejection of AGW without quantification
7. Explicit rejection of AGW with quantification
The reviewers then ‘simplified’ results into four main categories as follows:
Endorse AGW 3,896 32.6 per cent of abstracts
No AGW position 7,930 66.4 per cent of abstracts
Reject AGW 78 0.7 per cent of abstracts
Uncertain on AGW 40 0.3 per cent of abstracts
This gave 32.6 per cent of abstracts which the reviewers concluded endorsed AGW.
Now comes the clever bit. Instead of admitting that just 32.6 per cent of papers (actually just abstracts of papers) endorsed AGW, the group removed the 7,930 abstracts which didn’t take a position on AGW. That left just 4,014 abstracts of which 3,896 (97 per cent) supposedly ‘endorsed’ AGW.
This is like doing a survey of the voting intentions of 1,000 people. You find that 90 say they’ll vote Labour, 10 say they’ll vote Conservative and the remaining 900 are undecided. You eliminate the 900 undecideds and claim that 90 per cent of voters support Labour and just 10 per cent of voters will vote Conservative. This is, of course, complete statistical nonsense as the real percentage of the sampled 1,000 voters who have said they will vote Labour is 9 per cent, not 90 per cent.
That’s not the end of the magic employed to reach that wondrous 97 per cent. The reviewers lumped together three categories of abstracts – ‘explicit endorsement with quantification’, ‘explicit endorsement without quantification’ and ‘implicit endorsement’. (Implicit endorsement means that the reviewer felt that the paper endorsed the AGW theory even though the paper didn’t do so explicitly).
In the paper claiming 97 per cent support for AGW, the reviewers don’t tell us how many papers fitted into each of these three categories, but the survey’s own database shows that of the 3,896 abstracts which supposedly ‘endorsed’ AGW, just 64 were in the ‘explicit endorsement with quantification’ category; 922 were in the ‘explicit endorsement without quantification’ and the vast majority – 2,910 out of 3,896 – were in the ‘implicit endorsement of AGW’ category.
Thus only 986 of 11,944 – that’s just 8.2 per cent – of abstracts explicitly said they agreed with the theory of man-made global warming.
To summarise, this ‘97 per cent of scientists’ claim was based on the work of 11 to 12 volunteers, whose scientific credentials have not (as far as I know) been released and all of whom were probably firm AGW believers. Each looked at around 1,000, often quite obscure, scientific abstracts and from these documents decided whether the scientific papers (which they hadn’t read) supported the AGW theory. To claim such an approach is statistically valid is beyond farcical. To call the ‘97 per cent of scientists endorse AGW’ result ‘garbage’ could be seen as insulting to garbage.
Given the damage ‘net zero’ will do to our economies and our lives, it is incredible that not a single politician, mainstream journalist or editor seems to have had the ability or the inclination to expose the dubious origins of the ubiquitous ‘97 per cent of scientists endorse AGW’ claim.
September 14, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Obama | Leave a comment
By Vijay Jayaraj | RealClear Energy | September 07, 2022
There is being caught between a rock and a hard place, and then there’s Europe. The continent’s squeeze between a severe energy shortage and a policy of phasing out fossil fuels — the world’s most widely available energy source — got tighter Sept. 2 when Russia’s Gazprom stopped its natural gas supply to Europe through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline due to “oil leakage.”
Experiencing astronomical power prices and anticipating an energy-starved winter, citizens are saddled with their leaders’ pursuit of a green utopia that has denied them access to adequate supplies of coal, natural gas and oil. Consumers are left largely at the mercy of expensive and unreliable solar and wind power.
For many of us, Europe’s self-imposed disaster is a warning of what’s to come should our leaders insist on pursuing a carbon-free nirvana — an absurdity that is not even possible. However, for those faced with eye-popping price hikes, the situation is life altering!
In the UK, many small businesses have no choice but to shut down this winter. James Allcock of Beverley, England, says that the electricity prices for his tiny 22-seat restaurant has risen from 2,928 pounds a year to 22,516 pounds. “Unsure what to actually do next but as a business that cost would now be more than I pay in rent and more than I take some months,” he laments. “I simply don’t have the money for this.”
For slightly bigger businesses, the situation is even worse. Premier Seafoods Ltd, award-winning fishmongers in Grimsby, England, tweeted, “I have two meters in my business. Jointly, currently, 21,000 pounds. Quoted to go to a combined 91,000 pounds. What on earth do I do?”
Edwards of Conwy, awarded the Best UK Butcher (2014-15), says, “Last year I spent 129,000 pounds on energy. I received this quote yesterday for 782,011 pounds — 2,500 pounds a week to 15,000 pounds a week! Any suggestions on how I move forward.” A small fish and chip shop in Oswestry, Shropshire, must pay an energy bill that has increased from 9,000 to 35,000 pounds.
UK’s Federation of Small Businesses reports, “Nearly 15 percent of small- and medium-sized firms polled fear they may have to close or downsize as a direct result of the spiraling energy bills.”
In Germany, high energy prices have caused manufacturers to stop production. The country’s finance minister says that the trend in the manufacturing sector is “alarming.” And there are dozens of other EU countries where small business owners have expressed their helpless situation on Twitter.
Even during this difficult situation, many so called experts seem to be out of touch with reality. Instead of seeking ways to improve energy production, they advise Europeans to reduce energy use. One expert says Europe must reduce energy demand — even as winter is approaching.
Last week, outgoing British Prime Minister Boris Johnson blamed previous governments for the crisis and lamented not having enough nuclear plants. However, like many EU leaders, he steered away from using coal to generate more electricity or increasing fracking to produce more domestic natural gas.
Since then, Liz Truss has been named to replace Mr. Johnson. She speaks of producing more energy while indicating support for the green’s net zero nonsense. Where this actually goes for the UK remains to be seen.
Nonetheless, for many Europeans the prescription for their pain is more pain: Reduced energy supplies, economic stagnation and cold homes.
Addressing the political nature of energy crisis, British journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer tweeted, “The fact that we’re talking about rationing energy, kids dying from the cold, thousands of businesses facing closure, millions unable to afford to keep warm this winter, should be a matter of national shame…None of this just ‘happened’… It’s the result of political choices.”
While political leaders — and their cheerleaders in academia and the bureaucracies — live comfortably on taxpayer-funded salaries, citizens suffer.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, VA. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK and resides in India.
September 14, 2022 Posted by aletho | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | European Union, UK | Leave a comment
Tony Heller | September 7, 2022
The psychological warfare campaign being waged against the public has nothing to do with climate science, and everything to do with the science of propaganda.
September 14, 2022 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment
New security document significantly worsens tensions
By Lucas Leiroz | September 14, 2022
Once again, Kiev makes clear its intentions to continue the war against Russia. On September 13, the Ukrainian government published a national security plan that provides for the extension of Western aid for decades. In the text, it is suggested that NATO states should continue to support Kiev in a variety of ways, including investments in the defense industry. In practice, the Ukrainian state has made an official statement that it intends to expand the conflict indefinitely, which makes any form of negotiation for peace impossible.
This document looks like an alternative to Ukraine’s unfeasible accession to NATO. Since 2014, Kiev has been planning to join the Western military alliance, but, despite the country having been used several times to attack Russian citizens and destabilize Moscow’s strategic environment, NATO has never really seemed interested in approving such a membership. By the rules of the alliance, states in conflict cannot be accepted, since NATO is a collective security pact that establishes that all members must cooperate with each other in case of war in any of the states. As Kiev had been in a civil conflict for the past eight years, membership would be impossible.
Obviously, this project became even more unrealistic with the start of the Russian special military operation. Despite actively helping Ukraine with military and financial assistance, the Western Alliance would not allow Kiev to gain membership as this situation would create an obligation for all other members to send troops to fight Russia. Then, faced with the impossibility of joining the alliance, the Zelensky government established a document of guarantees to create conditions for cooperation between Kiev and NATO.
The recently released document establishes the signing of the Kiev Security Compact, of which, among others, the US, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Canada, Poland and Turkey would be signatories. This would allow various NATO powers to act in an integrated manner with the Ukrainian Defense Minister, despite the fact that the country is not a real member of the alliance. It is still determined that other bilateral pacts must be concluded, seeking to reinforce a policy of collective security. The text, however, makes it clear that Kiev will continue to seek its entry into NATO, with such pacts being just a way of establishing conditions of integration at a time when membership is not possible.
Among the guarantees that Kiev demands from its partners, the document also points to the presentation of a list of military measures to be taken if Ukraine suffers any attack. Unable to demand that NATO troops be sent to face its enemies, Kiev demands that military aid be officialized, extended and improved. In addition, the supply with intelligence data and investments in infrastructure and defense industry are also required. The document even states that Kiev’s troops must participate in drills and missions operated by NATO and EU members abroad.
“The security guarantees will be positive; they lay out a range of commitments made by a group of guarantors, together with Ukraine. They need to be binding based on bilateral agreements, but brought together under a joint strategic partnership document – called the Kiev Security Compact. The Compact will bring a core group of allied countries together with Ukraine. This could include the US, UK, Canada, Poland, Italy, Germany, France, Australia, Turkey, and Nordic, Baltic, Central and Eastern European countries (…) Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO and benefit from its mutual defense arrangements is safeguarded in its Constitution. This aspiration is the sovereign decision of Ukraine. Both NATO and EU membership will significantly bolster Ukraine’s security in the long-term”, the document says.
There is still no formal response on the part of NATO countries to the Ukrainian initiative, but considering the alliance’s destabilizing stance in the Ukrainian conflict, it is possible that some negotiations will move forward in this direction. NATO’s high degree of interventionism has been the main reason for the escalation of the conflict, which is why all possibilities for peace negotiations have been exhausted.
The Russian reaction, as expected, was extremely negative. The deputy head of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev commented on the case severely criticizing the Ukrainian government and stating that such a “guarantee” program looks like a prologue to WWIII. He also warned about the imminent risks of an escalation of the conflict:
“The Kiev camarilla has given birth to a project of ‘security guarantees’, which are essentially a prologue to a third world war (…) If these half-wits go ahead with the rampant pumping of the most dangerous types of weapons to the Kiev regime, then sooner or later the military campaign will achieve another level”.
In fact, Kiev is just trying to circumvent its non-membership, seeking to receive the guarantees of a NATO member state, which cannot be accepted. The alliance must act rationally and prioritize peace over its anti-Russian plans. Agreeing to give Kiev “security guarantees” would be an affront to which Russia would be forced to respond.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
September 14, 2022 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | European Union, Russia, Ukraine | Leave a comment
By UsForThem | TCW Defending Freedom | September 7, 2022
‘After schools shut their gates on Friday afternoon, they will remain closed until further notice.’
When then Education Secretary Gavin Williamson stood up in Parliament on March 18 2020 to utter these words, a chill went through the nation, especially parents. It was another two days before Boris Johnson announced that all pubs, restaurants, gyms and other social venues across the country were to close, putting children’s education firmly behind adults’ entertainment. That chill turns to an icy blast when it becomes clear that this seismic decision, one which will impact many children into their adult lives, was made in full knowledge that closures were likely to be lengthy – months, not weeks – and that there was little consideration as to what that would mean for children, nor any plan to support them.
Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, in his tell-all interview of lockdown decision-making, made clear that no one was prepared to consider the impact of school closures. ‘Forget about the economy,’ Sunak recalls himself saying, ‘surely we can all agree that kids not being in school is a major nightmare . . . There was a big silence afterwards. It was the first time someone had said it. I was so furious.’
To see such wilful blindness – some might say recklessness – at the heart of government in regard to the welfare, education and safeguarding of some 12million children in black and white is sobering. In light of that acknowledgment, we decided to do a deep dive into the minutes of Sage (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) to see what more the records could tell us about warnings that were ignored.
Our findings raise serious questions about the integrity of the assumptions made around school closures, the lack of any serious recognition of the impact on children in documented decision-making, and most consequential of all, about why the government and Department for Education (DfE) were not prepared for the scale of the shutdown when Sage had repeatedly made clear that, according to their estimates, school closures would need to be lengthy to have any impact.
School closures never anticipated to be effective in the long term
The core planning assumption at the outset (mid-February 2020) was for schools to stay open, in line with the assumptions of the previous influenza pandemic plans and the recognition that ‘any impact from school closures on the total number of cases is likely to be highly limited’.
Some (most notably the Institute for Government in their report on the government’s handling of education during the pandemic) have suggested that the policy switch to full school closures happened rapidly over the weekend of March 16/17 and took the DfE by surprise. However, if one tracks through the Sage minutes, a clear pattern is evident whereby the question of closures appears to escalate from a ‘probably not’ or perhaps an ‘if’, to a ‘when?’ and ‘for how long?’
A few factors make this progression especially perplexing. First, the impact of school closures on transmission was always highly uncertain. Even in the minutes of March 17, just before closures, the minutes read ‘Our best assessment is that they would reduce the reproduction number by between 10 per cent and 20 per cent’ and even that remains heavily caveated: ‘The impact of school closures, as a stand-alone policy, on Covid-19 would be expected to be smaller than for influenza.’
Early suggestions for mass school closures had been predicated on the basis that they should be considered only if children were responsible for high levels of transmission. But the day before Williamson’s statement, SPI-M-O (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling, Operational sub-group) predicted that ‘infected children could be an average of 25 per cent to 75 per cent as likely to transmit SARS-CoV-2 per contact than adults’. Why, then, were the models not re-run with these lower transmission rates?
Finally, all the models showed that when schools reopened, cases would increase again, and the effectiveness of the measure would therefore be limited. At best it was known from the start that school closures could only be a short term, very incomplete tool – ostensibly to help ‘save the NHS’ – yet this tool was still employed again a year later, in January 2021, and almost a third time when the NHS found itself in trouble again.
Children discriminated against vs other groups
In early February 2020, the view of SPI-M-O was that potential interventions had the ability to delay the pandemic for only one month, listing four interventions predicted to have the most impact. School closures were included in that list, despite a clear acknowledgement that the incubation period and lack of prior immunity among adults would mean that this would not be expected to be as effective a tool as in a flu pandemic.
By early March 2020, Sage recommended social distancing for over-70s as a key intervention estimated to reduce deaths by 20-30 per cent, and combined with isolation of symptomatic individuals and their households, by 50 per cent. Closing schools in this model had no impact on deaths. In light of this, why were school closures always on the table, and especially given the uncertain benefits, never rigorously questioned in regard to the long-term impact on children?
Lack of recognition of the impact on children
The Sage minutes recognise throughout that closing schools would have ‘impact’. Occasionally it is acknowledged that these impacts are on children, such as in the magnificently underplayed phrase ‘foregone education’ or in the guise of ‘educational costs’, but far more often the impacts on the rest of the population are the priority, for instance in terms of the following:
In truth, and as Sunak implied, Sage rarely looked at the implications for children. Only one paper with the Sage minutes for the six weeks preceding the decision to close schools raises the spectre of the awful treatment that we now know was suffered by the most vulnerable of young people. And it could not have been more underplayed: ‘Almost all strategies will result in reduced, or changed, adult oversight of children. This presents a risk of unintended consequences.’ So the deaths of Star Hobson and Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, and those of the other 220 children whose deaths during lockdown were thought to involve abuse or neglect, were ‘unintended consequences’ that no one in authority bothered to consider.
Lack of preparation and honesty on duration of closures
Sage say clearly in their minutes that ‘allowing exams to take place in otherwise closed schools would only have a marginal impact’, a conclusion drawn by most other countries as well. So why were Gavin Williamson and the Department for Education unprepared for this eventuality, when school closures had been on the table for at least six weeks before the decision was announced? Most shameful of all, though, is that the ‘closed until further notice’ announced by Gavin Williamson on 18 March was envisaged the day before by the scientists as variously ‘a long period’, ‘until September’, or – at best – ‘school closures would need to last several months to maintain the effect seen’.
So given that Sage were clearly signalling from early February that if schools closed it would need to be for a significant period, why was there no communication of this when schools closed? Why was there no plan for exams? Why had there been no attempt in the weeks prior to the closures to prepare pupils, parents and teachers for distance learning? Most of all, why weren’t the known safeguarding concerns acted upon?
Were school closures inevitable?
It is hard to recall now the increasing levels of uncertainty and fear in media and government communications in March 2020. By mid-March, with 20 per cent of teachers isolating and school attendance at 70 to 80 per cent, school closures may have become the only option. However, imagine if, as well as a plan to close schools, the DfE had a plan to reopen them, or – as envisaged in previous pandemic plans – to keep some form of in-person teaching going using a retired/reserve workforce. Imagine if the government had not chosen in its communications a route that decreed ‘the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging’ – a narrative which not only impacted the mental health of children, but also made it almost impossible to have a balanced view on the need for schools to reopen, leading to the chaos of isolations as well as the school closures of January 2021.
The decision-making around school closures, almost complete failure to grasp the severe and in some cases fatal implications for school closures on children, and the apparent lack of any coherent plan for reopening or education whilst schools were closed must be central to any examination by the UK Covid-19 Inquiry. If children and young people are once again excluded from the process, it will be a stark admission that our society places a lower value on children than on adults.
September 11, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 7, 2022
University COVID-19 vaccine mandates are unethical because the vaccines are up to nearly 100 times more likely to cause a person of student age serious injury than prevent him or her from being hospitalised with COVID-19, a new study has concluded.
The study, whose authors include Dr. Kevin Bardosh, a recipient of funding from the pro-vaccination Wellcome Trust led by Sir Jeremy Farrar, and Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg of the Florida Department of Health, presents a risk-benefit assessment of booster vaccines among people of student age and provides five ethical arguments against mandates.
The researchers estimate that 22,000-30,000 previously uninfected adults aged 18-29 must be boosted with an mRNA vaccine to prevent just one COVID-19 hospitalisation. In the study, which is currently undergoing peer-review, the authors analyse CDC and reported adverse event data and find that booster mandates are likely to cause a net expected harm. They estimate that for every COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented in previously uninfected young adults, 18 to 98 serious adverse events will occur, including 1.7 to 3.0 booster-associated myocarditis cases in males, and 1,373 to 3,234 cases of serious injury which interferes with daily activities.
The authors add that given the high level of natural immunity following infection now present in the population, the actual risk-benefit profile is even less favourable.
On the basis of this evidence they argue that university booster mandates are unethical because:
They consider counterarguments, such as a desire for socialisation and safety, and show that such arguments are weak and lack scientific and ethical support.
The authors include Dr. Vinay Prasad of the University of California and Dr. Martin A. Makary and Dr. Stefan Baral of Johns Hopkins University. A previous intervention in February by many of the same authors, published in BMJ Global Health, took a strong ethical stance against vaccine coercion in the form of mandates and passports.
It’s been clear for some time that the cost-benefit assessment of the vaccines will not be favourable for young people. But with leading scientists, including some funded by pro-vaccination organisations like the Wellcome Trust, now putting the case in top journals, hopefully the message will get through to politicians and administrators, especially in America, who continue to impose vaccine requirements on young adults.
While the present paper is focused on vaccine coercion, its arguments also apply more generally to the offer of vaccination to young adults, and raise questions as to whether vaccine recipients are being fully apprised of the risks and likely benefits before consenting to the inoculation.
September 11, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine | Leave a comment
By Eva Bartlett | Samizdat | September 10, 2022
This week, a number of international and Russian journalists convened in Moscow – with more joining by video link – to discuss the now-infamous Ukrainian Mirotvorets “kill list.” Many of them are included themselves.
While some don’t take it seriously, the horrific car-bombing murder of Darya Dugina on August 20 and the subsequent marking on her Mirotvorets entry as “liquidated” makes it fairly clear the people behind the list do, in fact, want people dead.
The same thing happened to the entry of Russian photojournalist Andrei Stenin and many others listed and subsequently killed, including the Italian Andrea Rocchelli.
What it feels like to be on the list
The head of the Foundation to Battle Injustice, Mira Terada, who convened the panel, noted that of the thousands of names entered on the site, 341 are journalists and, shockingly, 327 are minors.
“Publishing personal data on minors is a crime. It’s like a menu for pedophiles or people doing human trafficking.”
While her concern is for the children, journalists, activists, political figures and even ordinary Ukrainians who have somehow angered the Kiev regime and those behind the list, Terada now needs to exercise some caution after she herself was added to the database.
An hour and a half after a July 21 press conference about children being placed on Mirotvorets, Mira found herself listed. “This changed my life. I have to be vigilant 24/7,” she said.
Christelle Néant, a French war correspondent reporting from Donbass for the past six and a half years, mentioned to me before the panel began that some of the information on the site is not disclosed to the general public, and is password-locked.
Néant, who said she’s been receiving death threats for years, spoke of how it impacts her: “Every time I use my car, I check underneath it for any unpleasant surprise,” referring to a potential car bomb. “I don’t publish any photos with people I live with or love. I have to be vigilant at all times.”
“I’m not a terrorist, not a criminal, I’m just a correspondent. This list must be closed and all of those involved must be held accountable.”
German journalist Thomas Röper rightly noted that Western media outlets prefer to look the other way. “They could have reported on this, but they’re saying nothing.”
He also pointed out the silence of the German government, even when asked at press conferences.
“A state has a duty to protect its citizens, but I haven’t seen anything from my government to condemn the fact that Germans are on this list and one German national has been killed.”
And, in fact, rather than protect German journalists, the government is persecuting them, as is the case with Alina Lipp, whose bank account, and that of her mother, was closed after the German government launched a criminal case against her for her reporting from Donbass.
Russian journalist Veronika Naydenova, originally from Crimea but living in Germany, was added to the list in January, also after raising the inclusion of children, including 13-year-old Faina Savenkova, from the Lugansk People’s Republic.
“The same day my article was published, I was added to the list. But this hasn’t stopped me, I’ve written many articles since.”
She highlighted an additional, very real, threat: that of the refugees who’ve come to Germany from Ukraine, it isn’t possible to know who is merely a refugee and who holds Ukrainian nationalist extremist views. This is a very real fear for Naydenova, whose address is listed on Mirotvorets.
Dutch journalist Sonya van den Ende likewise fears returning home. “I’m labeled an ‘enemy of the state’ now in the Netherlands. I cannot go back, it’s very dangerous for me to do so.”
Janus Putkonen, a Finnish journalist who has been living in Donbass since 2015, pointed out how the risk extends globally.
“Because the Mirotvorets kill list has not been stopped, people around the world are now in danger of falling victim to the state terrorism of Ukrainian Nazism, comparable to ISIS terrorism.”
But, most of all, it threatens Ukrainians within Ukraine, something British journalist Johnny Miller emphasized.
“If you’re a journalist, blogger, political figure, or a citizen in Ukraine who wants to criticize extremism in Ukraine, which there is a lot of, or if you want to criticize Ukrainian government policies, most likely you’re going to be put on that list. And be under serious threat of death.”
Miller, who has reported from areas of western Ukraine, raised another important point:
“There are so many people in Ukraine who want to push for peaceful negotiations with Russia. But if anybody in Ukrainian society wants to stand up and push this line, they’re most likely going to be put on that list. Mirotvorets is very much a symbol of the extremist elements in Ukraine at the moment.”
For myself, I’ve been on the list since 2019, after going to Crimea and reporting from areas of the DPR where civilians were being terrorized by Ukrainian shelling, houses destroyed “street by street” as a local told me.
Complicit media
For various reasons, I haven’t been in my native Canada since February 2020, and at this point, don’t know what fate I would face were I to go back.
Ottawa unconditionally supports the Kiev regime, including its war against the civilians of Donbass, which the country has abetted by sending money and weapons to Ukraine for years before Russia’s military operation began in February.
Canada has spent nearly a billion dollars to train Ukrainian forces since 2014, including Neo-Nazi Azov fighters.
But in addition to that, the Canadian government knows about Mirotvorets. The state-run Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in July ran a smear piece on me, using information apparently gleaned from my Mirotvorets entry, though it doesn’t mention the kill list by name.
How do I think I know CBC was aware of the kill list entry on me? Their producer emailed me for an interview (which I did not concede to), mentioning my April participation in a Moscow-based panel on Ukraine’s war crimes. Except it wasn’t April, it was on March 11. The only other source for my participation being in April was, you guessed it, Mirotvorets.
Of course, there was no condemnation or call to shut down Mirotvorets (which independent Canadian media outlets previously interviewed me about and subsequently contacted the CBC about). Instead, they tried to spin my multiple reports on Ukraine’s war crimes in Donbass as a way to smear me as a Russian propagandist.
And now, the CBC has flagged my name to Ukrainian Nationalists in Canada who might otherwise not have known of me, and to Canadians who went to fight in Ukraine, became radicalized and indoctrinated, and could commit Azov-style crimes against journalists like me who have been reporting from the other side.
Journalists already have enough reasons to fear being targeted – one example is the August 4 bombing by Kiev’s forces of a Donetsk hotel that multiple journalists, including myself, were in. There is no conclusive proof that the hotel and the journalists were the intended targets, but given everything mentioned above, it’s certainly within the realm of possibility
A terrorist database
After the panel, I chatted again with Néant, who said she’d been appealing to international organizations about Mirotvorets for years.
“I’ve written to organizations like the OSCE, Amnesty, etc. None reacted, even when I discovered that children are on this list.” All she got was an automated confirmation of receipt.
During a Q&A after the panel, an American man in the audience suggested that Russia should have its own “hit force” going out and doing the same thing to the Ukrainian side.
In reply, Johnny Miller noted:
“When I tell people here in the UK about this kill list, one of the first things that people reply to me is,
‘Well, I’m sure Russia has a similar list.’ And I have to explain to them that, no, Russia does not have a list published on the internet with the names and home addresses of journalists and children and promote their killing. That’s the distinction between a civilized government and extremism and barbarism.”
According to Mira Terada, her foundation transferred documents and the evidence it collected to Russia’s Federal Security Service and is asking the service to recognize Mirotvorets as a terrorist organization.
Former US Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter likewise described Mirotvorets as “an instrument of terror” that “should be taken down at the insistence of the US Government.”
Note the irony: We are listed as terrorists for the work we do to highlight the suffering of civilians under the Kiev regime’s actual terrorism.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
September 10, 2022 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Ukraine | Leave a comment
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | September 8, 2022
Evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 being the product of gain-of-function (GoF) research. Indeed, attorney Tom Renz will soon release the results of a major legal investigation, which he claims will demonstrate — beyond a reasonable doubt — that SARS-CoV-2 was created as part of a GoF project.1
Whether the outbreak was accidental, intentional or the result of negligence, the end result is the same — devastation of health, commerce, finance and civil life worldwide for years on end.
Now imagine what might happen if something like the Spanish flu got out — or worse, a turbo-charged, genetically engineered version of it. Incomprehensible as it may seem to the average person, scientists in the U.S. and Canada have resurrected this devastatingly lethal virus and, not surprisingly, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) are involved.
Mad Scientists Are Testing Recreated Spanish Flu on Monkeys
As reported by Tom Renz, August 19, 2022:2
“… this is so absurd that I am just starting with the reference document because I am concerned no one will believe it. Here it is: ‘Spanish Flu GoF.’3 Yes, that is right, Fauci and crew are now actively performing gain-of-function (GoF) work and infecting primates with the Spanish Flu … Here is a quote from the document:
‘… Influenza virus A/South Carolina/1918 (H1N1) was generated by reverse genetics and handled in biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) containment at the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML).
Sequences of the 1918 influenza viral segments were based on data reported under GenBank accession numbers DQ208309, DQ208310, DQ208311, AF117241, AY744935, AF250356, AY130766, and AF333238.
1918 influenza virus was cultured using Madin-Darby canine kidney … cells. MDCK cells were grown in minimum essential medium … supplemented with 5% fetal bovine serum … and 1 L-glutamine …
A passage 2 (P2) virus stock was prepared using MEM supplemented with 0.1% bovine serum albumin (BSA) … 1 L-glutamine, and 1 mg/mL N-tosyl-L-phenylalanine chloromethyl ketone (TPCK)-treated trypsin …
This stock was used for animal inoculation. The mouse 50% lethal dose (MLD50) for this stock was determined previously to be 103.2 PFU; this value was confirmed prior to the use of the stock for macaque infection.’
I frankly do not care to debate the nuance of whether the recreation of generally extinct virus ‘generated by reverse genetics’ using pieces and parts of other animals qualifies as GoF; what I care about is that we have recreated the Spanish Flu and are experimenting with it on other animals.”
Spanish Flu ‘Not Lethal Enough’
As noted by Renz, the scientists appear frustrated by the fact that their reverse engineered Spanish flu virus — even at the highest doses tested — was not lethal enough to kill the two macaque species selected for the experiment.
Macaques were therefore deemed “not ideal for the development and testing of novel pandemic influenza-specific vaccines and therapies,” necessitating “other physiologically relevant nonhuman primate models.” Renz continues:4
“… given the result of the previous coronavirus GoF, can ANYONE possibly argue GoF work on the Spanish Flu is a good idea? Even the simple recreation of the disease demonstrates an incredible lack of respect for the disaster created by the coronavirus GoF.
So you may be asking, what moron could possibly be oblivious enough to support GoF work on the Spanish Flu while the world is still dealing with the nightmare that is COVID? The answer should not be surprising … NIH and NIAID are involved.
Apparently Fauci does not mind what he did with funding the creation of COVID and is at it again. You might also note the vaccine development crew’s involvement. A foundational point in this article is that the newly recreated Spanish Flu is not dangerous enough. Here is a pull-quote:
‘However, 1918 influenza was uniformly nonlethal in these two species, demonstrating that this isolate is insufficiently pathogenic in rhesus and Mauritian cynomolgus macaques to support testing novel prophylactic influenza approaches where protection from severe disease combined with a lethal outcome is desired as a highly stringent indication of vaccine efficacy.’
This means that these people are arguing that we need to make a more dangerous version of the Spanish Flu so they can make ‘better’ vaccines for it … despite the fact that until they recreated it, it likely no longer existed in nature.”
As noted by Renz, elected officials really need to answer the question, “Why is this kind of research allowed to continue on your watch?” Why are we reverse engineering the most lethal viruses the world has ever seen — after they’ve already been eradicated?
The argument that we need to create dangerous viruses “just in case” Nature comes up with something similar, so we can create vaccines for said viruses in advance, simply doesn’t hold water. Stop creating these monstrosities, and we won’t need the vaccines! This is science gone mad, and it must be stopped.
Besides, what are the chances that a virus would emerge naturally that just so happens to perfectly match the virus we now have a vaccine against? The entire premise is irrational from start to finish. It’s biowarfare research and nothing else.
The Intentional Cover-Up of SARS-CoV-2’s Origin
Fauci, former NIH chief Dr. Francis Collins, EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak and other members of the scientific community have spent the last two and a half years actively stifling debate about the genesis of SARS-CoV-2.
And, coincidentally, most of them have clear-cut connections to bat coronavirus GoF research and/or the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which appears to be the lab from which the virus somehow escaped.
So, it appears those who insist SARS-CoV-2 is of natural origin, despite all the evidence to the contrary, are doing so because they don’t want risky virological research to be blamed for the COVID pandemic. That would “blow their cover” and raise questions about the sanity of funding such research.
Some may be so enamored with their chosen careers, they cannot imagine doing anything other than tinkering with pathogens. For them, pulled funding is a threat to their livelihood. But for others, the underlying incentive may be more nefarious. Like I already said, there’s really no reason for this kind of research other than the creation of weapons of mass destruction.
Whatever incentive any given player may have had, what’s clear is that Fauci, Collins, Daszak and many others intentionally undermined efforts to get to the bottom of where SARS-CoV-2 came from.
Corrupted Science
Attesting to this corruption of science is Jeffrey Sachs, Ph.D., professor of economy at Columbia University, a senior United Nations adviser and chair of The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, convened in June 2020.
Sachs originally assigned Daszak to lead and organize the COVID-19 Commission’s task force to investigate the virus’s genesis (one of 11 task forces under the COVID Commission). Sachs ended up dismissing Daszak from the task force in June 2021, after he realized just how serious Daszak’s conflicts of interest were,5 and that Daszak was lying to him.6
Eventually, he realized Daszak wasn’t the only rotten apple in the bunch. Other members of The Lancet Commission’s COVID Origins task force were also working against their mandate to investigate the pandemic’s origin. The final straw came when Sachs sacked Daszak and several task force members suddenly attacked him for being “antiscience.”
Shortly thereafter, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request brought previously hidden NIH documents to light, and Sachs realized that those who were attacking him also had undisclosed ties that made their ability to get to the truth doubtful at best. At that point, in September 2021, he disbanded the whole task force.
Lack of Transparency Breeds Mistrust
In mid-May 2022, Sachs published a frank opinion piece in the journal PNAS,7 together with Neil Harrison, calling for a truly independent inquiry into the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
In their article, Sachs and Harrison argued that while transparency on the part of Chinese authorities would be “enormously helpful,” much may be gleaned from information found in U.S.-based research institutions that were working with Wuhan-based institutions, including the WIV. Yet such material has not been disclosed for independent analysis. Here’s an excerpt:8
“This lack of an independent and transparent US-based scientific investigation has had four highly adverse consequences. First, public trust in the ability of US scientific institutions to govern the activities of US science in a responsible manner has been shaken.
Second, the investigation of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has become politicized within the US Congress; as a result, the inception of an independent and transparent investigation has been obstructed and delayed.
Third, US researchers with deep knowledge of the possibilities of a laboratory-associated incident have not been enabled to share their expertise effectively. Fourth, the failure of NIH, one of the main funders of the US–China collaborative work, to facilitate the investigation into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 has fostered distrust regarding US biodefense research activities.
Much of the work on SARS-like CoVs performed in Wuhan was part of an active and highly collaborative US–China scientific research program funded by the US Government (NIH, Defense Threat Reduction Agency [DTRA], and US Agency for International Development [USAID]), coordinated by researchers at EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), but involving researchers at several other US institutions.
For this reason, it is important that US institutions be transparent about any knowledge of the detailed activities that were underway in Wuhan and in the United States. The evidence may also suggest that research institutions in other countries were involved, and those too should be asked to submit relevant information …”
Sachs and Harrison go on to name a number of U.S. institutions that need to come clean about their work, including the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), the University of North Carolina (UNC), the University of California at Davis (UCD), the NIH, NIAID and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
All of these agencies and institutions have conducted and/or collaborated on research that may be able to solve the mystery, but instead of transparently sharing their data, they’ve merely declared that they’ve “not been involved in any experiments that could have resulted in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.”
Blanket Denials Are Not Good Enough
As noted by Sachs, before we can believe such claims, we need to be able to confirm their veracity, and that requires independent analysis of all the data.
“Blanket denials from the NIH are no longer good enough. Although the NIH and USAID have strenuously resisted full disclosure of the details of the EHA-WIV-UNC work program, several documents leaked to the public or released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have raised concerns,” Sachs and Harrison wrote.9
“These research proposals make clear that the EHA-WIV-UNC collaboration was involved in the collection of a large number of so-far undocumented SARS-like viruses and was engaged in their manipulation within biological safety level (BSL)-2 and BSL-3 laboratory facilities, raising concerns that an airborne virus might have infected a laboratory worker.
A variety of scenarios have been discussed by others, including an infection that involved a natural virus collected from the field or perhaps an engineered virus manipulated in one of the laboratories.”
Suspicious ‘Coincidences’ Abound
Sachs and Harrison go on to discuss the problem of an unusual furin cleavage site (FCS) in SARS-CoV-2 that makes it more transmissible and pathogenic than related viruses.
While it’s not yet known how this feature came to be within SARS-CoV-2, whether by natural evolution or intentional insertion, “We do know that the insertion of such FCS sequences into SARS-like viruses was a specific goal of work proposed by the EHA-WIV-UNC partnership within a 2018 grant proposal (‘DEFUSE’) that was submitted to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),” Sachs wrote.
That particular DARPA proposal was never funded, but as noted by Sachs, “we do not know whether some of the proposed work was subsequently carried out in 2018 or 2019, perhaps using another source of funding.”
“Information now held by the research team headed by EHA, as well as the communications of that research team with US research funding agencies, including NIH, USAID, DARPA, DTRA, and the Department of Homeland Security, could shed considerable light on the experiments undertaken by the US-funded research team and on the possible relationship, if any, between those experiments and the emergence of SARS-CoV-2,” Sachs and Harrison wrote.10
“We do not assert that laboratory manipulation was involved in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, although it is apparent that it could have been. However, we do assert that there has been no independent and transparent scientific scrutiny to date of the full scope of the US-based evidence.”
In an August 2, 2022, Current Affairs interview,11 Sachs again reiterated that he believes the NIH and allied scientists colluded to impede The Lancet Commission’s investigation, for the simple reason that the virus was the result of U.S. research.
Indeed, aside from what Sachs brought up in his PNAS article, there are patents spanning decades to suggest that’s true (see “Patents Prove SARS-CoV-2 Is a Manufactured Virus“).
Sachs also opened up about his concerns and misgivings in an August 20, 2022, interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (video above). He admits believing in the zoonotic spillover theory early on, only to, over time, come to change his mind as he realized he was being lied to, over and over again.
Today, he believes the lab-leak theory is the most likely explanation for the pandemic — and that the U.S. government, the NIH, the NIAID and the rest are suppressing the truth for the simple reason that they’re responsible for its creation, even if only in part.
Final Thoughts
To circle back to where we started, is it really prudent to reverse engineer the Spanish flu virus, and further tinker with it to make it even more lethal — all in the name of vaccine development?
Think back over the past few years. Mull over the deaths — an estimated 18 million from COVID-19 alone12 — the suicides (deaths of despair), the lost businesses, lost education years, the loss of freedoms and Constitutional rights, the COVID jab injuries, and the massive wealth transfer that has occurred.
All of that may have been because of this kind of mad science. Do we really want to repeat it in the future, but with a far more lethal pathogen? Most sane persons would say no. It’s time for legislators to take definitive steps to ensure mankind is not wiped out by scientific hubris.
Sources and References
September 9, 2022 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Anthony Fauci, Canada, Covid-19, Darpa, NIAID, NIH, United States | Leave a comment
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | September 8, 2022
Dr. Paul Thomas is under threat by the Oregon Medical Board for publishing eye-opening, real-world data on his thousands of vaccinated, and unvaccinated patients. But, Dr. Paul is fighting back.
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | September 8, 2022
Despite attempts at gaslighting by Fauci and others, school closures have caused damage and loss of life into the future according to fact-based economist calculations. With masking kids still occurring within America, why are so many demanding these restrictions?
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | September 1, 2022
Recently, ICAN Lead Attorney, Aaron Siri, Esq, was published in Bloomberg Law. The topic was a legal strategy developed by ICAN, designed to hold health officials accountable. With your support, ICAN has brought this effective new strategy to the broader legal community.
September 9, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States | Leave a comment
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Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Jamal Kanj – Intifada-Palestine.com – January 14, 2011
Israel’s survival kit is: perpetuate conflict, insecurity to rationalize collective hate and finally playing victim.
Devoid of conflict, Israel implodes internally; without hate, Zionism loses its justification; and playing eternal victim to continue blackmailing the West. Absence of this holy trinity, Israel ceases to exist.
From its inception, the house of Zion has mastered exploiting adversarial powers to advance Israel’s cause. For instance, their influence over the Democratic Party in the US began with President Truman’s bid for 2nd term election in 1948.
Responding to strong opposition from Secretary of State General George Marshall and Department experts urging against recognition of Israel, President Truman replied: “I’m sorry gentlemen but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands [Jewish voters] who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of [voting] Arabs among my constituents”
Zionists influence over liberal American politics was matched with the doctrinal school of Conservative theoreticians aligning the Republican Party’s platform with Israel’s objectives. The Neoconservative Zionists, coined Zioncons, invented the “Clash of Civilization” concept to fight Israel’s wars. … continue
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