2020 was GloboCap Year Zero. The year when the global capitalist ruling classes did away with the illusion of democracy and reminded everyone who is actually in charge, and exactly what happens when anyone challenges them.
In the relatively short span of the last ten months, societies throughout the world have been transformed beyond recognition. Constitutional rights have been suspended. Protest has been banned. Dissent is being censored. Government officials are issuing edicts restricting the most basic aspects of our lives … where we can go, when we can go there, how long we are allowed to spend there, how many friends we are allowed to meet there, whether and when we can spend time with our families, what we are allowed to say to each other, who we can have sex with, where we have to stand, how we are allowed to eat and drink, etc. The list goes on and on.
The authorities have assumed control of the most intimate aspects of our daily lives. We are being managed like inmates in a prison, told when to eat, sleep, exercise, granted privileges for good behavior, punished for the slightest infractions of an ever-changing set of arbitrary rules, forced to wear identical, demeaning uniforms (albeit only on our faces), and otherwise relentlessly bullied, abused, and humiliated to keep us compliant.
None of which is accidental, or has anything to do with any actual virus, or any other type of public health threat. Yes, before some of you go ballistic, I do believe there is an actual virus, which a number of people have actually died from, or which at least has contributed to their deaths … butthere is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any authentic public health threat that remotely justifies the totalitarian emergency measures we are being subjected to or the damage that is being done to society. Whatever you believe about the so-called “pandemic,” it really is as simple as that. Even if one accepts the official “science,” you do not transform the entire planet into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare in response to a health threat of this nature.
The notion is quite literally insane.
GloboCap is not insane, however. They know exactly what they are doing … which is teaching us a lesson, a lesson about power. A lesson about who has it and who doesn’t. For students of history it’s a familiar lesson, a standard in the repertoire of empires, not to mention the repertoire of penal institutions.
The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We Fucking Want.” The point of the lesson is self-explanatory. The USA taught the world this lesson when it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. GloboCap (and the US military) taught it again when they invaded Iraq and destabilized the entire Greater Middle East. It is regularly taught in penitentiaries when the prisoners start to get a little too unruly and remember that they outnumber the guards. That’s where the “lockdown” concept originated. It isn’t medical terminology. It is penal institution terminology.
As we have been experiencing throughout 2020, the global capitalist ruling classes have no qualms about teaching us this lesson. It’s just that they would rather not to have to unless it’s absolutely necessary. They would prefer that we believe we are living in “democracies,” governed by the “rule of law,” where everyone is “free,” and so on. It’s much more efficient and much less dangerous than having to repeatedly remind us that they can take away our “democratic rights” in a heartbeat, unleash armed goon squads to enforce their edicts, and otherwise control us with sheer brute force.
People who have spent time in prison, or who have lived in openly totalitarian societies, are familiar with being ruled by brute force. Most Westerners are not, so it has come as a shock. The majority of them still can’t process it. They cannot see what is staring them in the face. They cannot see it because they can’t afford to see it. If they did, it would completely short-circuit their brains. They would suffer massive psychotic breakdowns, and become entirely unable to function, so their psyches will not allow them to see it.
Others, who see it, can’t quite accept the simplicity of it (i.e., the lesson being taught), so they are proposing assorted complicated theories about what it is and who is behind it … the Great Reset, China, the Illuminati, Transhumanism, Satanism, Communism, whatever. Some of these theories are at least partially accurate. Others are utter bull-goose lunacy.
They all obscure the basic point of the lesson.
The point of the lesson is that GloboCap — the entire global-capitalist system acting as a single global entity — can, virtually any time it wants, suspend the Simulation of Democracy, and crack down on us with despotic force. It can (a) declare a “global pandemic” or some other type of “global emergency,” (b) cancel our so-called “rights,” (c) have the corporate media bombard us with lies and propaganda for months, (d) have the Internet companies censor any and all forms of dissent and evidence challenging said propaganda, (e) implement all kinds of new intrusive “safety” and “security” measures, including but not limited to the physical violation of our bodies … and so on. I think you get the picture. (The violation of our bodies is important, which is why they love “cavity searches” in prison, and why the torture-happy troops at Abu Ghraib were obsessed with sexually violating their victims.)
And the “pandemic” is only one part of the lesson. The other part is being forced to watch (or permitted to watch, depending on your perspective) as GloboCap makes an example of Trump, as they made examples of Corbyn and Sanders, as they made examples of Saddam and Gaddafi, and other “uncooperative” foreign leaders, as they will make an example of any political figurehead that challenges their power. It does not matter to GloboCap that such political figureheads pose no real threat. The people who rally around them do. Nor does it make the slightest difference whether these figureheads or the folks who support them identify as “left” or “right.” GloboCap could not possibly care less. The figureheads are just the teaching materials in the lesson that they are teaching us.
And now, here we are, at the end of the lesson … not the end of the War on Populism, just the end of this critical Trumpian part of it. Once the usurper has been driven out of office, the War on Populism will be folded back into the War on Terror, or the War on Extremism, or whatever GloboCap decides to call it … the name hardly matters. It is all the same war.
Whatever they decide to call it, this is GloboCap Year Zero. It is time for reeducation, my friends. It is time for cultural revolution. No, not communist cultural revolution … global capitalist cultural revolution. It is time to flush the aberration of the last four years down the memory hole, and implement global “New Normal” Gleichschaltung, to make sure that this never happens again.
Oh, yes, things are about to get “normal.” Extremely “normal.” Suffocatingly “normal.” Unimaginably oppressively “normal.” And I’m not just talking about the “Coronavirus measures.” This has been in the works for the last four years.
Remember, back in 2016, when everyone was so concerned about “normality,” and how Trump was “not normal,” and must never be “normalized?” Well, here we are. This is it. This is the part where GloboCap restores “normality,” a “new normality,” a pathologized-totalitarian “normality,” a “normality” which tolerates no dissent and demands complete ideological conformity.
From now on, when the GloboCap Intelligence Community and their mouthpieces in the corporate media tell you something happened, that thing will have happened, exactly as they say it happened, regardless of whether it actually happened, and anyone who says it didn’t will be labeled an “extremist,” a “conspiracy theorist,” a “denier,” or some other meaningless epithet. Such un-persons will be dealt with ruthlessly. They will be censored, deplatformed, demonetized, decertified, rendered unemployable, banned from traveling, socially ostracized, hospitalized, imprisoned, or otherwise erased from “normal” society.
You will do what you are told. You will not ask questions. You will believe whatever they tell you to believe. You will believe it, not because it makes any sense, but simply because you have been ordered to believe it. They aren’t trying to trick or deceive anybody. They know their lies don’t make any sense. And they know that you know they don’t make any sense. They want you to know it. That is the point. They want you to know they are lying to you, manipulating you, openly mocking you, and that they can say and do anything they want to you, and you will go along with it, no matter how insane.
If they order you to take a fucking vaccine, you will not ask what is in the vaccine, or start whining about the “potential side effects.” You will shut up and take the fucking vaccine. If they tell you to put a mask on your kid, you will put a fucking mask on your fucking kid. You will not go digging up Danish studies proving the pointlessness of putting masks on kids. If they tell you the Russians rigged the election, then the Russians rigged the fucking election. And, if, four years later, they turn around and tell you that rigging an election is impossible, then rigging an election is fucking impossible. It isn’t an invitation to debate. It is a GloboCap-verified fact-checked fact. You will stand (or kneel) in your designated, color-coded, social-distancing box and repeat this verified fact-checked fact, over and over, like a fucking parrot, or they will discover some new mutant variant of virus and put you back in fucking “lockdown.” They will do this until you get your mind right, or you can live the rest of your life on Zoom, or tweeting content that no one but the Internet censors will ever see into the digital void in your fucking pajamas. The choice is yours … it’s is all up to you!
Or … I don’t know, this is just a crazy idea, you could turn off the fucking corporate media, do a little fucking research on your own, grow a backbone and some fucking guts, and join the rest of us “dangerous extremists” who are trying to fight back against the New Normal. Yes, it will cost you, and we probably won’t win, but you won’t have to torture your kids on airplanes, and you don’t even have to “deny” the virus!
That’s it … my last column of 2020. Happy totalitarian holidays!
Haiti is near the United States with fertile land and cheap labor that American business tycoons find attractive. In November 1914, the US Navy Department drew up a proposal called: “Plan for Landing and Occupying the City of Port-au-Prince” that outlined measures to take control of the capital of Haiti; and also set forth an official public rationale to invade: “solely for the establishment of law and order.” That rationale sufficed for immediate intervention, which American President Woodrow Wilson soon ordered without consulting Congress. With European powers busy with World War I, the American empire dispatched US Marines to invade Haiti and seize control. The American colonization of Haiti succeeded, but at the cost of thousands of Haitian lives while military records list 146 US Marines killed during their 19-year occupation.
An advisor to the Iraqi parliament’s foreign affairs committee says the Baghdad government is planning to lodge an international lawsuit against the United States for violating the country’s sovereignty and using internationally-banned munitions in civilian areas.
Hatif al-Rikabi told Arabic-language al-Maalomah news agency in an interview that Iraq is going to file the case at Swedish and German courts over appalling crimes that Washington has perpetrated in the Arab country, including the use of depleted uranium weapons.
Rikabi went on to say that such a measure will ensure international accountability for the US, and will not give it the chance to procrastinate the case.
“Hundreds of cancer cases are recorded every month [in Iraq], and the figure is clear evidence for the extent of the damage that US forces have committed,” he stated, calling on the Iraqi Health Ministry to “release facts and figures about casualties caused by US bombing campaigns.”
US-led wars in Iraq have left behind hundreds of tons of depleted uranium munitions and other toxic wastes.
Official Iraqi government statistics show that, prior to the outbreak of the First Persian Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people. By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000 people, and, by 2005, it had doubled to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. Current estimates show the increasing trend continuing.
Contamination from depleted uranium munitions and other military-related pollution is suspected of causing a sharp rise in congenital birth defects, cancer cases, and other illnesses throughout much of Iraq.
Many doctors and scientists maintain that recent emergence of diseases that were not previously seen in Iraq, such as new illnesses in the kidney, lungs, and liver, as well as total immune system collapse are connected to public exposure to war contaminants.
Depleted uranium (DU) contamination may also be related to the substantial rise in leukemia, renal, and anemia cases, especially among children.
Moreover, there has also been a dramatic jump in miscarriages and premature births among Iraqi women, particularly in areas where heavy US military operations occurred, such as Fallujah.
During 2004, the US military carried out two massive military sieges of the city of Fallujah, using large quantities of DU ammunition, as well as white phosphorous.
The Rambo of the State Department is leaving. James Jeffrey, the outgoing Syria envoy, boasts about his achievements in a recent candid interview with Al-Monitor which with no sense of shame opens up to public gaze the cynicism, callousness and sheer power-crazedness of US policy on Syria, conducted as though it were a video game or a game of Monopoly.
US Special Representative for Syria Engagement James Jeffrey at Syria-Turkish border (March 2020 Syriac Press)
Jeffrey makes no bones about it. It’s not about ending the Syrian conflict, it’s about prolonging it:
Basically, first and foremost is denial of the [Assad regime] getting military victory… And of course, we’ve ratcheted up the isolation and sanctions pressure on Assad, we’ve held the line on no reconstruction assistance, and the country’s desperate for it. You see what’s happened to the Syrian pound, you see what’s happened to the entire economy. So, it’s been a very effective strategy….
The point is, this [preserving the SDF] is our plan B. We have a plan A. Plan A doesn’t answer ‘how does this all end?’ Plan A’s whole purpose [is] to ensure that the Russians and Assad and the Iranians don’t have a happy answer to how this all ends, and maybe that will someday get them to accept Plan B. Meanwhile, they’re tied up in knots. They don’t see Syria as a victory.
So, we don’t care a jot if Syrian people are suffering greatly, that’s part of the plan. We are happy to prolong the suffering indefinitely as long as the Russians, Iranians and Assad can’t claim victory.
Plan B, by the way, requires implementation on US terms of UN resolution 2254, which would amount effectively to a suicide note for Assad as under those terms it would allow millions of Syrians outside Syria to vote and thus decide the fate of those still inside.
At no point in this lengthy interview does Jeffrey even mention the Syrian people. The only Syrians (condescendingly) mentioned are the Kurdish militia SDF:
The SDF, they’re clean kids. I’ve gotten to know them and their leadership very, very well. They really are phenomenal, by Middle Eastern standards. They’re a highly disciplined Marxist offshoot of the PKK.
So, let’s get this straight: the US is supporting a bunch of Marxists in North East Syria to stop Assad getting the much needed oil for the Syrian people and is indifferent to the fact that Idlib is controlled by a bunch of Islamist fanatics?
Jeffrey in fact does not say a single word about the character of the opposition to acknowledge their Islamist extremism, or about the likely consequences if Plan B were to succeed and deliver the keys of Damascus to Islamist radicals. In this game – and a game is clearly how callous power-crazed Washington policy makers see it – only preventing victory by the other side matters.
Trump emerges as relatively sensible, which is saying a lot.
The president was uncomfortable with our presence in Syria. He was very uncomfortable with what he saw as endless wars. … Trump kept asking, “Why do we have troops there?”
The reason that Trump pulled the troops out was I think because he was just tired of us having to come up with all these explanations for why we’re in there.
We at the State Department never provided any troop numbers to the president. That’s not our job. We didn’t try to deceive him. He kept on publicly saying numbers that were way below what the actual numbers were, so in talking to the media and talking to Congress, we had to be very careful and dodge around. But the Syria mission is the gift that keeps on giving. We and the SDF are still the dominant force in [northeast] Syria.
‘Not our job?’ The deviousness of this is breathtaking. The US State Department deliberately withheld crucial information from the President in order to get their way on keeping their counters on the Monopoly board which for them is Syria.
It’s no surprise that someone of Jeffrey’s calibre boasts about helping Israel to pulverise Syria:
We then also had the Israeli air campaign. The US only began supporting that when I came on board. I went out there and we saw Prime Minister Netanyahu and others, and they thought that they were not being supported enough by the US military, and not by intelligence. And there was a big battle within the US government, and we won the battle.
The argument [against supporting Israel’s campaign] was, again, this obsession with the counterterrorism mission. People didn’t want to screw with it, either by worrying about Turkey or diverting resources to allow the Israelis to muck around in Syria, as maybe that will lead to some blow-back to our forces. It hasn’t.
All that matters is ‘stabilizing the situation’ to US advantage:
So that was how we put together an integrated Syria policy that nestled under the overall Iran policy. The result has been relative success because we — with a lot of help from the Turks in particular — have managed to stabilize the situation.
The only change on the ground to the benefit of Assad has been southern Idlib in two and a half years of attacks. They are highly unlikely to continue, given the strength of the Turkish army there and the magnitude of the defeat of the Syrian army by the Turks back in March.
It would be hard to disagree with that pessimistic analysis. As long as the US puts stymieing its adversaries ahead of any genuine concern for the suffering and prospects of the Syrian people, including the millions of refugees condemned by this policy to indefinite exile, no end is in sight.
It’s worth bearing in mind that Jeffrey worked with Obama long before he worked with Trump. Anybody who expects a Biden administration to follow a different path on Syria must be seriously deluded, unless by ‘different’ is meant an even more reckless, activist, interventionist policy that goes beyond ‘stabilising’.
And there is no Trump there now to apply the brakes.
***
Author Peter Ford is the former British Ambassador to Syria (2003-2006) and Bahrain (1999-2002).
For the past 30 years, I’ve written about the dangers and ineffectiveness of vaccines, including the new COVID vaccine.
I’ve written about cutting edge nanotechnology research and its use, in vaccines, as implanted sensors, which would surveil body and brain processes in real time, and also send instructions to the body and brain.
I’ve written about the absurdity of basic vaccine theory; the unproven notion that the body needs a “rehearsal,” in order to prepare for the “real disease.”
I’ve written about how vaccines, in suppressing the immune system and its full inflammatory response, also suppress the outward signs of diseases, thus presenting a false picture of conquest of those diseases—when in fact the overall health and vitality of the body are reduced.
I’ve written about how criminal word games are played. For example, vaccines causing brain damage in children are shunted into a category called “autism”; and then, researchers claim autism is a separate disease with a genetic cause.
I’ve written about the destructive effects of a hundred years of wall-to-wall promotion of the one-disease-one-germ lie.
I’ve written about DNA vaccines permanently altering the genetic makeup of the recipients.
I’ve written about vaccines used to cause miscarriages in women when they later become pregnant.
But this article is about something else.
It’s about the dawn of a new pharmaceutical era, which was born the moment the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID vaccine was approved.
This marks the first time RNA technology deployed in a drug or vaccine has been dragged across the finish line and conditionally certified as safe and effective—which it is not.
But no matter. Bill Gates and other elite planners and money titans have won what for them is a great victory.
Because RNA vaccines are much faster, easier, and cheaper to produce than traditional vaccines.
Instead of years in the making, they can be developed in months.
And this means…bonanza.
Whole lists of so-called diseases—West Nile, Bird Flu, Zika, Swine Flu, SARS—can now be brought to soaring profits by making RNA vaccines to “prevent them.”
And not only that, a whole parade of older vaccines—hepatitis, measles, seasonal flu, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, etc., can be recast with brand new updated RNA versions.
Researchers can pretend to discover a whole slew of “new viruses” that require RNA vaccines jammed into the marketplace in record time.
Don’t forget the domesticated animal market; RNA vaccines for every conceivable invented purpose sold to big corporations that operate cattle, pig, chicken, and fish “factories.”
We’re talking about trillions and trillions of dollars. More dollars than Amazon dreams of.
This is why the Pfizer RNA COVID vaccine is first in line, and why the Moderna RNA vaccine is next.
Quick, easy, and cheap RNA technology will mean endless numbers of new vaccines. And therefore, a day will come when every person routinely takes a DNA test to establish a profile, and every profile will be fitted to customized sets of vaccines.
In the same way that cosmetics are designed for every shade of skin tone, vaccines will be designed for every DNA profile.
The whole apparatus will be a highly dangerous and ineffective hoax, but what else is new? Vaccines have been a hoax since the beginning. We’re talking about MONEY.
So much money, pharmaceutical companies will be bankrolled directly by governments, after a currency reset makes new money invented out of thin air replace the old “thin air money.” Patients will receive all these vaccines “for free.” Governments will pay the vaccines companies.
UNLESS THESE LUNATICS ARE STOPPED.
Unless the people rebel and refuse the vaccines—no matter what.
If you think the futuristic vaccine-world I’m describing could only be a fantasy, what would masks, distancing, lockdowns, and planetary destruction of national economies have been called 15 years ago?
Think of past vaccines as giant clunky IBM computers sitting in empty rooms…and future vaccines as cell phones carried by billions of people.
Because RNA technology opened the door to faster, easier, and cheaper production.
What remains the same—past, present, and future—is FREEDOM.
The natural right to say NO. And mean it, come hell or high water.
CODA: What could be more awkward and foolish than the Pfizer regimen for their COVID vaccine? A first shot followed by a later booster.
I don’t care how many apps and reminders are built into this system. The fall-off from the first shot to the second will be enormous. People will opt out, after they experience severe adverse effects from the initial injection. They’ll forget to show up according to the prescribed schedule.
As I’ve detailed, the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials of their vaccines were only designed to prevent mild illness—a cough, or chills and fever. Not serious illness. Not hospitalization. Not death. And cough, chills, and fever cure themselves. No need for a vaccine.
But none of this makes any difference to the vaccine kings. They and their public health colleagues can easily rig COVID case numbers in a downward direction—and then claim the success of the vaccine is the reason and the cause.
No, commercially speaking, the point of gaining approval of the vaccine was planting the flag of RNA technology in the marketplace.
This is the equivalent of building the first railroad tracks, digging the first big canals, flying the first air freight carriers.
New markets, new products, new customers, new money.
Marry these with a vast weakening of human vitality and a strengthening of control over populations, through vaccination, and you have the fascist Holy Grail.
Regardless of what happens with vaccines and Covid-19, debt and energy–inextricably bound as debt funds consumption– will destabilize the global economy in a self-reinforcing feedback.
Back in the early days of the oil industry (1880s and 1890s), the product that the industry could sell at a profit was kerosene for lighting and heating. Since there was no automobile industry yet, gasoline was a waste product that was dumped into streams.
Why couldn’t the refiners produce only kerosene? Why did they end up with “worthless” gasoline?
The answer is a barrel of oil produces a variety of products. While there is some “wiggle room” to produce more diesel and less gasoline, etc., it isn’t possible to turn a barrel of oil into only one product.
John D. Rockefeller became very wealthy by cornering much of the oil market in the 19th century. But he didn’t become fabulously wealthy until the 20th century, when the rise of automobiles created a market for all the “waste” gasoline.
Rockefeller became super-wealthy when all the products of each barrel of oil could be sold at a premium rather than just a portion of the products.
This reality has been forgotten: the price that can be fetched for a barrel of oil depends on the demand for all the products, not just a few of the products.
Those demanding an all-electric auto-truck fleet as a “green” alternative will re-create the dilemma of what to do with the “waste” gasoline. The world will still want fuel for all those container ships bringing all the goodies of a consumerist society, all those cruise ships visiting ports of call, jet fuel for all those exotic vacations enabled by 550 mile-per-hour aircraft, and oil-based lubricants, plastics and petro-chemicals, and so oil will still be pumped and refined, and almost half of it will be gasoline.
We can either use it or throw it away but we can’t magically turn a barrel of oil into only one product.
This is a topic worthy of your understanding, so grab a vat of your favorite beverage and turn off all distractions.
Longtime readers know I’ve focused on energy-oil markets for 15 years. Despite ups and downs in price, the oil market has been remarkably stable.
This stability is about to transition to chronic instability: wild swings in price, shortages, and social chaos in both producing and consumer nations.
Let’s start with the most basic dynamics in the cost of producing oil, refining it and selling the products at a profit.
1. As a general rule, a barrel of oil (42 gallons, 196 liters) yields a range of heavier and lighter products.
The price the producers can charge for each product–gasoline, diesel fuel, heating oil, jet fuel, propane, etc.– depends on demand for each product.
If the price for one product falls drastically, the oil producer can’t increase the price of some other product to compensate for the loss of income unless demand for the other products will support higher prices.
Consider the huge decline in demand for jet fuel as a result of global air travel dropping in the pandemic. Oil producers can’t just raise the price of gasoline to compensate for the drop in the price of jet fuel.
If gasoline demand continues declining (due to fewer commutes, etc.) then producers can’t charge more for diesel to make up the drop in the price of gasoline.
In other words, there has to be strong demand for all the products in a barrel of oil for producers to get enough money to extract, refine and transport the products globally.
Unlike the old days when producers could afford to throw away some petroleum products because their costs of extraction and refining were so low, now producers need more than $45/barrel just to break even.
This is what I’m calling Oil Paradox #1: if demand for any of the primary products is weak, producers can’t afford to continue extracting and refining oil, even if there is strong demand for some products.
2. Transportation is the primary use of oil: 68% of all petroleum products are consumed by transport, 26% by industrial and 6% residential/commercial. (These are U.S. statistics, but the global demand is roughly the same.)
If demand for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel remains weak, the value of each barrel of oil will remain below break-even, even if the industrial need for some products (lubricants, etc.) is strong because these industrial products are essential to the world’s industrial economy.
3. Much of the consumption of the past 20 years was funded by debt, which is now $277 trillion globally and accelerating. Humanity has borrowed and spent trillions on consumption, and what remains is the interest due on the debt.
This interest constrains future borrowing. The “solution” to interest is inflation, which devalues the interest due. But it also devalues the purchasing power of the currencies being inflated, and so everyone’s money buys fewer goods and services.
This is the Debt-Inflation Paradox: the more interest you owe, the greater your need to inflate away the burden of interest. But inflation destroys the purchasing power of money, impoverishing everyone who needs the money to live.
There is no way out of this paradox: either the global economy defaults on its debts, destroying trillions in phantom wealth, or its currencies lose value, impoverishing everyone.
Since so much consumption is funded by debt, any reduction in borrowing, no matter how modest, will destroy demand for petroleum, triggering the Oil Paradox (producers can’t charge enough to justify pumping and refining oil).
4. The pandemic has accelerated consumption trends that reduce demand for fuels. Remote work is here to stay, regardless of what you may read. Corporations can no longer afford to staff centralized offices in costly cities. Making everyone commute to offices is no longer financially viable.
Corporate travel is also no longer financially viable. As profit margins fall, the luxury of jetting to physical meetings is no longer justifiable except for senior management– a few dozen people, not hundreds or thousands.
Tourism thrived in an economy of easy, low-cost credit and secure incomes. Lenders can no longer afford to lend to those with poor credit–notice how credit card limits have been drastically reduced–and incomes are no longer secure.
If the pandemic were the only issue, it would be possible to see a return to 2019-level consumption. But unsustainable debt loads will only get more unsustainable, so much of the consumption that was funded by debt will go away and not come back: the interest on all the existing debt remains to be paid, one way or another.
This decline in consumption has lowered the price of oil far below break-even for most producers. As the article below explains, there are two break-even prices for petroleum: one to get it out of the ground, refine it and deliver it to market, and the second for the social costs the oil pays for.
This is the famous Oil Curse: nations with oil reserves end up depending on selling oil for virtually all their revenues because it doesn’t make sense to invest in less reliable, less profitable sectors.
As a result, Saudi Arabia can pump the oil for $45/barrel, but it needs a price of $85/barrel to pay all the social welfare costs it has promised its people.
If you glance at the charts in this article, you’ll see the full break-even price of oil for OPEC nations is extremely high.
This generates Oil Paradox #2: low demand/low prices for oil may be financially viable in terms of extracting the oil, but the societies that depend on vast oil revenues will unravel if oil prices stay low, and that will disrupt production.
Roughly half of U.S. petroleum production is from tight shale and other unconventional oil sources. Many of these wells are no longer profitable and will be shut down once the producers’ credit lines dry up. (This is already happening, triggering mass bankruptcies in the fracking industry).
The oil producing nations are basically surviving on $40/barrel oil by borrowing against future revenues. This is a dangerous game because if oil prices remain low their credit lines will eventually be withdrawn.
The oil producers need supply to fall drastically enough to raise prices back to the $80/barrel or higher level. But nobody can afford to cut their own production enough to reduce global supply enough to matter.
This introduces Oil Paradox #3: should petroleum producers succeed to slashing supply so oil goes to $85/barrel, the higher cost will push the fragile consuming nations into recession or depression, which will slash demand even more, which will require even deeper production cuts to maintain prices.
If we put all these paradoxes together, we see that oil markets are now intrinsically unstable and cannot return to stability because the mix of high break-even prices, declining demand and the end of debt-funded consumption cannot be resolved: high prices crush demand, low prices crush producers, and debt is crushing both consumers and producers.
Much hope is being placed on so-called renewable energy, most of which is not renewable but replaceable, as I’ve learned from Nate Hagens. A forest is renewable, a solar panel or windmill must be replaced every 20 years at enormous expense.
Right now all alternative energy sources–wind, solar, etc.– generate no more than 4% of global energy consumption. (see chart below) Despite hundreds of billions of dollars invested, all the alternative energy sources are a tiny fraction of global consumption, and their supposed fantastic rates of growth is revealed on this chart as inconsequential: all this new energy doesn’t replace a single drop of oil, it simply fuels additional consumption.
It will take a monumental investment and many years to get this to 10%. The reality is the vast majority of the global economy still depends entirely on petroleum for transport and industrial essentials such as lubricants.
Petroleum is now an unstable system and for all the reasons outlined above it cannot be restored to stability: just as time is a one-way arrow, so is the loss of stability.
What can we expect? Unstable systems are prone to wild swings to extremes and unpredictable collapses. So we may see collapses in the price of oil as we saw in March, and then rapid ascents in price above $100/barrel, which then crash once demand declines.
This unpredictability complicates projections and generates uncertainty. This is the final paradox (#4): the unpredictability of oil markets is itself a destabilizing force. Decisions on future production and consumption cannot be long-term, and this constrains investment in future production.
Regardless of what happens with vaccines and Covid-19, debt and energy–inextricably bound as debt funds consumption– will destabilize the global economy in a self-reinforcing feedback.
The UK and Russia have begun their mass COVID vaccination campaigns and it won’t be long from now until the experimental shot is deployed in your town.
Meanwhile Canada, the US and Mexico are among a growing list of countries who have approved the Pfizer vaccine.
In this report, we examine some of the possible adverse events the CDC and FDA will be looking for, according to the agencies’ own virtual meeting on surveillance and vaccine safety held in October 2020.
We will also take a look at some of the adverse events experienced by the volunteers who participated in the trials according to an FDA review of the trial, as well as those who experienced adverse events outside of the trials.
There is a revolution coming in geothermal energy. How big it will be and how fast it can grow remains to be seen, but the revolutionary technology is here now.
We already know about the new technology by name — fracking. But that is fracking for oil and gas, the energy revolution we are already living on, that the greens hate. The geothermal revolution is fracking for heat.
Here is the technical bit. The Earth’s crust we live on is just a thin film wrapped around an 8,000 mile diameter molten ball. In some places under the deep ocean this crust is estimated to be just 3 miles or so thick. It is somewhat thicker under the continents but the point remains; it gets hot fast as you drill down into the crust. That heat is geothermal energy.
We have used geothermal energy to make electricity for a long time, but only in tiny amounts. California does the most in the US and its entire generating capacity is about the size of a single large coal fired power plant, about 3000 MW. The whole world is said to just have a minuscule 15,000 MW.
The obstacle to doing more has been that useful energy sources are hard to find. You need a confined reservoir of hot water in fractured crust rock. The reservoir size, location and temperature of the water are all determined by nature. Suitable sites have been very few.
Now all of this has suddenly changed. With hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) we can make these geothermal reservoirs where we want them, the size we want them, and where the heat is the temperature we want, especially very hot. This includes the so-called “supercritical” water at 400 degrees C, which is now used in the most advanced power-plants.
It is like the difference between living on wild edibles, if and when you find them, and farming. Fracking for heat is literally a whole new world. Of course there are still pesky things like cost, feasibility and regulation, but the principal is clear; the technology of revolutionary thermal energy has arrived.
The greens are in a bit of a bind here. Geothermal juice looks like the ideal renewable. Unlike wind and solar, geothermal electricity is constantly available and it is not a land hog. But the greens despise fracking and have labeled it evil. Some States and even whole Countries have banned fracking for oil and gas. Whether this applies to fracking for heat remains to be seen, since the fracturing processes are rather different.
How this dichotomy will play out is anybody’s guess. As they say here in the mountains: “What goes around, comes around.” That is, don’t start trouble lest it bite you someplace soft. The greens desperately need geothermal fracking, they just don’t know it yet.
The US Energy Department has a Geothermal Technologies Office and they are understandably optimistic. They project something like 60,000 MW of advanced geothermal juice capacity by 2050. Mind you this is still small, given that our present generating capacity is around a million MW.
The amount of geothermal generating capacity installed by 2050 could be much larger, for one simple reason. It is probably the only way to make wind and solar work. A number of analysts, including me, have pointed out that electricity storage on the scale needed to power America with intermittent renewables is impossible. But many States have mandated a high level of renewables, even 100% in extreme cases.
This makes geothermal the perfect renewable, because its power can be available whenever the intermittent generators cannot provide the power we need. The more power we want from renewables, the more geothermal capacity we will need. It is that simple. We could be talking about many hundreds of thousands of MW. If the technology works cost wise it might actually be better than unreliable, land grabbing renewables.
Happily there is a massive frenzy of geothermal research going on, much of it aimed at reducing the obvious obstacles. Searching the engineering and scientific literature for the last five years on the word combination “geothermal” and “research” yields over 100,000 technical articles. That is a lot of research.
So there it is. Geothermal energy is potentially the second fracking revolution. No question the heat is there, thanks to the big molten ball we call Earth. And now we suddenly have the technology to create the infrastructure needed to tap into it. How practical it is, and how acceptable, still remains to be seen. Interesting times lie ahead.
David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy.
The video, made in collaboration with Fiona Hine, Founder of CoviLeaks, features 33 Doctors and a few other professionals – including some names you’ll be familiar with and others you won’t – who all urge caution regarding the CV-19 vaccine.
The video, recently banned from Facebook and Youtube, has received 55k views on brandnewtube (at the time of writing). We would have liked to embed this video here, however we can’t reliably embeded brandnewtube on this site at this time, for unknown reasons.
We’ve re-uploaded to bitchute (above), with the film-maker’s approval, but we encourage viewers to watch at the brandnewtube link, to help them climb the algorithm ladder.
The roster of experts include (in order of appearance): Dr Andrew Kaufman, Dr Hilde De Smet, Dr Nils R Fosse, Dr Elizabeth Evans, Dr Mohammad Adil, Dr Vernon Coleman, Prof. Dolores Cahill, Dr R Zac Cox, Dr Anna Forbes, Dr Ralf ER Sundberg, Dr Johan Denis, Dr Daniel Cullum, Moritz von der Borch, Dr Anne Fierlafijn, Dr Tom Cowan, Dr Kevin P. Corbett, Dr Carrie Madej, Dr Barre Lando,
Natural Nurse Kate Shemirani,
Pharmacist Sandy Lunoe,
Licensed Acupuncturist Boris Dragin, Dr Piotr Rubas, Dr Natalia Prego Cancelo, Dr Rashid Buttar, Dr Nour De San, Dr Kelly Brogan, Prof. Konstantin Pavlidis, Dr Sherri Tenpenny,
Journalist Senta Depuydt, Dr Heiko Santelmann, Dr Margareta Griesz-Brisson, Dr Mikael Nordforsa and Dr Elke F. de Klerk
These qualified and largely orthodox medical voices are posing essential questions and bringing their expertise to bear on this imminent and highly controversial vaccine.
If there are some names that cause eyes to roll for some viewers, doubtless there will be many others here to grab your attention and make you think.
Oracle has collated an accessible, sharable collection of alternative viewpoints, and we hope they can continue with their valuable work. When we are force-fed a myth of scientific and medical consensus behind this vaccine and this pandemic on a minute-by-minute basis, such work has never been more valuable.
Oracle Films says of the video:
This video is merely a compilation of doctors, scientists and activist who are offering their opinions. IN NO WAY do the views of any individual contributor to this video represent the views of anyone else shown. To confirm, this video contains a wide variety of views, all of which are exclusive to the individual expressing them.
With the rollout of the you-know-what just around the corner, we ask a worldwide panel of experts the question on everybody’s minds #asktheexperts
The Correlation of Armed Forces: U.S. goods and services trade with China totaled an estimated $634.8 billion in 2019. Exports were $163.0 billion; imports were $471.8 billion. The U.S. goods and services trade deficit with China was $308.8 billion in 2019. Trade in services with China (exports and imports) totaled an estimated $76.7 billion in 2019. Services exports were $56.5 billion; services imports were $20.1 billion. The U.S. services trade surplus with China was $36.4 billion in 2019.
There is talk within the Washingtoniat of a possible war with China. Steve Bannon, who apparently was dropped on his head as a child, actually favors such a war. We hear the usual shoo-the-boobs alarm about how the Chinese are doing something terrible and we must gird our loins and American values and show them what for, bow wow, woof. The danger is that the current game of who-blinks-first in Asian waters might actually provoke a shooting war. You know the kind of thing: One warship refuses to get out of the way of another, a collision ensues, some retard lieutenant who signed up on waivers opens fire, and we’re off and running. It is not a good idea to let children play with matches.
The said war is discussed either in emotional terms by idiots or in purely naval terms by those familiar with such things, so we hear of the First Island Chain and the Second Island Chain and whose missiles against the other’s missiles and so on. This would be appropriate if we were fighting World War Two again. Which we aren’t. Let’s take a quick-and-dirty look at how such a war might go.
To begin the war, America would overestimate itself and underestimate China. This is doctrine in the Pentagon. There is probably a manual on it. Inside the DC Bubble, fern-bar Napoleons would assure us that it would be a short war, a cakewalk, a matter of days, not weeks. You know, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. When it turned out that the Chinese had other ideas, among which surrendering was not, and the months dragged on, various fascinating things would happen.
Rand, a thinktank wholly owned by the Pentagon, at least mentally, has wargamed both the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, concluding that the war could be both very long and a loss for America. We no longer live in 1960.
OK, the war: On day one, all the multitudinous American factories in China shut down. Example: Apple loses its factories, products from those factories, and the Chinese market of 1.4 billion consumers. Its stores close. Tim Cook’s gratitude will know no bounds. American auto manufacturers sell googolplexes of cars in China (or at least lots), mostly made in China. Overnight they will lose factories, cars, and Chinese customers. Overall, China buys many more cars than does the US. This analysis, if anything so obvious may be called analysis, can be repeated for industry after industry after industry. Goodbye, business vote.
Within weeks, Walmart’s shelves go bare. Walk down the aisles and read the “Made in” labels. We are not talking only plastic buckets and mops but chain saws, pharmaceuticals, motorcycles, and blood-pressure cuffs. So much for the blue-collar vote. The US buys 472 billion in goods annually from China, high-tech, low-tech, consumer goods, manufacturing components. No more.
China buys over $163 billion annually in American goods: petroleum, semiconductors, airline engines, soybeans, airliners, on and on. No more. It is hard to underestimate the joy this will cause in influential boardrooms. And of course the American workers who would have produced these things for China will be laid off. As electoral politics, this will prove suboptimal.
China produces a great majority of the rare earth elements crucial to the manufacture of electronics, such as semiconductors. No quick substitute is in sight. Just about everything in America uses these, to include the computers that run the electrical systems of cars. Though I haven’t checked, it is quite possible that the computers themselves are made in China. If you want a new and deeper understanding of the word “hostile,” check the influential CEOs of businesses on their second chipless day.
In a real war, it is likely that China, having thought of the foregoing, would (intelligently) destroy Taiwan’s semiconductor fabs, notably those of TSMC, as well as other factories of electronics. This would hardly be difficult since the Taiwan Strait is only a hundred or so miles wide. Losing these industries would be exceedingly painful for the US since its high-end chips come from Taiwan. It would take America years to replace this capacity domestically. Some of the necessary equipment, extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, is not made in America and in any event cannot be stamped out like beer cans.
In America it would quickly be discovered that the country is rather more dependent on China than some might think. If I may make up an example: The automotive industry finds that its sparkplugs come from China. While America could certainly make spark plugs, it turns out that a decade back the industry found that China could make them for forty percent less. In the cooperative commercial world pre-Trump, this was no problem. Not now. So much for sales of cars. And for the jobs of the workers who make them.
I will bet you all my diamond mines in South Africa and cattle lands in Argentina, that if you went through a parts list for, say, Boeing’s airliners, you would find lots of them made in China. Sure, the US could manufacture most of them, eventually. But companies need parts now, not eventually.
The effects on other countries of a large war against China would be catastrophic if not worse. Other countries also get many things, from China or Taiwan, such as semiconductors. Google on “country x largest trading partner.” A strong pattern quickly becomes clear: China is huge in trading with practically everybody. “Everybody” includes Germany, Japan, Australia, Russia, and South America as a whole. The world economy in its entirety would collapse.
How smart would this be? The United States is already in serious trouble, what with a currency rapidly being debased, a sinking middle class, businesses dying of Covid, jobs disappearing abroad, people living paycheck to paycheck, and social unhappiness resulting in continent-wide riots. Do you suppose the public will gladly support an unfathomably stupid war causing an instant, profound, and murderous economic depression? If so, you probably already have a collection of bridges.
This can be inflicted on the entire earth by a half-dozen loons in or circling around the White House unhindered by a worthless Congress. Six loons. Yes, I know, Trump is unlikely deliberately to start a Third world War, even as a publicity stunt. No, the generals in the Pentagon are not nearly stupid enough. (They might even refuse, pointing out that starting a war requires a declaration by Congress.) The problem is that for years America has been, if not actually looking for a fight, at least daring other countries to start one. For example, murdering Iranian officials, pulling out of arms-control treaties, pushing NATO ever closer to Russia, sanctioning countries far beyond anything that can be called a trade war, and playing chicken with China in the South China Sea. Under these circumstances you can get a fight without quite looking for one.
Write Fred at jet.possum@gmail.com. Put the letters pdq anywhere in the subject line to avoid heartless autodeletion.
An email seen by NBC News indicates that Hunter Biden failed to pay taxes on profit from his Ukrainian board position. NBC was bombarded with comments explaining how the story is probably false and still irrelevant, if true.
According to the broadcaster, the son of presumed President-elect Joe Biden may have failed to include in his tax returns the $400,000 he received from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma in 2014. This is a conclusion from an email, received by NBC, which was sent to Hunter Biden in 2017 by his business partner, Eric Schwerin, who was then the president of Rosemont Seneca Partners.
“In 2014 you joined the Burisma board and we still need to amend your 2014 returns to reflect the unreported Burisma income,” the email dated January 16, 2017 said as cited by NBC News.
Hunter Biden joined Burisma in 2014, shortly after the ousting of Ukraine’s president at the time Viktor Yanukovich, with the Obama administration showing its support to the protesters. Then-Vice President Joe Biden is considered to be the mastermind behind policy on Ukraine at the time.
Before getting the well-paid gig, Hunter Biden had no background in energy or Eastern European affairs – something that didn’t stop Burisma from hiring him to take a board position.
The Trump administration claimed that Joe Biden had later abused his government office to lean on Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and have him fire a prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma. Biden shared publicly how he pressured the Ukrainian leader, but insisted it was done to get rid of a corrupt Ukrainian official. The incumbent US president was impeached this year at the Democrat-controlled House for asking Poroshenko’s successor to investigate the allegations of impropriety.
The NBC news story comes with a caveat: the email comes from a trove of documents recovered from a laptop that Hunter Biden allegedly left in a Delaware repair shop and which became the centerpiece of a censorship scandal shortly before the November 3 presidential election. The laptop and its contents were reported by the New York Post, but many other US media outlets dismissed it as a likely piece of “Russian disinformation” and refused to cover it.
Facebook and Twitter throttled dissemination of the Post’s reporting on their platform. Users were initially prohibited from sharing links to the story altogether and the newspaper’s account was suspended for days.
After the election, it was reported that federal prosecutors in Delaware were looking into Hunter Biden’s financial affairs and dealings with China since at least 2018. He confirmed that he was under investigation and expressed confidence that the probe would establish that he handled his affairs legally and appropriately.
Social media reaction to the fresh email revelation shows a strong desire to again dismiss alleged corruption in the Biden family. Many latched on to the source of the email to claim that it must be a fabrication.
The Biden campaign dismissed the laptop story as a partisan attack on the ex-VP’s bid for presidency, but never challenged the authenticity of the underlying materials.
Those willing to accept possible wrongdoing by Hunter Biden chose another line of defense – saying that his alleged tax evasion has nothing to do with his father.
And there was of course a great deal of ‘whataboutism’ involving Trump’s undisclosed tax returns and the business affairs of his family.
Days before the election, NBC News published a long explainer of its reaction to the Hunter Biden laptop story. It cited several reasons for not covering it, including not having access to the source material, claims by former intelligence officials that it has “hallmarks” of Russian disinformation and a lack of proof of corruption of then-candidate Biden shown in what was published.
Another major factor, according to the article, was that the laptop was not expected to reveal much new information about Hunter Biden, his apparent cashing in on his family name and allegations that he peddled access and influence of his father.
In the morning, the world is as the world should be. The sun rises, as predicted for this part of England in early December, at around twenty past eight. Shortly after this, I get up, go through the usual morning routines, have a quick breakfast, wash up, and am at my computer by ten o’clock. The hours pass unexceptionably until lunchtime. And then I can no longer put off the trip to the shops.
Going to the shops is something I do as little as possible nowadays. Once I might have walked in and out of the nearby town centre several times in a day, without thinking twice: but that was when I could move from home to street seamlessly, with no jarring transition between here and there.
Now it’s different. Now, beyond the protective confines of our home lies a parallel universe, a place of outlandish rituals and dogmas, where grotesquely masked figures pass each other warily on the street or, in the supermarket, lurk out-of-touch behind symbolic plastic screens. Instead of muzak, as I follow the prescribed route between the aisles, disembodied voices warn of death and disease, order me to protect myself and others by maintaining distance and keeping my plague-ridden exhalations to myself.
“We’re in this together!” they proclaim.
In less than a year some malign necromancy has transformed the fearless social beings who once thronged shops and cafés in the run-up to each Christmas into an infestation of dangerous, outsized germs: or, if scrupulous examination of the facts has left you confident that “the novel coronavirus” is no more threatening to moderately healthy people than the nastier brands of flu, into the crazed adherents of some apocalyptic cult.
Since I have spent the past nine months scrupulously examining the facts, the eyes now peering out at me over the inadequate face-covering of that woman beating a hasty retreat behind the cans of tuna as I approach are, it seems to me, those of a poor, unhinged lunatic. But then, I am an unbeliever. I do not wear the mask of allegiance. Marked out by the lanyard around my neck, I do my shopping as quickly as possible, and hurry back to the embattled sanity of domestic life.
Yes, even here embattled: for as the onslaught of propaganda continues without remission, only complete divorce from the outside world can afford protection. Fortunately, since the arrival of the computer I am beyond the reach of programmed television, but in order to wake to the accompaniment of pleasant but undemanding music, I used to put up with the intermittent smattering of adverts on Classic FM. Now that government has become the media’s most lucrative source of income, however, this is no longer tolerable. Who wants to be roused abruptly from sleep by inane incantations of “Hands! Face! Place!”, sometimes repeated twice within five minutes ?
“It’s just an actor!” my husband pleads with me, as I hurl execrations, and worse, at the radio. But whether it comes from actors or health ministers, the brain-washing stinks. “Don’t you just long for a nice commercial about sofas?” a friend asks mournfully, as we discuss the incremental take-over of advertising slots by the government’s ‘nudge unit‘. Even bona fide adverts from the likes of Boots and the big supermarkets are made nauseous by mealy-mouthed assurances of “safe” shopping. The only kind of safe shopping I long for is shopping safe from constant reminders of The Virus: shopping unmasked and convivially mingling; the chance to browse unimpeded in bookshops, and linger socially-undistanced over cups of coffee in a crowded café.
Why this campaign of terror, you have to ask? Why, in the midst of a genuine pandemic, would anyone need to be reminded unceasingly that death is dogging their footsteps? That at any moment The Virus, wafted abroad by some super-spreader passed fleetingly in the street, might be insinuating itself into one’s body – or, worse, that we ourselves, infected but unaffected, might be silently contaminating a loved-one?
The short answer is, they wouldn’t. In a genuine pandemic, this constant mental battering would be superfluous. If the Black Death were raging outside my door, government would know full well that they didn’t have to fork out millions to convince me to stay inside; more likely, they would have to pay me to leave the house.
Yet this government has bought the mass media lock, stock and barrel, at vast expense, with the sole purpose, it seems, of hammering home a message of impending doom. Instead of calming our fears with facts and rational arguments, they have seen fit to flood the airwaves with slogans calculated to maintain panic; with disingenuous appeals to the emotions; with out-of-context death counts, wilful obfuscation of the difference between cases and infections, a criminally dodgy PCR test and graphs and computer models (rubbish in, rubbish out) carefully selected to emphasise the worst possible eventualities.
And not content to cow us into submission with a constant diet of skewed and incomplete information, they have unleashed the army’s 77 Brigade to troll social media exchanges and snuff out any lingering dissent – or, as the government prefer to call it, “misinformation“. The aim can only be to induce maximum public terror in the face of a virus which, without all this deceptive ballyhoo, would hardly have been noticed by the population at large.
Why are they doing this? Surely, by now, they must be aware that increasing numbers of highly esteemed and experienced scientists contest policies which are killing vastly more people than they are saving, and which will go on killing well into the future!
True, non-scientists could get lost in all the reams of conflicting information churned out since we were first put on terror alert back in February and March, but one question is both fundamental and easily answered: are excess mortality figures for this year significantly above average? Only a huge and sustained divergence from the norm would indicate the presence of a new disease deadly enough to justify the extraordinary measures the government have taken.
The Euromomo charts for the UK show no such anomaly. In Northern Ireland there has never been any substantial increase in deaths overall. In Wales, too, mortality has hardly diverged from the normal range. Scotland had a well-above-average peak in the spring, but since then has remained almost entirely within the bounds of normality. Even populous England, despite a death rate which soared sharply to a great height in March before falling equally sharply back by the middle of June, has spent most of the year chugging along below the “substantial increase” line, with the usual increase as winter approaches. A further chart at Covid-19 in Proportion? shows that,
Levels of mortality in 2019/2020 are very similar to those suffered in 1999/2000
Definitely not the Black Death, then, nor even the 1918 influenza. In fact, one of the world’s premier epidemiologists, John Ioannidis, has long been assuring us that the infection fatality rate of Covid-19 is comparable with that of a bad flu. His early estimate, in March, of a case fatality rate in the general population of between 0.05% and 1.0%, as indicated by the outbreak on the cruise ship Diamond Princess – a conclusion for which the eminent professor was, hilariously, censored by the non-scientists at YouTube.
Yet now we are being told that only mass vaccination against this fairly run-of-the-mill virus will allow us to return to any semblance of normal life. By special dispensation, millions of doses of insufficiently tested vaccine are already in the pipeline, with a guarantee of no come-back for Big Pharma or for doctors turning a blind eye to the precept “First to do no harm”, should those treated be hit with damaging repercussions on their health or, indeed, on life itself.
We are told that we should all accept the suspect panacea regardless, in order to beat “this dreadful virus”: it’s quite safe – honest, you’ve got my word for it, says Matt Hancock. Yet, side-effects apart, there is no assurance that the Pfizer vaccine, received with jubilation on 8th December by its first grateful recipient, will be effective in preventing either the disease or its transmission: and even if it does turn out to offer initial protection, this may last for as little as three months, so presumably regular repeat injections will be required.
What? Repeat injections! Are the young and healthy facing a lifetime of booster shots against a disease that is dangerous almost exclusively to the old and sick? And if this isn’t crazy enough, we are being told that, even while being turned into human pin-cushions, we will probably need to go on wearing masks and holding our friends and family at arm’s length well into the future: a future, it is hinted, of health passports and routine mass surveillance, if we wish to travel on public transport or generally engage in life beyond our doorstep.
This, it seems, will be the New Normal – but not to worry! After all, you’re already masking up automatically when you leave the house, aren’t you, and following the one-way footsteps on the pavement as a matter of course? And if it becomes too much of a nuisance to carry your proof of vaccination around with you, well, we should soon be able to offer you the trouble-free alternative of an implanted microchip, to cover all eventualities: health; finance; your social credit score …
Sometimes I think it would be better to be one of the masked zombies. Trusting, obedient, they live in a world which, though threatening, they understand and accept. It is real to them. They know, unquestioningly, that a dreadful plague has been visited upon us, a plague which threatens to wipe out the species: and they know that if they wear their masks faithfully, wash their hands a thousand times a day and steer clear of other human beings, they will be doing their bit to save the nation, and, eventually, be granted the supreme unction of a vaccine; after which, they believe, everything will go back to normal – perhaps with a few more bicycle lanes and wind farms, and somewhat fewer jobs – but hey! – what will that matter, when the nice, compassionate government is promising us all a Universal Basic Income?
For the rest of us, it’s not so simple. The rest of us must live in a world where our own perceptions are remorselessly challenged by the prevailing lie. Guided by rational thought processes and the evidence, we know that we are at no more risk from Covid-19 this year than we were in previous years from one of the more aggressive strains of influenza, but as soon as we venture into the outside world, everything contradicts our inner reality: and though we may not participate actively in the masquerade, we are condemned to a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance, compelled to acquiesce silently in the grand illusion being played out all around us, under the direction of the government.
And to what end ?
If it were ever possible to put the enormities which have taken place since last March down to mere blundering, it certainly is not now. The argument that the government has simply blundered, and is now trying to save face by digging itself in deeper does not wash. Nor does the line about saving the NHS. The NHS has regularly survived winter flu seasons which saw beds lined up in corridors and staff rushed off their feet.
Besides, the Nightingale hospitals were quickly whisked into existence: and if the amount of money poured by the government into fear porn and the purchase of dud PCR tests and hastily concocted vaccines had been diverted into more beds, plus better pay for nurses and other non-administrative staff, the lesson might at last have been learned, and future winters made less chaotic.
It was obvious from the start to anyone with a basic education who bothered to check the facts that closing down the economy would be more damaging to life and limb than any virus. Why was this not also obvious to a prime minister with a PPE degree from Oxford, who is surrounded by whole cohorts of colleagues and advisers armed with equally prestigious qualifications?
Even granting an initial surge of panic when faced with hysterical predictions from the Imperial College fortune-telling team, it would have been possible to withdraw in fairly good order after the first lockdown, when many scientists were already saying that the danger had been exaggerated, that the virus was now endemic, and widespread natural immunity was in sight.
Why didn’t our government seize the opportunity, in June, to give themselves a pat on the back, announce that the lockdown had worked, and ease us all back into rationality via an interval of sensible voluntary precautions, as practised in Sweden?
Given a modification of the propaganda, the country would have believed them. When adroitly handled by the Behavioural Insights Team the country, it appears, will believe anything.
Why, then, insist on sticking to the advice of SAGE, and continuing to give credence to the serially failed speculations of Neil Ferguson, rather than attending to the more balanced suggestions offered by Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta?
Instead, the government chose to fan the flames of fear with an intensification of propaganda and orders to mask up, extending the reign of unjustified terror into the autumn, when the annual onset of respiratory diseases began to fill up hospital beds, and allowed the death counts and lockdowns to resume. One by one, those small businesses which survived the first onslaught are giving up the ghost, and it seems that our rulers will not rest content until every last man, woman and child in Britain has been thrown into the linked arms of corporate and state dependency.
What price conspiracy “theories” now? What we are dealing with are facts.
As countries throughout the world commit consensual suicide to a rousing chorus of “Build Back Better!”, what makes more sense? To shake the head in puzzlement, that so many nations, with one accord, should not only have made exactly the same mistakes earlier this year, but are now insisting, in unison, on entrenching the evils that have been unleashed?
Or to contemplate the possibility that a network of powerful supranational agencies – banks, corporations, NGOs – have for some time been collaborating to direct the course of world events through placemen and beneficiaries in local and national governments and their attendant bureaucracies, and that “the novel coronavirus” is being used to achieve the final push into an era of artfully camouflaged “global governance”: an era where policies devised by centralised, unelected committees are handed down to elected heads of state in the shells of what were once independent nations, and passed on by them to regional mayors and administrators for implementation and enforcement.
I caught the Asian flu in 1957. So did my mother: the only time I ever knew her to take a couple of days off work. The infection swept through the country, and tens of thousands died. In 1968 the Hong Kong flu passed me by, but once again the death toll was in the tens of thousands.
On neither occasion was it considered necessary to destroy millions of lives and livelihoods by closing the country down, nor was any attempt made to terrorise its inhabitants. Covid-19 is no more lethal than either of those previous infections – less so, unless you actually believe that all those currently described as dying “with Covid”, or dying within 28 days of testing positive, actually died from Covid. Never before have such destructive policies been inflicted on the nation in a futile attempt to wipe out a virus. Never before, outside war time, has the population of the UK been subjected to such outrageous assault and battery by a government propaganda machine.
Draw what conclusion you will. I’m off to feed the ducks. They don’t do anti-social distancing, and they don’t wear masks.
Trump claims Iran’s military is routed just as IRGC launched missiles strike American bases
RT | June 10, 2026
The Iranian military has been “completely defeated,” US President Donald Trump has claimed, warning Tehran it will “pay the price” for delaying a deal with Washington.
The warnings came after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced missile and drone strikes on American military facilities in several Arab countries in retaliation for recent US attacks. US Central Command said the operations inside Iran were carried out after an AH-64 Apache helicopter was lost near the Strait of Hormuz, an incident it blamed on Tehran.
Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday that Iran “is all talk and no action,” adding that “The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!!” … Full article
HEAT exposure could drive a dramatic rise in cardiovascular disease (CVD) burden across the USA over the next 25 years, with researchers warning that climate change and population ageing may combine to reverse decades of progress in heart health.
Heat Exposure Threatens Future Heart Health A new modelling study estimated that heat-attributable CVD burden could more than triple by 2050 under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, disproportionately affecting older adults and economically disadvantaged communities. … Full article
… Climate change and land use conversion have the potential to increase the frequency of encounters between snakes and humans. This situation arises due to changes in temperature and rainfall, the loss of natural habitats, and shifts in food sources, which drive snakes to move into areas closer to human activity.
Prof Mirza Dikari Kusrini, a lecturer in the Department of Forest Resource Conservation and Ecotourism, Faculty of Forestry and Environment (Fahutan) at IPB University, explained that climate change affects snakes’ behavior, distribution, and movement patterns. … Full article
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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