The forever-head of the US NIAID, Tony Fauci, has repeatedly demanded that the public “trust the science” as he shifts his own science opinion from one positon to another. What is never mentioned in mainstream media in the West or almost anywhere in the world is the scientific record of the major global vaccine making pharmaceutical giants. In short, it is abysmal and alarming in the extreme. That alone should prohibit governments from pushing radical untested experimental injections on their populations without extensive long-term animal and other testing to assure their safety.
This past April as the US vaccination program was in high gear, the Biden chief covid adviser, 80-year-old Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) since 1984, announced that the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had decided to order a “pause” on giving the Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) vaccine in order to examine reports of blood clots. It turned out that there were six reported blood clot cases of some seven million who then had had the J&J covid jab. Fauci in his press remarks declared, “one of the things that’s, I think, such a good thing about our system here, is that we’re ruled by the science, not by any other consideration.” There is good reason to question Fauci.
That was supposed to reassure people that the authorities were being ultra-careful with the experimental covid medications which, after all, never have been mass-tested on humans before and have only gotten “emergency use authorization,” provisional FDA approval. The FDA quickly lifted the pause as J&J agreed to print that its vaccine could cause blood clots.
Yet at the same time, rival vaccine makers, Pfizer and Moderna, both using a hyper-experimental genetic treatment known as mRNA, were not being paused by “the science” despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of alarming vaccine-related severe reactions, including official data of several thousand deaths from both, had been recorded by CDC data base, VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System).
According to the CDC such “adverse” events, post-vaccine, include anaphylaxis, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, myocarditis, pericarditis, and death. For the week of July 16 the CDC VAERS reported an alarming 9,125 reported deaths since late December from the COVID-19 vaccinations. Never in history have such high death totals been associated with any vaccine, yet the media is deafeningly silent about this.
Their dismal science record
The wording of Fauci is precise and deliberately manipulative. It suggests that there exists some fixed thing we can call “The Science,” like some Vatican religious dogma, whereas the real scientific method is one of continuous questioning, overturning past hypotheses with newly proven ones, adjusting. Yet when it comes to “Science,” the handful of giant vaccine makers, sometimes known as Big Pharma, a cartel not unlike Big Oil, have a record of fraud, deliberate doctoring of their own tests, as well as widespread bribing of doctors and medical officials to promote their various drugs despite “Science” results that contradict their assertions of safety. A look at the major global pharmaceutical giants is instructive.
J&J
We begin with the Johnson & Johnson Company of New Jersey. On July 21, 2021 J&J and three other smaller drug makers agreed to pay a staggering $26 billion damages to a group of US states for their role in causing America’s opioid epidemic. Of that J&J will pay $5 billion. The CDC estimates that use of the highly-addictive opioids as painkillers caused at least 500,000 deaths between 1999 and 2019. Johnson & Johnson is accused of pushing the deadly painkillers for excessive use and downplaying their addiction risks. They knew better.
The same J&J is in a huge legal battle for knowingly using a carcinogen in its famous baby powder. A 2018 Reuters investigation found J&J knew for decades that asbestos, a known carcinogen, lurked in its baby powder and other cosmetic talc products. The company is reportedly considering legally splitting its baby powder division into a small separate company that would then declare bankruptcy to avoid large payouts. The J&J covid vaccine, unlike that from Pfizer and Moderna, does not use mRNA genetic alteration.
The two global covid vaccine makers which have by far the largest market to date are the two being personally promoted by Fauci. These are from Pfizer in alliance with the tiny German BioNTech company under the name Comirnaty, and from the US biotech Moderna.
Pfizer
Pfizer, one of the world’s largest vaccine makers by sales, was founded in 1849 in the USA. It also has one of the most criminal records of fraud, corruption, falsification and proven damage. A 2010 Canadian study noted, “Pfizer has been a “habitual offender,” persistently engaging in illegal and corrupt marketing practices, bribing physicians and suppressing adverse trial results.” That’s serious. Note that Pfizer has yet to make fully public details of its covid vaccine studies for external examination.
The list of Pfizer crimes has gotten longer since 2010. It is currently engaged in lawsuits related to charges its Zantac heartburn medication is contaminated with a cancer-causing substance. As well, Pfizer received the biggest drug-related fine in US history in 2009 as part of a $2.3 Billion plea deal for mis-promoting medicines Bextra and Celebrex and paying kickbacks to compliant doctors. Pfizer pleaded guilty to the felony of marketing four drugs including Bextra “with the intent to defraud or mislead.” They were forced to withdraw their arthritis painkiller Bextra in the USA and EU for causing heart attacks, strokes, and serious skin disease.
Clearly in a move to boost revenue, Pfizer illegally paid doctors kickbacks for “off-label” use of more than one of its drug which resulted in patients being injured or killed. Among them were Bextra (valdecoxib); Geodon (ziprasidone HCl), an atypical antipsychotic; Zyvox (linezolid), an antibiotic; Lyrica (pregabalin), a seizure medication; its famous Viagra (sildenafil), an erectile dysfunction drug; and Lipitor (atorvastatin), a cholesterol drug.
In another court trial, Pfizer subsidiaries were forced to pay $142 million and release company documents that showed it was illegally marketing gabapentin for off-label use. “Data revealed in a string of U.S. lawsuits indicates the drug was promoted by the drug company as a treatment for pain, migraines and bipolar disorder – even though it wasn’t effective in treating these conditions and was actually toxic in certain cases, according to the Therapeutics Initiative, an independent drug research group at the University of British Columbia. The trials forced the company to release all of its studies on the drug, including the ones it kept hidden.”
In 2004 Pfizer subsidiary Warner-Lambert was forced to pay $430 to settle criminal charges and civil liability arising from its fraudulent marketing practices with respect to Neurontin, its brand for the drug gabapentin. Originally developed for the treatment of epilepsy, Neurontin was illegally promoted off-label for the treatment of neurological pain, and in particular for migraine and bipolar disorder – even though it wasn’t effective in treating these conditions and was actually toxic in some cases. Neurontin for unapproved uses made up some 90% of the $2.7 billion in sales in 2003.
A New York Times report disclosed in 2010 that Pfizer “… paid about $20 million to 4,500 doctors and other medical professionals in the United States for consulting and speaking on its behalf in the last six months of 2009.” It paid another $15.3 million to 250 academic medical centers and other research groups for clinical trials. In the US legal practice it is seldom that corporate executives actually doing the criminal deeds are prosecuted. The result is that court fines can be treated as “business costs” in this cynical milieu. In eight years of repeated malfeasance through 2009, Pfizer accumulated just under $3 billion in fines and civil penalties, about a third of one year’s net revenues.
In 2020 as its covid vaccine was in development, Pfizer paid $13,150,000 in lobbying Congress and officials in Washington among others. Also notable is the fact that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation own shares of both Pfizer and their partner in the leading mRNA vaccine, BioNTech of Germany.
Moderna
The third covid vaccine producer today with FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) is Moderna of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It has yet to be sued for illegal practices unlike J&J or Pfizer. But that fact is likely only because before its EUA for its mRNA experimental vaccine, in its ten years existence since 2010 it had failed to get FDA approval to market a single medicine, despite repeated failed attempts. However Moderna has a red neon sign that reads “conflict of interest” that should give pause.
Moderna and Fauci’s NIAID have collaborated on development of vaccines using Moderna’s mRNA platform and NIAID of Fauci on coronaviruses including MERS, since at least November, 2015. On January 13, 2020, before the first case of a supposed Wuhan, China “novel coronavirus” was even detected in the United States, Fauci’s NIAID and Moderna signed an updated cooperation agreement which described them as co-owners of a mRNA based coronavirus and that they had finalized a sequence for mRNA-1273, the vaccine now being given to millions for supposedly averting the novel coronavirus. That means that Fauci’s NIAID and perhaps Fauci personally (it’s allowed in the US) stood to reap huge financial benefits from emergency approval of the Moderna jab, yet Fauci has never admitted to the conflict publicly when he was Trump corona adviser, nor as Biden’s.
Ten days later on January 23, 2020 Moderna announced it was granted funding by CEPI, a vaccine fund created by Bill Gates’ foundation along with Davos WEF among others, to develop an mRNA vaccine for the Wuhan virus.
Moderna was created by a venture capitalist, Noubar Afeyan along with Harvard professor Timothy A. Springer, and others. In 2011 Afeyan recruited French businessman and former Eli Lilly executive Stephane Bancel as CEO of the new Moderna. Despite having no medical or science degree nor any experience running a drug development operation, Bancel lists himself as co-patent holder for a hundred patents of Moderna tied to the different vaccines. Beginning in 2013 the tiny Moderna was receiving grants from the Pentagon to develop its mRNA technology. As of 2020 just prior to its receiving emergency use authorization from the US Government FDA, fully 89% of Moderna revenues were from US Government grants. This is hardly an experienced company yet it holds the fate of millions in its hands. As Fauci says, “Trust the Science.”
In February 2016, an editorial in Nature magazine criticized Moderna for not publishing any peer-reviewed papers on its technology, unlike most other emerging and established biotech companies. The company remains ultra-secretive. That same year, 2016 Moderna got $20 million from the Gates Foundation for vaccine development using mRNA.
Up to its receiving EUA approval for its covid mRNA product in December 2020 Moderna had only made losses since its founding. Then curiously, following a March 2020 personal meeting with then-President Trump where Bancel told the president Moderna could have a vaccine ready in a matter of months Moderna luck changed.
On May 15, Trump announced creation of Operation Warp Seed to rollout a COVID-19 vaccine by December. The head of the Presidential group was a 30-year R&D veteran of the large UK drug firm GSK, Moncef Slaoui. In 2017 Slaoui had resigned from GSK and joined the board of none other than Moderna. Under Slaoui’s Warp Speed, some $22 billion of US taxpayer money was thrown at different vaccine makers. Moderna was a prime recipient, a brazen conflict of interest but nobody seemed to care. Slaoui funneled some $2 billion in government funds to his old company, Moderna, to develop the mRNA covid vaccine. Only under public criticism did Slaoui sell his stock in Moderna, making millions in profit from Moderna’s role as a covid vaccine leading candidate. Shortly after resigning at the end of the Trump presidency, Slaoui was fired by his old firm GSK from a company subsidiary following charges of sexual harassment of a female employee.
In February 2020 Trump Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, invoked the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) to exempt Moderna, Pfizer, J&J and any future covid makers from any and all liability arising from damage or death caused by their vaccines for the Wuhan coronavirus. The legal protection lasts until 2024. If the vaccines are so good and safe, why is such a measure needed? Azar was former head of the US drug giant Eli Lilly. There are some serious questions that must be raised openly regarding the vaccine makers who are now pushing experimental highly controversial gene-edited formulations in human experiments.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.
Every time there is a so-called ‘freak’ weather event, we hear from politicians and scientists about how it is down to climate change. But my time as an MEP showed me how the issue is hijacked to further individual interests.
London, like parts of Germany and China, has suffered a series of flash floods over the past few weeks. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, warned that the recent flash flooding “shows that the dangers of climate change are now moving closer to home.”
In an article penned for the Guardian newspaper, Khan also stated that the recent flooding “should be a wake-up call, spurring us all to take much more ambitious climate action.” Of course, Khan has a motive for linking the recent floods to climate change, as he is committed to making London carbon neutral by 2030. He plans to achieve this by pushing through a series of controversial measures, including even more cycle lanes, which have already turned London into a car park, and by extending the expensive ultra-low emission zone.
For politicians like Khan to get their way, the public has to accept that these floods are a recent phenomenon, and primarily caused by man. We all must be prepared to self-flagellate. People also must believe that London has never flooded before, because that would negate many of Khan’s arguments.
It is like some wacky Jedi mind trick: “This is the first time London has been flooded, and it is all a result of man-made climate change.” Oh, but hang on, Obi Wan Khan, London has flooded before – in fact, it has flooded loads of times. In the last century alone, London suffered serious flooding on many occasions, with 1928 and 1968 immediately springing to mind.
But it is not just last week’s floods that are being blamed on man-made climate change, it is also the recent heatwave. The Met Office head of civil contingencies, Will Lang, warned that “as a result of climate change, heatwaves are becoming longer and more extreme, and many people’s health and wellbeing will continue to suffer as a result.”
Now hang on Will, hasn’t there always been intermittent heatwaves in the UK? I remember the heatwave of 1990. I was a schoolboy and had a great summer playing cricket and tennis. In August 1990, temperatures hit almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit, beating the previous record which went all the way back to the heatwave of 1911.
Also, I was born in 1976, which is famous for its heatwave and drought. That year represented the driest in over 250 years and rivers literally became trickles of water. It did not rain between May and September and hosepipe bans were imposed. However, was the 1976 heatwave blamed on man-made climate change? No, of course not, because these same climate ‘scientists’ were not worried about warming back then, they were warning of global cooling and the onset of another ice age. They are, of course, now busy trying to row back on the theories, but it still represents an inconvenient truth, if you don’t mind the pun.
The point I am trying to make is that none of these recent weather events is unique. They have happened before, and in our recent history. But if we go back even further, say to the medieval warm period, we find grapes being produced as far north as Scotland and we also know that the climate was warmer during the Roman period. And why was this? Julius Caesar’s gas-guzzling 4×4 perhaps? Of course not, it was all natural and mainly to do with the big yellow thing in the sky that we call the sun.
It is not just politicians who are using the man-made climate change hypothesis as a weapon; the media are equally culpable. Take, for example, the fact that April this year was the coldest since 1922, and the first week of May was the coldest since 1659. Did you see this sprayed all over the mainstream media? Of course not, because it does not fit with the warming agenda. If they had been the hottest weeks or months for a number of years, we would never have heard the end of it.
And when mainstream media outlets don’t play the game, they are forced to apologise. Take for example the fact that the RTÉ News and Current Affairs Managing Director Jon Williams had to say sorry for not linking the recent flooding to climate change. Williams said, “we were wrong not to make clear connection between recent extreme weather events and climate change.” You must be a good boy Jon, or you’ll be subjected to a lecture from Greta.…
Now I have, in the past, been called a “climate change denier.” This was a cheap shot because I am not, far from it. I believe that the climate has always changed, but I am not convinced by how great man’s role has been in that change. What I do know is that that the issue is being used by cynical politicians to further their own agendas. I saw all this first-hand when I sat on the European Parliament’s Environment Committee. You see, climate change is used as a principal reason why we need supranational organisations like the European Union. “The climate knows no borders”, you hear repeated as if it were a cult. It gives the organisation a reason to exist.
The United Nations takes a similar line, and yesterday we had the toe-curling spectacle of Joyce Msuya, the assistant secretary general of the UN, claiming that Covid-19 was somehow linked to climate change. Now, as someone who is sitting here writing this article with Covid, I guarantee the dreary weather outside has absolutely nothing to do with my condition.
The one thing I can guarantee is that if you give a politician an inch, they will take a mile. Especially when they are backed by well-funded scientists and given a free pass by the cowed media. But this should not be the case. The science around man-made climate change is far from settled and the theories should be tested through rigorous debate. This is sadly not the case, as those who make an alternative argument are shouted down and abused. And that is why the climate alarmists can freely omit historical weather events to prove that what is happening now is unique, when it clearly is not.
Paul A. Nuttall is a historian, author and a former politician. He was a Member of the European Parliament between 2009 and 2019 and was a prominent campaigner for Brexit.
How is a citizenry to respond to Evil, to publicly made threats that they are now in a period where novel viruses, cyberterrorism, and food shortages may strike at any moment?
What about the fact that making threats to achieve political or ideological aims is the very definition of terrorism itself, or the fact that using the internet to do this is the definition of cyberterrorism? When we look at those who have benefited politically and financially from the lockdowns, and who will undoubtedly do the same with the coming cyberterrorism seasons, we are reasonable in asking: Is the World Economic Forum website in fact a terrorist website?
Are the Davos people terrorists? Certainly, the plausible deniability here is that these ‘threats’ are actually just warnings, warnings that other nefarious actors like the so-called DarkSide, “thought” to be behind the Colonial Pipeline attack, are lurking in the shadows of supposed anonymity may carry out attacks or make threats.
What about the rising phenomenon of censorship, and the taking of political prisoners?
Well how about a bit of wisdom from wiseguys and gangsters, new and old, which goes something like this: those delivering warnings work for those behind the threats.
We ought to be able to warn about impending doom without being accused of being the agent of said doom. But in normal criminology, we ask – who benefited, and who had the power to carry it out. When a single agent can both gain from something, and had the power to execute it, they become a suspect.
It is reasonable therefore to look at those giving ‘warnings’, because they become threats when understanding that they also have the most to gain from their own proposed ‘solutions’ to said threats, and also have the power to carry out the attacks themselves. These aren’t solutions, they are the ultimatums.
They furthermore have direct control over political actors whose nominal obligations are to protect and serve the public. In many ways, it is a perfect crime. And if it can happen, then it will happen, and likely has already happened. We should go so far as to propose that this is indeed what has happened, and is happening to us right now.
Fascism at Home
We are nevertheless asked to believe that it’s merely an incredible coincidence that just as the U.S. deep state failed to make victory in a whole array of geopolitical endeavors, that they launch an attack on civil society called ‘the new normal’. It was reasoned by Marxist revolutionaries Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky a hundred years ago that the roots of Fascism lie in dying and frustrated empires; that when the costs of empire exceeded the gains, that the final solution was to turn the gears of the machinery of the state apparatus against the home population of the empire itself.
Then the politics of divide and conquer, deceit and confusion – normal within parliamentary systems anyhow – becomes a deadly game of cancel culture but with mass graves and concentration camps. This is how evil operates in the world
Perhaps this is what we are seeing today. Because we really need to ask, does anyone else find it amazing that right as this series of imperial failures happened all within the short span of a few years, that magically the entire narrative of society transmogrifies overnight into a giant ritual sacrifice to prevent novel viruses, cyberterrorism, and food shortages?
Here we are also asked to suspend rational thinking and science, in the name of rationalizing and trusting the science. Provisions that governments make against an ever-mutating virus are more often at odds with science and the pre-Covid understanding of how transmission works, or what infected means, and what the significance of symptoms are or aren’t. All of the provisions seem aimed at stoking fear, furthering divisions, and transforming this fear into an anger, but yet not at those who created the virus in a laboratory – as U.S. Senator Rand Paul has explained in hearings.
Instead we are required in our obligatory two-minutes of hate, to redirect this weaponized anger at those who question the entire narrative.
Indeed the hallmarks of fascism are abundant, even if in a very superficial and superstructural way the apparent ‘roles’ were reversed. Fascistic gangs (despite their leftist ideology) financed by big business in the form of Antifa and BLM ran rampant for a whole year, in protests that were 95% peaceful and 5% arson and murder. But going back to wiseguys and gangsters, maybe one only needs to take out 5% of adversaries to instill fear in the other 95%. On the streets it’s called ‘making an example’.
Of Stolen Elections & Political Prisoners
Once the populist forces – ‘the Historical Block’ – a united front of minorities, workers, veterans, students, the unemployed, and small and medium business owners nevertheless won the battle of democracy in what appeared as a Trump landslide on election night 2020, the election was stolen.
But the real affront was that it wasn’t truly stolen, it was taken – and taken in broad daylight in front of everyone and God – in an openly publicized non-conspiracy by the Transition Integrity Project, financed by the World Economic Forum’s Nicolas Berggruen and led by Clinton favourite John Podesta, working with Big Tech oligarchs like Zuckerberg and advertised by Jeff Bezos’ The Washington Post.
Even Time Magazine’s write-up read as a confession. No doubt this was to inoculate the last dozen or so geriatric readers of Time Magazine, before they heard about it from friends. First impressions, after all, are lasting impressions.
Then on January 6th, when a tiny fraction of the historical block, still numbering countless tens of thousands, mobilized in a peaceful march on the Capitol, the FBI may have launched a false-flag attack that justified a coordinated parliamentary ‘about-face’ which brought to a halt the hopes of more than 70 million voters that the steal could be stopped. The corrupt DOJ would then proceed to hold a number of political prisoners, as they do to this very day, in grotesquely delayed proceedings on charges that in fact do not resemble the media charge of ‘insurrection’. And there are mounting credible reports that these political prisoners face torture and permanent bodily injury.
As attorney Joseph McBride, representing January 6th prisoners, stated in no uncertain terms in an interview that aired on NewsMax and reported by the Gateway Pundit:
“What I can say about the Jan. 6 protesters who remain incarcerated or detained at this point, is that their constitutional rights and human rights are being violated by the Department of Justice and the Federal Government at this very moment. The law is clear that no type of punishment is appropriate for a detainee. Despite that numerous detainees are being held in solitary confinement for long periods of time. They’re being denied medical care. They’re taking beatings. They’re being denied sleep. They’re being psychologically, emotionally, and physically tortured on a regular basis [by guards,],”
That the torture and abuse of political prisoners is being ignored by the same corporate media that promoted the fraudulent electoral outcome which in turn provoked the demonstration in the first place, is of course no surprise.
But the eminent threat besides the fact that this torture is occurring, is that social media – which until five years ago was a relatively safe bastion for free expression – is now openly collaborating with government to silence dissent.
The ‘real cyber-terrorism’ from the point of view of the corporate-state apparatus aren’t the false flags, past and future, which they have planned for the public. Rather, the threat is citizens utilizing the horizontal, peer-to-peer nature of social media as real people to communicate the real existing dangers in an authentic way.
We Are Plagued by Evil
In conclusion we can say that we are plagued – plagued by an elite which has come to view authority and the correct exercise of power through the lens of the corporate boardroom’s social Darwinism. We have meditated on the utility of this term, of evil, knowing very well the metaphysical connotations it carries.
But we use it now with certainty. There were other ways to carry out changes in society, if in fact climate change and human overpopulation were the actual problems to be solved – if indeed these are problems (questions we have debated elsewhere).
As we have written, this would largely include a process of manufacturing consent through a system of positive reinforcement, not punitive measures, isolation, and coercive technologies. Planned obsolescence would have been done away with, making the production of goods which are the primary cause of carbon emissions, to decrease many-fold almost overnight. This actual solution also happens to fit precisely with the needs of a rising multipolarity which, at least for some intermediate time, appears to necessitate a slow-down of global supply chains. It also fits with the rise of automation and an increasingly post-labor economic system, if we admit that the planned obsolescence model was as much at keeping people employed as it was about increasing the velocity of money in the economy.
Similar goes with cyberterrorism, and as the public has become increasingly aware but reluctant to admit, the over-use of online systems to manage critical infrastructure and food distribution.
It had been noted with great alarm that consequences of the ‘attacks’ such as the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack on May 7th of this year, were unnecessary. There is no rational underlying reason why the computerized system that Colonial uses, which regulates its pipelines, needs to be connected to computers which are in turn connected to the internet.
This raises serious questions about why it was deemed a good practice to have arranged this in the first place. And it also raises serious questions as to whether its computerized system controlling valves, measuring pressure, etc., was indeed connected to the internet. After all, Colonial’s shutting down in turn calls the entire official narrative into question, leading up to more and more of the ‘Russian hackers’ narrative.
In truth, whatever attack occurred or did not really occur, was claimed in thorough reportage to have affected its billing system, not the systems governing physical distribution. And yet, access to the pipeline was cut-off, affecting countless citizens in the process. Why? Was Colonial simply saying that if they don’t have a way to process payments, then we shut down distribution until further notice? Did Colonial attack itself?
The writing is on the wall. The medium is the message. For reasons explained in our works on this subject, the present elite in the west is governed by a misanthropic principle, which views the exercise of power as something measured by the degree to which it can be exercised in the most painful way.
So long as activists on the left and activists on the right are fighting over whether the Great Reset, lockdowns, and cyberterrorism is actually a capitalist plot or a communist plot, then it will be difficult for the public to organize an effective resistance to what this really all is: Evil.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
– Henry David Thoreau
WE LIVE in the age of the oxymoron. Diversity means everyone thinks the same. Tolerance means the vicious exclusion of anyone who doesn’t. Levelling up is literally exacerbating inequality to medieval levels. Freedom passports means you require papers to watch football. Vaccines don’t prevent the infection or transmission of disease. Democracy is the imposition of new laws and policies no one voted for. Journalism is propaganda. Modern Monetary Theory means effect before cause, the ‘wet pavements cause rain’ branch of economics. Education is the process of removing information rather than importing it. That you don’t think but repeat is more important than that you learn and grow. Asymptomatic transmission means the healthy can infect the immunised. Sociopaths are philanthropists. Virtue signalling is camouflage for a collapse in morality. The green new deal is neither green, new or a deal. Environmentalists means a collection of the world’s most polluting corporations. Climate change policies are any act which preserves the most extreme forms of exploitation. War is peace, freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Owning nothing is happiness, as Orwell might have added if he were around today. Probably on social media (another oxymoron, they’re hard to escape).
A parlour game for this age of absurdity is to see how many of these logical inversions you can think of. Now I want to head in a different direction and consider two questions: What is the effect of collective cognitive dissonance? Where will it lead us?
I believe the effect of collective cognitive dissonance is the mass abdication of responsibility to authority. When something becomes impossible to understand or reconcile, the natural human instinct is to rely on authority figures – to herd. When people feel intense insecurity they abdicate freedom for perceived safety.
According to psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980): ‘Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking – and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those of the majority.’
Fromm described the concept of automaton conformity as ‘changing one’s ideal self to conform to a perception of society’s preferred type of personality, losing one’s true self in the process’. Fromm described the desire to subsume the self into the herd.
The human species now sounds like a herd of animals with the relentless repetition of alliterative phraseology: for build back better I hear moo moo moo, new normal baa baaa etc. A cacophony of mindless agreement is expressed as poetic assonance: ‘double jabbed’, we yabber at each other like a flock of jabbering birds. Another parlour game for the next lockdown is to list all the new terms and phrases which sound like advertising slogans or neuro-linguistic programming. Why the repetition? Why the repetition?
The real pandemic is everyone thinking the same, a culture so mono it feels as if ISIS won. So why is this conformity reckless?
The width of the edge is what really matters in society. Too wide and we have anarchism, too narrow totalitarianism. Mass conformity is the mechanism of totalitarianism, it is the most reckless act. Progress is always ground up, never top down. All the good stuff happens at the edge. Great art is never produced by corporations. Scientific discoveries take place in patent offices, medical breakthroughs in dirty Petri dishes, great music is made by the unemployed, entrepreneurs succeed via repeated failure. Mandela didn’t change the world from Davos. The moment the pressure on de Klerk forced him to widen the edge, the idea of freedom nursed by Mandela blossomed like a giant protea. The campaigners for women’s suffrage were on the edge of society. Nothing changes from the middle. A third game might be to look around you and list everything born of the maverick. Start with the device you’re most likely reading this article on and work your way out.
Returning to the Thoreau quote at the top of this piece: mavericks need space to dance to a different tune. The edge needs to be just wide enough. ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music,’ as Nietzsche might have said. Reckless conformists hear only one note, mavericks the whole range. Think of us as the control group.
When YouTube censors videos, it also scrubs the video title and the name of the channel that uploaded the video from the page. All that remains is white space and a notice stating: “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s terms of service.”
This means that if all you have is a link to a YouTube video that was censored before you had a chance to watch it, you can’t search for the video title or the creator on alternative platforms.
The open-source TubeShift browser extension fixes this problem by finding alternative versions of censored YouTube videos and making links to these alternative videos available to you with a single click.
In addition to helping you find censored videos, TubeShift also finds alternative versions of non-censored videos across a variety of platforms. So if you’re watching a video on YouTube, TubeShift will let you know if the video’s also available on BitChute, Odysee, and the other platforms it supports.
While TubeShift is great for finding alternative versions of YouTube videos, you can also use it to find alternatives while browsing the other supported sites. For example, if you’re on Odysee and want to see if the creator also uploads to Rumble, TubeShift will let you know with a single click.
Currently, TubeShift supports five video-sharing platforms – BitChute, Odysee, Rumble, YouTube, and Dailymotion. It also plans to add support for the free speech video sharing platform Gab TV after it makes a planned change to its website.
By default, the TubeShift extension will turn red and show a counter whenever alternative versions of the video you’ve opened are available. TubeShift will find these alternative versions for both censored and live videos. You can then click on the extension to display the links to these alternative versions.
TubeShift displaying links to alternative versions of a censored YouTube video
In a Los Angeles Times editorial predictably hyping up the extreme danger to “national security” arising from the January 6 Capitol protests, the Times quotes Capitol police officer Harry Dunn as saying, “We represent the good side of America, the people who believe in decency.”
Really?
So tell us, Officer Dunn, what is decent about the following actions of the U.S. government:
1. The torture center and prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
2. The indefinite detention of people at Guantanamo Bay without charges or trial.
3. The denial of trial by jury in terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay.
4. The use of evidence acquired by torture at Guantanamo Bay.
5. The use of confessions acquired by torture at Guantanamo Bay.
6. The use of hearsay to secure convictions in terrorism “trials” at Guantanamo Bay.
7. The secret monitoring of communications between attorney and detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
8. The torture of people at the hands of U.S. officials in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the world.
9. The intentional destruction of videotapes depicting the torture of people at the hands of U.S. officials.
10. The invasion, occupation, and war of aggression against Iraq, a country that had never invaded or attacked the United States.
11. The invasion of Afghanistan and the resulting 20-year destruction of life and property.
12. The secret mass surveillance of the American people.
13. The secret illegal surveillance partnerships with American telecoms.
14. The sanctions against the people of Iraq, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
15. U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions, while difficult, were “worth it.”
16. The decades-old embargo against Cuba, which has been a major factor in the suffering of the Cuban people.
17. The sanctions against Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, and other countries, with the aim of causing death and suffering among the citizenry to achieve regime change.
18. Trade wars against China and other nations.
19. MKULTRA.
20. The invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
21. Coups and invasions for the purpose of regime change, including against democratically elected foreign presidents and prime ministers.
22. State-sponsored assassinations and executions, including of American citizens, along with cover-ups of such assassinations.
23. Official lies, including under oath.
24. The secret hiring of Nazis to secretly serve the U.S. government.
25. COINTELPRO.
26. The “war on terrorism.”
27. Secret illegal surveillance of American officials and American citizens for the purpose of blackmailing them.
28. The racist war on drugs, along with civil asset forfeiture, mandatory minimum sentences, and deadly no-knock raids.
29. The war on immigrants, which has brought untold death and suffering to countless people.
30. The immigration Berlin Wall along America’s southern border.
31. The immigration police state along America’s southern border, including domestic highway checkpoints, warrantless searches of farms and ranches, boarding of Greyhound buses to check people’s papers, and violent raids on American businesses.
32. The unexplained killing of Ashli Babbit during the January 6 Capitol protests.
33. Soaring federal spending and debt.
34. Waco and Ruby Ridge.
35. The undeclared Vietnam War.
36. The undeclared Korean War.
37. Inciting crises and new official enemies to justify ever-increasing budgets for the national-security establishment and its army of “defense” contractors.
38. The Federal Reserve and decades of monetary debauchery and debasement.
39. The IRS.
40. The persecution and prosecution of people who disclose the evil and sordid dark-side secrets of the U.S. government.
Pray tell, Officer Dunn: Is all this the official “decency” to which you refer?
There has been much debate among lawyers as to whether the various “non-pharmaceutical interventions” (i.e., lockdown measures) that have been imposed over the past year and a half are actually legal.
In April of 2020, the barrister Francis Hoar wrote an article laying out the case for the illegality of Britain’s lockdown. While his piece is very much worth reading in full, I will do my best to summarise the main points here.
Hoar argues that lockdown measures were a “disproportionate interference with the rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights”, and were therefore in breach of the Human Rights Act 1998.
To make his case, he appeals to the so-called Siracusa Principles, which were adopted by the UN Economic and Social Council in 1984. These principles stipulate that government responses to national emergencies that involve the restriction of human rights must fulfil certain criteria.
Specifically, they must be: carried out in accordance with law; directed toward an objective of general interest; strictly necessary to achieve that objective; the least intrusive way of achieving that objective; based on scientific evidence, and neither arbitrary nor discriminatory; of limited duration, respectful of human dignity and subject to review.
Hoar argues convincingly that lockdown measures failed to meet several of these criteria. For example, lockdowns were not strictly necessary, since the same outcomes could plausibly have been achieved with far less intrusive measures (i.e., a focused protection strategy).
And it’s highly doubtful that lockdowns were “respectful of human dignity and subject to review”, given that they initially proscribed all political gatherings and public demonstrations without exception – a measure unprecedented in British history.
Hoar suggests that, “were they challenged by judicial review”, the measures should be “disapplied if necessary”. (Recall that he was writing back in April of last year). Incidentally, a longer and more detailed version of his article is available here.
Another figure from the legal community to argue for the illegality of the UK’s lockdowns is Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court Justice. In a lecture delivered to the Cambridge Law Faculty in October 2020, he claimed that lockdown measures were without legal basis, and described the U.K.’s response as “a monument of collective hysteria and government folly”.
As readers may be aware, there was in fact a major legal challenge to the U.K.’s lockdowns, brought by the entrepreneur Simon Dolan (and funded to the tune of £427,000). The challenge sought a judicial review of the lockdown measures. Unfortunately, it proved unsuccessful.
I’ve been told by people with legal expertise that mounting another challenge would be difficult, given the adverse judgement in the case brought by Dolan. It’s therefore unlikely the Government will be liable for claims from individuals and businesses who’ve suffered due to lockdown.
So while the High Court in London did reject Dolan’s case against the Government, lockdown opponents have won important victories in a number of countries.
And given that the evidenceagainst lockdown has only increased since the judgement in Dolan’s case, lockdown opponents will have plenty of ammunition if any future Government decides to lock down in response to a similar virus.
An open letter to the Cabinet Office Minister, Michael Gove
Dear Mr Gove,
I UNDERSTAND that you consider people who have decided to decline the experimental mRNA gene therapy injections to be selfish.
This is emotive stuff from the man who stabbed Boris Johnson in the back during the 2016 Conservative Party leadership contest. No doubt you would claim that what you did was for selfless reasons, and who are we to question that? After all, we can’t see inside your soul to judge your motives.
Yet you claim to be able to divine the motives of others. And lo, you tell us that they are all the same. And the motive that you have detected is really quite a second-rate one, as though it is held by so many immature children instead of by thoughtful adults every inch your equal.
How on earth did you obtain these special powers? Please tell us so that we can be guided by your superior wisdom with full confidence that you care for us and have our best interests at heart. Because if you can’t do that we may be forced to infer some rather ugly motives on your part.
Your government, in apparent close co-ordination with governments all round the world, has stated since the very beginning of the Covid-19 saga that it is the goal to inject every single person on the planet with this novel technology. Just as Bill Gates suggests. Just as the Big Pharma companies desire. Just as is necessary to implement your beloved vaccine passport system. (Nice trip to Israel, Mr Gove? Did you learn a lot about passports there?)
Oh yes, I’m enjoying this game of attributing motives to others. And don’t you live in a lovely big glass-house of transparent motives? Yes, this is fun.
Are you salivating at the prospect of being a member of the nomenklatura? Of relegating the unvaccinated to the status of Untouchables, all the better to manoeuvre them into the trapped lower caste that you have been so successful in creating for the good people of Britain who believed the tissue of lies that you have gulled them with?
Let me survey a few of the first-rate motives that the unvaccinated may have for keeping themselves free of your desperate remedy.
It turns out that:
the mRNA injections don’t prevent infections, transmission or hospitalisation, despite the grandiose promises;
the mRNA injections don’t stay in the muscle where injected, but travel all round the body to the heart, brain and reproductive organs;
medium and long term safety information is unavailable thanks to rush, rush, rush policies;
there are safe, cheap and effective treatments available that work well against Covid-19;
thousands upon thousands of deaths are being reported worldwide soon after the injections.
You see, Mr Gove, there are other reasons available, if you care to look.
In closing, I’d like to say that I don’t trust you because I doubt your motivations. But I can’t look into your soul. If you have one.
More than 100K pages of FOIA documents referenced here have been condensed into 173 pages of the most relevant selections in my appendix Prometheus Shrugged. It was here, last February, that the role of Dr. Fauci in ongoing academic censorship of COVID’s origin was first exposed.
A chronological narrative of the events described throughout my research will included in a forthcoming volume of DRASTIC’s set of published collections of evidence.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote that truth goes through 3 stages:
1st, it is ridiculed; 2nd, it is violently opposed; and 3rd, it is accepted as being self-evident
Guess what’s next for us?
Six months ago, I began my first article on scientific censorship during COVID-19 by introducing Dr. Fauci as a surprise character that had emerged unexpectedly while digging through what was then 83,000 FOIA emails, published by US Right-to-Know over the course of the last year:
I’ve been trying for quite some time to get people to understand the full scope of the Dr. Fauci ‘situation,’ but it’s clear that segments of our national leadership are preventing an honest and open inquiry into his actions because they fear the backlash/collateral damage that will result from the tarnishing of their sacred cow. It’s time Americans were told the truth – that the grant money sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV] is merely a footnote in this narrative.
After all, Dr. Fauci controls nearly $4 billion of annual grant funding for the NIAID, the institute within the NIH he has directed since 1984; over 37 years, more than 50,000 research projects have been supported with more than $50 billion [conservatively] of taxpayer funds have been doled out to them.
It’s reasonable to hold him accountable for the results of his organization’s efforts, but the direct funding received by the WIV for Gain-of-Function (GOF) research represents only a tiny fraction of Fauci’s involvement in enabling risky research – the 2017 repeal of the GOF ban was decided without the consultation of the Trump administration, even though news coverage during the pandemic blamed him for the decision.
Neither Fauci nor his boss Francis Collins [the NIH director] bothered to clarify the record, which looks especially disgusting in the wake of persistent rejections of Senator Rand Paul’s assertions [with accompanying evidence] that the NIH ever financially supported such research:
Contents:
Dr. Fauci’s true legacy
The evidence of his involvement
The questions Congress [and everyone else] should be asking Dr. Fauci
The impact of his efforts
First, do no harm … to Fauci’s Legacy
It’s important to plainly state that I’m aware of the intense politicization of virtually every aspect of the pandemic and the pandemic response. Since many readers may not be aware, I’ll point out that my specific motivation for building a COVID-19 website and speaking to a broader audience about the various facets of the pandemic was to offer unfiltered information to counter the disgusting polarization I observed:
I felt obligated to re-iterate my stance, but the nature and importance of the situation can’t be ignored any longer, because Congress is now actively engaged in investigating the pandemic’s origins, and we must confront the truth if we are to gain meaningful insight that can help us prepare for future crises. There is no level of partisanship that justifies ignoring a tragedy of this magnitude.
“Everything rises and falls on leadership” – John Maxwell
It’s hard to place a dollar value on the impact of Fauci’s leadership decisions upon almost all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is why it’s not difficult to understand the willingness of some to avoid a legitimate inquiry into the issue altogether. After all, he sits at the nexus of –
A) the NIH’s role in supporting the research & development of mRNA technology and new antiviral drugs like Remdesivir, and the resulting conflicts of interest that the NIH continues to ignore
B) His role in pushing those NIH-sponsored inventions; specifically, advocating for Remdesivir on the basis of weak evidence while rejecting legitimate investigations into generic alternatives with no less statistical support, as well as…
C) … His role in obfuscating concerning data and censoring public debate over the risk/benefit evidence emerging about COVID-19 vaccines. Had Fauci been bluntly honest about the unknowns involving the new technology throughout the pandemic, Americans would still largely have assumed the risk – at least, assuming that antibody dependent enhancement [ADE] was not a likely outcome. Oops.
D) His evolving stances on masking, lockdowns, school closures and other non-pharmaceutical interventions [NPI], largely the result of growing public awareness that those decisions have consistently been based upon reducing the accountability of cowardly officials, not the best interest of their constituents [Note: this is a conclusion from my research focus last year, that I will return to once the origin issue allows me to do so].
E) His refusal to address the blatant censorship of vaccine side-effect data; it takes a disturbing level of cynicism to witness the large-scale skepticism and uncertainty that has resulted from such censorship and then vilify those willing to speak up – and blaming them for any future vaccine breakout when one of the most likely causes would be ADE. ADE with SARS-CoV-2 would most likely result from the specific targeting of the MRNA vaccines, not vaccine hesitancy [in the absence of a simultaneous global administration of the jabs – which was never feasible under the geopolitical and temporal constraints of the pandemic.
Each of those factors has contributed to the fading perception of Fauci as ‘America’s Doctor, but each has also become a divisive litmus test for which the evidence for and against is hotly debated. My purpose here is not to offer judgment on those issues; rather, I want to highlight the fact that Dr. Fauci’s legacy includes elements far beyond the scope of my research – and the context of those debates is directly relevant for the proper framing of the failures illuminated here. The same hubris and gaslighting in defense of ‘Science’ has plagued everything.
My disgust doesn’t stem from casual reflection & an exaggeration of weak assertions to fan partisan flames. It stems from my analysis of 100K pages of FOIA documents, 1,000+ research articles reviewed, and my own published analysis of the the impact of Fauci’s censorship, which was the 1st of its kind.
My approach was external to science – from the perspective of an historian seeking to understand the ‘why’ behind the further collapse of trust in our institutions during the pandemic. My conclusions were formed over six months of investigation, and focused on the realization that one of the worst developments of the pandemic is the evaporation of public trust in scientists [see Edifice Wrecks].
I’ve never sought to inflame conspiracies or ignore evidence in support of zoonosis, but I’ve personally entered into discussions with a half-dozen of the scientists highlighted below, and none of them ever addressed the emerging evidence that, under normal circumstances, would’ve been part of the open debate that Fauci pretends already took place.
Every additional moment spent in denial and suppression just adds fuel to the coming backlash, and thus far discussions have ignored what I believe is the largest and most consequential elephant in the room:
F) Fauci quietly but directly ensured that scientific censorship was implemented, in large measure, to prevent public awareness of the extent of his role in GOF research and the controversies surrounding it. The evidence proves that, at the start of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci and many leading scientists moved to protect themselves – not us, who weren’t yet aware of the potential calamity at our doorstep.
Fauci LED the efforts to obstruct research into COVID’s origins, colluding with the President’s Science Advisor Kelvin Dreogemeier and Wellcome Trust head Jeremy Farrar, to proactively undermine consideration of the evidence that directly tied their global research initiatives to the lab at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To date, all of their efforts have been focused on preventing disclosure of embarrassing connections – not preventing another novel pathogen from sparking a global pandemic; to prevent future scrutiny, not future tragedy.
Scientists, if you’re struggling to understand the distinction between degrees of commitment to truth, I offer the example of Thích Quảng Đức, pictured here protesting the corrupt S. Vietnam regime in a prologue of the Vietnam War:
You see, the message for scientists who believe that a threat is existential is that words gain true meaning when they are supported by the actions & sacrifices of the speaker. What message are we supposed to derive from the COVID-19 pandemic?
I’d recommend pausing for reflection – on the image above, specifically – because what the world is beginning to see is that the scientific establishment made a mockery of the trust it had been given. The world’s leading experts in virology and public health called attention to a threat by setting the world on fire, rather than themselves – and then blaming us for being too simple to believe their noble lie.
Priorities
The baseline assumption of the public at large has been that Dr. Fauci has earned the benefit of the doubt thanks to his five decades of public service and consistency in defending establishment science – the admiration of which has risen nearly to cult worship in recent decades. The cognitive dissonance between appearance and reality have created a situation where trust in ‘science’ has reached its sacred peak at the exact moment when such trust is least deserved.
At the center of this incestuous arrogance is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the recipient of unquestioned adulation by those in the political sphere who have spent more than a century arguing that a Platonic ‘philosopher-king’ ideal must be forced upon intellectually vacuous masses whom, left to their own devices, would inevitably self-immolate.
Scientists reached new heights in the ivory tower when they warned us that man’s evil nature had left previous generations protected only by the horrific death equation of Mutually Assured Destruction. Setting aside the obvious complicity of scientists in the creation of nuclear weapons, trusting science over many decades has simply led to a new formulation of that Faustian bargain – Mutually Assured Corruption.
A Study In Scarlet
Before heading down the long and winding road, it’s important to explain what zoonosis is and why Fauci’s denial of basic facts simply kicks the accountability can down the road. Should we really be surprised that Dr. Fauci is ‘confused’ by the definition of “Gain if Function?” After all, not that long ago, he also ridiculed the idea that the virus could’ve come from a lab before finally admitting that it was a statistical possibility.
Zoonosis in the context of viral emergence doesn’t mean a virus originally sprung from nature – all viruses do. It means that the jump from animals to humans happened in the wild, as the result of a fortuitous combination of mutations that allow a virus to survive the switch. If human intervention artificially encouraged the process of adaptation by experimentation, or simply by virtue of bringing a virus to a lab and increasing the odds of such exposure, then the origin of a viral pandemic is a lab.
What’s sickening about his tortured twisting of language is that Fauci knows this better than almost anyone; thus his lies aren’t borne of ignorance. What he’s done is use his scientific gravitas to pretend that observers’ understanding of literal definitions is flawed because we are too ignorant to appreciate the complexity of the issues. The truth, however, is that our generation’s most prominent infectious disease expert is gaslighting the citizens of the country he swore an oath to protect [one could also use the term epistemic injustice ].
The authenticity of the alleged “Iranian secret cyber files” cited by Sky News, on how cyber attacks could be used against civilian infrastructure objects, is debatable, experts said, shortly after the UK media outlet published so-called ‘classified documents’ said to have been acquired from Iranian intelligence.
According to the Monday Sky News report, Iran has been conducting “secret research” into how cyber attacks could affect cargo ships and petrol stations, along with other civilian infrastructure entities. The outlet, citing an unnamed source, attributes the alleged intelligence to the Islamic republic’s clandestine Intelligence Team 13 – a cell described as “a sub-group within the IRGC Shahid Kaveh unit”, which is reportedly under an individual named Hamid Reza Lashgarian.
The anonymous source who shared the documents with the outlet said he was “very confident” in their authenticity.
Dr. Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a professor of English Literature and Orientalism at the University of Tehran, does not, however, appear to share that confidence, saying that the publication of the so-called classified documents could be “an attempt to ratchet up tensions, especially since they gave it to Sky News.”
Marandi noted that the documents do not appear to have a “date or file number”, and neither there is an IRGC logo on the cover page, saying that it makes the report look “inauthentic”.
Dr. Rasool Nafisi, an Iranian analyst and professor at Strayer University in the US state of Virginia, agreed with the suggestion, underlining a “lack of professional format” in the document.
“The document is not dated, not stamped with security device, it is not typed on especially made papers with transparent emblem. The content is also debatable. It seems more like a dry run for a likely scenario of action. It is not surprising at all if The Islamic Republic of Iran tries to investigate possible cyber interventions, replicating what others have been doing to it for over a decade”, Nafisi pointed out.
The so-called classified documents appeared in the UK media ahead of the possible resumption of the Vienna negotiations for the restoration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or the Iranian nuclear deal. The talks that initially started in April were postponed and could resume after the inauguration of the new Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, set to take place on 5 August. The UK is among the sides involved in the negotiations.
Not everyone is happy about the plausible revival of the nuclear deal with Iran, however. Israel continues to be a vocal opponent of the restoration of the JCPOA, claiming that the accord would pave the way for Iran to create a nuclear weapon – something that the Islamic republic has consistently denied, insisting that its nuclear program remains exclusively peaceful.
When asked about reasons to attempt to dismantle relations between the UK and Iran by the publication of the unverified documents, Marandi suggested that it could be connected with activities of the “pro-Israeli lobby”.
“The Pro-Israeli lobby is working hard to push the two sides towards confrontation. It makes sense for some entity connected to them to be involved in the manufacturing of such a document”, he said, noting that “that’s a possibility” that the intention of the “leak” is to disrupt plans to resume the JCPOA negotiations.
What’s in the ‘Iranian Secret Cyber Files’?
The documents cited by Sky News make five reports, each of them said to be marked as “very confidential”.
Most of the reports are also said to feature a quote that “appears to be” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, reading: “The Islamic Republic of Iran must become among the world’s most powerful in the area of cyber.”
The first report, named “Ballast Water”, allegedly has six pages dedicated to the research of the complex systems on large cargo ships that remotely control infrastructure including filtration and ballast water. Sky News estimated that the document contains open-source research, rather than “privileged information”.
The report adds that “any kind of disruptive influence can cause disorder within these systems and can cause significant and irreparable damage to the vessel.”
Another report, also six pages long, is said to address “a system called an automatic tank gauge that tracked the flow of fuel at a petrol station.” Particularly, the research name-checked fuelling equipment produced by a US firm, Franklin Fueling Systems.
The report allegedly ponders the possible impact of “problems” with the systems, including cutting off the fuel supply, changing its temperature and even mulling the effects of an explosion.
“[An] explosion of these fueling pumps is possible if these systems are hacked and controlled remotely”, the report allegedly said.
Services providing maritime communications are addressed in what was said to be a 14-page report which studies two types of satellite communications used at sea – Sealink CIR and Seagull 5000i, noting that the latter is offered by such companies as Wideye in Singapore and Thuraya in the United Arab Emirates.
While the majority of the report is said to “repeat facts” from open sources about the two systems, there was also a chart in the end, Sky News said, showing the results of something commonly known as “Google dork” – conducting internet searches with certain key phrases enclosed in quotation marks that improve the accuracy of a search.
According to the screenshots from the report, the findings referred to devices from the United Kingdom, France and the United States.
Sky News described two other reports, the only ones marked with dates, that are claimed to be dedicated to building management systems and electrical equipment.
The first, allegedly compiled on 19 November 2020, had nine pages about “computer-based systems that control lighting, ventilation, heating, security alarms and other functions in a smart building”. Among other things, it listed companies that provided such services, including US firms KMC Controls and Honeywell, along with the French electrical equipment group Schneider Electric and the German company Siemens.
The second appears to be the longest of all five, consisting of 22 pages exploring electrical equipment made by the German company WAGO, and reportedly compiled on 19 April 2020.
This piece of purported research explored vulnerabilities in PLCs – “programmable logic controller” – with the findings saying, however, that it would not be possible to use them.
“Continuing the investigation, in order to use these processes, we noticed the vulnerabilities within these systems are irreparable, if there is an attack, damage will not easy to fix,” the report said. “Therefore, compared to other PLC brands, this brand is impenetrable once connected online. When online, the infrastructure and intelligence on engineering cannot be reached and cannot be lost.”
Although neither the Sky News ‘source’ nor British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace could confirm the authenticity of the “classified documents”, the latter nevertheless declared that they could pose “a threat to our way of life”, since they allegedly demonstrate that Western countries currently vulnerable to cyber attacks could see much worse than simple ransomware and DDoS exploits.
“They [Iran] are among the most advanced cyber actors,” claimed General Sir Patrick Sanders, the top military officer overseeing the UK cyber operations,” adding, “We take their capabilities seriously. We don’t overstate it”.
Tehran has not yet officially commented on the allegations made by Sky News.
Iranian trace?
This is not for the first time that Iran, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in particular, have been accused by a Western country of being involved in hacking activities.
Earlier in July, Facebook alleged that “Iranian hackers” presenting themselves as “recruiters, employees of defense contractors and young, attractive women” on the social media platform had tried to hack into the PCs of US military personnel.
The unsubstantiated claims by the two US agencies followed accusations by Microsoft that “Iranian hackers” targeted candidates in the 2020 US presidential elections – claims that were denied by Iran, which asserted that “unlike the US, Iran does not interfere in other country’s elections”.
While being constantly accused of conducting hacking operations, Iran is known to be a frequent target of hacker attacks. The latest came in early July and was conducted against the nation’s rail service, leading to a brief shutdown of the website for the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development.
‘Morality pills’ may be the US’s best shot at ending the coronavirus pandemic, according to one ethicist
The article’s author is Parker Crutchfield, an Associate Professor of Medical Ethics, Humanities and Law at Western Michigan University, and his argument can be broken down into four key points:
Wearing masks and social distancing are good for public health
People who refuse to follow these rules are “defectors” who need to be “morally enhanced”
This moral enhancement can be achieved with medication to make people more “empathetic” and “co-operative”
This medication should be compulsory and/or administered secretly via the water supply.
I swear I’m not exaggerating. Not even a little bit. To absorb the full horror I suggest you read it for yourself (and then read the comment section as well, it will make you feel better) but, if you’re not so inclined, here are some choice quotes:
like receiving a vaccine to beef up your immune system, people could take a substance to boost their cooperative, pro-social behavior.
Moral enhancement is the use of substances to make you more moral. The psychoactive substances act on your ability to reason about what the right thing to do is, or your ability to be empathetic or altruistic or cooperative.
These substances interact directly with the psychological underpinnings of moral behavior […] Then, perhaps, the people who choose to go maskless or flout social distancing guidelines would better understand that everyone, including them, is better off when they contribute, and rationalize that the best thing to do is cooperate.
Another challenge is that the defectors who need moral enhancement are also the least likely to sign up for it […] a solution would be to make moral enhancement compulsory or administer it secretly, perhaps via the water supply.
This isn’t just a panicked response to an unforeseen emergency, Crutchfield’s area of bioethics research focuses on “questions like how to induce those who are noncooperative to get on board with doing what’s best for the public good”, and a look through his articles reveals that this is an agenda which pre-dates our current “pandemic”.
This isn’t just about masks, if it were implemented it would be a lot more far-reaching. From masks to vaccines to anything else, beyond even the “pandemic”. The author admits as much himself [our emphasis]:
But a strategy like this one could be a way out of this pandemic, a future outbreak or the suffering associated with climate change.
Happy Pills in our water to make us proper cooperative citizens? “Covert moral enhancement” to produce “superior post-persons”?
That is literally “Soma” from Huxley’s Brave New World. It can’t be satirized or exaggerated. It is the very zenith of dystopian horror. And it is being seriously suggested by research scientists in apparently respectable publications.
This may be just one article in a comparatively small (and murkily funded) magazine, but that’s how it starts.
Of course, it also further feeds into the stream of propaganda which seeks to dehumanise those who express dissent.
And now it’s being seriously posited that those who refuse to comply should be subject to covert medication to render them more malleable to the “public good”.
It’s not hard to see where this is going. Show this article to everyone you know. People have to be told what their world is being turned into, while we still have the brainpower to stop it.
The latest in the long succession of attempts at maximizing people’s fear of covid is the claim that it causes brain damage. And not just in those who have spent time in the ICU, in everyone, even if all they had was a mild cold. The claim is currently doing the rounds on social media (apparently alarmist propaganda only counts as misinformation if it’s going against the dominant narrative). The assertion comes from a paper that’s recently been published in EClinicalMedicine(a daughter journal of The Lancet ). The paper is actually quite illuminating about the current state of medical research, so I thought it would be interesting to go through it in some detail.
81,337 individuals residing in the UK completed an on-line test of their cognitive function. They also provided information on their covid status (whether or not they thought they’d had it, and how sick they were), as well as a bunch of other demographic information. The data was collected from January to December 2020.
12,689 (16%) of the 81,337 participants indicated that they thought they had had covid-19. They were sorted by the researchers into five categories based on the severity of disease, from “ill without respiratory symptoms” to “hospitalised and on a ventilator”. The results from these five categories were then compared with the results from the 68,648 people that didn’t think they’d had covid.
The reason the study is causing such a stir is because of the results. All five of the “I think I’ve had covid” categories performed worse on the cognitive function test than the “I don’t think I’ve had covid” category did. The reduction in performance was correlated with the severity of disease, with the people who had been on a ventilator performing worst – according to the researchers their results were equivalent to a seven point reduction on an IQ test. If we assume that the non-covid group have an IQ of 100, this would mean that the group that had been on a ventilator have an IQ of 93.
Ok, open and shut, right? Having covid makes you more stupid, and the more severe disease you have, the more stupid you become. Well, not quite.
The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that this was an observational study. Observational studies cannot usually say anything about cause and effect, because the participants haven’t been randomly assigned to the different groups (as they would have been in a randomized controlled trial). The inability to draw any conclusions about cause and effect is especially true when the difference between the groups is small, as it is in this study. There could well be major underlying differences between the groups that explain the differences in performance on the cognitive function test.
When we go through the demographic data, we see that this is actually the case, in particular when it comes to chronic conditions. Chronic liver disease (such as for example liver cirrhosis) was more common in those who thought they had had covid, and the relative rate increased the more severely sick people had been with covid. Chronic lung disease (such as COPD) and chronic kidney disease also co-varied with severity of covid. These underlying illnesses could on their own confound the results enough to explain the differences in cognitive performance seen in the study. People with underlying chronic diseases have worse cognitive function, and they’re also more likely to become severely ill if they get covid. Just because you see a correlation doesn’t mean there’s a cause and effect relationship!
The groups also varied in terms of the proportion in each category that had ADHD. The people who didn’t think they’d had covid were less likely to have ADHD than the people who thought they’d had covid. Oddly, severity of disease correlated quite closely with the probability of having ADHD. This matters, because it’s likely that people with ADHD will underperform on many parts of a cognitive function test. If the researchers wanted to, they could have interpreted this as showing that covid causes ADHD. But they didn’t, because that would be silly. Yet the exact same logic (correlation between two variables in observational data) was used to claim that covid causes brain damage.
It’s worth noting that for all the possible confounding factors that the authors of the study have asked the participants about and tried to account for, there are many more that they haven’t asked about, and that could also explain the results seen in the study. Confounding isn’t something that should be taken lightly, which is why conclusions about cause and effect shouldn’t be drawn from purely associational data.
The second thing that needs to be pointed out is that this study was cross-sectional. In other words, participants only had their cognitive function tested at one time. That in itself makes it impossible to say anything about whether the participants performance decreased after having had covid, because we have no idea what their performance was before they got covid. If you want to know if something has changed over time you need to do a longitudinal study, where you test people multiple times.
The fact that the study was observational and cross-sectional, and that there were big underlying differences between the groups, is on its own enough to disqualify any claims about this study being able to show that covid causes brain damage. But it gets worse. A lot worse.
A major problem with the study is that 97%(!) of the people who thought they’d had covid lacked testing to confirm the diagnosis. Of the 12,689 that thought they’d had covid, only 386 actually had a confirmed diagnosis. The only group in which the majority actually had a positive test confirming that they had had covid was the group that had been on a ventilator in an intensive care unit! If you can’t even be sure that 97% of participants actually had the disease you’re trying to draw conclusions about, then you really don’t have a leg to stand on.
I think it’s worth remembering that, even during the covid peak, only around 20% of covid tests were coming back positive. In other words, even when covid was spreading at its most rampant, most people who had a respiratory infection did not have covid. They had something else. It is therefore reasonable to think that at least 80% of the 97% (i.e. at least 78% of participants) that think they had covid, did not in fact have it. What that means is that the study is rubbish, and cannot make any claims about covid whatsoever. Yet it does. And it’s been published in a peer reviewed journal.
To me, the main lesson here is that we currently live in a world where junk science goes unquestioned and gets published in peer-reviewed journals as long as it feeds in to the dominant narrative. If this study had been claiming, say, that face masks didn’t work, then it would remain stuck at the pre-print stage forever, or, if it ever did get published, it would immediately have been retracted. It has become blatantly obvious over the past year and a half that it is not primarily the quality of studies that determines where and whether they get published, but rather their acceptability to the powers that be.
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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