Samizdat | March 29, 2022
Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said on Monday that President Joe Biden’s apparently declining mental faculties present a “national security risk” that could see the US dragged into a war with Russia. Biden earlier appeared to call for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s removal from power, before walking back the statement, then making it again.
“A lot of times when you’re around somebody who’s in cognitive decline, you find yourself trying to help them with a sentence, trying to help them complete it,” Paul told Fox News host Jesse Watters on Monday evening, adding that “we shouldn’t have to do that for the commander-in-chief.”
Earlier on Monday, Biden told reporters that he “was not articulating a change in policy” when he called Putin a “butcher” who “cannot remain in power” during a visit to Poland over the weekend. Despite assuring the press that he wasn’t demanding regime change in Moscow, Biden then said again that Putin “shouldn’t be in power.”
Biden read from pre-prepared cue cards during the press conference.
“It is actually a national security risk because he’s sending signals that no one in their right mind would want to send to Russia at this point,” Paul continued. “We aren’t trying to replace Putin in Russia. We aren’t trying to have regime change. We’re not sending troops into Ukraine, and we’re not going to respond in kind with chemical weapons,” he stated, referring to two other statements that Biden made and the White House walked back.
These statements involved Biden seemingly telling US soldiers that they would be deployed to Ukraine, and that the US would “respond in kind” to a hypothetical Russian use of chemical weapons on the battlefield. Both actions would result in open war between the US and Russia, something that Biden has repeatedly said he wished to avoid.
“So I do think that it is a real problem, and there’s a humorous angle to this,” Paul said. “But it’s really not funny because we’re worried about what he’s saying, precipitating or escalating the conflict in Ukraine into a world war. That’s very serious.”
While Paul has condemned Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine, the Kentucky Republican opposes any US involvement in the conflict. Prior to Russia’s attack, Paul insisted that Ukraine “should not and cannot be our problem to solve,” and that the country’s accession into the NATO alliance – which the US and her allies insist is its right – would be “a recipe for war and disaster.”
March 29, 2022 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Joe Biden, United States | Leave a comment
BY LAURA ROSEN COHEN | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | MARCH 20, 2022
The end of the Covid-19 pandemic is being declared by most countries in the world at almost the precise 2nd anniversary to the day of the entire world shutting down voluntarily for “two weeks to flatten the curve.” Mask and vaccine mandates, along with vaccination passports, are dropping all over the world.
But if you thought that the end of the pandemic meant a return to normal life, you would be wrong. In the blink of an eye, we have seamlessly transitioned our attention from a pandemic enemy to the new Tsarist enemy in our global village. But have no fear, Sheriff Zelenskyy and his elite, woke allies in the West are going to save us from Vladimir Putin. And if you’re not on Team Ukraine, then you know, like whatever.
If this sounds kind of unbelievable to you, it’s because it is. It is astonishing to watch world leaders’ flourishing rhetoric on Ukraine, an unfathomable itch for war (see Nancy “I’d like to take out those tanks” Pelosi) and positioning the war between Russia and Ukraine as the barometer of our civilizational survival.
It has been particularly puzzling and stupefying over the past week to have seen that Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau is in Europe now, taking photos with armed Ukrainians and pontificating about freedom, democracy and tolerance. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy addressed the Canadian Parliament to a full house not seen at any point during two years of coronavirus and Justin Trudeau marveled at his stance against authoritarianism.
All around the world, meaningless gestures of antipathy toward Russia are proliferating on social media. Russian vodka is poured out. The National Mustard Museum has banned Russian Mustard (there is a mustard museum, who knew??), Russian orchestra conductors are getting fired and medical clinics in Germany are denying care to Russians. And in the most Canadian rebuke ever, the alleged inventors of poutine in Quebec, Canada have renamed their creation so as not to give credit to Putin.
Meanwhile, back at home, unvaccinated Canadians including my own severely disabled son are still not allowed to board a plane or train within Canada or to leave Canada. Truckers’ bank accounts and crypto wallets are still frozen, their trucks destroyed and persons targeted by the Canadian government for supporting the truckers will be ‘marked for life’ by Canadian banks.
Provincial Covid passports and mask mandates have been rescinded from coast to coast across Canada, yet Trudeau still holds six million unvaccinated Canadians hostage in their own country. Similar to many places in America, Canadians’ freedom is still subject to capricious, mean-spirited, abusive and nonsensical regulations that have no public health justification or scientific evidence.
Should freedom not begin at home? For how much longer will this federal cognitive dissonance be sustainable?
Hopefully, the absurdity and punitive nature of the travel regulations will come to an end in Canada soon. If not, there are several court challenges being simultaneously mounted by civil rights groups and individuals challenging the legality and constitutionality of the restrictions. But that will be a slow process of winding through the courts.
American lawmakers also see this issue as a problem. A group of Republican lawmakers is proposing legislation that will open up the border completely to Canadians. If that happens, Trudeau will have no choice but to follow suit.
Peace talks, or at least ceasefire talks are underway between Russia and Ukraine. No such ideological ceasefire, talks or dialogue of any kind are occurring in Canada between political factions or between leaders and their psychologically, financially and emotionally wounded populace. The coronavirus measures enacted in Canada have created a highly divisive country, torn apart along public health lines.
The pandemic left a highly fractured, wounded populace in its wake in Canada, US, and most places in the world. We are desperately in need of displays of unity, kindness and healing among themselves and above all, from their leadership.
Unfortunately for now, Canadians will continue to be fed a steady diet of the importance of democracy and the dangers of authoritarianism from the Canadian Prime Minister who enacted the current iteration of Canada’s War Measures Act to dislodge peaceful protesters from their capital city. It is hard not to conclude that it may in fact take a change of government to redemocratize the Dominion of Canada.
Invocations of freedom and sanctifying democracy must begin at home.
March 29, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Canada, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights | Leave a comment
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | March 28, 2022
For the past two years, I and many others have detailed the ways in which COVID-19 deaths have been overcounted to create the illusion of the pandemic being far worse than it actually is.
Now, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and individual states are backtracking on their death statistics, showing we were right all along. Deaths were initially exaggerated for political purposes, and now they’re being downplayed for the same reason.
CDC Removes More Than 72,000 COVID Deaths
As reported by The Defender,1 March 14, 2022, the CDC had removed 72,277 “COVID deaths” from the tally, including 24% of those attributed to children under 18.2,3 They claim a “coding logic error,” a faulty algorithm, had “accidentally” counted deaths that weren’t related to COVID. As reported by Udumbara:4
“Some of the pediatric deaths attributed to COVID-19, according to a search of the CDC’s Wonder system, include deaths where drowning or drug use was listed as the primary cause of death.”
Meanwhile, the CDC used the false death statistics among children to push for COVID shots for 5- to 7-year-olds. In November 2021, CDC director Rochelle Walensky cited that data to justify the recommendation to issue emergency use authorization for the Pfizer shot for this age group.5
Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that it took the CDC two years to realize this error. It’s simply not believable, and The Epoch Times has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for internal communications relating to the data change.6
Ironically, the adjustment comes on the heels of fact-checking articles “debunking” claims that COVID deaths have been overcounted. For example, in early March, Health Feedback claimed there’s “no evidence COVID deaths have been overcounted,” and that “the evidence suggests the opposite.”7 Yet here we are. Deaths were clearly overcounted, not undercounted. That fact check didn’t age well.
CDC Has Been Turned Into a Propaganda Agency
According to Dr. Meryl Nass, a member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee, the CDC is cherry-picking data to justify its public health policies, and when it gets caught, it simply blames its “outdated IT systems.” In a March 19, 2022, article, she wrote:8
“CDC is not a public health agency. It is a public propaganda agency that collects a massive amount of data. CDC marshals its huge data library to create presentations that support the current administration’s public health policies …
A 2007 Senate oversight report on the CDC noted the agency spent $106 million on the Thomas R. Harkin Global Communications (and Visitor) Center, and summarized its 115-page report with the following:
‘A review of how an agency tasked with fighting and preventing disease has spent hundreds of millions of tax dollars for failed prevention efforts, international junkets, and lavish facilities, but cannot demonstrate it is controlling disease.’”
Health Officials End Reporting COVID-19 Deaths
Curiously, three months before the CDC started changing its mortality statistics, the U.S. Health and Human Services stopped collecting data on hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 altogether. The HHS announced9 changes to the reporting requirements for hospitals and acute care facilities January 6, 2022. The new guidelines, which took effect February 2, note “The retirement of fields which are no longer required to be reported,” which include the “previous day’s COVID-19 deaths.”
What are they trying to hide? Are they stopping the flow of data to prevent examination and analysis? According to some, the HHS hospital data are among the best we have in the U.S., so ending that data collection doesn’t make sense. January 2021, Alex C. Madrigal, co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project, wrote:10
“In a series of analyses that we ran over the past several months, we came to nearly the opposite conclusion of other media outlets. The hospitalization data coming out of HHS are now the best and most granular publicly available data on the pandemic.”
An unnamed federal health official spoke with a reporter from WSWS,11 calling the move to stop reporting COVID-29 hospital deaths “incomprehensible.” The official added:
“It is the only consistent, reliable and actionable dataset at the federal level. Ninety-nine percent of hospitals report 100% of the data every day. I don’t know any scientists who want to have less data.”
Changing Definitions Justify the COVID Narrative
From the start of the pandemic, changing definitions have allowed authorities to manipulate data in whatever way they needed. Now, states are starting to change the way they define a “COVID death,” resulting in lowered mortality rates. In Massachusetts, for example, COVID deaths dropped by 3,700 after the state changed its definition to be in alignment with that of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.12
As reported by CBS Boston:13
“The state said currently the COVID death definition includes anyone who has the disease listed as a cause of death on their death certificate. It also includes anyone who had a diagnosis within 60 days but did not have it listed as a cause on their death certificate. Under the new definition, the timeframe is changed to 30 days for people without a COVID diagnosis on their death certificate.”
For the record, counting someone who died of any cause as a COVID death simply because they tested positive within 30 days of their death is still a grossly inaccurate way of determining the true death toll from this virus, because we know PCR tests have a false positive rate of about 97% when run at 35 cycles or greater,14 as was the norm from the start.
Results From At-Home Tests Aren’t Reported
Case counts are also being adjusted downward. In mid-January 2022, the Biden administration started distributing half a billion at-home COVID tests to the American public,15 and the results from those are not being reported anywhere.16 As a result, case counts will be skewed downward. According to 13NewsNow:17
“… the fallibility of case counts is the reason health officials track several COVID-19 metrics, like hospitalizations, deaths, and now, even viral samples in the wastewater18 — metrics that do not necessarily rely on people to go get tested or report the results they get at home.”
And yet the HHS is no longer requiring hospitals to report COVID deaths, which is one of the metrics health officials are supposedly focusing on in lieu of tracking cases. Don’t get me wrong, PCR testing was a scam from the start and I’m not suggesting we should pay much attention to those data. The point here is that the tracking of COVID data has been fatally flawed from the start.
What they’re really trying to do is shift toward passive monitoring, starting with wastewater sampling.19 Eventually, the goal is to monitor every person’s biological processes in real-time, and this is part and parcel of the transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution and The Great Reset.
CDC Hides Data
To make matters even murkier, the CDC is also hiding data on COVID hospitalizations and the COVID jab. The stated justification for not making certain data public is that people are “misinterpreting” the data. In other words, the data show that the COVID jabs don’t work, and the CDC doesn’t want that to be widely known.
It has also collected data on the effectiveness of COVID-19 boosters, but for some reason has not included the data for 18- to 49-year-olds in any of its publications. “Coincidentally,” this is “the group least likely to benefit from extra shots,” the New York Times pointed out, adding:21
“Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots.”
COVID Has Served a Purely Political Agenda
Over the past two years, the pandemic has been used to usher in a range of radical changes that would never have been accepted were it not for widespread panic. It was used to implement illegitimate voting rules, which appear to have had an impact on the 2020 elections.
It was used to announce the urgent need for a “Great Reset” and a Fourth Industrial Revolution. It’s been used to strip people of basic human rights, and to justify radical environmental policies that will result in lower standards of living.
It was also used to abruptly transition the vaccine industry from conventional vaccine manufacturing using eggs to the use of risky gene transfer technology. The only thing the pandemic has not been used for is to make recommendations that actually improve public health. And throughout, data have been massaged and manipulated to justify the unjustifiable.
Now, it appears data are being manipulated yet again — this time to artificially end the COVID crisis so that the Biden administration can take credit for it during the upcoming elections. As stated in a February 24, 2022, letter from Impact Research, titled “Taking the Win Over COVID-19”:22,23
“It’s time for Democrats to take credit for ending the COVID crisis phase of the COVID war, point to important victories like vaccine distribution and providing economic stability for Americans, and fully enter the rebuilding phase that comes after any war. Below we lay out some strategic thoughts for Democrats positioning themselves on COVID-19 …”
Strategic positioning includes declaring the crisis phase over; pushing for “feeling and acting more normal;” and taking the side of people who are burned out on COVID and don’t want to hear about it anymore. Not setting a standard of zero COVID as the “victory condition,” and to “stop talking about restrictions and the unknown future ahead.”
“If Democrats continue to hold a posture that prioritizes COVID precautions over learning how to live in a world where COVID exists, but does not dominate, they risk paying dearly for it in November,” the letter states.24
Dr. Anthony Fauci perhaps did not receive this memo, as he is out there signaling that we can expect a return to COVID restrictions at any given point. In a mid-March CNN interview, he stated that “we need to be flexible” and “if we see a resurgence, we have to be able to pivot and go back to any degree of mitigation that is commensurate with what the situation is. We can’t just say ‘We’re done, now we’re going to move on.’”
Based on what we’ve seen so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if this “pivot” back into COVID crisis mode were to occur right before the midterm elections.
Fauci: If we see an increase in cases, we have to "be able to pivot and go back to” COVID restrictions pic.twitter.com/rWAHSWqR6y
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 17, 2022
Sources and References
March 29, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, United States | Leave a comment
Stop the narrative I want to get off!
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • MARCH 29, 2022
The semi-official United States government plus media lie machine knows that constructing a plausible reason to bomb the crap out of someone all depends on where you begin your narrative. If you keep starting your accusations at a point where the target has done something bad, all you have to do is repeat yourself over and over again to drown out any alternative backstory that surfaces. And if you really want to demolish all contrary views, all you have to do is liken the targeted foreign leader to Adolph Hitler and keep repeating. That tactic was used with Saddam Hussein of Iraq and is now being employed against Vladimir Putin of Russia and it always works.
In the current context of Ukraine versus Russia the trick has been to tie everything to the invasion by Putin’s armed forces over four weeks ago, an undoubted act of aggression. Once you establish that as your launching point, preceding developments are rendered moot. Who cares about US promises not to expand the NATO alliance eastwards after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991? And there is also Washington’s role in regime change in Ukraine in 2014? Or even the relentless demonization of Russia linked to the 2016 US presidential election followed by any unwillingness by Washington to negotiate even the most reasonable of Putin’s demands? Fuggedabout it! And also forget about considering whether or not the US has any national interest in going to war over Ukraine. Only Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard seem inclined to challenge the basic premise, which is to raise the question “Since Russia does not threaten us why are we doing this? Do we really want a possible nuclear war over Ukraine?”
Just read the New York Times and you will learn that it is not about what’s good for America at all. It is all about a big bully country attacking a “democratic” neighbor with the US and its brave allies standing up as the standard bearers of a Washington imposed “rules based international order.” And now the US is upping the ante by pushing ahead with its insistence that Russia is committing war crimes. But convincing the world on that point is a bit more difficult to accomplish. If one were to ask the question “Which nation in the world commits the most war crimes?” the general international response might well be Israel or the United States. Part of the problem would be working out an acceptable definition for a war crime while also developing a methodology for defining “the most.” If Israel attacks Syria four times in a week is that four separate war crimes or only part of one continuous war crime. As the United States has military bases in both Syria and Iraq that the respective governments have not authorized, and have in fact, asked the Americans to leave, is that a single war crime of illegal invasion and occupation or a continuous one punctuated only by the occasions when US troops kill a few of the natives?
In any event it is difficult to “convict” Russia as neither Israel nor the US has ever been held accountable for the war crimes they have committed, to include shooting and bombing civilians, hospitals, schools at random and occasionally wedding parties and other social gatherings. President George W. Bush even started a couple of wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq based on fabricated “intelligence” and the greatly beloved Barack Obama did the same to Libya and Syria. Both are now regarded as venerable elder statesmen even though they should be in prison and there is lately some talk among Democrats of seeing Obama or his wife run again in 2024 for the highest office in the land. And is that Hillary waiting in the wings for a second try? Either way, it will be a bad day for anyone trying to establish a modus vivendi for working with Russia.
America’s blood lust vis-à-vis Russia is completely bipartisan, with the few sensible voices in Congress drowned out by the drumroll in high places accompanying the avalanche of propaganda pouring out of the mainstream media. It has long been axiomatic that the first victim of war propaganda is truth, but the United States only needs the stimulus of the possibility of war or conflict to begin its pattern of lying. And, as the current situation illustrates, it is quite prepared to designate enemies that in reality do not threaten the country. It did so to bring about a greatly enlarged US commitment in Vietnam and also through the Cold War by deliberate CIA overestimates of the power and reach of the Soviet Union. Since 9/11 there has been a succession of presidents who have lied about nearly everything relating to national security and foreign policy, leading to invasions, assassinations, other types of interventions, and a “sanctions” prone government that has denied ordinary citizens of food and medicines while leaving the leadership of the targeted countries untouched.
One of the recent lies is a replay of the old “let’s get Saddam Hussein” playbook. Remember those savage Iraqi soldiers tearing Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators and throwing them onto the floor? Of course, it was all a lie concocted by the Kuwaiti ruling family and US government largely neocon accomplices. Now we are learning that the vile Russians bombed a maternity hospital! Except, of course, that it may have turned out to be completely untrue. And the media is now exclaiming that “Russia is putting the planet on the brink of World War 3!” while the New York Times is indicting political conservatives as purveyors of Russian propaganda. Actually, it was the United States and NATO that have opened the door to a possible nuclear holocaust, but one hates to dispute what is an apparently a profitable and well-received story line.
But the best bit of lying has to be the ongoing propaganda war over twenty-six biological laboratories in Ukraine funded at least in part by the Pentagon. “Nothing to see here” says the Biden White House, while Russia is saying “Just a minute, folks…” Meanwhile the plot thickens as emails have now surfaced indicating that Joe Biden’s son Hunter was involved in obtaining, and profited from, the US government’s funding of the labs.
The biolab controversy began when the United States government’s State Department number three Victoria Nuland recently admitted to a congressional panel that the labs exist and also added that Ukraine possesses chemical and biological weapons. She then realized her error and both backtracked and elaborated that “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research facilities [and] we are now in fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.”
The statement is absurd as the Russians undoubtedly already possess their own stocks of bioweapons. The existence of the labs themselves may be linked to the legacy of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, when, by one account, the US provided assistance through its “Cooperative Threat Reduction Program” to manage the existing bio and chem labs lest their toxic chemicals and pathogens fall into the wrong hands. But the US has actually done much more than that, Ron Unz observes how “Over the decades America had spent over $100 billion dollars on ‘biodefense,’ the euphemistic term for biowarfare development, and [has] had the world’s oldest and largest such program, one of the few ever deployed in real life combat.”
Currently, the US government claims blandly that the labs, which are run by America’s Department of Defense, remain active for “peaceful research and the development of vaccines.” The US Embassy in Kiev described the activity in greater detail as working “to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats.”
Some Ukrainians have, however, been suspicious of their purpose, particularly as their activities are secret and are managed by the Pentagon rather than some civilian agency. And if the original objective was to prevent the development of bioweapons, why is the US still hanging around seventeen years later? Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, who held the post under President Viktor Yanukovych, spoke about how the decision to start collaborating with the Americans was taken by Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s office and subsequently implemented under President Viktor Yushchenko in 2005. It was generally believed in the government that the agreement was focused on Ukrainian biosecurity, but all its related activities were and are classified and Ukrainian citizens were not even allowed to work together with the Americans.
There was some pushback on the labs, to include a cursory inspection in 2010-2012 and by 2013 the Ukrainian government sent an official letter demanding that the labs be closed. The 2014 regime change intervened however, and the decision was never implemented by the new regime.
It should be noted that if one is to protect against toxins and pathogens one must first create them in order to manipulate them or prevent them. If one thinks back to the notorious Anthrax scare in the United States in 2001, investigators determined that the lethal strain of the pathogen had actually been created in a US Army biological weapons lab at Fort Detrick Maryland. One might also consider COVID and the widely held belief that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been manipulating various coronavirus strains to make them more contagious and lethal.
Nuland clearly admitted that there were US-funded bioweapons in Ukraine when she expressed concern that Russia might occupy one of the labs and be tempted to acquire the material for its own use against Kiev. And the Biden Administration, clearly embarrassed by the admission, has attempted to turn the tables by rejecting Russian suggestions that the labs might be seeking to design biological pathogens that target certain ethnic groups, which is why the existing labs have been placed all around the world, including Ukraine. As far back as 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his concerns about US collection of biological material from ethnic Russians, as Unz puts it “certainly a very suspicious project for our government to have undertaken.”
If these Pentagon funded laboratories are indeed involved in propagating mutated strains of pathogens like anthrax and plague as biological weapons, like may have taken place at Wuhan, it would be a violation of Article I of the “UN Biological Weapons Convention,” making the United States government indisputably a War Criminal, with its leaders subject to the death sentence under the Nuremberg Laws which were in large part established by the United States Government itself in 1946. That aside, the real concern right now should be that the US/NATO will stage some kind of false flag incident which will lead to calls for direct military intervention. Watching Biden’s serial blunders and cover-ups suggests that there is nothing that Biden and Blinken will not do, up to and including starting some kind of hopefully manageable war to boost the presidents sinking approval ratings. Now that Joe Biden is talking tough, it is hard to imagine how he will get off of the horse that he is riding without stepping into some sort of armed conflict. As the former Reagan Administration official Paul Craig Roberts has astutely observed “The evil that [now] resides in Washington is unprecedented in human history.”
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
March 29, 2022 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Joe Biden, Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment
By Nicolas J. S. Davies | Global Research | March 28, 2022
The war in Ukraine has placed U.S. and NATO policy toward Russia under a spotlight, highlighting how the United States and its allies have expanded NATO right up to Russia’s borders, backed a coup and now a proxy war in Ukraine, imposed waves of economic sanctions, and launched a debilitating trillion-dollar arms race. The explicit goal is to pressure, weaken and ultimately eliminate Russia, or a Russia-China partnership, as a strategic competitor to U.S. imperial power.
The United States and NATO have used similar forms of force and coercion against many countries. In every case they have been catastrophic for the people directly impacted, whether they achieved their political aims or not.
Wars and violent regime changes in Kosovo, Iraq, Haiti and Libya have left them mired in endless corruption, poverty and chaos. Failed proxy wars in Somalia, Syria and Yemen have spawned endless war and humanitarian disasters. U.S. sanctions against Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Venezuela have impoverished their people but failed to change their governments.
Meanwhile, U.S.-backed coups in Chile, Bolivia and Honduras have sooner or later been reversed by grassroots movements to restore democratic, socialist government. The Taliban are governing Afghanistan again after a 20-year war to expel a U.S. and NATO army of occupation, for which the sore losers are now starving millions of Afghans.
But the risks and consequences of the U.S. Cold War on Russia are of a different order. The purpose of any war is to defeat your enemy. But how can you defeat an enemy that is explicitly committed to respond to the prospect of existential defeat by destroying the whole world?
This is in fact part of the military doctrine of the United States and Russia, who together possess over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. If either of them faces existential defeat, they are prepared to destroy human civilization in a nuclear holocaust that will kill Americans, Russians and neutrals alike.
In June 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree stating,
“The Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies… and also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”
U.S. nuclear weapons policy is no more reassuring. A decades-long campaign for a U.S. “no first use” nuclear weapons policy still falls on deaf ears in Washington.
The 2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) promised that the United States would not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state. But in a war with another nuclear-armed country, it said, “The United States would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.”
The 2018 NPR broadened the definition of “extreme circumstances” to cover “significant non-nuclear attacks,” which it said would “include, but are not limited to, attacks on the U.S., allies or partner civilian population or infrastructure, and attacks on U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment.” The critical phrase, “but are not limited to,” removes any restriction at all on a U.S. nuclear first strike.
So, as the U.S. Cold War against Russia and China heats up, the only signal that the deliberately foggy threshold for the U.S. use of nuclear weapons has been crossed could be the first mushroom clouds exploding over Russia or China.
For our part in the West, Russia has explicitly warned us that it will use nuclear weapons if it believes the United States or NATO are threatening the existence of the Russian state. That is a threshold that the United States and NATO are already flirting with as they look for ways to increase their pressure on Russia over the war in Ukraine.
To make matters worse, the twelve-to-one imbalance between U.S. and Russian military spending has the effect, whether either side intends it or not, of increasing Russia’s reliance on the role of its nuclear arsenal when the chips are down in a crisis like this.
NATO countries, led by the United States and United Kingdom, are already supplying Ukraine with up to 17 plane-loads of weapons per day, training Ukrainian forces to use them and providing valuable and deadly satellite intelligence to Ukrainian military commanders. Hawkish voices in NATO countries are pushing hard for a no-fly zone or some other way to escalate the war and take advantage of Russia’s perceived weaknesses.
The danger that hawks in the State Department and Congress may convince President Biden to escalate the U.S. role in the war prompted the Pentagon to leak details of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) assessments of Russia’s conduct of the war to Newsweek’s William Arkin.
Senior DIA officers told Arkin that Russia has dropped fewer bombs and missiles on Ukraine in a month than U.S. forces dropped on Iraq in the first day of bombing in 2003, and that they see no evidence of Russia directly targeting civilians. Like U.S. “precision” weapons, Russian weapons are probably only about 80% accurate, so hundreds of stray bombs and missiles are killing and wounding civilians and hitting civilian infrastructure, as they do just as horrifically in every U.S. war.
The DIA analysts believe Russia is holding back from a more devastating war because what it really wants is not to destroy Ukrainian cities but to negotiate a diplomatic agreement to ensure a neutral, non-aligned Ukraine.
But the Pentagon appears to be so worried by the impact of highly effective Western and Ukrainian war propaganda that it has released secret intelligence to Newsweek to try to restore a measure of reality to the media’s portrayal of the war, before political pressure for NATO escalation leads to a nuclear war.
Since the United States and the U.S.S.R. blundered into their nuclear suicide pact in the 1950s, it has come to be known as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. As the Cold War evolved, they cooperated to reduce the risk of mutual assured destruction through arms control treaties, a hotline between Moscow and Washington, and regular contacts between U.S. and Soviet officials.
But the United States has now withdrawn from many of those arms control treaties and safeguard mechanisms. The risk of nuclear war is as great today as it has ever been, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warns year after year in its annual Doomsday Clock statement. The Bulletin has also published detailed analyses of how specific technological advances in U.S. nuclear weapons design and strategy are increasing the risk of nuclear war.
The world understandably breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Cold War appeared to end in the early 1990s. But within a decade, the peace dividend the world hoped for was trumped by a power dividend. U.S. officials did not use their unipolar moment to build a more peaceful world, but to capitalize on the lack of a military peer competitor to launch an era of U.S. and NATO military expansion and serial aggression against militarily weaker countries and their people.
As Michael Mandelbaum, the director of East-West Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, crowed in 1990, “For the first time in 40 years, we can conduct military operations in the Middle East without worrying about triggering World War III.” Thirty years later, people in that part of the world may be forgiven for thinking that the United States and its allies have in fact unleashed World War III, against them, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, Pakistan, Gaza, Libya, Syria, Yemen and across West Africa.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin complained bitterly to President Clinton over plans for NATO expansion into Eastern Europe, but Russia was powerless to prevent it. Russia had already been invaded by an army of neoliberal Western economic advisers, whose “shock therapy” shrank its GDP by 65%, reduced male life expectancy from 65 to 58, and empowered a new class of oligarchs to loot its national resources and state-owned enterprises.
President Putin restored the power of the Russian state and improved the Russian people’s living standards, but he did not at first push back against U.S. and NATO military expansion and war-making. However, when NATO and its Arab monarchist allies overthrew the Gaddafi government in Libya and then launched an even bloodier proxy war against Russia’s ally Syria, Russia intervened militarily to prevent the overthrow of the Syrian government.
Russia worked with the United States to remove and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, and helped to open negotiations with Iran that eventually led to the JCPOA nuclear agreement. But the U.S. role in the coup in Ukraine in 2014, Russia’s subsequent reintegration of Crimea and its support for anti-coup separatists in Donbass put paid to further cooperation between Obama and Putin, plunging U.S.-Russian relations into a downward spiral that has now led us to the brink of nuclear war.
It is the epitome of official insanity that U.S., NATO and Russian leaders have resurrected this Cold War, which the whole world celebrated the end of, allowing plans for mass suicide and human extinction to once again masquerade as responsible defense policy.
While Russia bears full responsibility for invading Ukraine and for all the death and destruction of this war, this crisis did not come out of nowhere. The United States and its allies must reexamine their own roles in resurrecting the Cold War that spawned this crisis, if we are ever to return to a safer world for people everywhere.
Tragically, instead of expiring on its sell-by date in the 1990s along with the Warsaw Pact, NATO has transformed itself into an aggressive global military alliance, a fig-leaf for U.S. imperialism, and a forum for dangerous, self-fulfilling threat analysis, to justify its continued existence, endless expansion and crimes of aggression on three continents, in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya.
If this insanity indeed drives us to mass extinction, it will be no consolation to the scattered and dying survivors that their leaders succeeded in destroying their enemies’ country too. They will simply curse leaders on all sides for their blindness and stupidity. The propaganda by which each side demonized the other will be only a cruel irony once its end result is seen to be the destruction of everything leaders on all sides claimed to be defending.
This reality is common to all sides in this resurgent Cold War. But, like the voices of peace activists in Russia today, our voices are more powerful when we hold our own leaders accountable and work to change our own country’s behavior.
If Americans just echo U.S. propaganda, deny our own country’s role in provoking this crisis and turn all our ire towards President Putin and Russia, it will only serve to fuel the escalating tensions and bring on the next phase of this conflict, whatever dangerous new form that may take.
But if we campaign to change our country’s policies, de-escalate conflicts and find common ground with our neighbors in Ukraine, Russia, China and the rest of the world, we can cooperate and solve our serious common challenges together.
A top priority must be to dismantle the nuclear Doomsday machine we have inadvertently collaborated to build and maintain for 70 years, along with the obsolete and dangerous NATO military alliance. We cannot let the “unwarranted influence” and “misplaced power” of the Military-Industrial Complex keep leading us into ever more dangerous military crises until one of them spins out of control and destroys us all.
March 29, 2022 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | NATO, Russia, Ukraine, United States | Leave a comment
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | March 24, 2022
Last year there was a sudden spike in deaths among 25 to 44 year olds. Biologist & data analyst, Dr. Jessica Rose joins The HighWire to discuss her latest investigation into this phenomena, and the overwhelming evidence she has uncovered on the possible culprit.
March 29, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine | Leave a comment
By Aaron Kheriaty | The Brownstone Institute | March 28, 2022
In January 2020, at the very start of the pandemic, the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter that suggesting the possibility that covid could be spread by people who did not show any symptoms of the illness. This article was based on a single case report.
Germany’s public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), later spoke with the person mentioned in the case report, who was supposedly the asymptomatic spreader, and she clarified that she did have symptoms encountering the second person mentioned in the article. So, this case report, published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, was a false alarm. But no matter, the myth of asymptomatic spread was born.
On June 8, 2020, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that asymptomatic people could transmit covid. That same day, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead for the covid pandemic, clarified that people who have covid without any symptoms “very rarely” transmit the disease to others.
WHO then backtracked on their original alarmist statement one day later. Weeks later, Kerkhove was pressured by the public health establishment, including Harvard’s Global Health Institute, to backtrack on her statement that asymptomatic spread was very rare, claiming that the jury was still out.
Her original claim that asymptomatic spread was not a driver of the pandemic was correct, as is now clear. Given that no respiratory virus in history was known to spread asymptomatically, this should not have surprised anyone.
But the damage was already done. The media ran with the asymptomatic threat story. The specter of people with no symptoms being potentially dangerous—which never had any scientific basis—turned every fellow citizen into a possible threat to one’s existence.
We should notice the complete reversal that this effected in our thinking about health and illness. In the past, a person was assumed to be healthy until proven sick. If one missed work for a prolonged period, one needed a note from a doctor establishing an illness. During covid, the criteria was reversed: we began to assume that people were sick until proven healthy. One needed a negative covid test to return to work.
It would be hard to devise a better method than the widespread myth of asymptomatic spread combined with quarantining the healthy to destroy the fabric of society and to divide us. People who are afraid of everyone, who are locked down, who are isolated for months behind screens, are easier to control.
A society grounded on “social distancing” is a contradiction—it’s a kind of anti-society. Consider what happened to us, consider the human goods we sacrificed to preserve bare life at all costs: friendships, holidays with family, work, visiting the sick and dying, worshipping God, burying the dead.
Aaron Kheriaty, former Professor of Psychiatry at the UCI School of Medicine and Director, Medical Ethics at UCI Health, is a Senior Scholar of the Brownstone Institute.
March 28, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, New England Journal of Medicine | Leave a comment
Tony Heller | March 26, 2022
Climate alarm is based on ambulance chasing commonplace events, making up fake statistics about them, and never permitting an honest scientist to weigh in on the discussion.
March 28, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment
By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | March 24, 2022
I hate sleeping pills. I really hate them. The negative emotional response I get when I see them in a patient’s chart is much stronger than what I feel when I see pretty much any other drug. In particular, there is one class of sleeping pill that I really hate, and that is the weirdly named “nonbenzodiazepine”, which is basically a benzodiazepine (a highly addictive sedative drug) but which as been marketed instead as a sleeping pill. Common examples of nonbenzodiazepines are Imovane and Ambien.
Why do I hate them so much?
Well, because they’re used so irresponsibly by both doctors and patients. The big problem with these drugs is that they are absurdly addictive, and that tolerance develops after just days of use. So, while Imovane or Ambien may help you fall asleep a little bit faster, and sleep a little bit longer initially (the effect is actually quite marginal, less than half an hour), that beneficial effect is completely gone after just a few days or weeks of use.
What that means is that the amount of sleep you are getting is equivalent, after just a few weeks, to what it would have been if you’d never taken the drug in the first place. On top of that, you’ve now developed an addiction – if you don’t take the drug, your sleep will be much worse than it would have been if you’d never taken the drug in the first place. And once an addiction to a nonbenzodiazepine has developed, it is very hard to stop. Which is why so many people end up addicted to these drugs.
An elderly colleague once said to me that if you want to have a good life as a doctor, then you should refuse to ever prescribe addictive drugs to anyone, especially addictive sleeping pills. That way, the addicts will soon realize that they won’t get anywhere with you, and they’ll go elsewhere. Of course, that doesn’t remove the problem, it just shifts it on to someone else’s plate. But at least then you’re not contributing to the problem by producing new addicts.
Sleeping pills are basically band-aids. They do nothing to solve the underlying problem. If you have a sleeping problem and you take a sleeping pill, then even if the pill works, you still have a sleeping problem. Nothing has changed. What people need to realize is that there is no magic pill that can fix your problems for you. That is true for everything, not just sleep. A statin won’t fix your heart disease, a blood pressure lowering drug won’t fix your high blood pressure, and a glucose lowering drug won’t fix your diabetes. They’re all band-aids, and pretty ineffective band-aids at that. What you need to do, if you have a health issue, is to start taking responsibility for your own health.
There are antihistamine-based sleeping pills that aren’t addictive, it’s true, but they’re still just band-aids, and while they may help somewhat with sleep (the effect is pretty marginal, as it is for most other types of drugs), they interfere with sleep architecture and worsen cognitive performance, just like the addictive sleeping pills do.
If you have a sleeping problem, then first you need to ask yourself, what is causing it?
Is the problem alcohol? Well, then you need to cut down your alcohol consumption. Is the problem that you’re not physically active enough? Well, again, the solution is simple. Start moving more. Tire yourself out enough during the day that your body is ready to sleep at night. Is the problem anxiety about having to go to a job you hate in the morning? Change jobs!
And make sure you have good sleep hygiene. Avoid screens close to bed time. Sleep in a dark, cool room. Don’t get in bed until you’re truly tired enough to fall asleep, and if you can’t fall asleep naturally within 15 minutes, get up again and read a book until you are tired enough to sleep. Set an alarm and get up at the same time every day (even weekends).
If you have a sleeping problem and your doctor tries to prescribe you a sleeping pill, ask why they are prescribing it and if they think it’s really necessary. Most likely the reason is that they think you expect/want a prescription, and they don’t think it’s really necessary. Then ask if you can get a referral for sleep therapy instead. Unlike sleeping pills, sleep therapy really does work to improve sleep over the long term.
March 27, 2022 Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
The Scoop – February 16, 2022
Greg Hill, a pilot with 32 years experience in both regular and military contexts, calls on Canadians to ‘have courage’. Greg Hill uses a well airline disaster as an example to drive home his point.
March 27, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, Video | Canada, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights | Leave a comment
By James Rogers | TCW Defending Freedom | March 26, 2022
PATRICK Benham-Crosswell’s excellent article in TCW on Thursday stimulated a need to consolidate a few thoughts.
The concept of ‘man-made climate change’ has always been a complete falsehood. I used to think it was a simple scam that enabled governments to raise taxes and levies on prosperous Western societies; but it is now a much bigger, and more complicated, matter. Whether or not, back in 1992, with Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance, our current situation was the planned destination, or whether or not other agendas have been piggy-backed on to environmentalism, we don’t know.
Two years ago we were presented with another ‘inconvenient truth’, that the government – indeed governments almost everywhere – were suspending our liberties ‘for a few weeks’. As March 2020 dragged into April and May, stuck in their homes, people began to do their own research. It became obvious to me that what was happening was not about a ‘deadly virus’, and I stated my belief was that vested interests were working to ensure that the temporary socialisation of our society and economy became permanent. Expressing this belief cost me many relationships.
In spring 2020, despite Johnson’s effective parliamentary coup to rule by decree, I did not believe that our government’s C-19 strategy represented those vested interests. By autumn though, I did. Dr Mike Yeadon and friends demolished the Corman-Drosten Paper on PCR tests. This dishonest paper asserted that PCR testing for C-19 was both valid and necessary, and we know that Hancock based his whole act and legal authority on there being legions of ‘infectious’ people around, all procured by PCR tests. Two of the signatories of the Corman-Drosten Paper, Maria Zambon (also a senior Sage member) and Joanna Ellis, are senior staff of Public Health England, so the British government knew full well that their strategy was based on scientific fraud.
At Christmas 2021 we learned that in spring 2020 our government certainly did not believe that C-19 was a deadly illness: they worked in offices together, celebrated birthdays and Fridays together, all in the face of the ‘worst viral pandemic since 1919’.
Nothing about C-19 has made any sense whatsoever. It was a purposely manufactured ‘crisis’ and entirely sustained by propaganda and massive government over-reach. For the past 25 years various viruses created problems that were dealt with quite quickly, and emergencies were normalised swiftly. Isn’t that one of the principal functions of government? To keep society calm, stable, well-managed and productive? So why was a cold virus, fatal only to 0.1 per cent of those who caught it, allowed to dominate our lives for two years? Two years in which the democratic values and legal freedoms that took centuries to generate have been well and truly stomped on, and the integrity of science trashed. Why have governments, health services and academics all around the world wilfully ignored the undeniable damage that the jabs have done? Why have they ignored the fact that the jabs never worked as advertised? Why have the media been complicit in this?
In WWII governments came down very hard on defeatism and fear-mongering. Anyone claiming the nation was doomed was arrested and faced a possible death penalty. With C-19, governments went out of the way to generate fear. With our own money, they bought the media, and created the illusion of a devastating ‘crisis’ needing radical solutions that only governments could provide.
Foolish people and lazy thinkers accepted this without question, especially as governments paid people not to work, and/or allowed them to ‘work from home’. What was for them not to like? In 2020 and 2021 a lot of people saved a lot of money – but they never questioned the true cost of submitting to regulation.
Governments abused their powers and trampled on freedoms, and in parallel, without too many people noticing, they proceeded to create digital systems that will enable them to keep the people subdued and manipulated for ever. In all probability, digital ID, health records and currency are nearly ready to be implemented; they are just waiting for the ‘right time’. What the signal will be and who will give it are interesting questions to ponder.
Governments’ responses to C-19 also created significant economic problems, all of which have been and will be disproportionately borne by small businesses and lower income households while making big business much, much richer. These economic issues have been compounded by what is happening in Ukraine. Nothing about this ‘crisis’ makes any sense either. It is clear that the West has been manipulating Ukrainian politics for over 20 years.
So, together with ‘pestilence’ and ‘war’, the other ‘crisis’ that has been rolling along for 25 years is ‘climate change’, or more accurately, the West’s source(s) of energy. Once again, there’s not much about the West’s renewable energy strategy that makes sense. That carbon dioxide is a ‘problem’ makes no rational sense. Power generation by means of nuclear technology [?], fracking and even creating energy from burning household waste makes perfect sense; yet all have been eschewed in favour of more expensive and damaging options, windmills and solar energy, the construction, maintenance and operation of which costs far more than the alternatives. They desecrate the environment and provide nowhere near as much energy as is required.
It is clear that we are all going to have to consume less energy than we do now. How this will be managed is another interesting question. It seems it will be possible only with coercion. Coercion? Impossible? Not at all – how easy was it for governments to ‘persuade’ people to get jabbed? How easy was it for them to get people to turn on their neighbour for not being jabbed? How easy was for them to make useless face masks a symbol of virtue and integrity? How easy has it been for governments to get people to believe that the Ukrainian government is a squeaky-clean ‘victim’?
When the power cuts come – and they will: why else has the government been pushing ‘smart meters’ for ten years? – watch out for the signs in windows that proudly claim, ‘Happy to sit in the cold and dark to save polar bears’ or ‘Don’t drive, save the world’ or ‘Proud to eat raw food so we don’t have to buy Russian gas’.
It’s been so easy for them to make new truths, which in turn must create deniers, who are unequivocal demons.
Ever wondered why we are being continually told that ‘racism’ is a huge stain on the world, and that footballers must kneel before every game? Why are we constantly being made to feel bad about being white? Why were Britons not allowed to continue the good progress in race relations that commenced in the mid-1980s, and saw Britain morph into a nation that was very comfortable with itself in the 1990s? Why has racism become a ‘devastating problem’, when we all know that our society is tolerant and benevolent?
Because governments use ‘racism’ as a method of dividing and conquering. Similarly, all the tripe about LBGTQ. It easy for governments to accomplish their prime task of economic devastation and the socialisation and total control over society, if people are too busy arguing about ‘micro-aggressions’, not feeling ’safe’, the ‘right to choose gender’ and why there aren’t enough black people playing cricket for England.
Those who ‘went green’ are the same people who insist that Britain is a ‘racist country’, the same people who voted ‘remain’ and demanded the result of a democratic referendum be overturned, the same people who hated Trump, declared that he would bring about disaster and were happy when a senile man became leader of the free world. They are the same people who wear masks and demand that you get jabbed, the same people who demanded lockdown regulation and cheered the £400billion spent on it all, the same people who are holding fundraisers for Ukraine. They are the same people who believe in the ‘toxic privilege of white males’ and the same people who believe that gender is not a matter determined by nature and science.
These are people who believe in the ‘greater good’; they are no doubt genuinely nice people, but they are wrong about almost everything. They have believed everything that the BBC and Guardian have told them for 25 years. Has anyone else noticed how every vox pop and interview with a sports star involves questions about ‘emotions’? Emotion is now the sole currency of television, it has become far, far more important than reason. Emotions can be manipulated, and so can people – think about all of those who spent Thursday evenings banging pots for the NHS (which had shut down). These people ceased to do their own reading and research, they stopped thinking critically and rationally, they feel guilty about being comfortably off and they have no qualms at all about sacrificing individual freedom and democracy if doing so justifies their beliefs and helps ’their side’ win.
The very fact that society – even the Royal Society – can entertain unscientific, and totally uneconomic, ideas about the climate, about viruses and the basic biology of gender, tells us everything about the situation we are in. Governments are manipulating everything, and a huge section of society has swallowed, or is too polite or afraid of being controversial, to stand against it.
In the not-too-distant future, it is highly likely that the ‘crises’ of pestilence, war and energy will create economic devastation. I guess that this will be the point where they impose their systems of control and universal basic income, and if you want your ‘income’, you’d better get a jab – yes, it will kill you at age 70, but it’s for the greater good. Our society will be socialised permanently, our lives will change for ever, and this will be cheered to the rafters by people whose mindset has been trained to ‘care’ about things other than their basic freedoms.
March 26, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, UK, United States | Leave a comment
By David Seedhouse | The Daily Sceptic | March 25, 2022
One of the most troubling aspects of the Government’s response to the pandemic was its complete disregard for ethics. It seems not to have occurred to the decision-makers that the instant removal of fundamental civil liberties required – and must always require – the most comprehensive ethical justification.
During the largely self-made crisis, the Government passed sweeping mandates with barely any serious reflection on the impacts on millions of people’s lives, and stubbornly refused to listen to a multitude of far more thoughtful, well-informed alternatives.
Inexcusably, it appears that the main reason the Government and its advisors neglected to consider ethics was brute ignorance – they didn’t think about ethics because they have no idea why it is important. To them ethics is at best a scarcely relevant adjunct to ‘following the science’.
Had they understood ethics – or bothered to ask people who do – they would have been able to approach policymaking in a properly balanced and effective manner.
There are several ways to include ethics in decision-making. Two of these are 1) to apply ethical standards and principles and 2) to deliberate holistically. Both can be undertaken simultaneously.
Ethical standards
A range of carefully considered ethical standards has been developed and fought for in the Western world over the past 70 years and more. Arguably the most fundamental of these is the principle of informed consent to interventions, established in both ethical theory and health care law. It is now regarded as essential that any health care professional – including public health professionals – must fully explain the range of possible interventions available and disclose the reasoning behind any recommendation they make. Anything less is either negligent or coercive.
Holistic deliberation
Beyond the application of fundamental principles, ethics may be seen as a thoughtful, wide-ranging decision-making approach which seeks to balance a variety of factors to reach reasonable conclusions. These conclusions will aways include both evidence and values. Taking one without the other is bound to lead to inadequate choices: the evidence cannot speak for itself and value judgements alone quickly become dogma.
The Government and its advisors failed woefully to take account of either understanding of ethics.
Any robust analysis of a personal or social problem requires the consideration of a range of ideas. However it seems that where public health is concerned, policies are routinely drawn up according to a single imperative – ‘we must reduce disease and therefore save lives’ – but of course this imperative itself requires ethical standards and ethical deliberation because, as we have tragically witnessed, trying to save lives in one way risks lives in other ways.
As soon as you start to think beyond the fear of infection to consider the bigger picture, there is a flood of specific ethical issues.
There are many other measurable harms that should have been considered. ‘Minimising death’ was only one of many possible rationales. Consequently, the Government’s stubborn failure to reflect in a professional, balanced way caused massive, avoidable damage.
Ethics is ultimately a matter of respecting thoughtful traditions grounded in compassion and human rights, and thinking as deeply as possible about the many effects your choices will have on other people. Ethics is the essence of civilised human co-existence. Over the past two years a handful of people, quite out of their depth, were able to dismiss ethics – along with previous well-documented Government pandemic planning – with what seemed like a mere wave of the hand.
We must ensure that this can never happen again.
March 26, 2022 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, UK | Leave a comment
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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