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Killing the Bill of Rights

Democrats repress dissent to stay in power

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 15, 2022

In 2005, President George W. Bush allegedly addressed a meeting of Republicans discussing whether to renew the Patriot Act due to its possible unconstitutionality by angrily blurting out that the Constitution was “just a goddamned piece of paper!” If the story is true, it partly explains the numerous crimes committed by Bush and his associates, including the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq based on hyped and even fabricated intelligence. It also suggests the unwillingness of proponents of overriding executive authority to accept that the American people are the inheritors of a number of inalienable liberties to include freedom of speech and association, both of which were impacted negatively by the Patriot Act and the other legislation that followed.

I often think of George Bush when I observe the antics of Joe Biden and his claque of Trotskyites at work. To be sure, thanks to the Bill of Rights you can currently say anything you want in the United States, though there are limits on that freedom if one goes so far as to offend those who are powerful. If you do upset the oligarchs who run our country through corruption of public officials, they have a thousand ways to get you. I recently wrote an article on the use of lawfare to block people and views one objects to by taking them to court on some pretext and bankrupting them through legal fees and penalties. The court system hardly represents the people in any country. It is inevitably heavily politicized by the politicians that grant it its authority and ultimately represents the big money interests that the judges consider their real peers in the Establishment.

The United States government has in fact embraced the suppression of unpopular views and the nations and groups that it finds offensive through the use of sanctions, which are essentially punishments doled out arbitrarily as the government can issue a sanction on its own authority without having to provide any evidence or make a case. And when the White House sanctions a foreign government or group, secondary sanctions kick in to prevent anyone from exchanging goods or services with the targeted entity. I recently was on the receiving end of a Department of the Treasury demand that I stop writing for a foreign website which had been sanctioned. I was warned that I might be subject to a $311,562 fine if I failed to comply. Insofar as I could determine, the foreign website was only guilty of having strongly condemned United States foreign policy, as do I and many other Americans, but the threat of the government coming down with its thousands of lawyers meant that I and other US contributors terminated our relationship.

The federal government was telling us that we had a right to free speech and association except in cases where we were interacting with groups that the Treasury Department disapproved of. In a system as hopelessly corrupted as the US federal government, it is inevitable that powerful groups will surface that will be able to dictate what is acceptable and what is not. That very often comes down to what might once have been regarded as free speech and association issues. The Democratic Party might reasonably be described as a group of satrapies representing certain special interests, most visibly homo-and transsexuals, “choice” women, blacks and Jews. The balancing act required to keep all the subsets under control frequently strains credibility. Joe Biden recently made an impassioned speech demanding that the so-called Equal Rights Amendment should immediately become part of the Constitution because it is “the clear will of the American people.” Ironically, Joe heads a government that believes that gender discrimination is okay as long as it is directed against white men. He is also currently pushing for national education reform, which some refer to as either dumbing down or reverse racism, to bring more “diversity” and “equity” into the system. Doing so of course will require Affirmative Action style discrimination based on race and the president is also pledged to nominate a new Supreme Court Justice based solely on skin color and gender, not on qualifications or preparation for the position. Other candidates need not apply even if they are better qualified and “equal rights” depend on who you are in the Democratic Party pecking order. Leondra Kruger, reportedly a leading candidate is black, a woman and also Jewish.

So Joe Biden either understands the meaning of the words and expressions he uses, or he doesn’t. He probably thinks it doesn’t matter as he is speaking to a receptive and not very critical audience, which includes his mainstream media allies. And there is also his Chief of Staff Ron Klain there to poke him in the ribs when he is hesitating and has to say anything or look presidential.

In another speech in Atlanta regarding the so-called “right to vote,” Honest Joe explicitly compared skeptics in the Senate who would prefer to have the states determine who is a legal resident and citizen for voting purposes to historic racists Bull Connors and George Wallace. He then denied that he had been calling the dissidents out as racists. George Orwell’s “newspeak” is definitely on the way as the “right to vote” is little more than a pious slogan that is an invitation to widespread electoral fraud benefiting the Democrats through mail-in voting and registration without documentation.

And there is of course Israel, which has an entire government department dedicated to the propagation of expressions like “holocaust denial, “surging anti-Semitism” and “right to defend oneself.” January 27th was International Holocaust Remembrance Day and some of the antics engaged in by presumably well-educated adult politicians and government officials perhaps offer a glimpse into what is coming in terms of the waning ability to speak one’s mind. The United Nations approved an Israeli motion calling for a crackdown on “holocaust denial,” and the Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan demanded that such content be banned from social networking media worldwide. He claimed that “Holocaust denial has spread like a cancer. It has spread under our watch. It has spread because people have chosen to be irresponsible and to avoid accountability…As you dodge responsibility, evil grows… Social media giants can no longer remain complacent to the hate that spreads on their platforms.”

To be accurate, the “avoiding accountability” claim sounds more reminiscent of Israeli and US behavior than that of those social media sites alleged to be in denial. And the malady appears to have taken hold in “liberal” Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has denounced protesting truckers as “fascists” and “racists.” He is beginning to sound like Joe Biden and Naftali Bennett and I am waiting for the “domestic terrorist” and/or “anti-Semite” label to be applied to quell what is a genuine populist reaction to draconian government policies. To cite Orwell again, what Israel, Canada and the United States understand is that when it comes to establishing the preferred narrative “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past… The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” Labeling opponents as racists or Nazis delegitimizes them so you will not have to deal with their grievances or arguments, which is precisely what is intended.

The irony is that free speech is already a distant memory in many countries. Orwell opined that “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” Constitutions guaranteeing a right to free speech proliferate in the Old World but are ignored or circumvented by governments, particularly if one is addressing almost anything having to do with the Second World War. Witness how in Europe the issue of presumed “holocaust denial,” now sometimes referred to in the US as “holocaust denialism” as if it were a disease, has been widely criminalized. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the negation or revision of “clearly established historical facts — such as the Holocaust — … would be removed from the protection of free speech under the European Convention on Human Rights.”

Bear in mind that “holocaust denial” includes any questioning of any aspect of the standard narrative endorsed by the US and other governments. Interestingly, a bit of pushback against a holocaust exemption for free speech appeared in an issue of Foreign Policy magazine, entitled “First they came for the Holocaust Deniers and I did not speak out”. The author Jacob Mchangama observes how hate speech and similar legislation has an unfortunate tendency to propagate and be used by governments to block all kinds of speech and writing that is actually quite innocent of any agenda but disapproved of by those in power. He cites how in 2014 a Russian blogger named Vladimir Luzgin was arrested and imprisoned after writing quite innocently on social media that Communist Russia and Nazi Germany collaborated to invade Poland in 1939 and thus began World War 2. His account was undoubtedly historically accurate, but the way it was presented offended someone in power and he was found guilty of misrepresenting the accepted narrative relating to the “Great Patriotic War against Germany.”

It is not completely clear what kind of Brave New World the Democrats are intent on creating, but it should be accepted as certain that once free speech goes and the universities go “woke” there will no longer be platforms to challenge the status quo. Conservative or otherwise dissenting publications will come under pressure to toe the line or the arbiters of decorum in Washington will be quick to make sure that the message is received that there will be consequences. We have entered into a strange twilight zone where what really happens and happened in the past will not be subject to examination. Will it be a better or safer world because of that? Undoubtedly no, but living now in what are likely to be the twilight years of our tottering republic we can only hope that somehow sanity will prevail and we will again be able to experience real freedom.

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.

February 15, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

What Will We Tell Our Children?

BY SARABETH MATILSKY | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | FEBRUARY 14, 2022

When I try to answer my children’s questions, I am so furious that I can barely speak.

I choose my words slowly. “Many grownups around you have failed.”

Never have I wished so strongly to be wrong than when I remember predictions I made back in March of 2020. And instead, for almost two years and counting, we have collectively failed and keep failing at the primary goal of any society: protecting our children.

The sum total of youth Covid policy comes down to this: millions of kids wearing masks in school, being told to stay away from each other and obsessively avoid germs, and receiving vaccines en masse that they likely do not need.

Why are so few of us speaking up for the children?

“Always be skeptical,” I tell my children, “of anyone who wants you to be scared. Thoughtless fear is dangerous, and one should always try to make decisions when calm. Grownups haven’t been doing a good job of this lately.”

And here is the ultimate crime against our children, perpetuated by two administrations thus far: censorship and removal of jobs and licenses from thousands of respected doctors and researchers who disagree with the dominant Covid narrative, while repeatedly ignoring and ridiculing their simple and honorable message: “Early Covid treatment saves lives.”

This censorship and canceling does not “stop misinformation:” it interrupts the scientific process itself, and leaves a bad taste in the mouths of all who wish to live in a democratic society. And yes, it is still censorship if you urge private companies to do the dirty work for you, again and again.

“Kiddos,” I say, “science is something you DO, not a dogma to be obeyed. And we can all do science, and learn how to think scientifically.”

Many have recently and repeatedly urged our children to “listen to the experts.” To which I respond: a democratic society depends upon education, and not the rote and submissive variety. If we want one of those Democracies, we owe it to our children to model the complexity and necessity of using our brains to come up with our own opinions, in addition to learning what “experts” believe.

“But Mama, they wouldn’t make kids do these things if they were DANGEROUS… would they, Mama?”

And I have to look at my children and blink away tears, because yes: in the current social moment, we adults are allowing our society to slip ever further into Pharma totalitarianism.

“Okay, but Miss Matilsky, these vaccines are safe and effective, and masks are Not a Big Deal Anyway, so why get angry now? The kids should Do Their Part to social-distance, and Slow the Spread!”

Masks are actually part of a very big deal for children, because they interfere with every aspect of normal social functioning, also a big deal is raising an entire generation of kids to believe that hiding their faces is normal, and that it plus “testing” completes their civic duty toward our collective public health.

This is both shameful and a lie. There is not and has never been evidence justifying community-wide mask wearing (and the equally shamefully enormous quantity of plastic garbage that comes from it). It would be nice if masks worked well to protect their wearers and those around them from contagious disease, but they don’t.

Study after study refutes their benefit in community settings, and we can see around us that people spread Covid even when masks are worn scrupulously, even while statistical epidemiology modeling supports the possibility that they might slow the spread if they were thicker, bigger, more widely worn.

I am reminded of the plan to use smaller dinner plates, which in turn was supposed to reduce portion sizes and therefore cause widespread weight loss! But oh, wait… this was similarly a case of wishful theories being confused with actual results.

Ultimately: no amount of ever thicker and more stringently-worn masks, nor fanatic germ-avoidance, will ever make up for the true public health measures that do increase resistance to contagious disease: ensuring access to clean water, clean air, and clean, fresh, wholesome food, not to mention meeting our human need to gather socially for work, relaxation and spiritual pursuits.

And here we grownups must stop beating around the bush, and face the most shameful fact of all: condoning regulatory capture by pharmaceutical companies has become the defining feature in Covid policy mismanagement by two administrations.

Why should we trust them with our children’s health for even one moment, let alone rely on their press releases to guide public policy?

Presidents Trump and Biden, you should be ashamed to have been taken in by these corporations so incredibly adept at manipulation. We need leaders who can identify and protect children from the effects of such bullying.

It is not for me to decide if a vaccine is the right choice for you or your child. And it absolutely is up to me to insist that anyone trying to convince me to accept a medical treatment on my child’s behalf should never promote, pressure, or discuss the matter with my child separately from me (i.e. in schools or anywhere else, or by requiring a medical treatment, test, or vaccine for admission); and not be in the business of marketing their drugs to me for profit.

We failed our children when we made them put their lives on hold while we adults squabbled for two years, and now we fail them even further, while we let politicians and epidemiologists and drug companies experiment with their bodies for reasons that leave nobody healthier, while exposing them to known and unknown risks from policies that aren’t reducing transmission, cases, or the Covid death rate.

How incredibly lonely for our children, to be masked and told to interact with others only cautiously… because so many grownups around them are so fearful and unwilling to learn some of the basic principles of cell biology and scientific inquiry that our kids are supposed to be learning in grade school.

How shameful to coerce medical treatment on those who stand to benefit the least. How on earth will we build up enough trust in our government and our systems if we can’t admit our mistakes and apologize to our children, the way we make them do when they’re wrong?

Step up to the plate, grownups. It’s the least we can do for the generation that will have to care for our messes when we’re old; it would be nice if today’s kids could have productive, meaningful, healthy lives first.

February 15, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

The Sad and Brutal Final Hours of Camp Freedom and the Convoy to Canberra

A Sense of Place | February 15, 2022

What had been a remarkably successful policing operation, handling the one million protestors who showed up in Canberra to protest two years of government overreach during the Covid era, turned sour in the final hours.

Until that point there had been no reports of violence, rapes, vandalism or all the other behaviours one might fairly expect with such a wildly diverse and yes, angry crowd.

Although the crowd was unmasked, and certainly weren’t lining up to QR code in, the authoritarian derangement and violent police excesses the nation has become accustomed to were nowhere to be seen.

Australians are extremely slow to protest; but with millions having lost their jobs, their businesses, even contact with their families amidst deep social divisions created by being daily threatened or ostracised if they do not take “the jab”, they are silent no more.

The hands off policing which had characterised both the protest and the handling of the 200,000 campers at Camp Epic, only one of a number of campsites, were largely peaceful because the police did not seek confrontation.

That all ended on the 14th of February, 2022, two days after a million people marched on Parliament House in jubilant unity.

The putative and publicly squabbling leadership of the movement at Camp Epic did nothing to dispel tensions. And all of them disappeared on the penultimate day, leading to yet more fear and confusion amongst the thousands who remained on the site itself, including many with children who had no jobs and no homes to return to.

All the rhetoric from various members of the movement that they were there “until the job is done”, or “until this is over”, proved as substantial as smoke.

The social chaos and personal crises wrought by the blizzard of government diktats and authoritarian overreach of the past two years is now clearly evident.

Camp Epic was already rapidly emptying on the final day when police moved in and aggressively moved every last protestor off the site.

In the inflammatory leadup, sowing yet more tension and confusion, protestors were initially told that they would have to move on by midnight. One woman with two young children said people had come to her tent early in the evening and told her she would be bashed and arrested if she did not move on.

The woman did not have a car and had no way of complying.

The next rumour in this evolving drama was that campers had until 8am to comply.

As it turned out the police arrived in force at around 11am, repeatedly broadcasting the message: “Leave Now. You are trespassing. Leave immediately. If you do not leave you will be arrested.”

Police, tolerating no resistance, worked their way through from the showgrounds from the top camping ground until every last protestor had been evicted.

The irony of police aggressively moving demonstrators from the nation’s capital, ostensibly the heart of Australian democracy, was lost on nobody.

As more than 98% percent of protestors had already left, and of the holdouts most were already packing up to leave, it was a largely pointless show of force.

In one of those all too human moments, one protestor pleaded with the police: “Don’t vax your kids.”

One sign, emblematic of the passionate sincerity of protestors, read: “Touch Our Kids & It’s War.”

While from a policing point of view the dissolving of Camp Freedom may well be deemed a success and end up as a textbook model for policing in highly volatile situations, it has also left many questions over its inhumanity and deceptive nature.

Every last protestor moved on yesterday has one message in their head: “The government is my enemy.”

Campers were told multiple conflicting stories. They could move to a large holiday camp an hour outside of town; that they could move to another Council controlled camping ground Camp Cotter at Cotter Creek half an hour away; or that they would be safe and welcome to stay on Ground Seven, at the top of the Epic showgrounds.

In the dramatic unravelling, none of these stories, or deliberate falsehoods, turned out to be true.

The hundreds of people who moved up to Ground Seven on the understanding that as it was private property they would be safe to stay were easily kettled, or corralled, given no choice but to leave after more than 50 police entered the grounds with backup forces clearly evident behind them. While many wore the standard uniforms of local police, there were other heavily armed special operatives wearing masks and holding leashed dogs, adding to the fear and panic already spreading through the crowd.

Amid these surreal and frightening scenes, it was obvious that a few of the officers were enjoying their role perhaps “a little too much”; but that many were unhappy about the duties they were being asked to perform.

In the midst of this chaos, some of the younger officers in particular, were exceptionally polite, thanking the protestors for their cooperation.

Many protestors moved to Cotter Creek Campground, a council run venue, on the assurance that they would be safe and welcome there.

That also proved false, with police aggressively moving protestors on, despite the fact that they had already made bookings and paid for their visit.

Another suggestion that protestors could move to a large conference and adventure centre Caloola Farm, an hour outside of Canberra, provided free of charge by the sympathetic owner, also proved false.

Police blockaded the roads and refused to let protestors enter.

Owner Ralph Hurst-Meyers, well known for his community generosity, said: “After consultation with the authorities, Caloola Farm and the Hurst-Meyers Charity Limited will allow vulnerable people affected by recent events such as the elderly, the disabled, and the indigenous community, single mothers with children, vulnerable families with children to temporarily stay at Caloola Farm free of charge while they make preparations to return home.

The problem with that, of course, is that many of the remaining protestors have no home to return to.

As one of the many passionate people involved in the weeks events observed: “Everyone here is on the verge of losing everything.”

A million people on their doorstep has upset the smug disdain displayed towards the largely working class protestors by Canberra’s insular, well paid public servants and their political overlords.

But as the many Australians who are refusing to accede to the government’s vaccine mandates burn through their savings and resources, the social chaos inflicted on Australia’s working and middle classes by the Canberra elites can only intensify.

The authorities may have succeeded in moving the protestors on this time around, but this story is going nowhere.

February 15, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Sanity Beyond the Sloth

By Omar Khan | Uncommon Wisdom | February 11, 2022

Western democracies have beckoned many of us, both its citizens, and those who looked across the way at their shining, seemingly self-evident example of relatively “enlightened” governance. Successful Asian powerhouses like Japan and Singapore, and of course Hong Kong (both Asia and Britain in many ways for so long), drew inspiration on how they should be structured, governed and led.

Those in developing countries, or countries where authoritarianism held sway, pined for the rule of law, hoping their leadership might take a cue from Western role models, yearning for the tonic of good leadership and sound social structures, rather than continuing to suffer under corrupt, incompetent, misrule.

And then these countries, unlike Western counterparts, had virtually no social safety nets. Progress, education, prosperity, safety and security, these were the enchantments portrayed across the world.

How Superficial Was It All?

Post COVID, and the fact-free, hysterical over-reaction and meltdown we have still not recovered from, “democratic” countries have been in free fall. Who can not be dismayed by how these “democratically elected” leaders behaved, manipulating and being manipulated by their own systems? How shattering to see the shallowness of character, where in a charade of “public health,” constitutional rules were compromised, fundamental societal norms ignored, and seeking unbridled power, apparently the prevailing narcotic.

The US has unraveled. Fauci is found tripping over his tongue, his “testimony” and his emails, and gross misrepresentations re the “origins” of the coronavirus (the once forbidden fruit of the “Lab Leak”, now a mainstream consideration), gain of function definition and taxonomy, as well as multiple varietals of “guidance” on masks to lockdowns to “vaccine efficacy”, and still, utterly immune to consequence or accountability.

And we have been treated to the rambling, well-nigh unintelligible proclamations and machinations of the US President, reading from “scripts” while the “case-demic” rages. While debasing the Constitutionally sacred right to skepticism, we have seen an ignominious departure from Afghanistan (where on our fourth President dealing with it, we have essentially “gifted” the Taliban a remarkable military arsenal), and the Southern border seems porous to illegal, at times, literally “criminal” migrants. And the Democratic party has become apologists for defunding the police, and ransacking through rampant lawlessness, more than one large American city.

And with all of Mr. Trump’s misadventures with the law, and family cronyism, we are also face-to-face with Hunter Biden, in the fine tradition of the Clinton influence machine, brazenly peddling political influence for massive personal (financial) gain. This happens routinely, though it is common sport in these circles to sneer at African despots, while socializing at country clubs, for their “outrages” on similar fronts.

US law enforcement “enforces” or not, corruption is comprehensive, and ruling junta agendas advance Party interests, not those of the people. The once proud Republic is tottering and teetering as selective use of the law, extra-legal “emergency” powers, massive “mandating” of legally indemnified experimental therapy posing as “vaccines”, endemic abuse of positions of power — all dances side by side with hypocritic injunctions (maskless leaders being served by “masked” servers). HCQ and Ivermectin are availed of by Fauci’s family and Congressional leaders, while the public is treated to gaslighting galore.

Across the pond, a once sane Boris Johnson, rightly proclaiming natural immunity, got spooked by SAGE, and capitulated to widespread nonsense. His large parliamentary majority should have immunized him, instead he retreated into ineffectual flailing as mobs tore down historical statues. Rather than lead a national conversation, “white guilt” was the easy default setting. Scientific charlatans, disproven again and again, brandishing a new population-decimating “plague” were enough to send PM and advisers scurrying towards hysteria and “lockdowns”.

The resulting economic disaster and undermining of the quality of life of millions of people, were apparently a small price to pay. However, their own lifestyles and outings and those of affluent sponsors bypassed the draconian legislation. And so, they knew it was all essentially tommyrot as Wimbledon and office parties were unrestrained in either physical proximity or passionate engagement.

And while the UK is, for now, “liberated” of COVID restrictions, France is “easing up” but without relinquishing the threat of possibly reinstating the “Stalinist” decrees about “vaccination” (though the shots provide no immunity), at the first flutter of Macron’s angst infused paranoia. When you begin to threaten the withdrawal of citizenship and promise brutal force, you know how adrift and panicked a proposition must be.

Other countries “shelving” COVID restrictions include Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy and Lithuania. Israel is retaining its infamous “Green Pass” for parties and weddings, and it is being abolished for restaurants, hotels, gyms and theaters.

Overall Madness

The stats shriek their testimony. Late January each of the last two years saw the COVID “peak” overall. With or without “lockdowns,” with or without the silly masks, or whatever absurd companion restrictions came with it, the same results. Two years of “expert remedies” provided primarily a cesspool of sunk costs, as new waves and variants came implacably forward. We were scammed by “approved” experts and Big Pharma, and officiously stripped of rights that were once considered “unalienable” (more on this below).

The “two weeks” to flatten the spread metastasized into endless restrictions on human movement and autonomy with nary an end point in sight. A new cloth mask wearing religion was enforced, and automatons even today walk in fresh air where we have zero evidence of spread, inhaling their own waste. Oh, we also received the “blessings” of fresh segregation (long after we hoped that had been consigned to the dustbin of history) via a biosecurity state, and billions paid out for sheer snake oil (a.k.a. “safety”) – for example the utterly unreliable “testing” regime which couldn’t even be globally harmonized, so the same standards applied. There was not even a pretense of “quality control.”

Anti-humane and economic wars have been waged on people around the world, hitting hardest the most impoverished of course. Constitutions have gone up in flames, and anyone who wished to speak out to preserve that which made life worth living, or interfered with the Big Pharma subsidized autocracy, was demonized as an ”enemy of the state” (more on this below as well).

People around the world saw livelihoods and businesses vanish and had to undergo the sheer humanitarian outrage of multiple rounds of experimental injections, for them, and then their children, just to be able to feed their families or operate in society at all. What does it take to get outraged?

In “advanced societies” (with notable exceptions like Sweden and then states like Florida), local academia made “schools” (when they were actually open, even though children were at virtually zero risk and did not pass on the infection either before the “vaccination” bedlam) virtual penal camps (children eating in the cold, forced spacing, muzzling) to advance political gains and aims while teeming concerts and sporting events made a mockery of these injunctions.

And then, we do not yet even know the magnitude of the adverse impact of these “vaccines.”

The Great Embalming Fiasco

Hats off to the indefatigable Steve Kirsch, entrepreneur and crusader for COVID data that showcases the realities we are dealing with. Steve has offered cash to anyone who can show him the key early treatments don’t work, he has offered to debate public health officials or doctors, and to field doctors and specialists if they don’t wish to debate a so called “layman.”

But he recently brought attention to an alarming finding that deserves to be highlighted. In the United States, fifteen embalmers are seeing odd “fatal clotting” that was first discovered in 2021. As the night follows the day, the mainstream media are scrupulously disinterested, not to mention CDC, and their acolytes.

Specifically, Steve interviews Richard Hirschman, Alabama embalmer, 20 years of experience, and a funeral director. Stew Peters interviewed Mr. Hirschman, generating 800,000 views on Rumble alone.

The facts are damning and well-nigh irrefutable. In the subsequent interview with Mr. Kirsch, Mr. Hirschman clarifies that he started noticing the clots around May or June 2021. They may have been evident earlier, but that’s when he became aware of them.

He knows of no instance of such clots in “unvaccinated” cases (except one instance, someone who had received a transfusion).

Currently, over 50% of the bodies he embalms have these strange clots which he believes are directly caused by “vaccines” and boosters. In January 2022, 65% of all cases he came across (37 out of 57) had these suspicious clots. He roughly handles 600 bodies a year, so this is not “small number” distortion. Also, being COVID recovered and being sane enough to realize he was not at risk, other funeral homes have been contracting his services. So, he truly, in saying “over 50%” is referring to a largely unfiltered group of people.

He says he’s spoken to 15 of his peers who all are seeing the same thing but refuse to speak out publicly. As Steve mentions, this phenomenon is fairly common given the reprisals against anyone speaking up and out, for example school officials being unwilling to reveal the high rates of myocarditis that are suddenly percolating in their schools.

While shunned by mainstream media, Hirschman was contacted by PolitiFact (oxymoronically named) seeking to discredit him, but they ditched the article as presumably nothing compromising was located even by their scavenging.

The line of causation, following Occam’s Razor, of taking the simplest explanation until and if its refuted, is clear. An experimental injectable “therapy” is first used in 2021, which we know results in blood clots, and over 50% of the population are so “injected.” And this coincides almost exactly with the “embalmer’s expose.”

If this is in the vicinity of the truth, then of the 65,000 that die every week in the US, and you discount Hirschman’s “60%” to “40%” to err on the side of caution, that would still be 26,000 dying from the adverse effects per week or 676,000 annual “vaccine” related deaths.

But let’s go further suggests Steve. Assume this analysis is off by 1000X. Then it would be a “mere” 676 annual deaths, which would be 3 times more deadly than the smallpox vaccine which is currently deemed to be too unsafe to use. With even the “possibility” on the other hand, of a 65% death rate, every health agency, every media outlet should be there vetting the data. Not one has.

How could they possibly know there’s nothing there? Not even a request for a tissue sample for analysis by a medical journal. It distils down to a simple conclusion: they don’t care, they don’t want to know. The mania is to “embalm” the truth and in a frenzy, jab away…no matter what.

The Frenzy

The truckers rolled up Parliament Hill in Ottawa, now having sparked parallel outbursts of “civil” and at times not so civil disobedience. They are described with frenzied disdain, as if they were a plague of locusts from scripture.

And their “blasphemies” were there for all to read: “United Against Tyranny,” “No Vaccine Mandates,” “Freedom to Choose.” What gall!

As CJ Hopkins put it,

“Yes, that’s right, New Normal Canada has been invaded and is now under siege by hordes of transphobic Putin-Nazi truckers, racist homophobes, anti-Semitic Islamophobes, and other members of the working classes!”

The media is painting portraits of swastika waving goons, stealing food from the mouths of homeless people, while taking time out to desecrate war memorials. CJ adds

“Rumor has it, a kill-squad of truckers has been prowling the postnatal wards of hospitals, looking for Kuwaiti babies to yank out of their incubators”
as was asserted for the vengeful hordes of “Satanic” Saddam.

And if with a few restoratives, you come to, and remind yourself this is Canada, and this seems rather fanciful, remember this characterization of the protestor’s motives has passed muster by the “fact checkers” who are been elevated to the tribunal of truth, and have showered us with such unimpeachable insight about masks, early treatments, “vaccine” safety and effectiveness, and so much more.

Truculent Trudeau in his own Twitter blessed words:

“Today in the House, Members of Parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days.”

Who’s the satirist, CJ or the prime minister of Canada? The latter has been hidden in a bunker, after his boosted self, tested positive for COVID, hurling epithets at these rascally, depraved truckers, who decided to draw a civilizational line in the sand – long overdue.

All over the world, all creeds, colors, ages, families with kids, working class and simply sane and humane citizens are flocking to the streets against this surreal Covidian cult charade. And their stance and presence is a powerful rebuke to the face muzzling, socially distancing against an airborne pathogen, double boosting with obsolete “therapeutics,” brigade.

Therefore, governments have to somehow “try” to declare victory and roll the nonsense back, before the edifice is shamed into confessing its absurdity. We have to pray their desperation does not boil over into even more acute manifestations of authoritarian distemper.

Woe Betide Any Accountability

Of course, the convoy was not even covered in the mainstream media, despite it representing the most important protest in modern times in Canada. Despite no coverage, public opinion in Canada swung 15% to create a solid majority against both restrictions and mandates.

Suddenly a new slogan is born, “living with COVID.” As epidemiology would have mandated from the outset.

But the sloganeering is pernicious, as it has been since Nixon’s Press Secretary Ron Ziegler intoned, “mistakes were made.” The chalice of responsibility thus escaped his lips, rather than a genuine acceptance and reckoning. Was the mistake the lies and illegality or “getting caught?” Kudos to Thomas Harrington of the Brownstone Institute for helping us to forage for this moral understanding.

The deliberately obfuscating language, now a cornerstone of political life, is a form of vandalism of the public trust. Mr. Ziegler was for some time the widespread prototype of the oily dissembler who should not be holding public office in a serious Republic.

However, today, he seems the grandfather of public communication, disgustingly so. When moral responsibility is diluted in this way, we have little clarity. How did the disgraceful Iraq war get mandated and how are war criminals who led it being recognized with honors today? Who caused the financial meltdown? Who is actually accountable?

The COVID saga has been made possible, in all its pervasive implausibility by this new reflex of “changing the subject” if moral accountability is asserted or challenging the “source” of ideas rather than actually engaging the ideas themselves.

So those who have been undermining our human dignity and freedom are being threatened with potential meltdown. Some key Democratic governors reading the tea leaves re possible electoral annihilation, are lifting the idiotic mask mandates in their states. The excuse? The mild Omicron variant. That’s easier than admitting two decades of science has been utterly consistent on the uselessness of face muzzles to alter the spread of respiratory viruses within the general population in any statistically significant way.

All the countries like Britain, Norway and others, who are dismantling COVID restrictions, claim that the “leaky” “vaccines” that don’t ward off reinfection nor prevent spread but suppress symptoms for a brief window of efficacy, were responsible for opening society back up after we faced the “terror” of a coronavirus with a 99%+ recovery rate for those not in the most vulnerable demographic (above 70 with multiple comorbidities, with an average age of death of 82, beyond life expectancy virtually everywhere). A sick, deluded stance, with shattered lives everywhere and the widespread debris of our constitutional protections and civil liberties, but hey, “let’s do a little sidestep” as the old song says.

When physical autonomy is up for grabs due to “non-science” then all other liberties are ornamental. So we must tell this tale straight on, lest “mistakes were made” becomes our pathetic hymnal as we lurch from one contrived crisis to another.

COVID as Trojan Horse

The real battle will not be about mandates, but our refusal to “normalize” the underlying legal and ethical outrages of this period. Already, in the US, Homeland “Insecurity” is claiming that spreading “misinformation” would be tantamount to a “terrorist act.” You have to gag when you read their assertion of “current heightened threat environment” being triggered by “The proliferation of false or misleading narratives, which sow discord or undermine public trust in US government institutions.”

Ah! The fount of “WMD” never runs dry. The founders of the American Republic, once a fragile revolutionary, embryonic experiment in self-government in the 18th century, enshrined free speech in the “first” Amendment.

By contrast, imagine elected cronies, on numerous payrolls, endowing themselves the right to determine what is “false” or “misleading.” And government that has lied about so much, distorted so much to perpetuate the jabbing mania, including subjecting children to it on no grounds whatsoever, believes it is just “entitled” to public trust?

Just as Macron has scant moral standing going against the tide of liberation washing over Europe to lecture Putin on “democracy” (hence 60% of those polled in France assessed the visit a “failure”), but even more so, seemingly benign Britain has announced plans to put an increased emphasis on “personal responsibility” and “duties to the wider society” as well as not “abusing” rights. And who will determine any of this? Music swells… the grand majesty of today’s crony riddled political parties, or at the very least, the one in current electoral ascendance.

This is to be an articulated “bill of rights” and veering away from those “unalienable rights” that no government could impugn or interfere with, we will have a parasitic “quid pro quo” with the state, now acting as ethical puppeteer. “Rights”, precisely as they sound, are “innate” and not a gift from callow, feckless politicians, or indeed anyone else.

This is what must really be stopped. The legalizing of the insulation from responsibility of those whose only legitimacy derives from serving the people and safeguarding (not editing) their rights.

Imagine if our worst fears about the longer-term immunosuppressive impact of these “vaccines” come to pass? I pray they don’t. Let’s hope they are just incompetent. But whatever is the case we must take stock, we must use the disinfectant of “facts” to deal with distortions, no matter of what type. But challenging these may get you thrown in with terrorists, allowing government wide latitude in addressing being jolted by such revelations.

March 2020 cannot happen again, when in panic, and ignoring mounting data, governments asserted themselves over individual rights by declaring an “emergency” (which it seems will not stop “emerging”). We ignored the impact on the vulnerable, the poor, on children, on those running personal businesses, those needing other medical care, and we never debated “cost-benefit” before blowing up society and shutting down the planet.

The world became an authoritarian police state. And it is reluctantly having to have that wrested from its grip. The unconditional nature of free speech and core rights are critical to keep governments from embarking on dubious “crusades” allegedly for the public good. It keeps scientific/medical bodies from claiming to be a “Ministry of Truth” and doubling down on grotesque mistakes to avoid accountability.

Self-anointed potentates and virtue signaling mobs have to be held in check by this scaffolding of rights we are fighting for, the right to interrogate narratives and do a deep dive into facts. How we live is our business to decide, not a privilege granted by government if you conform to their often-self-serving vision. Let us never again cede that.

It may be the world will have to take tuition from new exemplars, as our Western role models have sadly become so tarnished. Japan, for example, never fully locked down, has refused mandates and has actually been scientifically open to early treatments like Ivermectin. In a statistical repudiation of the science-free narrative that had been coming out of Western governments, Africa, with 6% “vaccination” has only 3% of the world’s COVID ascribed fatalities.

But wherever and however, all together, we must renew human traditions, and rediscover discourse, and commit to educating ourselves so our “voice” is meaningful.

Essential human needs beckon… to live, to contemplate, to take decisions, to love, to kick off enterprise, to adventure, to explore, and yes to both be “safe” and to trust our ability to navigate challenges and manageable dangers. If we don’t, we will find ourselves in a hell not suitable for human habitation. If we do, this debased chapter can give way to the glory of being radiantly, autonomously alive.

February 15, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine crisis

After the fall of the Soviet Union, I told the Senate that expansion would lead us to where we are today.

By Jack F. Matlock Jr. | Responsible Statecraft | February 15, 2022

Today we face an avoidable crisis between the United States and Russia that was predictable, willfully precipitated, but can easily be resolved by the application of common sense.

But how did we get to this point?

Allow me, as someone who participated in the negotiations that ended the Cold War, to bring some history to bear on the current crisis.

We are being told each day that war may be imminent in Ukraine. Russian troops, we are told, are massing at Ukraine’s borders and could attack at any time. American citizens are being advised to leave Ukraine and dependents of the American Embassy staff are being evacuated. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian president has advised against panic and made clear that he does not consider a Russian invasion imminent. Vladimir Putin has denied that he has any intention of invading Ukraine. His demand is that the process of adding new members to NATO cease and that Russia has assurance that Ukraine and Georgia will never be members.

President Biden has refused to give such assurance but made clear his willingness to continue discussing questions of strategic stability in Europe. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government has made clear it has no intention of implementing the agreement reached in 2015 for reuniting the Donbas provinces into Ukraine with a large degree of local autonomy — an agreement with Russia, France, and Germany that the United States endorsed.

Was this crisis avoidable?

In short, yes. In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, many observers wrongly believed they were witnessing the end of the Cold War when It had actually ended at least two years earlier by negotiation and was in the interest of all the parties. President George H.W. Bush hoped that Gorbachev would manage to keep most of the 12 non-Baltic republics in a voluntary federation.

Despite the prevalent belief held by both the DC foreign policy establishment and most of the Russian public, the United States did not support, much less cause the break-up of the Soviet Union. We supported the independence of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and one of the last acts of the Soviet parliament was to legalize their claim to independence. And — despite frequently voiced fears — Vladimir Putin has never threatened to re-absorb the Baltic countries or to claim any of their territories, though he has criticized some that denied ethnic Russians the full rights of citizenship, a principle that the European Union is pledged to enforce.

Since Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.

Was this crisis predictable?

Absolutely. NATO expansion was the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. In 1997, when the question of adding more NATO members arose, I was asked to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In my introductory remarks, I made the following statement:

“I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.” Indeed, our nuclear arsenals were capable of ending the possibility of civilization on Earth.

But that was not the only reason I cited for including rather than excluding Russia from European security. As I explained to the SFRC: “The plan to increase the membership of NATO fails to take account of the real international situation following the end of the Cold War, and proceeds in accord with a logic that made sense only during the Cold War. The division of Europe ended before there was any thought of taking new members into NATO. No one is threatening to re-divide Europe. It is therefore absurd to claim, as some have, that it is necessary to take new members into NATO to avoid a future division of Europe; if NATO is to be the principal instrument for unifying the continent, then logically the only way it can do so is by expanding to include all European countries. But that does not appear to be the aim of the administration, and even if it is, the way to reach it is not by admitting new members piecemeal.”

The decision to expand NATO piecemeal was a reversal of American policies that produced the end of the Cold War. President George H.W. Bush had proclaimed a goal of a “Europe whole and free.” Gorbachev had spoken of “our common European home,” had welcomed representatives of East European governments who threw off their communist rulers and had ordered radical reductions in Soviet military forces by explaining that for one country to be secure, there must be security for all.

President Bush also assured Gorbachev during their meeting in Malta in December, 1989, that if the countries of Eastern Europe were allowed to choose their future orientation by democratic processes, the United States would not “take advantage” of that process. (Obviously, bringing countries into NATO that were then in the Warsaw Pact would be “taking advantage.”) The following year, Gorbachev was assured, though not in a formal treaty, that if a unified Germany was allowed to remain in NATO, there would be no movement of NATO jurisdiction to the east, “not one inch.”

These comments were made to Gorbachev before the Soviet Union broke up. Once it did, the Russian Federation had less than half the population of the Soviet Union and a military establishment demoralized and in total disarray. While there was no reason to enlarge NATO after the Soviet Union recognized and respected the independence of the East European countries, there was even less reason to fear the Russian Federation as a threat.

Was this crisis willfully precipitated?

Alas, the policies pursued by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all contributed to bringing us to this point.

Adding countries in Eastern Europe to NATO continued during the George W. Bush administration but that was not the only thing that stimulated Russian objection. At the same time, the United States began withdrawing from the arms control treaties that had tempered, for a time, an irrational and dangerous arms race and were the foundation agreements for ending the Cold War. The most significant was the decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which had been the cornerstone treaty for the series of agreements that halted for a time the nuclear arms race. After 9/11, Putin was the first foreign leader to call President Bush and offer support. He was as good as his word by facilitating the attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It was clear at that time that Putin aspired to a security partnership with the United States as the jihadist terrorists who were targeting the United States were also targeting Russia. Nevertheless, Washington continued its course of ignoring Russian (and also allied) interests by invading Iraq, an act of aggression that not only Russia opposed, but also France and Germany.

Although President Obama initially promised improved relations through his “reset” policy, the reality was that his government continued to ignore the most serious Russian concerns and redoubled earlier American efforts to detach former Soviet republics from Russian influence and, indeed, to encourage “regime change” in Russia itself. American actions in Syria and Ukraine were seen by the Russian president, and most Russians, as indirect attacks on them.

And so far as Ukraine is concerned, U.S. intrusion into its domestic politics was deep, actively supporting the 2014 revolution and overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government in 2014.

Relations soured further during President Obama’s second term after the Russian annexation of Crimea. Then things got worse during the four years of Donald Trump’s tenure. Accused of being a Russian dupe, Trump passed every anti-Russian measure that came along, while at the same time flattering Putin as a great leader.

Can the crisis be resolved by the application of common sense?

Yes, after all, what Putin is demanding is eminently reasonable. He is not demanding the exit of any NATO member and he is threatening none. By any common sense standard it is in the interest of the United States to promote peace, not conflict. To try to detach Ukraine from Russian influence — the avowed aim of those who agitated for the “color revolutions” — was a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one. Have we so soon forgotten the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Now, to say that approving Putin’s demands is in the objective interest of the United States does not mean that it will be easy to do. The leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties have developed such a Russo-phobic stance that it will take great political skill to navigate such treacherous political waters and achieve a rational outcome.

President Biden has made it clear that the United States will not intervene with its own troops if Russia invades Ukraine. So why move them into Eastern Europe? Just to show hawks in Congress that he is standing firm?

Maybe the subsequent negotiations between Washington and the Kremlin will find a way to allay Russian concerns and defuse the crisis. And maybe then Congress will start dealing with the growing problems we have at home instead of making them worse.

Or so one can hope.

February 15, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

INCREDIBLE SCENES IN CANBERRA AS SEA OF PROTESTERS WANT THEIR COUNTRY BACK

February 13, 2022

UKAction: https://brandnewtube.com/@UKAction
Australia Archive: https://earthnewspaper.com/category/australia

And coming soon to California:

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | February 10, 2022

February 15, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Vengeful Thievery by Biden and the Pentagon with Afghanistan

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | February 14, 2022

Throughout the invasion and 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, U.S. officials portrayed themselves as great saviors and benefactors of the Afghan people. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is the Pentagon’s application of the term “Operation Enduring Freedom” to its deadly and destructive operations in Afghanistan. There was also the supposed concern for “women’s rights” within the country.

It was always a lie. That was demonstrated by the fact that there was never an upward limit on the number of Afghan people who could be killed during the invasion and occupation. Why, early on, the Pentagon and the CIA even established a policy to not keep count of the number of Afghans they killed. It didn’t matter. Any number of deaths and injuries, no matter how high, was considered acceptable. The idea was that those people who survived the deadly and destructive U.S. violence would enjoy “enduring freedom” and “women’s rights.”

The truth is that U.S. officials never cared one whit for the well-being of the Afghan people, including all those people at Afghan wedding parties who were periodically bombed during the 20-year occupation.

Today, the U.S. government’s viciousness is, once again, on display, with two things: (1) The decision by President Biden and the Pentagon’s to enforce one of their patented systems of economic sanctions on the Afghan populace, and (2) Biden’s and the Pentagon’s decision to steal more than $7 billion from the Afghan government.

The sanctions are a pure display of viciousness. Why target the Afghan people with more death and suffering? The war is over. The Pentagon and the CIA lost. Get over it. Leave the Afghan people alone. Enough is enough. Can’t they be satisfied with the large number of deaths and the massive destruction they wreaked for the last 20 years on the Afghan people? Why kill and impoverish even more with a brutal system of economic sanctions?

The dark irony is that they’re enforcing the sanctions in the name of fighting “terrorism.” But isn’t the reason they condemn terrorism is that it targets innocent people as a means to achieve a political goal? Well, that is precisely what their evil system of sanctions does. It too targets innocent people with death, impoverishment, and suffering as a way to achieve a political goal — i.e., to make the Taliban regime look bad or even maybe — (hope springs eternal!) — brings regime change and another corrupt U.S. puppet regime into power.

Prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban central bank had deposited more than $7 billion in the United States for safekeeping. That money rightly belongs to the Taliban central bank, which has demanded it back. It matters not that the Taliban defeated the Pentagon and the CIA and forced them to exit the country. The money still rightly belongs to the Afghan government.

President Biden and the Pentagon, however, have decided to steal it. They say that they are going to use half the money to compensate the victims of 9/11 and the other half for “humanitarian aid.” Oh, aren’t they such good, caring, and compassionate people? Who would have known?

But they are not. They are nothing more than common thieves. They have no moral or legal right to steal that money, no matter what they do with it. The money belongs to the Afghan government.

Moreover, the Taliban regime never had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, and no one, including the victims of 9/11, has ever provided any evidence to the contrary. The only reason that the George W. Bush regime ordered the invasion of Afghanistan was because the Taliban refused his unconditional extradition demand for Osama bin Laden, which the Taliban had the legal right to do given that there was no extradition treaty between the two countries. The Bush regime never provided one iota of evidence indicating that the Taliban were complicit in the 9/11 attacks and neither have any of the 9/11 victims.

Moreover, the notion that Biden and the Pentagon are going to be “humanitarian” with the Taliban’s money is laughable. They couldn’t care less about humanitarian concerns among the Afghan people. Remember: There was never an upward limit on the number of Afghan people they were willing to kill, maim, and injure in the process of bringing “enduring freedom” and “women’s rights” to Afghanistan. Keep in mind also that 99 percent of the people they killed, maimed, and injured and whose homes and businesses were destroyed by U.S. bombs for 20 long years had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

After wreaking so much death, suffering, and destruction on the people of Afghanistan, Biden and the Pentagon need to do the right thing. They need to lift those deadly and destructive sanctions and finally leave the Afghan people alone. They also need to return the Afghan government’s money to the Afghan government. Behaving like vicious common thieves seeking revenge and retribution for their defeat does not reflect well on the United States.

February 14, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

GOP lawmakers demand answers from Fauci

RT | February 14, 2022

US Republican lawmakers have sent a letter pressing chief White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci for answers about his alleged silencing of concerns that the Covid-19 virus originally came from a Chinese lab.

The letter, sent on Monday by three US House members, cited emails suggesting that Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), tried in early 2020 to quash speculation among scientists that the virus may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Instead of alerting national security officials to the pandemic’s potentially unnatural origin, Fauci and Collins sought to shut down the debate, the GOP lawmakers said.

The emails, which were obtained by media outlets under Freedom of Information Act requests, reportedly showed that some virology experts saw reason to believe that the virus was lab-created. Some of the messages made reference to a February 2020 conference call in which many scientists leaned toward the lab-leak theory. For instance, Tulane Medical School professor Robert Garry said he could see no “plausible natural scenario” for some aspects of Covid-19 otherwise.

“However, those same email communications, particularly when viewed in light of other publicly available information, demonstrate an apparent effort by you and Dr. Collins not only to cover up the concerns those virologists raised, but to suppress scientific debate about the origins of Covid-19,” the letter said.

Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), Brett Guthrie (R-Kentucky) and Morgan Griffith (R-Virginia) signed the letter.

They demanded that Fauci provide details on how those conversations with scientists were initiated and who consulted him and Collins on Covid-19’s likely origins. The lawmakers also requested information on any communications by Fauci and Collins with Chinese scientists, as well as documents related to US funding of the research in Wuhan.

Even as scientists were speculating about Covid-19’s potentially manmade origins, Fauci told reporters in April 2020 that the sequencing of the virus was “totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” Earlier that same day, Collins sent him a message of concern about the lab leak theory, asking how NIH might “put down this very destructive conspiracy.”

Republican lawmakers have accused Fauci of directing taxpayer funding to gain-of-function research that could potentially make organisms more transmissible or lethal. In Monday’s letter, the House members claimed the efforts to quell the lab-leak theory may have stemmed at least partly from fears of those grants being exposed. “It appears you and Dr. Collins may have done so to protect China and avoid criticism about incredibly risky research that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was funding at the Wuhan lab,” the legislators said.

February 14, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Plan to Turn You Into a Genetically Edited Human Cyborg

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | February 14, 2022

A May 2021 project report by the U.K. Ministry of Defense, created in partnership with the German Bundeswehr Office for Defense Planning, offers shocking highlights of the dystopian cybernetics future that global technocrats are pushing mankind toward.

The report, “Human Augmentation — The Dawn of a New Paradigm, a Strategic Implications Project,”1 reviews the scientific goals of the U.K. and German defense ministries, and they are precisely what the title suggests. Human augmentation is stressed as being a key area to focus on in order to win future wars.

But human augmentation will not be restricted to the military ranks. It’s really a way to further separate classes of humans, with the rich and powerful elite being augmented “super-humans.” It’s worth noting that anything released to the public is a decade or more behind current capabilities, so everything in this report can be considered dated news, even though it reads like pure science fiction.

“… the field of human augmentation has the potential to transform society, security and defense over the next 30 years,” the report states. “We must begin to understand the implications of these changes and shape them to our advantage now, before they are thrust upon us.

Technology in warfare has traditionally centered on increasingly sophisticated platforms that people move and fight from, or artefacts that they wear or wield to fight with. Advances in the life sciences and converging developments in related fields are, however, beginning to blur the line between technology and the human …

Many technologies that have the potential to deliver strategic advantage out to 2050 already exist and further advances will undoubtedly occur … Our potential adversaries will not be governed by the same ethical and legal considerations that we are, and they are already developing human augmentation capabilities.

Our key challenge will be establishing advantage in this field without compromising the values and freedoms that underpin our way of life …

When we think of human augmentation it is easy to imagine science fiction inspired suits or wonder drugs that produce super soldiers, but we are on the cusp of realizing the benefits in a range of roles now. Human augmentation will help to understand, optimize and enhance performance leading to incremental, as well as radical, improvements.”

Changing What It Means To Be Human

As noted in the report, “Human augmentation has the potential to … change the meaning of what it means to be a human.” This is precisely what Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), has stated is the goal of The Fourth Industrial Revolution.2

WEF has been at the center of global affairs for more than 40 years, and if you take the time to dive into WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution material, you realize that it’s all about transhumanism. It’s about the merger of man and machine. This is a dystopian future WEF and its global allies are actively trying to implement, whether humanity at large agrees with it or not.

Schwab dreams of a world in which humans are connected to the cloud, able to access the internet through their own brains. This, of course, also means that your brain would be accessible to people who might like to tinker with your thoughts, emotions, beliefs and behavior, be they the technocratic elite themselves or random hackers. As noted by history professor Yuval Noah Harari in late 2019, “humans are now hackable animals.”3 As noted in the featured report:4

“Human augmentation will become increasingly relevant, partly because it can directly enhance human capability and behavior and partly because it is the binding agent between people and machines.

Future wars will be won, not by those with the most advanced technology, but by those who can most effectively integrate the unique capabilities of both people and machines. The importance of human-machine teaming is widely acknowledged but it has been viewed from a techno-centric perspective.

Human augmentation is the missing part of this puzzle. Thinking of the person as a platform and understanding our people at an individual level is fundamental to successful human augmentation.”

Key words I’d like to draw your attention to is the affirmation that human augmentation can “directly enhance behavior.” Now, if you can enhance behavior, that means you can change someone’s behavior. And if you can change a person’s behavior in a positive way, you can also control it to the person’s own detriment.

Theoretically, absolutely anyone, any random civilian with a brain-to-cloud connection and the needed biological augmentation (such as strength or speed) could be given wireless instructions to carry out an assassination, for example, and pull it off flawlessly, even without prior training.

Alternatively, their physical body could temporarily be taken over by a remote operator with the prerequisite skills. Proof of concept already exists, and is reviewed by Dr. Charles Morgan, professor in the department of national security at the University of New Haven, in the lecture below. Using the internet and brain implants, thoughts can be transferred from one person to another. The sender can also directly influence the physical movements of the receiver.

The Human Platform

On page 12 of the report, the concept of the human body as a platform is described, and how various parts of the human platform can be augmented. For example:

  • Physical performance such as strength, dexterity, speed and endurance can be enhanced, as well as physical senses. One example given is gene editing for enhanced sight
  • Psychological performance such as cognition, emotion and motivation can be influenced to activate and direct desired behavior. Examples of cognitive augmentation include improving memory, attention, alertness, creativity, understanding, decision-making, intelligence and vigilance
  • Social performance — “the ability to perceive oneself as part of a group and the readiness to act as part of the team” — can be influenced. Communication skills, collaboration and trust are also included here

They list several different ways to influence the physical, psychological and social performance of the “human platform,” including genetics (germ line and somatic modification), the gut microbiome, synthetic biology, invasive (internal) and noninvasive (external) brain interfaces, passive and powered exoskeletons, herbs, drugs and nano technology, neurostimulation, augmented reality technologies such as external holograms or glasses with built-in artificial intelligence, and sensory augmentation technologies such as external sensors or implants. As noted in the report:

“The senses can be extended by translating frequencies beyond the normal human range into frequencies that can been seen, heard or otherwise detected. This could allow the user to ‘see’ through walls, sense vibrations and detect airborne chemicals and changes to magnetic fields.

More invasive options to enhance existing senses have also been demonstrated, for example, coating retinal cells with nanoparticles to enable vision in the infrared spectrum.”

They also point out that, from a defense perspective, methods to de-augment an augmented opponent will be needed. Can you even imagine the battlefield of the future, where soldiers are barraged from both sides with conflicting inputs?

As for ethics, the paper stresses that “we cannot wait for the ethics of human augmentation to be decided for us.” There may even be “moral obligations” to augment people, they say, such as when it would “promote well-being” or protect a population from a “novel threat.”

Interestingly, the paper notes that “It could be argued that treatments involving novel vaccination processes and gene and cell therapies are examples of human augmentation already in the pipeline.” This appears to be a direct reference to mRNA and vector DNA COVID jabs. If so, it’s an open admission that they are a human augmentation strategy in progress.

The Challenge of Unintended Consequences

Of course, there can be any number of side effects and unintended outcomes when you start augmenting an aspect of the human body or mind. As explained in the featured report:

“The relationship between augmentation inputs and outputs is not as simple as it might appear. An augmentation might be used to enhance a person’s endurance but could unintentionally harm their ability to think clearly and decisively in a timely fashion.

In a warfighting context, an augmentation could make a commander more intelligent, but less able to lead due to their reduced ability to socially interact or because they increasingly make unethical decisions. Even a relatively uncontentious enhancement such as an exoskeleton may improve physical performance for specific tasks, but inadvertently result in a loss of balance or reduced coordination when not being worn.

The notion of enhancement is clouded further by the intricacies of the human nervous system where a modifier in one area could have an unintended effect elsewhere. Variation between people makes designing enhancements even more challenging.”

Still, none of that is cause to reconsider or slow down the march toward transhumanism, according to the authors. We just need to understand the human body better, and for that, we need to collect and analyze more data on human performance, behavior, genetics and epigenetics. As noted by the authors:

“Devices that track movement, heart rate, oxygenation levels and location are already commonplace and will become increasingly accurate and sophisticated, making it possible to gather an increasingly wide array of performance data in real time. We can also analyze data in ways that were impossible even five years ago.

Artificial intelligence can analyze massive sets of information almost instantaneously and turn it into products that can inform decision-making. This marriage of data collection and analytics is the foundation of future human augmentation.”

Lab-Grown Designer Babies

As mentioned, by the time a technological advancement is admitted publicly, the research is already a decade or more down the road. Consider, then, the February 1, 2022, article in Futurism,5 which announced that Chinese scientists have developed an artificial intelligence nanny robot to care for fetuses grown inside an artificial womb. According to Futurism :6

“The system could theoretically allow parents to grow a baby in a lab, thereby eliminating the need for a human to carry a child. The researchers go so far as to say that this system would be safer than traditional childbearing.”

As of now, the AI robot is only in charge of lab-raised animal embryos, as “experimentation on human embryos is still forbidden under international law.” However, that could change at any time. In May 2021, the International Society for Stem Cell Research went ahead and relaxed the rules7 on human embryonic experimentation.8

Up until then, the rule had been that no human embryo could be grown in a lab environment beyond 14 days. Human embryos may now be grown beyond 14 days if certain conditions are met. In some countries, laws would still need to be changed to go beyond 14 days, but regardless, there’s no doubt that as transhumanism gets underway in earnest, ethical considerations about growing babies in laboratories will be tossed out.

Combine the announcement of an AI robot nanny to care for lab-grown embryos with the 2018 announcement that Chinese scientists were creating CRISPR gene-edited babies. As reported by Technology Review, November 25, 2018,9 “A daring effort is underway to create the first children whose DNA has been tailored using gene editing.”

The embryos were genetically edited to disable a gene called CCR5, to make the babies “resistant to HIV, smallpox and cholera.” The embryos were then implanted into a human mother using in vitro fertilization. At the time, the lead scientist refused to answer whether the undertaking had resulted in a live birth, but shortly thereafter it was confirmed that one trial participant had indeed given birth to gene-edited twins in November 2018.10

In June 2019, Nature magazine published an article11 questioning whether the CRISPR babies might inadvertently have been given a shorter life span, as research had recently discovered that people with two disabled copies of the CCR5 gene were 21% more likely to die before the age of 76 than those with one functioning copy of that gene. The babies might also be more susceptible to influenza and autoimmune conditions, thanks to this genetic tinkering.

Should We Breed Chimeras to Satisfy Need for Organs?

Ethical considerations about animal-human hybrids (chimeras) will probably also fall by the wayside once transhumanism becomes normalized. Already, human-monkey hybrid embryos have been grown by a team of Chinese and American scientists.12

The hybrid embryos are part of an effort to find new ways to produce organs for transplant patients. The idea is to raise monkeys with human-compatible organs that can then be harvested as needed. Here, the embryos were grown in test tubes for as long as 20 days — and this was done before the ISSCR officially agreed to relaxing the 14-day rule.

The question is, if this kind of research ends up being successful, and the creation of animals with human organs is actually feasible, at what point does the chimera become a human?

How do we know that what looks like a monkey doesn’t have a human brain, with the intelligence that goes with it? Taking it a step further, even, what’s to prevent scientists from growing human organ donors? Human clones, even? It’s a slippery slope, for sure.

Privacy in the Age of Transhumanism

Perhaps one of the greatest concerns I (and many others) have is that not only are we moving toward a merger of man and machine, but at the same time we’re also increasingly outsourcing human morality to machines. I cannot imagine the end result being anything but devastating. How did that happen? Timandra Harkness, a BBC Radio presenter and author of “Big Data: Does Size Matter?” writes:13

“As the recent pandemic years have shown, the desire to be free from scrutiny unless there’s a good reason to be scrutinized is widely seen as, at best, eccentric and, at worst, automatic grounds for suspicion.

We simply can’t articulate why a private life is valuable. We have no sense of ourselves as autonomous beings, persons who need a space in which to reflect, to share thoughts with a few others, before venturing into public space with words and actions that we feel ready to defend …

Part of the appeal of technologies like AI is the fantasy that a machine can take the role of wise parent, immune to the emotion and unpredictability of mere humans. But this tells us less about the real capabilities of AI, and more about our disillusionment with ourselves.

The urge to fix COVID, or other social problems, with technology springs from this lack of trust in other people. So does the cavalier disregard for privacy as an expression of moral autonomy.

Technology ethics can’t save us, any more than technology can. Even during a pandemic, how we regard one another is the fundamental question at the root of ethics. So we do need to treat technology as just a tool, after all. Otherwise we risk being made its instruments in a world without morals.”

Sources and References

February 14, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment

Sea Temperatures at the Great Barrier Reef Haven’t Increased in 150 Years, Newly Uncovered Data Show

By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | February 14, 2022

An 1871 dataset of sea temperatures across the Great Barrier Reef in Australia has been compared to recent measurements logged at the same reef areas. No differences in temperature were found by Dr. Bill Johnson, leading him to conclude: “Alarming claims that the East Australian Current has warmed due to global warming are therefore without foundation.”

The 1871 temperatures were taken by the SS Governor Blackall steamship on a voyage around the Australian east coast to observe a total eclipse of the sun in the north of the continent. Hourly measurements were made between 6am and 6pm every day in the voyage from Port Stanley, north of Sydney, to Cape York and repeated on the journey back. Dr. Johnson, a former research scientist at the New South Wales Department of Natural Resources, allowed for the considerable seasonal variations in temperature across the reef but concluded that nothing much had changed. He said there was no evidence that the system regulating temperature had broken down “or is likely to break down in the future”.

Needless to say, such stories do not tend to appear in the media, most of which is firmly wedded to the notion that human-caused global warming is destroying the coral reefs around the world.  In October 2020, the BBC reported that the Great Barrier Reef had lost half of its coral since 1995, citing a report that said it was due to “warmer seas driven by climate change”. But Professor Peter Ridd, who has spent 40 years observing the reef, noted recently that it was in robust good health. Coral growth rates have if anything “increased over the last 100 years”. The graph below, compiled by Ridd from Australian Institute of Marine Science records, illustrates recent growth.

Agence France-Presse‘s award-winning reporter Marlow Hood recently quoted a University of Leeds paper that said coral reefs anchoring a quarter of marine wildlife will “most likely” be wiped out, even if the rise in global warming from pre-industrial times is capped at 1.5°C – which amounts to future warming of just 0.4°C, as 1.1°C has already occurred since 1820. Mr. Hood describes himself on his twitter feed as the “Herald of the Anthropocene” and was recently given €100,000 by the Spanish bank BBVA , which is heavily involved in Net Zero finance. In his commendation, Mr Hood was praised for his ability to “synthesize complex scientific models and studies and explain them in simple terms”. Certainly, Mr Hood went to the heart of the Leeds paper by further reporting that with an increase of 2°C, reef mortality “would be 100%”. This finding is said to have come from a “new generation of climate models”.

Corals have long occupied an exalted place in the climate tablets of doom. Their demise is commonly projected from the natural bleaching that occurs when they expel symbiotic algae, suggested to occur in reaction to sudden changes in water temperature. However, most bleaching – which also appears to have an important evolutionary function – occurs around weather oscillations, such as the El Niño event. These happen on a regular basis and once localised conditions have been stabilised, the coral usually recovers. Tropical coral thrives in temperatures between about 24°C and 32°C and sometimes grows quicker in warmer waters. Any change in long term global temperatures is unlikely to be a threat and certainly not one as small as 0.4°C. In any case, according to Dr. Johnson’s discoveries, there hasn’t been any change in such conditions on the Great Barrier Reef for at least 150 years.

A more practical threat to coral reefs is the less discussed practice of blowing them up and using them for building materials, jewellery, calcium health supplements and marine aquarium decorations. According to Big Blue Ocean Cleanup, an environmental non-profit organisation, this trade is worth $375 billion a year. This is an astonishing sum. Across the Pacific, Blue Ocean identifies two techniques of destruction. The first is small-scale mining using crowbars and sledgehammers to break off the coral branches. The second involves the use of dynamite.

Needless to say, this has an enormous impact on the surrounding eco-system, killing marine life and leaving a barren ocean behind. Indiscriminate destruction also causes sand erosion and removes coastal protection. Ironically, much of the coral has been used to build airports and resorts in places like the Maldives to house tourists who come to marvel at the reefs.

Coral reefs need protecting. It is not a good idea to drench them in untreated sewage, douse them with toxic chemicals, smash up their habitat with reckless fishing or rearrange the ocean floor with high explosives. But this is relatively mundane environmental housekeeping work. It is a world away from using unproven science statements and climate models to spout ‘save the planet’ rhetoric and push for an unrealistic control-and-distribute Net Zero project.

In the run up to COP26, one of Prince William’s £1 million “Earthshot” gifts was handed to a small Bahamian company called Coral Vita that says it grows coral to replant in the ocean. Writing in the Spectator Australia, the biologist Jennifer Marohasy noted that the Australian government permitted the mining every year of 200 tonnes of coral from the Great Barrier Reef. At the same time, $1 billion Australian dollars was provided to save the ‘dying’ reef. Some of this money, she noted, will be used to replant corals.

She added: “[T]here will be jobs for scuba divers, and it will be filmed by underwater videographers, marine scientists will collect data around the programme and boats will be chartered. There will be money for almost everyone who wants to participate – if they are vaccinated, believe in human-caused climate change and believe the Great Barrier Reef is dying.”

February 14, 2022 Posted by | Environmentalism, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

There Was No Exit Plan from “Slow the Spread”

By Robert Blumen | BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | February 13, 2022

Last year, cartoons began to appear depicting an endless cycle of variants and government responses. They call to mind the definition of insanity (misattributed to Einstein) as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Or perhaps the less well known line from a 1990s Stephen King miniseries “Hell is repetition.”

The direction of public health policy over the past two years has been difficult to understand. It may be a fool’s errand to use logic and reason for something that by design makes no sense. But coming at it as I do with no prior education in medicine or epidemiology, crude tools such as logic and common sense may still be useful: The basic principles of reality are true for all endeavors. For a plan to work, it must work within a finite time; for every on ramp, there must be an exit. 

We started out with “Two weeks to flatten the curve.” If nothing else can be said in favor of this plan, credit must be given for how well it was explained. Pictures like this were clear enough. With my university-level education in math and physics, I understood that the area under the curve was expected to remain equal under both alternatives: the one with and the other without “precautions” (as the label in the diagram euphemistically refers to life under communism). The peak of the curve would be lower, at the cost of the epidemic being extended in duration.

While the plan might or might not work, it is possible to state the premise without contradicting laws of logic or common sense. The flattening plan does accept that nearly everyone will eventually be exposed and the contagion will exhaust itself. If the plan enables some people to delay their exposure, up to a point, that could buy doctors some time to better learn how to treat them. Or perhaps a miraculous vaccine will be introduced that would create sterilizing immunity and halt the outbreak in its tracks enabling those who had delayed to avoid infection entirely.

And doctors did learn how to treat the disease, but treatment is actively fought by the medical establishment. The FDA – the drug regulator in the US – tweeted you should only get treated for covid if you are a horse. Even today, you can get banned from social media for suggesting that it is possible to treat the disease. So any possible advantage in developing a treatment was wasted.

While the plan was clear, it was not guaranteed to work. Subtle effects could undermine the simple story told by the picture. Perhaps everyone staying at home will not help because people will get infected at home. Or perhaps too many people must leave home because essential critical infrastructure workers such as marijuana dispensaries must remain open to keep society running.

Some suggested then a policy that postpones population immunity would give the virus more time to mutate. Given enough time, people who were infected and have developed natural immunity to an earlier variant would face a virus sufficiently different that they might become infected again. Along these lines, biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy and medical professor Dr Apoorva Ramaswamy MD, writing in the Wall Street Journal, question whether we should even try to slow the spread when “Speeding It May Be Safer.” Cognitive scientist Mark Changzi suggests “slowing the spread among the healthy not-at-risk, which just raises the frail’s chances of getting infected.” “Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, who have been asserting that you can’t vaccinate your way out of a pandemic for months” believe that vaccination during an outbreak accelerates the evolution of the virus away from the version targeted by the vaccine.

Quite likely the “precautions” did nothing to make the curve flatter. With the benefit of hindsight we can observe that outbreaks of the virus in proximate US states (or neighboring nations that are similar in size and demographics in other regions of the world) rise and fall side by side in cyclical surges, regardless of when or if efforts to slow the spread were made. There is no impact on the variability of any public health metric based on when a “precaution” was undertaken.

After the hospitalizations peaked and then declined to near zero in the spring of 2020, I naively expected that we had done what we could, and it was over. Whether we had flattened the curve, or, the virus did what it would have done anyway, was at that point irrelevant. Instead of ending the precautions, there was an unstated shift from the original strategy to a new one. Unlike the original, the new policy was not clearly explained. I suspect the reason is that it could not have been explained without it becoming obvious that it did not make any sense.

“Flatten the curve” assumes contagions come to an end – either through immunity or viruses burn themselves out for reasons we do not fully understand. All things come to an end. Even the plague of the Black Death ran out of gas before it wiped out the entire human race. If an outbreak ends when most of us have been exposed (and either died or developed immunity), how can slowing it down be said to save lives? Is it not the best we can hope for that some people are exposed and suffer the consequences later rather than sooner?

Evidence of the new reality appeared to me one day when I was stuck in a traffic jam, on a trip I (and many of my neighbors) made in violation of my locality’s “shelter in place” order. As I puzzled over this new reality, I noticed overhead digital signage (paid for by my governor’s massive ad spend on Covid propaganda), stating: “Stay at home: save lives.” This was the initial wave of a propaganda tsunami imploring us to “slow the spread.”

A story about a superspreader who went to a party and infected multiple people who subsequently died attributed the deaths to the careless person who probably did not wear a mask. Was there some alternate version of reality in which the dead partygoers lived out the rest of their natural life never being exposed to a virus to which they were vulnerable? Should the superspreader be held responsible for their exposure, or was it only a matter of time until the virus found them, one way or another?

Sanctimonious lockdowners heaped scorn and ridicule on countries that did not slow the spread. A small industry of curve-fitting explanations were offered to explain the “success stories:” they locked down, they wore face masks, they tested, they quarantined, they contact-traced, they social distanced. They did as they were told. They obeyed authority. And we should do likewise.

According to Dr. Anthony Fauci MD, it was the time for us ornery Americans to do as we were told. In retrospect every one of the virtuous nations had its own spike or two, or three, often after getting fully vaccinated, taking a victory lap, and dislocating both of their shoulders by patting themselves on the back overly vigorously.

Consider testing. Some virtuous nations tested. Based on the long lines of cars to get into the popup centers, the United States tested a lot too. When former president Donald Trump suggested that – perhaps – we were overtesting, he was subjected to enormous ridicule. Yet how could testing help slow the spread of a virus? By itself testing does nothing other than identify sick people.

Can a test do a better job at identifying sick people than they can do on their own simply by noticing whether they have symptoms? If testing once a week does not help, does testing twice a week? And if so, then why do we care about a test result, if asymptomatic people are not contagious? In reality testing produced too many false positives to be useful.

Testing could in theory help if combined with contact tracing and quarantines to isolate the infected people. Contact tracing was another ritual of the success stories – yet contact tracing could not possibly work if someone could be infected by coming within six feet of a sick person or walking down the same side of the street because the second-order contacts of contacts would rapidly explode to include everyone in an entire city or region. This was another instance of Yogi Berra’s observation that “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”

I wondered what the goals of the new policy of “slow the spread” could be. Was it zero-covid? Zero-covid was the objective of a small cult of fanatics that never gained much traction in the US. A serious go at it would require a country to permanently ban inbound international travel. This was done in a small and tightly controlled nation where a friend of mine lives. According to my friend, they had very low levels of infection; however, the nation’s economy was tourism-based and the continued success of the policy requires that travelers not enter the country. The operation was a success, the patient died.

Several other countries tried and failed zero-covid. Antarctica, which should have been a slam dunk, could not pull it off. Nor could an isolated island in the Pacific. In one hilarious story from the zero-aspiring nation of Australia, the virus escaped from jail when a Covid security guard hooked up with a detained person at a quarantine facility.

We were not flattening the curve, nor did it look like a strategy of total eradication. We were in a strange middle ground. At best we were pushing the pain into the future but with no plan to ever deal with it. The goals and exit conditions of the plan were not clearly explained. I did at one point find a statement by Dr. Fauci that preventive measures could drive the disease down to a very low level. Was it assumed to remain low forever? If not, then from that low base, outbreaks could be somehow contained?

University of California Professor Dr. Vinay Prasad MD wrote about a similar message from President Biden:

So when people heard in Summer 2020 that Biden aimed to “get covid under control,” some people imagined an optimistic state of affairs whereby, once we all got vaccinated or wore masks for just 100 days (link), covid might be suppressed to such a permanently low level that most of us could forget about it, just as we forget about polio. Such people imagined a one-time, short-term effort to “get covid under control,” like unlocking a door.

If we are to believe that a worldwide pandemic grew from an outbreak of twelve people in Wuhan, China to infect nearly the entire world (even indigenous tribes in the Amazon jungle who are by definition quarantined) why would it not do the same when we emerged from our underground fallout shelters? What if through assiduously standing in small circles painted on the floor in grocery stores and wearing underwear on our faces, we succeeded in driving the number of Covid infections down to a very small number? To pick a number, for example, twelve people. Why would the contagion not, in the absence of broader acquired immunity, spread again from that new base of twelve, until eventually reaching all of those remaining uninfected?

It took me some time to give it a name. I settled on “suppression.” The fundamental reason that suppression is not a policy is that it has no exit. For a thing to work it must work within a limited time. If the measures to slow the spread succeeded in slowing it, then what? The nature of the off ramp is the answer to the question, “What happens when we stop doing it?” If the answer is, “It would go right back to what it was doing before,” then there is no exit.

During 2020 I had people tell me that we could not end the lockdown because the epidemic would pick up right where it left off and millions would die AND (sometimes the same people ) that if we keep up the restrictive measures for a while then we could stop because the virus would not come back. A bit of logic rules out the possibility that the virus could both come back and not come back.

Do we then spend the rest of our lives acting out Covid theater? Dr. Fauci said that he would never shake hands again. Blue check marks fret about quarantining their children. Jenin Younes reflected on a survey in which hypochondriac epidemiologists who are afraid to open their mail explain that they now consider a normal life to be dangerously reckless. Substack author Eugyppius writes about a medical journal editor who “can’t work out what we’re even doing here, but he wants us to keep doing it.”

Dr Prasad explained the difference between finite and infinite strategies:

Even if most of Biden’s voters agreed with his campaign promise to “get covid under control” in the abstract, this slogan does not specify whether the state of being “under control” involves a one-time effort, or a sustained effort over time. If you unlock a door, you do it once and you can forget it; if you lift an overhead hatch, maybe you have to keep holding it up so that it doesn’t fall back down again.

Slowing the spread – if such a thing is even possible – means we get to the same place later rather than sooner. Flat or not, it is over when you reach the right tail of the curve. The strange middle ground of slowing the spread with no exit condition, would, if tried, ruin our lives forever. Are you willing to live under covid restrictions for the rest of your life? And your children for the rest of their lives and all subsequent generations? For some measures that slow the spread of disease, such as indoor plumbing, garbage removal and better diet, the answer is yes. But if our forebears during the plague of the Black Death had adopted a covid-like attempt at suppression, no one would have gone outdoors since the 15th century.

During this time of insanity, some of us went about our lives as best we could and ignored the restrictions. The rest of the world is now coming to terms with the understanding that the “precautions” don’t do much. At best what is going to happen anyway, happens. If there is no off ramp then the change is either permanent or it will go on until failure is evident and people stop caring. Then they will go back to normal one by one.

Robert Blumen is a software engineer and podcast host who writes occasionally about political and economic issues.

February 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Brian Peckford, Signatory of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, on Trudeau and the COVID-19 Mandates

February 11, 2022

Former Premier of Newfoundland expresses pure passion for his country.

The Charter’s only living signatory sues Canada over travel mandates

Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms | January 26, 2022

OTTAWA – The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms today filed a lawsuit in Federal Court seeking to strike down the federal government’s mandatory Covid-19 vaccine requirements for air travellers. The court action is on behalf of several Canadians from across Canada whose Charter rights and freedoms have been infringed.

On October 30, 2021, the federal government announced that anyone travelling by air, train, or ship, must be fully vaccinated. The travel vaccination mandate has prevented approximately 6 million unvaccinated Canadians (15% of Canada’s population) from travel within Canada and prevents them from flying out of Canada. Some of the Canadians involved in the lawsuit cannot travel to help sick loved ones, get to work, visit family and friends, take international vacations, and live ordinary lives.

The main applicant in the case is former Newfoundland Premier, The Honourable A. Brian Peckford. Mr. Peckford, pictured, is the only surviving drafter and signatory 40 years after the 1982 Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted.

“It is becoming more obvious that being vaccinated does not stop people from getting Covid and does not stop them from spreading it”, says the former Premier. “The government has not shown that the policy makes flying safer—it simply discriminates”, he notes. “When I heard Prime Minister Trudeau call the unvaccinated ‘racists,’ ‘misogynists, ‘anti-science’ and ‘extremist’ and his musing ‘do we tolerate these people?’ it became clear he is sowing divisions and advancing his vendetta against a specific group of Canadians—this is completely against the democratic and Canadian values I love about this country”, adds Mr. Peckford.

“The federal travel ban has segregated me from other Canadians.  It’s discriminatory, violates my Charter rights and that’s why I am fighting the travel ban,” explains Mr. Peckford.

The Justice Centre’s legal challenge cites violations of Charter rights including mobility, life, liberty and security of the person, privacy, and discrimination. The lawsuit also challenges whether the Minister of Transportation has the jurisdiction to use aviation safety powers to enforce public health measures.

In discussing effective border control measures at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, Canada’s chief medical officer, Dr. Tam, said: “As you move further away from that epicentre, any other border measures are much less effective. Data on public health has shown that many of these are actually not effective at all… WHO advises against any kind of travel and trade restrictions, saying that they are inappropriate and could actually cause more harm than good in terms of our global effort to contain.” (Canada House of Commons, Standing Committee on Health Meeting, February 5, 2020)

The World Health Organization (“WHO”) continues to maintain that position and on January 19, 2022, urged all countries to: “Lift or ease international traffic bans as they do not provide added value and continue to contribute to the economic and social stress experienced by States Parties. The failure of travel restrictions introduced after the detection and reporting of Omicron variant to limit international spread of Omicron demonstrates the ineffectiveness of such measures over time.” The WHO repeated that countries should: “not require proof of vaccination against COVID-19 for international travel.” (World Health Organization, Statement on the tenth meeting of the International Health Regulations (2005) Emergency Committee regarding the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, January 19, 2022.) 

“Despite the confirmed science that the vaccine does not stop people from getting or spreading the virus and the repeated warnings from the WHO, it’s clear the federal government is out of step and arbitrarily restricting Canadians fundamental rights and freedoms,” says Keith Wilson, Q.C., lead counsel for the legal challenge. “It is profoundly disturbing that a marginalized group in Canada—the unvaccinated—are essentially prohibited from leaving the country,” he adds.

“Canadians have been losing hope in the Charter and our courts.  We are going to put the best arguments and evidence forward so that the court can clarify where governments overstep,” concludes Mr. Wilson.

The court will be asked to hear the case on an expedited basis given the serious infringement on Canadians’ mobility and other rights. Canada is the only country in the developed world that has banned Covid vaccine-free travellers from air travel.

Notice of Application, Filed and Served

February 14, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment