When it comes to issues of ‘human rights’ and individual liberties, every country in the world takes a different stance. Culture, religion, and nationality all play their roles, but now it’s clear the West wants to change this.
On Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted a picture of the rainbow pride flag raised outside the State Department in Washington, writing that the commemoration of two major LGBT events “reminds us how far we’ve come – and how much more we need to achieve, at home and worldwide.” The key word here is “worldwide.”
As the West elevates LGBT issues to be the highest measure of morality, reorganizing its culture accordingly, it begs the question – how will this manifest itself in foreign policy? Values are deployed as an effective instrument in Western power politics, with liberal democracy held up as a hegemonic norm that allows countries like the US to lead the world and exempt themselves from international law.
Even the CIA is rebranding itself now as an organization guided by the advocacy of LGBT rights, which is a clear indication that the celebration of ‘our’ righteous values will soon be expressed as derision and attack on the ‘other’.
What is the difference between a ‘values-based’ foreign policy and a civilizing mission designed to undermine the sovereignty and cultures of other states? In the post-Cold War era, the West explicitly legitimizes hegemony, hierarchies, and sovereign inequality in the defense of universal liberal democratic values. Is the world heading towards a woke form of imperialism?
Woke values as a hegemonic norm?
Ideologies tend to appeal to grand ideals such as freedom and reason, yet at the same time they can divide the world into good versus bad – leaving little room for freedom or reason.
An open and democratic debate is missing regarding the extent to which modern liberal values are universal. It is, for example, reasonable to ask whether gender reassignment surgery or hormone treatment for children is a universally held value spanning all cultures, and how different states balance parental consent and involvement.
It also seems reasonable to discuss whether people born male should be allowed to compete in sports as women, and the impact this would have on women’s sports. Ideology has reduced these discussions to love versus hate, which suggests that dissent is impermissible. Herein lies the power of ideology that is too seductive to keep out of foreign policy.
Hungary recently passed a law that banned the promotion of LGBT lifestyles to children. Its prime minister, Viktor Orban, argues that he has previously been a strong promoter of gay rights, and this law is intended to protect children and parents from sexual material. As the EU deems this to be an issue of universal values, any nuanced discussion was skipped and it instead moved straight on to talking about punishment.
Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands, stated: “My goal is to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue” and called for expelling Hungary from the EU. The French president argued that Brussels should show “no weakness” in facing down Hungary. No sense of irony was apparent as the EU condemned Hungary for “authoritarianism.” The ideological mantra of ‘diversity and inclusion’ ironically accepts no diversity of values for thousand-year-old cultures, and fails to include states with compatible values.
Russia versus the West
Throughout history, the West aimed to prove its civilizational superiority by comparing itself to supposed Russian barbarism. For centuries, ethnicity was at the center as civilized ‘Europe’ was contrasted with ‘Asiatic’ Russia. The purported opposite of Western freedom and civilization was this Eastern slavery and barbarism, which gradually became a fundamental part of the liberal ideology.
Through this prism, Russia has been allowed to play two roles: either a lowly apprentice of Western civilization, or a counter-civilizational force that must be contained or defeated.
In the early 18th century, Peter the Great established Russia as a great power and initiated a cultural revolution to Europeanize his country. The Western Europeans applauded Peter for adopting the role as the ‘student’ who would civilize Russia, according to European standards.
In the early 1990s, Russia aimed yet again to ‘return’ to Europe by adopting capitalism and a form of democracy. The West again applauded Moscow’s acceptance of the teacher-student relationship, although it rejected the inclusion of Russia in the European security architecture to any extent that would entail sovereign equality.
The rejection of the role as a civilizational second fiddle to the West, and the implicit sovereign inequality that would go with it, has once more entailed a return to containment and confrontation. Moscow therefore remains skeptical of any foreign policy framed as a civilizing mission.
Liberal authoritarianism
The West’s commitment to a ‘values-based’ international system has since meant artificially reorganizing and propagandizing all politics as a competition between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. International law, with equal respect for states, is dismantled and replaced with the so-called ‘rules-based international system’. This is portrayed as an extension of international law, but is actually the antithesis of it. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently commented: “the beauty of these Western ‘rules’ lies precisely in the fact that they lack any specific content.”
Strategically ambiguous standards are designed to enable NATO countries to decide when the rules have been broken and then unilaterally punish those who run contrary to their values.
The rules-based international system is intended for the West to police the rest, which is why it does not apply to the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange or the treason charges leveled against Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk. It also exempts Guantanamo Bay, the Stuxnet saga, NSA mass surveillance, digital censorship, the dismemberment of Serbia, or the hundreds of thousands who have perished in the illegal ‘humanitarian wars’ of Western states. The responsibility of NATO countries to uphold the rules-based system is instead used as the reason for exempting themselves from these rules.
Under the veil of the responsibility to selflessly uphold values, members of the bloc can ever-so casually discuss ways to topple foreign governments with economic sanctions or military power.
Towards woke imperialism?
Will humanitarian imperialism evolve into woke imperialism? It hardly seems far-fetched that woke values will be absorbed into the existing liberal-democratic civilizing mission to remake the world in the West’s image. Can the objective “to bring Hungary to its knees” develop into subversion, regime-change operations, or LGBT wars?
In the current age of liberal authoritarianism, the US is partnering with Saudi Arabia to fight for Syrian human rights by occupying the country’s territory, cooperating with jihadi groups, stealing oil Damascus needs to fund rebuilding, and stealing the wheat required for civilians there to survive.
Rights for sexual minorities is an important topic for any society, but cynical forces are obviously at play when the pride flag is raised over US military bases.
Glenn Diesen is a Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal.
Interviewed by Mike Adams, Dr. Lee Merritt of themedicalrebel.com talked about the dangers of taking the coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine as news emerged that four vaccinated British Airways pilots allegedly died of blood clots recently. She noted that those pilots are young, healthy guys. Adams added that young and healthy men are also being diagnosed with heart inflammation called myocarditis after taking mRNA vaccines.
The two also discussed the psychology behind the mad rush to have everyone vaccinated. Dr. Merritt said there’s likely a psychologic operation that made American people have their children take an experimental vaccine. Adams quoted Dr. Peter McCullough, a renowned cardiologist, who said his fellow doctors who are promoting vaccines even to pregnant women “are in a TRANCE, as if they have been HYPNOTIZED.”
Dr. Merritt proceeded to talk about how highly trained medical lab people in the United States and around the world were doing 40-45 cycles on PCR tests while the right range should be between 25 and 35 cycles. She said that they either had a collective “brain fart” or were told by higher power to not do the right thing. That’s not coincidence, Dr. Merritt said, but a CONSPIRACY.
BELGRADE – The use of depleted uranium bombs by NATO in 1999 and the destruction of environmentally hazardous facilities during air strikes led to Serbia currently leading in cancer deaths across Europe, Danica Grujicic, director of the Institute for Oncology and Radiology of Serbia (IORS), told Sputnik.
“There are more and more children with oncological disorders, cancer appears in previously uncharacteristic age groups. In patients, including children, the growths react weaker to therapy. Despite all necessary tests, it is increasingly difficult to predict the behavior of tumors. Serbia is now first place in Europe in mortality from cancer,” Grujicic said.
She stressed that the consequences of the use of uranium and chemicals during the bombings of Yugoslavia by NATO will be felt for a long time, especially taking into account what the UN Environment Program described as an “ecocide” and a “regional environmental disaster in April 1999.”
The oncologist noted that the first results of the bombings, which may be called the “acute phase” in the medial field, are death, destruction of infrastructure, and pollution of the air, rivers and soil. The next stage, according to Grujicic, is the “chronic phase,” which was first noticed by veterinarians in the south of central Serbia after domestic animals began bearing abnormal offspring.
Medics then started observing more cases, as benign growths develop unpredictably and aggressively in humans, Grujicic noted.In 2018, there were almost 30,000 new cancer patients registered in central Serbia, without including the autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina, compared to 19,000 in 1999. The death toll in 2018 reached 15,500, as opposed 12,000 in 1999, despite better treatment available, the oncologist stated. Within the country there have been some 58,000 new cancer cases reported in one year, out of a population of seven million.
A group of some one hundred scientists and medical experts previously suggested that the Serbian government conduct a detailed study on the consequences of the 1999 NATO strikes. The half-life of uranium is about 4.5 billion years.
NATO airstrikes in Yugoslavia continued from March 24 to June 10, 1999. The exact number of victims of the airstrikes is unknown. Serbian authorities suggest that as many as 2,500 people, including 89 children, were killed and about 12,500 people were injured in the bombings. According to various sources, the material damage is assessed at between $30 billion and $100 billion.
The military operation was conducted without the approval of the UN Security Council and on the basis of Western countries’ allegations that Yugoslavian authorities had carried out ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and provoked a humanitarian catastrophe.
A Canadian indigenous group has said 182 unmarked graves have been discovered in the South Interior of the province of British Columbia, the third such discovery in the past two months near former Catholic schools.
The burial site is located at the former Catholic-run St. Eugene’s Mission School, the Lower Kootenay Band announced on Wednesday.
The community of ʔaq’am – or St. Mary’s Indian Band – based near the city of Cranbrook made the gruesome find after using radar detection equipment, which apparently pointed to there being graves around a meter below the surface.
Last week, 751 unmarked graves were uncovered at a Catholic school in Saskatchewan province, another indigenous community announced.
That discovery came after the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old, were found at another Catholic school in British Columbia in May.
St. Eugene’s, now a casino and resort, was run by the Catholic Church from 1890 until the 1970s, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body set up to document the history of indigenous students in Canadian schools.
The Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre said the school was hit by frequent outbreaks of influenza, mumps, measles, chickenpox, and tuberculosis.
As many as 100 people from the Lower Kootenay Band had been forced to attend the institution, the group said.
“It is believed that the remains of these 182 souls are from the member Bands of the Ktunaxa Nation, neighbouring First Nations communities and the community of ʔaq’am,” the community said in a statement.
More than 150,000 indigenous children were required to attend Catholic-run state schools in Canada from the 1870s until 1997.
In 2015, a report by the commission said the government’s forced assimilation of indigenous students and the system itself could “best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’”
THE behaviour of political and public-health leaders across the world over the past fifteen months has been deplorable: for reasons yet to be confirmed, they have turned themselves into procurers for Big Pharma.
Governments not only funded fast-paced vaccine development but also psychologically prepared their populations to receive them by means of sustained media manipulation. Billions of pounds in public money has been transferred to drug corporations which have been insulated from civil legal challenge in respect of harm or loss arising from their products.
Medical staff have lost a great deal of public trust by colluding with vaccine stakeholders and withdrawing general support. They have delivered experimental gene therapies to people who did not need them but who were cowed into having them, and they have exposed young people, healthy adults and pregnant women to unnecessary risks without their full knowledge or consent in breach of their own ethical and professional standards.
Such legal immunity is unusual but came from an emergency government consultation in September 2020, after the Department of Health and Social Care under Matt Hancock had determined that changes to civil liability were necessary to ‘better facilitate the widespread use of a Covid-19 vaccine in Britain’.
Emergency approval had already been granted for Pfizer/BioNTech’s two-shot ‘vaccines’ through Regulation 174 of the HMR, which allowed them to avoid statutory licensing procedures, so with civil legal protections, they were unfettered. Crony capitalism and avarice beat prudence and public protection.
To qualify for assistance, a claimant must provide medical evidence that proves to the Department of Work and Pensions that on ‘the balance of probability’ there is a ‘causal link between the vaccine and the claimed disability [and] that the resulting disability is severe – up to 60 per cent’.
Those who can prove their cause receive a one-off tax-free payment of £120,000. The test poses two key challenges for claimants, the high threshold of disablement and the relatively low level of compensation.
Consumer Protection Rights and common law rights still apply for people damaged by Covid-19 vaccines but due to the legal definition of product defects and a rule known as the ‘state-of-the-art defence’, it may be very difficult to get compensation: only time and case law will tell.
The very fact that Covid vaccine research was funded by government is curious and may, arguably, make them also liable; that manufacturers’ experimental products were given emergency authorisation is questionable; that immunity against civil action for damages was granted is an egregious betrayal; and the continuing promotion of the jabs, despite growing evidence of harm, is evil.
What distinguishes these remedies from novel ‘vaccines’ is that they are already fully licensed and off-patent. They are relatively cheap to manufacture and administer, and therefore unlikely to bring new long-term income streams to Big Pharma.
All of which brings us unhappily to our question: Why on earth was our government so eager to fund the activity of international drug giants and why did it provide them with tax-funded legal immunities for products that only they will profit from?
It’s not as if Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock or their Sage advisers can claim ignorance of the business practices or track records of these outfits: they all have strong public links to them, either as employees, researchers, directors, business partners, shareholders, or recipients of funding.
In December 2020, Global Justice Now, a UK-based ‘social justice organisation’ published a report which concluded:
‘The current pharmaceutical model is . . . deeply flawed, delivering outcomes which are poor value for money for the public sector, which exacerbate global inequality and which are driven by the objective to make sky-high returns to shareholders, not a healthier population.’
It described the market as dysfunctional with incentives for ‘the most appalling behaviour including aggressive marketing of inappropriate drugs, kickbacks to doctors, claims of testing drugs on children without proper consent, massive price hikes on essential medicines, profiteering, blocking competition, and secrecy’.
In the US, Public Citizen, a non-profit, consumer rights advocacy group, published Twenty Seven Years of Pharmaceutical Industry Criminal and Civil Penalties 1991 through 2017, which detailed the 412 settlements against drug companies that resulted in them paying out $38.6 billion in criminal and civil penalties. A small loss relative to the $711 billion in net profits made by the 11 largest global drug companies during ten of those 27 years (2003-2012).
Pfizer, now the leading Covid mRNA vaccine manufacturer, was found guilty of more transgressions than any other company and forced to pay 34 settlements amounting to $4.7billion: AstraZeneca had to settle just over $1billion on 13 matters, including concealing data.
Johnson & Johnson was ordered to pay $2.8billion in 20 settlements that included unlawful promotion of prescription drugs and unfair practices.
Such penalties are clearly accepted by the companies as a ‘cost of doing business’. They are certainly no incentive to changing behaviour.
Criminal prosecutions of executives of drug companies are extremely rare, as are prosecutions of politicians. Nonetheless, a forensic assessment of who is liable for the risks, damages, and losses brought by Covid -19 ‘vaccines’ is long overdue.
Regular health checks (a.k.a routine visits) are probably the bane of many a primary care physician’s existence. I can’t imagine many things more boring than running through a standardized list of questions with a patient who feels absolutely fine, then going through a list of lab values that are almost invariably within the normal reference range, and finally topping it off with a perfunctory physical examination. Nothing converts a highly trained professional into an unthinking automaton more than the regular health check.
Of course, the physician’s feelings about regular health checks aren’t really what matters (except in so far as they cause physicians to choose not to work in primary care, and thereby cause a shortage of primary care physicians). What matters is whether the regular health check results in objective benefits for the patient. Well, do they?
A review was recently published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) that sought to answer that question. Regular health checks are a big part of what primary care physicians do in many countries. In the US for example, 8% of doctor’s appointments are for a regular health check. This means that a lot of money is poured into them, and it therefore makes sense to try to figure out whether or not they actually do any good. Otherwise that money could be better used elsewhere, like for example launching Jeff Bezos into space.
The review included both randomized trials and observational studies, with the only requirements for inclusion being that a study have at least 200 participants, that there be a control group, that the health check be conducted in a primary care clinic, and that it be a “general” health check, i.e. not designed to screen specifically for any one disease. 19 randomized trials and 13 observational studies were identified. The smallest study had 240 participants, while the largest had almost 500,000 participants, and the length of follow-up varied from six months to thirty years. The oldest included study was published in 1973, and the most recent was published in 2017. Virtually all were carried out in western Europe or north America, with a disproportionately large proportion of the studies being carried out in Denmark, because apparently the Danes are disproportionately interested in health screening.
The frequency of the health check varied quite a lot. Some of the studies had a single visit, some had a visit annually or bi-annually, and some had irregular intervals.
So, what were the results?
13 randomized trials studied the effect of health checks on mortality, and eleven of these failed to show any benefit. This includes the study that ran the longest, a Danish trial with almost 18,000 people that provided health checks at baseline and then after five years and again after ten years. It failed to show any difference in mortality after thirty years. It also includes the largest study, another Danish trial with almost 60,000 people that provided health checks at baseline and again five years out (and also at the one year and three year marks for those deemed to be at high risk). It failed to show any mortality benefit after ten years of follow-up.
As mentioned, two of the thirteen studies did show a mortality benefit. The larger, another Danish study with 50,000 participants, which provided a single health check and then followed participants for five years to see what happened, showed an extremely marginal benefit (10% vs 11 % dead five years out), but the result only just crossed the threshold for statistical significance and could thus easily be a fluke. The other of the two was a smaller study with 4,195 people conducted in the US, which provided a health check at baseline and at one year out. It showed an improvement in mortality at two years (8% vs 11%) and four years (19% vs 22%).
Overall, though, I think it’s safe to conclude that the totality of studies that have so far been done of regular health checks fail to show that they result in any reduction in mortality. Of course, whether you’re dead or alive isn’t the only thing that matters. So let’s look at other outcomes too.
Five randomized trials looked at whether regular health checks helped prevent cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular events (a.k.a. heart attacks and strokes). All five failed to find any benefit. This is a bit odd, since one rationale for regular health checks is that they catch problems like high blood pressure and high cholesterol early, one major goal of which is to prevent cardiovascular events.
Four randomized trials and six observational studies did seek to understand whether the health checks increased detection of disease. A randomized trial conducted in Denmark (of course), in which 1,104 participants aged 45-64 were randomized to either a health check or “usual care” (i.e. don’t bother the doctor unless you feel sick) and then followed for one year, the health check had resulted in more than twice as many people being treated with anti-depressants (5% vs 2%). As I’ve written about previously, anti-depressants don’t work (better than placebo), but do result in significant side effects, so it’s questionable whether this is a good thing.
The health check did not however result in an increase in the diagnosis of high blood pressure, hypercholesterolemia (high cholesterol), or diabetes. Which is a bit surprising, quite frankly. Other trials did find a difference, however. An American trial in which 906 adults were randomized to a single health check or usual care and then followed for a year found that the health check resulted in a significant increase in the number of people diagnosed with high blood pressure (14% vs 10%). A British observational study including over 85,000 people found that attending regular health checks was associated with an increased likelihood of being diagnosed with high blood pressure, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease. Participants were also more likely to be diagnosed with hypercholesterolemia and treated with statins.
So the totality of evidence suggests that regular health checks do result in an increase in the number of people being given diagnoses and thus the number of people being put on medical treatment. But they don’t improve mortality or the frequency of cardiovascular events. That is strange, isn’t it? How do we explain that?
Here’s what I think.
Firstly, some of these diagnoses don’t actually result in any treatment. Take chronic kidney disease, for example. As people age, their kidneys gradually wear out. Once your kidneys’ capacity is at around 70% of the normal value in a healthy young person, you will be diagnosed as suffering from “chronic kidney disease”. Luckily, the kidneys have an enormous amount of spare capacity, and you don’t actually develop any symptoms until the kidneys are down to 10 to 15% of their original capacity. Most people who have been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease die of other causes long before their kidney function gets to that point. So regular health checks might increase the number of people diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, but the diagnosis doesn’t actually change anything in reality (except for the psychological harms of now thinking that you have a chronic disease, of course).
Secondly, there are many diagnoses that are treated, but where the benefits of treatment are so marginal that it isn’t clear whether treatment actually improves overall outcomes. This applies to mildly elevated blood pressure and blood sugar. Treating very high blood pressure and very high blood sugar is undoubtedly a good thing. But when they are only marginally raised, then treatment is much more questionable, and it’s not clear that the benefits outweigh the harms. The reason this is relevant is that most of the people identified with these conditions through health checks are at the milder end of the spectrum, and thus statistically unlikely to benefit from medical interventions.
Another condition that falls in to this category is the aforementioned hypercholesterolemia. Reducing cholesterol levels in the blood results in a reduction in deaths from heart disease (at least, that’s what the trials produced by the corporations that own the cholesterol lowering drugs say), but it doesn’t result in a reduction in overall mortality. Which does rather beg the question why we even bother to treat high cholesterol.
Thirdly, if regular health checks increase diagnoses and thus increase drug prescriptions, then they also increase the problem of polypharmacy, which is now a leading cause of death. Polypharmacy (taking many drugs simultaneously) frequently cancels out the benefits seen in clinical trials, where unusually healthy and young patients are being treated with a single drug or just a few drugs (i.e. a situation very far from the clinical reality).
It is thus easy to see how regular health checks could result in an increase in diagnoses and an increase in prescriptions without there being any noticeable improvement in survival.
Let’s move on and look at some more results.
Overall, health checks were associated with small improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol, as would be expected given the increase in prescriptions. However, it is hard to see what the value of an improvement in a surrogate marker is if there is no actual improvement in survival.
There was also a consistent increase in the uptake of disease specific screening services in people who took part in health checks. Which intuitively sounds like a good thing, except that again the reality is far more complicated. As I’ve written about before, both breast cancer screening and prostate cancer screening harm far more people than they help, and don’t result in any reduction in overall mortality. So increasing uptake of screening interventions can actually be a bad thing overall. It all depends on which particular screening interventions are being recommended.
Ok, let’s sum up. Regular health checks result in an increased probability of receiving a diagnosis and an increased probability of being put on drugs. They do not however improve longevity. With that being the case, the increase in diagnoses and drug prescriptions is of questionable value, and might even be a net negative, when side effects of the drugs and the negative psychological consequences of thinking of yourself as someone with a “chronic disease” are considered.
MANY have asked themselves how policies so ineffective and yet damaging to so many people’s lives and liberties could have been put in place so quickly, and seemingly almost on a global basis, in response to the Covid crisis.
Part of the answer has been provided by an investigation by German journalist and author Paul Schreyer. In an hour-long video, he tracks a series of pandemic simulation exercises conducted at the highest level over many years among the most influential industrial nations of the West.
Top officials were ‘primed’ to respond as they did, once the World Health Organisation declared the pandemic spread of a new coronavirus, SARS-COV-2, almost regardless of the nature of the virus or the degree of harm it was likely to cause.
This weakness can be seen as a huge obstacle to rational decision-making. It helps to explain how the views of thousands of doctors, scientists and others who have challenged the official, fear-based approach to the pandemic came to be ignored.
Schreyer maintains that political decisions during the crisis did not come out of the blue, but stemmed from a ‘war on viruses’ begun back in the 1990s, alongside the ‘war on terror’.
It was as though a fresh enemy had to be brought into being, following the end of the Cold War era in which the superpowers Russia and America confronted each other with immense and potentially suicidal armaments and military budgets.
‘I am running out of villains. I am running out of demons,’ said General Colin Powell in a 1991 newspaper interview. ‘I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-Sung.’ At the time he was the highest-ranking military official in the USA.
That was the context in which the fight against terror, including preparations to fight biological weaponry, began. A 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Centre in New York City, attributed to Islamist terrorists, boosted demands for continued use of American military abroad, and a similar attack, though with mysterious origins, on a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 reinforced fears of a ‘shadow enemy’ within.
At the same time, dangerous biological research was being conducted at US facilities, said to be aimed at better understanding the threat that could be posed by a state or terrorist with a biological arsenal.
Colonel Dr Robert Kadlec, Biodefence Programmes Director at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote in a 1998 Pentagon strategy paper: ‘Using biological weapons under the cover of an endemic or natural disease occurrence provides an attacker the potential for plausible denial. Biological warfare’s potential to create significant economic loss and subsequent political instability, coupled with plausible denial, exceeds the possibilities of any other human weapon.’
That same year saw the founding of the Johns Hopkins Centre for Civilian Biodefence Strategies, later renamed the Centre for Health Security. This institution has played a major role in the Covid pandemic, compiling, displaying and analysing data on a global dashboard used by media – for the most part, unquestioningly – all over the world.
And it was this centre that organised several important simulation exercises in the field of disaster response strategies.
The first, the National Symposium on Medical and Public Health Response to Bioterrorism, was held at Arlington, home to the Pentagon, in February 1999. Hundreds of delegates from ten countries took part. Smallpox was the supposed bioweapon, and delegates were taken through a series of sessions simulating how an attack might be handled and problems that might arise.
How far could the police go to detain patients? How to proceed with vaccination? Should martial law be implemented? How to control the message going to the public? Public health issues were for the first time being treated as military problems, with the Department of Health becoming part of the US national security apparatus.
A similar exercise took place in November 2000 in Washington DC, this time using plague as the simulated pandemic. Scenarios enacted in front of the high-level officials attending included: ‘The sight of an armed military presence in US cities has provoked protests about the curtailment of civil liberties … the question is, how do we enforce it, and to what degree? How much force do we use to keep people in their homes?’
A third exercise, called Dark Winter, held at a military base a few miles outside Washington in June 2001, simulated a full-scale smallpox emergency. It brought in journalists from well-known media, including the BBC, to question the politicians and top-level officials so that they could learn the kind of issues that would arise.
Among the conclusions:
We are ill-equipped to prevent the dire consequences of a bioweapon attack.
America lacks the resource stockpiles required for appropriate responses, including vaccines, antibiotics, and means of effective distribution.
Forcible constraints on citizens may likely be the only tools available when vaccine stocks are depleted.
Americans can no longer take basic civil liberties such as freedom of assembly or travel for granted.
On a fictional news channel created as part of the exercise, Kadlec announced: ‘The problem is, we do not have enough vaccine … it means this could be a very dark winter in America.’
When the real Covid-19 struck, Kadlec became the top emergency preparedness official co-ordinating the response from both the US Department of Health and Human Services, and the federal government.
Days after Joe Biden was declared winner of the presidential election, he warned of a ‘dark winter’ ahead, urging continued mask-wearing. ‘You might call it a coincidence, although you could also suspect that his choice of words was related to the exercise,’ Schreyer says.
The September 11, 2001 attacks brought home the terrorist threat to everybody in the global community. Proposed legal changes to extend state powers of surveillance met resistance in the US, but that disappeared following the so-called anthrax attacks in October the same year. Letters containing anthrax spores were sent to several news media offices, and to two senators who had opposed the changes.
‘To this day it is not clear who was responsible for those attacks,’ says Schreyer, who interprets them as ‘a signal that a certain red line should not be crossed’.
A month later, in November 2001, on the initiative of the US Government, a new international organisation was founded called Global Health Security Initiative (GHSI).
It was emphasised that every government was in danger of receiving a deadly pathogen, and there was a need to unite and jointly take action. The participating countries were Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Britain, and the USA. The European Union also signed up to the initiative and the WHO was involved as technical adviser. Health ministers and senior officials came together regularly to discuss bioterrorism and how best to co-ordinate a response.
In 2002 a further crucial step was taken: The group declared that the threat need not only be man-made, but might also come from nature, such as with a flu pandemic. Emergency preparation was needed for both scenarios, on a global scale.
From then on, exercises were co-ordinated internationally. The first, called Global Mercury, convened in 2003, depicted an attack by fictitious self-inoculated terrorists to spread smallpox internationally to target countries. A planning group for the exercise was led by Canada and comprised ‘trusted agents’ from all participating nations or organisations. Hundreds of people participated.
Another important exercise, convened in 2005, was called Atlantic Storm. Many of the country representatives were either current or former individuals with governmental responsibility. The real-life Madeleine Albright, for example, former US Secretary of State, played the US President.
Key questions highlighted in the post-exercise report included:
How should national leaders determine measures such as border closures or quarantine?
If actions are taken that restrict the movement of people, for how long should they be maintained? How would they be coordinated internationally, and how would the decision be made to lift them?
The basic premise of all the scenarios, Schreyer says, was to highlight decision-making processes and competencies in a public health emergency. ‘But they also involved declaring a state of emergency, implementing authoritarian leadership, bypassing parliament and investing certain federal officials with augmented decision-making power while also suspending fundamental civil rights and effecting plans to vaccinate the population.
‘What strikes me as particularly noteworthy is the ready suspension of basic human rights when responding to a pandemic or bioterror attack; because that is not necessarily a logical consequence.
‘Observing all this, the question arises: Maybe such exercises might have served as a cover and testing ground for a state of emergency and checking out how such a political situation could be handled.’
One lesson we might draw from the handling of the Covid crisis is that while politicians understandably feel a need to prepare for global disasters, they risk causing far more harm than good by following tramlines of action rigidly predetermined to be ‘the science’ of the situation, but which actually obstruct rational responses.
… It is time we had a grown-up discussion about the optimum quantity of human beings in this country and on this planet. Do we want the south-east of Britain, already the most densely populated major country in Europe, to resemble a giant suburbia?
This is not, repeat not, an argument about immigration per se, since in a sense it does not matter where people come from, and with their skill and their industry, immigrants add hugely to the economy.
This is a straightforward question of population, and the eventual size of the human race.
All the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control. Isn’t it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started talking about the real number one issue?
“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” Edward Grey
Several years ago, I wrote a book called Doctoring Data. It was my attempt to help people navigate their way through medical headlines and medical data.
One of the main reasons I was stimulated to write it, is because I had become deeply concerned that science, especially medical science, had been almost fully taken over by commercial interests. With the end result that much of the data we were getting bombarded with was enormously biased, and thus corrupted. I wanted to show how some of this bias gets built in.
I was not alone in my concerns. As far back as 2005, John Ioannidis wrote the very highly cited paper ‘Why most Published Research Findings are False’. It has been downloaded and read by many, many, thousands of researchers over the years, so they can’t say they don’t know:
‘Moreover for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.’1
Marcia Angell, who edited the New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years, wrote the following. It is a quote I have used many times, in many different talks:
‘It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.’
Peter Gotzsche, who set up the Nordic Cochrane Collaboration, and who was booted out of said Cochrane collaboration for questioning the HPV vaccine (used to prevent cervical cancer) wrote the book. ‘Deadly Medicine and Organised Crime. [How big pharma has corrupted healthcare]’.
The book cover states… ‘The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs… virtually everything we know about drugs is what the companies have chosen to tell us and our doctors… if you don’t believe the system is out of control, please e-mail me and explain why drugs are the third leading cause of death.’
Richard Smith edited the British Medical Journal (BMJ) for many years. He now writes a blog, amongst other things. A few years ago, he commented:
‘Twenty years ago this week, the statistician Doug Altman published an editorial in the BMJ arguing that much medical research was of poor quality and misleading. In his editorial entitled ‘The scandal of Poor Medical Research.’ Altman wrote that much research was seriously flawed through the use of inappropriate designs, unrepresentative sample, small sample, incorrect methods of analysis and faulty interpretation… Twenty years later, I feel that things are not better, but worse…
In 2002 I spent eight marvellous weeks in a 15th palazzo in Venice writing a book on medical journals, the major outlets for medical research, and the dismal conclusion that things were badly wrong with journals and the research they published. My confidence that ‘things can only get better’ has largely drained away.’
Essentially, medical research has inexorably turned into an industry. A very lucrative industry. Many medical journals now charge authors thousands of dollars to publish their research. This ensures that it is very difficult for any researcher, not supported by a university, or a pharmaceutical company, to afford to publish anything, unless they are independently wealthy.
The journals then have the cheek to claim copyright, and charge money to anyone who actually wants to read, or download the full paper. Fifty dollars for a few on-line pages! They then bill for reprints, they charge for advertising. Those who had the temerity to write the article get nothing – and nor do the peer reviewers.
It is all very profitable. Last time I looked the Return on Investment (profit) was thirty-five per-cent for the big publishing houses. It was Robert Maxwell who first saw this opportunity for money making.
Driven by financial imperative, the research itself has also, inevitably, become biased. He who pays the paper calls the tune. Pharmaceutical companies, food manufacturers and suchlike. They can certainly afford the publication fees.
In addition to all the financial and peer-review pressure, if you dare swim against the approved mainstream views you will, very often, be ruthlessly attacked. As many people know, I am a critic of the cholesterol hypothesis, along with my band of brothers… we few, we happy few. In the 1970s, Kilmer McCully, who plays double bass in our band, was looking into a cause of cardiovascular disease that went against the mainstream view. This is what happened to him:
‘Thomas N. James, a cardiologist and president of the University of Texas Medical Branch who was also the president of the American Heart Association in 1979 and ’80, is even harsher [regarding the treatment of McCully]. ”It was worse than that – you couldn’t get ideas funded that went in other directions than cholesterol,” he says. ”You were intentionally discouraged from pursuing alternative questions. I’ve never dealt with a subject in my life that elicited such an immediate hostile response.”
It took two years for McCully to find a new research job. His children were reaching college age; he and his wife refinanced their house and borrowed from her parents. McCully says that his job search developed a pattern: he would hear of an opening, go for interviews and then the process would grind to a stop. Finally, he heard rumors of what he calls ”poison phone calls” from Harvard. ”It smelled to high heaven,” he says.’
McCully says that when he was interviewed on Canadian television after he left Harvard, he received a call from the public-affairs director of Mass. General. ”He told me to shut up,” McCully recalls. ”He said he didn’t want the names of Harvard and Mass. General associated with my theories.’ 2
More recently, I was sent a link to an article outlining the attacks made on another researcher who published a paper which found that being overweight meant having a (slightly) lower risk of death than being of ‘normal weight. This, would never do:
‘A naïve researcher published a scientific article in a respectable journal. She thought her article was straightforward and defensible. It used only publicly available data, and her findings were consistent with much of the literature on the topic. Her coauthors included two distinguished statisticians.
To her surprise her publication was met with unusual attacks from some unexpected sources within the research community. These attacks were by and large not pursued through normal channels of scientific discussion. Her research became the target of an aggressive campaign that included insults, errors, misinformation, social media posts, behind-the-scenes gossip and maneuvers, and complaints to her employer.
The goal appeared to be to undermine and discredit her work. The controversy was something deliberately manufactured, and the attacks primarily consisted of repeated assertions of preconceived opinions. She learned first-hand the antagonism that could be provoked by inconvenient scientific findings. Guidelines and recommendations should be based on objective and unbiased data. Development of public health policy and clinical recommendations is complex and needs to be evidence-based rather than belief-based. This can be challenging when a hot-button topic is involved.’ 3
Those who lead the attacks on her were my very favourite researchers, Walter Willet and Frank Hu. Two eminent researchers from Harvard who I nickname Tweedledum and Tweedledummer. Harvard itself has become an institution, which, along with Oxford University, comes up a lot in tales of bullying and intimidation. Willet and Hu are internationally known for promoting vegetarian and vegan diets. Willet is a key figure in the EAT-Lancet initiative.
Where is science in all this? I feel the need to state, at this point, that I don’t mind attacks on ideas. I like robust debate. Science can only progress through a process of new hypotheses being proposed, being attacked, being refined and strengthened – or obliterated. But what we see now is not science. It is the obliteration of science itself:
‘Anyone who has been a scientist for more than 20 years will realize that there has been a progressive decline in the honesty of communications between scientists, between scientists and their institutions and the outside world.
Yet, real science must be an area where truth is the rule; or else the activity simply stops being scient and becomes something else: Zombie science. Zombie science is a science that is dead, but is artificially keep moving by a continual infusion of funding. From a distance Zombie science looks like the real thing, the surface features of a science are in place – white coats, laboratories, computer programming, PhDs, papers, conferences, prizes etc. But the Zombie is not interested in the pursuit of truth – its citations are externally-controlled and directed at non-scientific goals, and inside the Zombie everything is rotten…
Scientists are usually too careful and clever to risk telling outright lies, but instead they push the envelope of exaggeration, selectivity and distortion as far as possible. And tolerance for this kind of untruthfulness has greatly increased over recent years. So, it is now routine for scientists deliberately to ‘hype’ the significance of their status and performance and ‘spin’ the importance of their research.’ Bruce Charlton: Professor of Theoretical Medicine.
I was already pretty depressed with the direction that medical science was taking. Then COVID19 came along, the distortion and hype became so outrageous that I almost gave up trying to establish what was true, and was just made up nonsense.
For example, I stated, right at the start of the COVID19 pandemic, that vitamin D could be important in protecting against the virus. For having the audacity to say this, I was attacked by the fact checkers. Indeed, anyone promoting vitamin D to reduce the risk of COVID19 infection, was ruthlessly hounded.
Guess what. Here from 17th June:
‘Hospitalized COVID-19 patients are far more likely to die or to end up in severe or critical condition if they are vitamin D-deficient, Israeli researchers have found.
In a study conducted in a Galilee hospital, 26 percent of vitamin D-deficient coronavirus patients died, while among other patients the figure was at 3%.
“This is a very, very significant discrepancy, which represents a big clue that starting the disease with very low vitamin D leads to increased mortality and more severity,” Dr. Amir Bashkin, endocrinologist and part of the research team, told The Times of Israel.’ 4
I also recommended vitamin C for those already in hospital. Again, I was attacked, as has everyone who has dared to mention COVID19 and vitamin C in the same sentence. Yet, we know that vitamin C is essential for the health and wellbeing of blood vessels, and the endothelial cells that line them. In severe infection the body burns through vitamin C, and people can become ‘scrobutic’ (the name given to severe lack of vitamin C).
Vitamin C is also known to have powerful anti-viral activity. It has been known for years. Here, from an article in 1996:
‘Over the years, it has become well recognized that ascorbate can bolster the natural defense mechanisms of the host and provide protection not only against infectious disease, but also against cancer and other chronic degenerative diseases. The functions involved in ascorbate’s enhancement of host resistance to disease include its biosynthetic (hy-droxylating), antioxidant, and immunostimulatory activities. In addition, ascorbate exerts a direct antiviral action that may confer specific protection against viral disease. The vitamin has been found to inactivate a wide spectrum of viruses as well as suppress viral replication abd expression in infected cell.’ 5
I like quoting research on vitamins from way before COVID19 appeared, where people were simply looking at Vitamin C without the entire medico-industrial complex looking over their shoulder, ready to stamp out anything they don’t like. Despite a mass of evidence that Vitamin C has benefits against viral infection, it is a complete no-go area and no-one even dares to research it now. Facebook removes any content relating to Vitamin C and COVID19.
As of today, any criticism of the mainstream narrative is simply being removed. Those who dare to raise their heads above the parapet, have them chopped off:
‘Dr Francis Christian, practising surgeon and clinical professor of general surgery at the University of Saskatchewan, has been immediately suspended from all teaching and will be permanently removed from his role as of September.
Dr Christian has been a surgeon for more than 20 years and began working in Saskatoon in 2007. He was appointed Director of the Surgical Humanities Program and Director of Quality and Patient Safety in 2018 and co-founded the Surgical Humanities Program. Dr. Christian is also the Editor of the Journal of The Surgical Humanities.
On June 17th Dr Christian released a statement to over 200 of his colleagues, expressing concern over the lack of informed consent involved in Canada’s “Covid19 vaccination” program, especially regarding children.
To be clear, Dr Christian’s position is hardly an extreme one.
He believes the virus is real, he believes in vaccination as a general principle, he believes the elderly and vulnerable may benefit from the Covid “vaccine”… he simply doesn’t agree it should be used on children, and feels parents are not being given enough information for properly informed consent.’ 6
When I wrote Doctoring Data, a few years ago, I included the following thoughts about the increasing censorship and punishment that was already very clearly out in the open:
… where does it end? Well, we know where it ends.
First, they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist
Then they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist
Then they came from the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist
Then they came for me, and there was no-one left to speak for me
Do you think this is a massive over-reaction? Do I really believe that we are heading for some form of totalitarian stated, where dissent against the medical ‘experts’ will be punishable by imprisonment? Well, yes, I do. We are already in a situation where doctors who fail to follow the dreaded ‘guidelines’ can be sued, or dragged in front the General Medical Council, and struck of. Thus losing their job and income…
Where next?
The lamps are not just going out all over Europe. They are going out, all over the world.
NAZARETH, ISRAEL — In May, the world watched Israel’s brutal occupation on full display: The forcible displacement of Sheikh Jarrah residents was underway; Israeli security forces attacked Muslim worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan; Israeli rocket fire rained down on Gaza; and Jewish extremists chanted “Death to Arabs!” in the streets.
According to multiple testimonies, Israeli police in Nazareth ran a “torture room” where they ruthlessly attacked Palestinian detainees during the wave of demonstrations against Israel in May.
Now, as international headlines fade on Palestine, Israeli violence continues.
‘The floor of the room was covered in blood’
Faiz Zbedeiat was talking on the phone about 20 feet away from a protest in Nazareth. The moment the 21-year-old student hung up the phone, Israeli police threw a stun grenade into the street. An officer then charged at him and punched him in the nose. Zbedeiat was soon encircled by police who grabbed him, hit him, and pushed him toward a Border Police officer who tried to slam his head against a wall.
“I asked why they were hitting me when I’m not resisting,” Zbedeiat said. “I put my hands behind my back even though they didn’t handcuff me. Nevertheless, the same Border Police officer hit me in the nose with the walkie-talkie that he was holding.”
The officers dragged Zbedeiat by his head to the police station, beating him along the way.
“On the way, we met a policeman who appeared to be an officer, and he started laughing and said to them: ‘Did you only arrest him? That’s not enough. We need more,’” Zbedeiat said.
The beating continued inside the police station. Cops kicked, slapped, and hit detainees with batons, laughing as they struck them.
Zbedeiat detailed how one officer smacked detainees with an M-16 rifle. He watched as one man with a broken nose — face covered in blood — was continuously hit by officers. Then Zbedeiat described his own treatment:
A police officer approached me and whispered in my ear, threatening me. He cursed my mother, my sister, and my wife. He then asked, ‘Did you understand?’ I didn’t answer, and he immediately slapped me in the face. He asked me again: ‘Do you understand?’ I still didn’t answer and he slapped me again in the face. Finally, he said ‘Go explain to your friends.’ He pushed me back down to the floor and hit me again.”
Zbedeiat’s violent detention in May is one of many such, according to Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. The advocacy group collected multiple sworn affidavits attesting to the abuse of Palestinian protesters by Israeli officers, attorneys, bystanders, and children inside Nazareth’s police station from May 9 to May 14. The majority of the violent arrests and most of the abuse were conducted by Israeli special forces, including undercover Mista’aravim (counter-terror units within the Israeli Army, Border Police, and Israel Police) officers pretending to be Palestinians.
Adalah submitted a complaint to Israel’s Attorney General and the chairman of the Police Investigation Department on June 7. In their letter, Adalah wrote:
Police officers led the detainees to a room located on the left side of the entrance corridor to the station, forcing them to sit on the floor handcuffed, to lower their heads towards the floor, and began to beat them on all parts of their bodies, using kicks and clubs, slamming their heads against walls or doors, and more. Officers wounded the detainees, terrorized them, and whomever dared to lift his head upwards risked more beatings by officers. According to affidavits, the floor of the room was covered in blood from the beatings.
Police violence amounting to torture
Under Israeli law, authorities must respond to the letter within 45 days. But Adalah attorney and co-author of the complaint, Wesam Sharaf, told MintPress that Adalah has not received a response from the Attorney General or Police Investigation Department. Adalah did receive a response from Nazareth’s Chief of Police, stating that he will cooperate if there’s an investigation and will take the appropriate disciplinary actions.
“What happened inside the police station in Nazareth amounts to torture and ill-treatment, and requires the immediate opening of a criminal investigation to examine the circumstances and conditions of the protesters’ detention at the station – including the investigation and prosecution of police officers involved in the violence,” Adalah attorneys wrote in their complaint.
Sharaf explained that the witness and victim accounts of police brutality inside the Israeli police station describe activity deemed torturous under international law:
What we have seen in the police station is that instead of investigating the people, the police would beat them up. [The police] deny [the detainees] in need of medical attention that medical attention and make them sign [false] affidavits as a condition to get medical attention… When this treatment is [directed at] detainees, it may amount to torture according to international law.”
Torture is defined under international law as intentionally inflicting severe pain or suffering in order to obtain a confession or information, intimidate or coerce the individual, or as punishment for alleged offenses. Torture is illegal and considered a war crime.
In a statement to MintPress News, Israeli Police said:
We emphasize that an investigation branch officer contacted the director of detention on behalf of the Public Defender’s Office and requested the presence of defense attorneys at the station, and accordingly, when the detainees arrived at the station, two defense attorneys were present to advise them. Unfortunately some of the lawyers complaining about the appeal were at the entrance to the station, tried to create provocations on the spot. Notwithstanding the foregoing, they were periodically allowed to enter the station and tour the facility in order to prove that the detainees were being treated properly.”
The police spokesperson also noted that medical staff was present at the station and detainees in need of medical care were promptly treated.
In a move largely seen as squelching Palestinian dissent, Israel Police launched a mass-arrest campaign in May, targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel who participated in protests against ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah, attacks at Al-Aqsa Mosque, and Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Israeli police arrested 2,142 individuals and filed 184 indictments during “Operation Guardian of the Walls” and “Operation Law and Order.” According to Sharaf, more than 150 Palestinians were arrested in Nazareth in May, and about one in ten were indicted.
Ashraf Mahroum, an attorney representing nine people detained by police in Nazareth, said his clients and others were charged for protesting illegally, creating illegal organizations, and assaulting police officers. Maroum’s clients allege police fired rubber bullets at the upper parts of their bodies during the protests — a direct violation of the law governing use of rubber bullets. During their detention, officers struck them with batons and smacked them over the head with guns. Most of his clients’ injuries were on the head and face. Some were forced to sign affidavits stating they won’t disclose what happened to them in order to receive medical treatment.
Evidence of similar police violence against Palestinians appeared in other cities across 1948-occupied Palestine (modern-day Israel) including in Lydd, Akka, Yaffa and Haifa, Sharaf said, adding detainees in these localities arrived in court with visible signs of abuse. Sharaf concluded:
[Adalah] “has other testimonies about police brutality in different areas; some of this brutality was against protesters and some of it has been inside police stations against detainees. With the systematic ill treatment that we have witnessed from the 9th of May to the 14th of May, we can assume that more people have been subject to such kind of treatment.”
Israel’s expanding history of torture
The Israel Security Agency (ISA) has long used torture as a standard tactic during interrogations of Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories. Until the late 1990s, the ISA was allowed to use “psychological pressure” and a “moderate degree of physical pressure” in order to “prevent terrorism,” according to 1987 recommendations from a state commission. The commission’s opinion permitted the ISA to use methods of torture in their interrogations under the “necessity defense” clause found in Israeli penal law.
The Israeli Supreme Court banned the use of physical methods during interrogations in 1999 after a series of petitions were filed by human rights organizations and Palestinians who experienced ISA interrogations. However, the court ruled the practice of physical pressure could remain in urgent cases as part of the “ticking bomb” exception under the necessity defense. This legal loophole has allowed torture and ill treatment to persist in ISA interrogations, despite the Israeli Justice Ministry having drafted a law to criminalize torture.
An illustration from a 1991 B’Teslem report detailing torture methods used by Israeli forces
According to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), 1,300 complaints regarding the use of torture against Palestinian citizens in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) by the ISA have been submitted to the Ministry of Justice since 2001. These complaints resulted in only one criminal investigation and no indictments.
PCATI receives dozens of complaints each year attesting to brutality occurring during arrest, detention, interrogation and imprisonment of Palestinians from the OPT. The nonprofit organization estimates 5% to 10% of these cases amount to instances of severe torture.
Severe interrogations increased sharply in 2020. “In the passing year, more people were tortured in Israel than in any other year in the past decade,” PCATI said in their 2020 situation report on torture of Palestinians by Israeli security forces. While cases of torture are prevalent within the OPT, Tal Steiner, Director General of PCATI, said 1948-occupied Palestine is now experiencing an escalation of torture incidents. Steiner told MintPress:
[PCATI] “has seen attributes that are usually found in the West Bank trickling into Israel. There’s administrative arrest, prevention of rights to seek counsel, to receive medical attention — those are things that are quite unfortunately common in the West Bank and the Occupied Territories that have now become more evident within Israel proper… This is not something that’s usual or routine within Israel for Israeli citizens — Palestinian or not. So it’s a turn for the worse.”
An illustration from a 1991 B’Teslem report detailing torture methods used by Israeli forces
Steiner attributed this surge within Historic Palestine to a culture of impunity spurred by Israeli politicians like former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, explaining:
“When the police and military forces entered the mixed cities within Israel to so-call restore the peace, then-Prime Minister Netanyahu was quoted saying, ‘Go ahead and do your job and don’t worry about any commission of inquiry.’ These types of announcements by the prime minister and other Israeli leaders can also be a reason why police officers thought they could get away with it. They can use extreme force toward citizens, demonstrators, and especially toward people from minority groups, and go unpunished.”
“I thought I was going to die”
On May 13, the eve of the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr, Nazareth resident Omaiyer Lawabne was out with friends to celebrate. As he approached an ATM to withdraw money, he saw an officer decked in full riot gear running toward him. Instinctively, he began running away.
“The cops started throwing grenades at me, and I kept running because I knew that if I stood still I could be badly wounded by the grenades,” Lawabne said. “While I was still running, one of the policemen raised his hand and hit me in the left eye, and I fell to the ground.”
Police surrounded Lawabne on the pavement, kicking him in the face and head. One officer pressed his boot into Lawabne’s head and shoulder. “I felt intense pain all over my body, from my head to my legs. One of them started kicking me in the artery behind the ear,” Lawabne said. “At that moment, I thought I was going to die.”
At the police station, Lawabne saw detainees stuffed into a room, resembling “prisoners of war.” They sat on the floor with their legs folded under them and heads bent. A masked officer paced around the room with a club-like object in his hand. Any detainee who lifted his head met the full swing of the officer’s bat on their head.
“They pushed me down into a corner and I lowered my head and curled up. Nevertheless, the same police officer hit me hard on the head with that object,” Lawabne said.
Days after his detention, Lawabne still felt excruciating pain throughout his body. He couldn’t sleep from the dizziness. He couldn’t eat without vomiting. He couldn’t speak coherently. He still doesn’t understand why he was arrested when he wasn’t participating in any nearby protests.
“It was the first time I had been arrested, an arrest that I believe was illegal, pointless, and very violent,” Lawabne said.
Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based journalist for MintPress News covering Palestine, Israel, and Syria. Her work has been featured in Middle East Eye, The New Arab and Gulf News.
Covid 19 was and is a pseudopandemic. It was the gross exaggeration of the threat posed by a low mortality respiratory illness, comparable to influenza.
The pseudopandemic was a psychological operation (psy-op) designed to terrorise the public. The objective was to accustom the people to draconian system of government oppression by familiarising them with the mechanisms of a biosecurity state.
The pseudopandemic was based upon an influenza like illness which, regardless of its origin, was not and is not a disease which can legitimately be considered the cause of a “pandemic.” The only way it could ever be described as such was by the removal of any reference to mortality from the World Health Organisation’s definition.
COVID 19 is a disease which has a mortality age distribution profile indistinguishable from standard mortality. Unlike influenza, which disproportionately impacts the young, in terms of threat to life, COVID 19 was and is a wholly unremarkable illness.
Were it not for political theatrics and mainstream media propaganda, which began in China, no one, outside of the medical profession and COVID 19 sufferers, would have remarked on this disease.
The illusion of overwhelmed health services was created by massively reducing their capacity and staffing levels while simultaneously reorienting healthcare to treat everyone who presented with a respiratory illness as viral plague carriers.
In reality the pseudopandemic saw unusually low levels of hospital bed occupancy. However, due to the additional policies and procedures heaped upon them, healthcare services were thrown into into disarray.
This was combined with the use of tests, incapable of diagnosing anything, as proof of a COVID 19 “case.” This enabled governments around the world to make absurd claims about the threat level. They relied upon fake science and junk data throughout. As symptomatic illness and resultant disease mortality was relatively low, they asserted that people without any signs of illness (the asymptomatic) were spreading the contagion.
This was abject nonsense. There was no evidence that the asymptomatic infected anyone. Those at risk of severe illness were the small minority of people who already had serious comorbidities, often due to their age.
The mass house arrests (lockdowns) and other measures, such as wearing face masks, were then used to increase the infection risk, to reduce broad levels of population immunity and give the false impression of an extraordinary public health threat. The removal of health care for every other disease, including cancer and ischaemic heart disease, coupled with the health costs of increasing deprivation and immunosuppressant policies, were then exploited to bolster the illusion of a pandemic.
This does not mean that COVID 19 didn’t kill people but those who died of the disease were a small percentage of the total numbers claimed. COVID 19 had no discernible impact upon all-cause mortality. The increase above one of the lowest ever 5 year mortality averages was mainly caused by the withdrawal of health services, as increasing numbers of people died in their own homes or in overburdened care settings, without receiving normal medical attention.
Despite these efforts, mortality in 2020 was still only the 9th highest in the first two decades of the 21st century and one of the lowest age-standardised mortality rates in the last 50 years.
COVID 19 presented virtually no risk to those of working age an none at all to the young. There was no evidence that children were either at or presented any risk. The school closures were part of the pseudopandemic psy-op. They gave the misleading impression of an emergency and provided fraudulent justification for vaccinating children.
The pseudopandemic was planned to lead to the complete transformation of our culture and society. It has irrevocably changed our relationship with governments, has caused catastrophic economic disruption, shutdown global trade and saw millions become reliant on government subsidies. The pseudopandemic was the opening salvo in a global coup d’état.
The new pseudopandemic biosecurity apparatus is designed to control our behaviour as we are forced through a global transformation. Those behind the pseudopandemic intend to change the International Monetary and Financial System (IMFS) and establish global governance in the shape of technocracy. Technocracy is a neofeudal, totalitarian system based upon communitarian principles.
We will be offered the illusion of participatory democracy through our required participation and belief in “civil society.” Civil society will be a “stakeholder” in the Technocracy. However, civil society will only be allowed to pursue polices set at the global level.
Applied psychology was used throughout the pseudopandemic to fix our “choice environment.” We were conditioned to believe that following the rules was the responsible and moral choice. In reality our behaviour was being deliberately altered to ensure our compliance with the diktats of the biosecurity state, preparing society for the transition to technocracy.
The new global IMFS is built upon carbon trading and a $120 trillion carbon bond market is currently under construction. Assets are being defined in terms of their Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics which rate investments depending upon their environmental, social and governance (ESG) score.
These metrics have been established by the World Economic Forum working in partnership with the central banks, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and other stakeholder capitalists, such as the investment firm BlackRock.
The global system of central banks, headed by the BIS, are “going direct” by directly funding government policy. They have linked monetary policy to fiscal policy which means ultimate control of all government spending by the BIS. The Financial Services Board of the BIS regulates ESG’s and determines the value of sustainable financial assets.
In this way, the global technocracy will facilitate the continuation of crony capitalism, as only the right stakeholders will receive the approved ESG rating. Those who don’t will not be able to raise the investment capital they need and will be forced out of business.
“Going direct” began before the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a global pandemic. All of the economic and financial responses to the pseudopandemic, such as furlough and business support packages, were agreed as part of the “going direct” plan in August 2019.
The so called economic stimulus of Quantitative Easing (QE) is a fraud. It is based upon the unbridled monetisation of debt on an unprecedented scale. Going direct means that the toxic junk assets of the financial institutions have been taken on to the balance sheets of the central banks. Thus creating unimaginable levels of public debt that can never, and will never, be repaid.
The QE money, created out of absolutely nothing, has been pumped into the financial markets for the continued enrichment of the right stakeholders. The vast expansion of the money supply will shortly lead to hyperinflation. The mass unemployment that will occur as a result of the austerity, caused both by the staggering levels of debt and our transition to a new IMFS, will create stagflation.
The new net zero carbon economy will mean permanent austerity for the majority. The Technate will provide a universal basic income (UBI), or some variation of the concept, to be paid in Central Bank Digital Currency (CDBC). This will mean that no one will have their own money, other than the chosen stakeholders, as all transactions will be monitored and controlled by the central banks.
Those who oppose the neofeudal authority of the corporate, stakeholder Technate and refuse to comply with the imposition of biosecurity obligations will have their CBDC restricted or switched off. The pseudopandemic has established the framework of the biosecurity state that will control all our lives. The vaccine passports are the gateway to full biometric identity for every citizen in the new normal Technate.
We will be required to show our biometric ID on demand. Access to goods and services will be monitored and restricted as desired by the Technate. UBI and CBDC combined with biometric ID will ensure our compliance. The central planners of the Technate will oversee the AI controlled system which will automatically limit the freedoms of those who defy the rules decreed by the stakeholder capitalists.
Money, as we currently understand it, is no longer required by those behind the pseudopandemic. The net zero carbon economy enables them to seize control of the “global commons.” This means that they will have dominion over all of the Earth’s natural resources. All land, the oceans, the atmosphere and even space is being converted into assets via Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics.
Not only will we have no money of our own, we will be unable to access the resources we need to survive without permission from the Technate. While this system of technocracy has been planned for more than a century, it was the financial collapse in 2008 that led the pseudopandemic planners to increase the pace of transformation. The monetisation of debt had long been the source of their authority but this IMFS was unsustainable. As all money was debt, its eventual collapse was inevitable. It passed the point of no return in 2008.
With their going direct plan in place, the stage was set for the pseudopandemic. SARS-CoV-2 provided the perfect opportunity and the core conspirators behind the pseudopandemic had trained extensively in readiness for the operation. We were then barraged by a mainstream media propaganda campaign and military’s information warfare units were deployed to control our “choice environment.”
Scientific and medical doubts were censored as the suspension of normal democratic processes was exploited to introduce the biosecurity state. Laws were passed to allow government to commit any crime it wished in pursuit of stakeholder capitalist sustainable development goals. Laws to end the right of protest and censor free speech are moving unopposed through the legislature as national governments, who are no more than stakeholder partners within the new normal technocracy, prepare us for the coming Technate.
For the core conspirators of the pseudopandemic this is the realisation of their long held dream of global governance. They are steeped in the mythology of eugenics and population control. Once they have total control of the global commons they will no longer need us as consumers and are intent upon significant population reduction.
As insane as this all sounds the evidence, explored in pseudopandemic, is overwhelming. We are facing global neofeudalism unless we act now. Herein lies our hope.
The core conspirators have no real power. It is an illusion that they are desperate to maintain. They invest billions in propaganda, hybrid warfare and security systems because they are terrified that we will realise what they are doing.
Their plan can only succeed if we believe their lies and comply with their orders. If we don’t there is nothing they can do about it.
We can reset the world.
Pseudopandemic, by Iain Davis, is available both in kindle and paperback, from Amazon and other sellers. Or you can subscribe to In This Together for a free copy.
Human trafficking is certainly one of the most monstrous mass criminal activities ever undertaken by other humans (although calling them “humans” is a bit of a stretch). And yet, there’s a special kind of this deeply repulsive crime that pushes it to diabolical proportions – child trafficking. Underage kids, particularly those who were abandoned, sold or have very poor/abusive family backgrounds, are by far the most vulnerable group. The depraved criminals who engage in such illicit activities specifically target unfortunate children and given there are millions of them all around the globe, particularly in war-torn areas, the “recruitment pool” is effectively endless. Unfortunately, the demand on the black market also seems to be constant and growing, making it a very lucrative and appealing prospect for criminals. … continue
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With their going direct plan in place, the stage was set for the pseudopandemic. SARS-CoV-2 provided the perfect opportunity and the core conspirators behind the pseudopandemic had trained extensively in readiness for the operation. We were then barraged by a mainstream media propaganda campaign and military’s information warfare units were deployed to control our “choice environment.”
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