The devastating hack on SolarWinds was quickly pinned on Russia by US intelligence. A more likely culprit, Samanage, a company whose software was integrated into SolarWinds’ software just as the “back door” was inserted, is deeply tied to Israeli intelligence and intelligence-linked families such as the Maxwells.
In mid-December of 2020, a massive hack compromised the networks of numerous US federal agencies, major corporations, the top five accounting firms in the country, and the military, among others. Despite most US media attention now focusing on election-related chaos, the fallout from the hack continues to make headlines day after day.
The hack, which affected Texas-based software provider SolarWinds, was blamed on Russia on January 5 by the US government’s Cyber Unified Coordination Group. Their statement asserted that the attackers were “likely Russian in origin,” but they failed to provide evidence to back up that claim.
Since then, numerous developments in the official investigation have been reported, but no actual evidence pointing to Russia has yet to be released. Rather, mainstream media outlets began reporting the intelligence community’s “likely” conclusion as fact right away, with the New York Times subsequently reporting that US investigators were examining a product used by SolarWinds that was sold by a Czech Republic–based company, as the possible entry point for the “Russian hackers.” Interest in that company, however, comes from the fact that the attackers most likely had access to the systems of a contractor or subsidiary of SolarWinds. This, combined with the evidence-free report from US intelligence on “likely” Russian involvement, is said to be the reason investigators are focusing on the Czech company, though any of SolarWinds’ contractors/subsidiaries could have been the entry point.
Such narratives clearly echo those that became prominent in the wake of the 2016 election, when now-debunked claims were made that Russian hackers were responsible for leaked emails published by WikiLeaks. Parallels are obvious when one considers that SolarWinds quickly brought on the discredited firm CrowdStrike to aid them in securing their networks and investigating the hack. CrowdStrike had also been brought on by the DNC after the 2016 WikiLeaks publication, and subsequently it was central in developing the false declarations regarding the involvement of “Russian hackers” in that event.
There are also other parallels. As Russiagate played out, it became apparent that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, but the nation was Israel, not Russia. Indeed, many of the reports that came out of Russiagate revealed collusion with Israel, yet those instances received little coverage and generated little media outrage. This has led some to suggest that Russiagate may have been a cover for what was in fact Israelgate.
Similarly, in the case of the SolarWinds hack, there is the odd case and timing of SolarWinds’ acquisition of a company called Samanage in 2019. As this report will explore, Samanage’s deep ties to Israeli intelligence, venture-capital firms connected to both intelligence and Isabel Maxwell, as well as Samange’s integration with the Orion software at the time of the back door’s insertion warrant investigation every bit as much as SolarWinds’ Czech-based contractor.
Orion’s Fall
In the month since the hack, evidence has emerged detailing the extent of the damage, with the Justice Department quietly announcing, the same day as the Capitol riots (January 6), that their email system had been breached in the hack—a “major incident” according to the department. This terminology means that the attack “is likely to result in demonstrable harm to the national security interests, foreign relations, or the economy of the United States or to the public confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the American people,” per NextGov.
The Justice Department was the fourth US government agency to publicly acknowledge a breach in connection to the hack, with the others being the Departments of Commerce and Energy and the Treasury. Yet, while only four agencies have publicly acknowledged fallout from the hack, SolarWinds software is also used by the Department of Defense, the State Department, NASA, the NSA, and the Executive Office. Given that the Cyber Unified Coordination Group stated that “fewer than ten” US government agencies had been affected, it’s likely that some of these agencies were compromised, and some press reports have asserted that the State Department and Pentagon were affected.
In addition to government agencies, SolarWinds Orion software was in use by the top ten US telecommunications corporations, the top five US accounting firms, the New York Power Authority, and numerous US government contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, and the Federal Reserve. Other notable SolarWinds clients include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Credit Suisse, and several mainstream news outlets including the Economist and the New York Times.
Based on what is officially known so far, the hackers appeared to have been highly sophisticated, with FireEye, the cybersecurity company that first discovered the implanted code used to conduct the hack, stating that the hackers “routinely removed their tools, including the backdoors, once legitimate remote access was achieved—implying a high degree of technical sophistication and attention to operational security.” In addition, top security experts have noted that the hack was “very very carefully orchestrated,” leading to a consensus that the hack was state sponsored.
FireEye stated that they first identified the compromise of SolarWinds after the version of the Orion software they were using contained a back door that was used to gain access to its “red team” suite of hacking tools. Not long after the disclosure of the SolarWinds hack, on December 31, the hackers were able to partially access Microsoft’s source code, raising concerns that the act was preparation for future and equally devastating attacks.
FireEye’s account can be taken with a grain of salt, however, as the CIA is one of FireEye’s clients, and FireEye was launched with funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-tel. It is also worth being skeptical of the “free tool” FireEye has made available in the hack’s aftermath for “spotting and keeping suspected Russians out of systems.”
In addition, Microsoft, another key source in the SolarWinds story, is a military contractor with close ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus, especially Unit 8200, and their reports of events also deserve scrutiny. Notably, it was Unit 8200 alumnus and executive at Israeli cybersecurity firm Cycode, Ronen Slavin, who told Reuters in a widely quoted article that he “was worried by the possibility that the SolarWinds hackers were poring over Microsoft’s source code as prelude to a much more ambitious offensive.” “To me the biggest question is, ‘Was this recon for the next big operation?’” Slavin stated.
Also odd about the actors involved in the response to the hack is the decision to bring on not only the discredited firm CrowdStrike but also the new consultancy firm of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos, former chief information security officer of Facebook and Yahoo, to investigate the hack. Chris Krebs is the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and was previously a top Microsoft executive. Krebs was fired by Donald Trump after repeatedly and publicly challenging Trump on the issue of election fraud in the 2020 election.
As head of CISA, Krebs gave access to networks of critical infrastructure throughout the US, with a focus on the health-care industry, to the CTI League, a suspicious outfit of anonymous volunteers working “for free” and led by a former Unit 8200 officer. “We have brought in the expertise of Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos to assist in this review and provide best-in-class guidance on our journey to evolve into an industry leading secure software development company,” a SolarWinds spokesperson said in an email cited by Reuters.
It is also worth noting that the SolarWinds hack did benefit a few actors aside from the attackers themselves. For instance, Israeli cybersecurity firms CheckPoint and CyberArk, which have close ties to Israeli intelligence Unit 8200, have seen their stocks soar in the weeks since the SolarWinds compromise was announced. Notably, in 2017, CyberArk was the company that “discovered” one of the main tactics used in an attack, a form of SAML token manipulation called GoldenSAML. CyberArk does not specify how they discovered this method of attack and, at the time they announced the tactic’s existence, released a free tool to identify systems vulnerable to GoldenSAML manipulation.
In addition, the other main mode of attack, a back door program nicknamed Sunburst, was found by Kaspersky researchers to be similar to a piece of malware called Kazuar that was also first discovered by another Unit 8200-linked company, Palo Alto Networks, also in 2017. The similarities only suggest that those who developed the Sunburst backdoor may have been inspired by Kazuar and “they may have common members between them or a shared software developer building their malware.” Kaspersky stressed that Sunburst and Kazuar are not likely to be one and the same. It is worth noting, as an aside, that Unit 8200 is known to have previously hacked Kaspersky and attempted to insert a back door into their products, per Kaspersky employees.
Crowdstrike claimed that this finding confirmed “the attribution at least to Russian intelligence,” only because an allegedly Russian hacking group is believed to have used Kazuar before. No technical evidence linking Russia to the SolarWinds hacking has yet been presented.
Samanage and Sabotage
The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was “compiled, signed and delivered through the existing software patch release management system,” per reports. This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators had direct access to SolarWinds code as they had “a high degree of familiarity with the software.” While the way the attackers gained access to Orion’s code base has yet to be determined, one possibility being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.
US investigators have been focusing on offices of SolarWinds that are based abroad, suggesting that—in addition to the above—the attackers were likely working for SolarWinds or were given access by someone working for the company. That investigation has focused on offices in eastern Europe, allegedly because “Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted” in those countries.
It is worth pointing out, however, that Israeli intelligence is similarly “deeply rooted” in eastern European states both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, ties well illustrated by Israeli superspy and media tycoon Robert Maxwell’s frequent and close associations with Eastern European and Russian intelligence agencies as well as the leaders of many of those countries. Israeli intelligence operatives like Maxwell also had cozy ties with Russian organized crime. For instance, Maxwell enabled the access of the Russian organized crime network headed by Semion Mogilevich into the US financial system and was also Mogilevich’s business partner. In addition, the cross-pollination between Israeli and Russian organized crime networks (networks which also share ties to their respective intelligence agencies) and such links should be considered if the cybercriminals do prove to be Russian in origin, as US intelligence has claimed.
Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in 2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first inserted, but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms associated with numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government. Israel is deemed by the NSA to be one of the top spy threats facing US government agencies and Israel’s list of espionage scandals in the US is arguably the longest, and includes the Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS software scandals of the 1980s to the Larry Franklin/AIPAC espionage scandal in 2009.
Though much reporting has since been done on the recent compromise of SolarWinds Orion software, little attention has been paid to Samanage. Samanage offers what it describes as “an IT Service Desk solution.” It was acquired by SolarWinds so Samanage’s products could be added to SolarWinds’ IT Operations Management portfolio. Though US reporting and SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying that it is an American company, Samanage is actually an Israeli firm. It was founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously worked for several years at MAMRAM, the Israeli military’s central computing unit.
Samanage was SolarWinds’ first acquisition of an Israeli company, and, at the time, Israeli media reported that SolarWinds was expected to set up its first development center in Israel. It appears, however, that SolarWinds, rather than setting up a new center, merely began using Samanage’s research and development center located in Netanya, Israel.
Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed SolarWinds Service Desk, became listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition’s announcement in April of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained access to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time. Samanage’s automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the now-compromised software during that period.
Samanage appears to have had access to Orion following the announcement of the acquisition in April 2019. Integration first began with Orion version 2019.4, the earliest version believed to contain the malicious code that enabled the hack. In addition, the integrated Samanage component of Orion was responsible for “ensuring the appropriate teams are quickly notified when critical events or performance issues [with Orion] are detected,” which was meant to allow “service agents to react faster and resolve issues before . . . employees are impacted.”
In other words, the Samanage component that was integrated into Orion at the same time the compromise took place was also responsible for Orion’s alert system for critical events or performance issues. The code that was inserted into Orion by hackers in late 2019 nevertheless went undetected by this Samanage-made component for over a year, giving the “hackers” access to millions of devices critical to both US government and corporate networks. Furthermore, it is this Samanage-produced component of the affected Orion software that advises end users to exempt the software from antivirus scans and group policy object (GPO) restrictions by providing a warning that Orion may not work properly unless those exemptions are granted.
Samanage, Salesforce, and the World Economic Forum
Around the time of Samange’s acquisition by SolarWinds, it was reported that one of Samanage’s top backers was the company Salesforce, with Salesforce being both a major investor in Samanage as well as a partner of the company.
Salesforce is run by Marc Benioff, a billionaire who got his start at the tech giant Oracle. Oracle was originally created as a CIA spin-off and has deep ties to Israel’s government and the outgoing Trump administration. Salesforce also has a large presence in Israel, with much of its global research and development based there. Salesforce also recently partnered with the Unit 8200-linked Israeli firm Diagnostic Robotics to “predictively” diagnose COVID-19 cases using Artificial Intelligence.
Aside from leading Salesforce, Benioff is a member of the Vatican’s Council for Inclusive Capitalism alongside Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, and members of the Lauder family, who have deep ties to the Mega Group and Israeli politics.
Benioff is also a prominent member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and the inaugural chair of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), making him one of the most critical players in the unfolding of the WEF-backed Great Reset. Other WEF leaders, including the organization’s founder Klaus Schwab, have openly discussed how massive cyberattacks such as befell SolarWinds will soon result in “even more significant economic and social implications than COVID-19.”
Last year, the WEF’s Centre for Cybersecurity, of which Salesforce is part, simulated a “digital pandemic” cyberattack in an exercise entitled Cyber Polygon. Cyber Polygon’s speakers in 2020 included former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Mishustin, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, and IBM executive Wendi Whitmore, who previously held top posts at both Crowdstrike and a FireEye subsidiary. Notably, just months before the COVID-19 crisis, the WEF had held Event 201, which simulated a global coronavirus pandemic that crippled the world’s economy.
In addition to Samanage’s ties to WEF big shots such as Marc Benioff, the other main investors behind Samanage’s rise have ties to major Israeli espionage scandals, including the Jonathan Pollard affair and the PROMIS software scandal. There are also ties to one of the WEF’s founding “technology pioneers,” Isabel Maxwell (the daughter of Robert Maxwell and sister of Ghislaine), who has long-standing ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus and the country’s hi-tech sector.
The Bronfmans, the Maxwells, and Viola Ventures
At the time of its acquisition by SolarWinds, Samanage’s top investor was Viola Ventures, a major Israeli venture-capital firm. Viola’s investment in Samanage, until its acquisition, was managed by Ronen Nir, who was also on Samanage’s board before it became part of SolarWinds.
Prior to working at Viola, Ronen Nir was a vice president at Verint, formerly Converse Infosys. Verint, whose other alumni have gone on to found Israeli intelligence-front companies such as Cybereason. Verint has a history of aggressively spying on US government facilities, including the White House, and created the backdoors into all US telecommunications systems and major tech companies, including Microsoft, Google and Facebook, on behalf of the US’ NSA.
In addition to his background at Verint, Ronen Nir is an Israeli spy, having served for thirteen years in an elite IDF intelligence unit, and he remains a lieutenant colonel on reserve duty. His biography also notes that he worked for two years at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, which is fitting given his background in espionage and the major role that Israeli embassy has played in several major espionage scandals.
As an aside, Nir has stated that “thought leader” Henry Kissinger is his “favorite historical character.” Notably, Kissinger was instrumental in allowing Robert Maxwell, Israeli superspy and father of Ghislaine and Isabel Maxwell, to sell software with a back door for Israeli intelligence to US national laboratories, where it was used to spy on the US nuclear program. Kissinger had told Maxwell to connect with Senator John Tower in order to gain access to US national laboratories, which directly enabled this action, part of the larger PROMIS software scandal.
In addition, Viola’s stake was managed through a firm known as Carmel Ventures, which is part of the Viola Group. At the time, Carmel Ventures was advised by Isabel Maxwell, whose father had previously been directly involved in the operation of the front company used to sell bugged software to US national laboratories. As noted in a previous article at Unlimited Hangout, Isabel “inherited” her father’s circle of Israeli government and intelligence contacts after his death and has been instrumental in building the “bridge” between Israel’s intelligence and military-linked hi-tech sector to Silicon Valley.
Isabel also has ties to the Viola Group itself through Jonathan Kolber, a general partner at Viola. Kolber previously cofounded and led the Bronfman family’s private-equity fund, Claridge Israel (based in Israel). Kolber then led Koor Industries, which he had acquired alongside the Bronfmans via Claridge. Kolber is closely associated with Stephen Bronfman, the son of Charles Bronfman who created Claridge and also cofounded the Mega Group with Leslie Wexner in the early 1990s.
Kolber, like Isabel Maxwell, is a founding director of the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation. Maxwell, who used to chair the center’s board, stepped down following the Epstein scandal, though it’s not exactly clear when. Other directors of the center include Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad. Kolber’s area of expertise, like that of Isabel Maxwell, is “structuring complex, cross-border and cross industry business and financial transactions,” that is, arranging acquisitions and partnerships of Israeli firms by US companies. Incidentally, this is also a major focus of the Peres Center.
Other connections to Isabel Maxwell, aside from her espionage ties, are worth noting, given that she is a “technology pioneer” of the World Economic Forum. As previously mentioned, Salesforce—a major investor in Samanage—is deeply involved with the WEF and its Great Reset.
The links of Israeli intelligence and Salesforce to Samanage, and thus to SolarWinds, is particularly relevant given the WEF’s “prediction” of a coming “pandemic” of cyberattacks and the early hints from former Unit 8200 officers that the SolarWinds hack is just the beginning. It is also worth mentioning the Israeli government’s considerable ties to the WEF over the years, particularly last year when it joined the Benioff-chaired C4IR and participated in the October 2020 WEF panel entitled “The Great Reset: Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
Start Up Nation Central, an organization aimed at integrating Israeli start-ups with US firms set up by Netanyahu’s longtime economic adviser Eugene Kandel and American Zionist billionaire Paul Singer, have asserted that Israel will serve a “key role” globally in the 4th Industrial Revolution following the implementation of the Great Reset.
Gemini, the BIRD Foundation, and Jonathan Pollard
In addition to Viola, another of Samange’s leading investors is Gemini Israel Ventures. Gemini is one of Israel’s oldest venture-capital firms, dating back to the Israeli government’s 1993 Yozma program.
The first firm created by Yozma, Gemini was put under the control of Ed Mlavsky, who Israel’s government had chosen specifically for this position. As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout, Mlavsky was then serving as the executive director of the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, where “he was responsible for investments of $100 million in more than 300 joint projects between US and Israeli high-tech companies.”
A few years before Gemini was created, while Mlavsky still headed BIRD, the foundation became embroiled in one of the worst espionage scandals in US history, the Jonathan Pollard affair.
In the indictment of US citizen Pollard for espionage on Israel’s behalf, it was noted that Pollard delivered the documents he stole to agents of Israel at two locations, one of which was an apartment owned by Harold Katz, the then legal counsel of the BIRD Foundation and an adviser to Israel’s military, which oversaw Israel’s scientific intelligence-gathering agency, Lekem. US officials told the New York Times at the time that they believed Katz “has detailed knowledge about the [Pollard] spy ring and could implicate senior Israeli officials.”
Subsequent reporting by journalist Claudia Wright pointed the finger at the Mlavsky-run BIRD Foundation as one of the ways Israeli intelligence funneled money to Pollard before his capture by US authorities.
One of the first companies Gemini invested in was CommTouch (now Cyren), which was founded by ex-IDF officers and later led by Isabel Maxwell. Under Maxwell’s leadership, CommTouch developed close ties to Microsoft, partially due to Maxwell’s relationship with its cofounder Bill Gates.
A Coming “Hack” of Microsoft?
If the SolarWinds hack is as serious as has been reported, it’s difficult to understand why a company like Samanage would not be looked into as part of a legitimate investigation into the attack. The timing of Samanage employees gaining access to the Orion software and the company’s investors including Israeli spies and those with ties to past espionage scandals where Israel used back doors to spy on the US and beyond raises obvious red flags. Yet, any meaningful investigation of the incident is unlikely to take place, especially given the considerable involvement of discredited firms like CrowdStrike, CIA fronts like FireEye and a consultancy firm led by former Silicon Valley executives with their own government/intelligence ties.
There is also the added fact that both of the main methods used in the attack were analogous or bore similarities to hacking tools that were both discovered by Unit 8200-linked companies in 2017. Unit 8200-founded cybersecurity firms are among the few “winners” from the SolarWinds hack, as their stocks have skyrocketed and demand for their services has increased globally.
While some may argue that Unit 8200 alumni are not necessarily connected to the Israeli intelligence apparatus, numerous reports have pointed out the admitted fusion of Israeli military intelligence with Israel’s hi-tech sector and its tech-focused venture capital networks, with Israeli military and intelligence officials themselves noting that the line between the private cybersecurity sector and Israel’s intelligence apparatus is so blurred, it’s difficult to know where one begins and the other ends. There is also the Israeli government policy, formally launched in 2012, whereby Israel’s intelligence and military intelligence agencies began outsourcing “activities that were previously managed in-house, with a focus on software and cyber technologies.”
Samanage certainly appears to be such a company, not only because it was founded by a former IDF officer in the military’s central computing unit, but because its main investors include spies on “reserve duty” and venture capital firms linked to the Pollard scandal as well as the Bronfman and Maxwell families, both of whom have been tied to espionage and sexual blackmail scandals over the years.
Yet, as the Epstein scandal has recently indicated, major espionage scandals involving Israel receive little coverage and investigations into these events rarely lead anywhere. PROMIS was covered up largely thanks to Bill Barr during his first term as Attorney General and even the Pollard affair has all been swept under the rug with Donald Trump allowing Pollard to move to Israel and, more recently, pardoning the Israeli spy who recruited Pollard during his final day as President. Also under Trump, there was the discovery of “stingray” surveillance devices placed by Israel’s government throughout Washington DC, including next to the White House, which were quickly memory holed and oddly not investigated by authorities. Israel had previously wiretapped the White House’s phone lines during the Clinton years.
Another cover up is likely in the case of SolarWinds, particularly if the entry point was in fact Samanage. Though a cover up would certainly be more of the same, the SolarWinds case is different as major tech companies and cybersecurity firms with ties to US and Israeli intelligence now insist that Microsoft is soon to be targeted in what would clearly be a much more devastating event than SolarWinds due to the ubiquity of Microsoft’s products.
On Tuesday, CIA-linked firm FireEye, which apparently has a leadership role in investigating the hack, claimed that the perpetrators are still gathering data from US government agencies and that “the hackers are moving into Microsoft 365 cloud applications from physical, on-premises servers,” meaning that changes to fix Orion’s vulnerabilities will not necessarily deny hacker access to previously compromised systems as they allegedly maintain access to those systems via Microsoft cloud applications. In addition to Microsoft’s own claims that some of its source code was accessed by the hackers, this builds the narrative that Microsoft products are poised to be targeted in the next high-profile hack.
Microsoft’s cloud security infrastructure, set to be the next target of the SolarWinds hackers, was largely developed and later managed by Assaf Rappaport, a former Unit 8200 officer who was most recently the head of Microsoft’s Research and Development and Security teams at its massive Israel branch. Rappaport left Microsoft right before the COVID-19 crisis began last year to found a new cybersecurity company called Wiz.
Microsoft, like some of Samanage’s main backers, is part of the World Economic Forum and is an enthusiastic supporter of and participant in the Great Reset agenda, so much so that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote the foreword to Klaus Schwab’s book “Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” With the WEF simulating a cyber “pandemic” and both the WEF and Israel’s head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate warning of an imminent “cyber winter”, SolarWinds does indeed appear to be just the beginning, though perhaps a scripted one to create the foundation for something much more severe. A cyberattack on Microsoft products globally would certainly upend most of the global economy and likely have economic effects more severe than the COVID-19 crisis, just as the WEF has been warning. Yet, if such a hack does occur, it will inevitably serve the aims of the Great Reset to “reset” and then rebuild electronic infrastructure.
January 23, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CIA, CyberArk, Israel, NSA, Unit 8200, United States, WEF |
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SARS-CoV-2, better known simply as the ‘new coronavirus’, is just one of a handful of related RNA viruses that cause respiratory illnesses of varying severity among humans and some animals.
Past infections by other coronaviruses help the human immune system fights SARS CoV-2. That’s the conclusion reached by a group of researchers from Northern Arizona University (NAU) and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), local non-profit.
In their research, scientists used a custom-made tool created by NAU and TGen called ‘PepSeq’ to “finely map antibody responses to all human-infecting coronaviruses,” ranging from simple ones which cause symptoms no more serious than those of a common cold, to more severe and potentially deadly ones.
What they found was that exposure to previous coronaviruses appears to improve the human immune system’s ability to battle the new one, with the new virus’s introduction into the body summoning antibodies originally created to fight the other viruses.
“Our results suggest that the COVID-19 virus may awaken an antibody response that existed in humans prior to our current pandemic, meaning that we might already have some degree of preexisting immunity to this virus,” study co-author Dr. John Altin explained in a press release regarding the study, which was published in Cell Reports Medicine, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Before the new coronavirus, humanity is known to have become introduced to at least half-a-dozen other types of coronaviruses.
Therefore, together with SARS-CoV-2, the scientists studied coronavirus antibody responses to two other dangerous coronavirus which have threatened the world recently – MERS-CoV, which led to a localized outbreak in Saudi Arabia in 2012, and SARS-CoV-1 – which saw an outbreak in Asia in 2003.
Four older, less dangerous and far more prevalent coronaviruses – alphacoronavirus 229E, alphacoronavirus NL63, betacoronavirus OC43 and betacoronavirus HKU1 were also studied. Humanity has developed high levels of immunity to these viruses, with their symptoms usually no more serious than those of the common cold, causing mild upper respiratory infections.
The findings may prove hugely important in giving scientists the knowledge to create new diagnostics tools, study the impact of using convalescent plasma as a therapy for Covid-19, and even designing new vaccines and antibody therapies that can fight mutations of the new coronavirus.
“Our findings highlight sites at which SARS-CoV-2 response appears to be shaped by previous coronavirus exposures, and which have potential to raise broadly-neutralizing antibodies. We further demonstrate that these cross-reactive antibodies preferentially bind to endemic coronavirus peptides [short chains of amino acids], suggesting that the response to SARS-CoV-2 at these regions may be constrained by previous coronavirus exposure,” Altin said.
The scientists say further studies will be needed. Research could, for example, help to explain the broad way in which Covid-19 manifests itself, with some people experiencing only mild symptoms or even getting through the virus entirely asymptomatically, while others face severe symptoms or even succumb to complications associated with the disease.
“Our findings raise the possibility that the nature of an individual’s antibody response to prior endemic coronavirus infection may impact the course of COVID-19 disease,” Dr. Jason Ladner, the study’s lead author, said.
The research also included participation from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and a number of other hospitals and research institutions.
January 23, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
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January 20 was a day of mourning for countless numbers of people harmed by Biden that went on for nearly half a century in public office.
The same holds for misery he’ll inflict on countless more ahead —ordinary people exploited so privileged ones can benefit, including himself and family members.
He built a dishonorable career on a foundation of shilling for powerful interests that included waging wars on humanity at home and abroad.
His record as US senator and vice president reflects virtually everything disturbing about dirty politics as usual in Washington.
It includes endless examples of breaching the rule of law and betraying the public trust.
In 2002, then-Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren slammed him, saying:
“His energetic work on behalf of the credit card companies has earned him the affection of the banking industry and protected him from any well-funded challengers for his Senate seat.”
Even the NYT criticized him in 2005 for “vot(ing) against a proposal to require credit card companies to provide more effective warnings to consumers about the consequences of paying only the minimum amount due each month.”
Throughout his public life, he backed predatory corporate interests and the military, industrial, security complex at the expense of peace, equity, justice and the rule of law — notions he always disdained.
He’s one of the ugliest ugly Americans in Washington — past and present, a figure to be despised, never trusted.
Along with his political record of shame, he was accused many times of acting inappropriately toward women and girls.
At least eight women accused him of inappropriate touching and/or violating their personal space — then refusing to apologize for his unacceptable behavior.
He was criticized for offensive remarks about the physical appearance of young girls when campaigning.
Former staffer in Biden’s Senate office Tara Reade accused him of inappropriate touching and more, saying the following:
He “used to put his hand on my shoulder and run his finger up my neck.”
In 1993, she accused him of pressing her up against a wall, kissing her neck, prying her legs open with his knees, and penetrating her digitally — a serious charge.
She filed a police report in Washington, accusing him of sexual assault.
She also filed a Senate complaint. Around half a dozen former Biden staffers said they were told about the assault incident.
Other women accused Biden of sexual assault and harassment.
Reade’s former neighbor in the 1990s Lynda LaCasse said Biden’s assault “happened, and I know it did because I remember talking about it.”
Last May, Biden denied the accusation, claiming it “never happened.”
Around the same time, Reade called on Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, adding:
“(I)f Joe Biden takes” a polygraph test, so will she.
Describing the alleged incident, Reade said:
“He’s talking to me and his hands are everywhere and everything is happening very quickly.”
“He was kissing me and he said, very low, ‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’ ”
“He said, ‘Come on, man. I heard you liked me.’ ”
When Biden entered the presidential race last year, eight women publicly accused him of sexual harassment, including unwanted kissing, hugging and inappropriate touching.
Former Nevada state assemblywoman Lucy Flores earlier accused Biden of making her feel uncomfortable by inappropriate touching and kissing.
He’s “not just a hugger,” she said. He “very clearly was invading women’s spaces without their consent in a way that made them feel uncomfortable.”
“Does he potentially have the capacity to go beyond that? That’s the answer everyone is trying to get at.”
On inauguration day January 20, Reade commented on his ascension to power, saying the following:
Viewing the inauguration was “unspeakably hard to watch.”
“Coming forward about being sexually harassed and assaulted in 1993 when I was Joe Biden’s staffer was excruciating on so many levels.”
“Biden used his power and resources with certain media to erase me and silence me.”
“I stand in solidarity with all survivors coming up against such power.”
“I will not be silenced. Instead of talking about saving the country’s soul he should be held accountable for his actions.”
“The hard part is I believe in many policies that will move forward as I am a progressive independent, but it is unspeakably hard to watch the man who assaulted me go to the most powerful position in the land.”
“I’m sorry that I’m politically inconvenient but my perpetrator was Joe Biden. And people need to deal with it.”
Separately, Reade tweeted:
“Today is yet again another difficult day for survivors of sexual violence.”
“While I’m thankful Trump was defeated, the idea of the man who assaulted me as our president is still terribly painful.”
“I will be sharing resources for survivors today for #Inauguration2021.
“Instead of talking about saving the country’s soul he should be held accountable for his actions.”
“The hard part is I believe in many policies that will move forward as I am a progressive independent, but it is unspeakably hard to watch the man who assaulted me go to the most powerful position in the land.”
Trump once bragged about being able to do whatever he wanted with women with remarks like:
“When you’re a star, they let you do it.”
Draw your own conclusions about the duo.
A Final Comment
Psychology Today earlier called sexual assault “any sexual activity that occurs without consent,” adding:
It’s “a pervasive problem. In America, one in three women and one in four men experience sexual violence in their lifetimes, according to the National Institutes of Health.”
“And those numbers are likely an underestimate due to the shame and fear that prevent many survivors from reporting abuse.”
“Sex and violence are closely linked,” notably by “dominant men forcing themselves on women.”
“(S)exual assault is more about power than…sex…motivation stem(ming) from the perpetrator’s need for dominance and control.”
Children and adolescents are affected like adults.
Biden is a political predator many times over, his long record of shame well documented.
Now in the nation’s highest office.
He got there the old-fashioned way — by stealing it.
January 23, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | United States |
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HighWire Catches MSM Misinformation; Decoding COVID Death Data; ICAN’s Biggest Win Against the CDC Ever
#TheHighWire #COVID19 #MisinformationMatters
January 22, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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There is an agenda. A huge agenda. It is a Globalist agenda that is in the process of inflicting gigantic harm to humanity. It is called the Covid-19 – The Great Reset, issued by the World Economic Forum (WEF), authored by its founder, Klaus Schwab. If left undisturbed, The Great Reset’s plan is a crime of epic dimensions, never seen before in our civilization. Mr. Trump did not want to be part of this agenda.
Donald Trump, for better or for worse, is not a Globalist. He calls himself a patriot. He wanted to Make America Great Again (MAGA). Sounds silly? Perhaps. But it’s not globalist. Therefore, Mr. Trump was not the guy of the Globalist Cabal, currently calling the shots on world events – way above Presidents like Donald Trump and those of the other 192 UN member countries. This Globalist Cabal has enormous power. Joe Biden and his gang respond to this power.
What is behind Donald Trump’s “silly” idea of MAGA, the western globalist-brainwashed world cannot understand. It was supposed to bring the United States back to again become a sovereign, independent, economically autonomous nation. On more occasion than one Mr. Trump said, he wishes the same for every nation in the world. He also insinuated that NATOs purpose was passé. And he said before his 2016 election, under his Presidency the US would no longer be the policeman of the world. He may have tried on all of these scores, but the Powers That Be (PTB) had other ideas.
In foreign policy – interfering in other countries’ affairs – he certainly didn’t act according to his pre-election promises (or was not allowed to by the PTB); not in Syria, not in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea – not in Europe, not anywhere in the world where “American interests” are at stake – as they euphemistically call “interference” in other sovereign nations’ affairs.
Especially not in Russia and China. Quarreling with these sovereign nations, and menacing them, was a lost cause. He knew it, but it was good for cosmetics. It presents well as an international show of upmanship, for maintaining the image of a super-power and an emperor. Both of which are long gone. But perception is always limping behind facts.
However, you have to give him this: Against the wishes and pressure of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), Donald Trump did not start any new wars. He maintained those started under his predecessors – six active ones – give or take a conflict here and there. Thereby keeping the MIC at bay.
Donald Trump obviously did not fit the Globalist agenda. It was not his plan. Contrary to what many may think, he had no ambitions for a One World Order (OWO), which is clearly the Globalist’s goal. This is the plan behind the Great Reset (see this The World Economic Forum (WEF) Knows Best – The Post-Covid “Great Global Reset”). To achieve completion of the Great Reset, millions of people may have to die.
The Globalist Cabal doesn’t care. Jo Biden doesn’t care. Because Joe Biden is a Globalist, as well as his crew, inherited mostly from the Obama era – and so is Hillary (on her “demolish Libya” initiative, cynically laughing and referring to Muammar Gadhafi: “We came, we saw, he died”), still an important figure of this – let me call it what it is – a criminal clan.
Joe Biden’s political career was born in the swamp of Washington – and the way it looks today, it will end in the swamp of Washington, either with him as President – or without him as President. At this age, despite all the noble words spoken at his inauguration, Joe Biden will not reform his conscience. “I will be President not only for those who voted for me, I will be President also for those who didn’t vote for me; I will be President for all Americans.” This slogan-style wishy-washy palaver has no meaning.
There is not one US President who hasn’t used such words, at least during the inauguration – and most of them much earlier during their campaigns. “I will work to unite our badly divided America again.” When in the last 70 Years were the United States united? Never. Will Joe Biden meet the challenge?
During his inauguration speech, as well as in several previous occasions, including the pre-election Presidential Debates, Joe Biden referred to the coming “Dark Winter” – hoping that America will get through it without harm. What is the “Dark Winter”? – Why the mystery, instead of transparency? Why talk in code-language, when American people are, as Biden implied, his number one priority?
Did his remark refer to Operation Dark Winter which was a code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted on June 22–23, 2001, at Andrews Air Force Base Maryland? The simulation was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. The simulation was sponsored and carried out by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Note – the Johns Hopkins research and teaching complex is strongly supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Does this mean that there is or may be a plan for a biowarfare attack – in the form of Ebola, smallpox or a stronger strand of coronavirus? Or any other highly infectious and deadly disease? – If so, Mr. Biden, and all the others who mentioned a Dark Winter ahead, including Barak Obama, must know what’s behind it. And they hide it from the people.
The insinuation that such a catastrophe may be in the making, without openly warning the people, or better, preventing the Dark Winter – is certainly not a sign of caring for the people. To the contrary, it shows distain for the people – the lower castes. Sounds like Hillary Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” in a 2016 Presidential campaign speech. Seems, the core of the Dems, as they pan out with Joe Biden’s election, have a particular flair to feel above the rest of the people.
People, and unity within the United States seem clearly not to be a priority preoccupation of Joe Biden’s. Much more important, how can he – or rather the team behind him – be a driver in the implementation of the globalist agenda, the Great Reset. Because, he, Joe Biden, and the swamp behind him are committed to this cause. The Globalist Cabal, chose him over a continuation of Donald Trump’s Presidency.
Never mind that there was massive – but massive, proven voter fraud, possibly in the hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million votes were added to Biden or electronically switched from Trump to Biden. But Mr. Trump’s legal team was not successful in bringing forward and defending their evidence before any court, including the US Supreme Court. Imagine the Immense power behind this Global Cabal!
Mr. Trump, like him or not, for his country he had another agenda. He wanted to rebuild the US economy again. Bringing back outsourced labor, create jobs. His approach may have been inadequate, and at times he sounded awkward addressing economic issues, as well as the people. But he was not a Globalist, he did not strive for an OWO. That’s why 80 million Americans voted for him. They do not want an OWO. Most of the world – 99.99% – do not want an OWO.
Those who voted for Trump also sensed that the so-called Dems had not the least interest of the people in mind. Never had, at least not since JFK.
So, Donald Trump did not fit the agenda of the Global Cabal – also called “Deep State”. Those, who are way above the President of the US – and the leaders (sic) of the world. They are dead-set on implementing the Great Reset – grabbing more power for themselves, more wealth – and a technified, digitized, robotized world, a totally electronic plutocracy – a technocracy cum tyranny, under which the Epsilon-people (lowest cast in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) will behave and obey as they are digitally ordered – modern slaves – own nothing and be happy – the Great Omen of the Great Reset.
And if their eugenist wish comes through, they, the Globalist Cabal, will reign over a massively reduced population. That’s where the current western inoculation campaign comes in – all three of the most used vaccines, or rather toxic injections – Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraSeneca – contain mRNA, thus, DNA-altering substances – and have so far not proven effective as vaccines. To the contrary, dangerous side effects and death rates exceed by far the common measures of traditional vaccines. They also contain sterilization and infertility components which fits the eugenics agenda well.
Unfortunately, Russian and Chinese traditional live-attenuated vaccines (a weakened form of the virus) that creates a strong and long-lasting immune response, are not freely available in the west. Such vaccines do not affect the human DNA. However, the methodology is based on decades of experience.
The imminent question is – why suddenly a new type, never tested before vaccine? What is the agenda behind these new types of jabs? Do they have to do with the implementation of the Great Reset? – Why are scientists not allowed to talk openly about the effects and possibly long-term negative impacts of these new-type injections? Why do governments around the globe keep any true science about them under wraps – prohibited – censored in the media – even forbidden under fine and in extremis arrest in psychiatric wards?
Why this immense drive to vaccinate everyone as fast as possible – under menace “if you are not vaccinated, you cannot move”? – And that for a virus – covid-19 – that has a mortality rate approximately comparable to, or in some years even less, than the common flu? – See Anthony S. Fauci, Director the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID / NIH – USA), in “Covid-19 – Navigating the Uncharted”, New England Journal of Medicine – NEJM (28 February, 2020):
If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)…
Among Joe Biden’s first decisions during his few days as President is an increased effort of vaccination – with the mRNA-type vaccines, as well as massive testing by the also proven ineffective and totally inappropriate PCR test – in the US.
He vows to vaccinate 100 million Americans in the first 100 days if his Presidency. This is spot-on with the Great Reset and the Globalist Cabal’s agenda. He has already been warning about the spread of a new more infectious covid-mutation – which would require more of the unpopular repressive measures – also further infringing on the already hard-hit economy. And if Washington decides to “tighten the screws” on the population (Mme. Merkel’s expression), Europe will soon follow suit – and so will all the other western world’s vassals.
——-
Think that’s exaggerated? You may want to read up on the Great Reset and its follow-on White Paper, “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda: Disruption and Renewal in a Post-COVID World” which is basically an implementation manual of the Great Reset. See also The Post Covid World, The WEF’s Diabolical Project: “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda” – After “The Great Reset”. A Horrifying Future.
Following the agenda of the Globalist Cabal is Mr. Biden’s number one priority. On his first “work day”, actually on his Inauguration Day, he has not hesitated to sign 17 Executive Orders, of which the New York Times says:
“Despite an inaugural address that called for unity and compromise, Mr. Biden’s first actions as president are sharply aimed at sweeping aside former President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic response, reversing his environmental agenda, tearing down his anti-immigration policies, bolstering the teetering economic recovery and restoring federal efforts to promote diversity.”
Among these measures are returning the US to WHO, making Anthony Fauci, Director NIAID / NIH, the head of the U.S. delegation to the organization’s Executive Board. “He will jump into the role with a meeting this week”, says the NYT. Mr. Fauci has long been known for his conflict of interest with the vaccine pharma-companies, and for working hand-in-hand with Bill Gates, who funds up to one third of WHO’s budget, and calls the shots on WHO’s vaccination policy. What does that say for Joe Biden, other than he plays already on his first day into the hands of the Globalist Cabal.
President Biden also signed a National Mask Mandate – or “the 100 days masking challenge”, when every serious scientist says how dangerous wearing masks is. However, this is a step towards the Globalist Cabal’s crackdown on humanity, that and social distancing, and isolation by quarantining – leading to lockdowns after lockdowns – all within a massive fear campaign. This is supposed to bring the populace at large to its knees, so that the implementation of the horrible steps within the Great Reset will encounter less resistance.
Mr. Trump never saw lockdowns or mask wearing as the solution to the covid-19 crisis – an opinion shared by many high-ranking scientists and professors the world over. He wanted the already covid-destroyed economy to get back running again, as quickly and as closely as possible to “normal” – thereby also improving the desperate employment situation of the people.
You may see the details of Mr. Biden’s 17 first-day Executive Orders here https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/us/biden-executive-orders.html
So, because Mr. Trump didn’t see eye to eye with the Globalist Cabal, he had to go. His quest for justice from the High Courts with regard to voter fraud was denied.
—–
The Great Reset agenda, dictated by the Globalist Cabal, is to be implemented in its cruelest details under the supervision of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Medicine (funded by the Rockefeller Foundation), WHO, the IMF, World Bank — and the entire UN apparatus. It is an integral part of the UN Agenda 21-30, which depicts to the world the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as the agenda’s glorious “raison d’être”.
In fact, the Great Reset is the key driver of the UN Agenda 21-30. The SDGs are but a noble gesture to tell the Global South how interested the West, or Global North is in the wellbeing of the poor and marginalized people of the nations of the Global South, also called Third World or “developing countries”.
The caveat for the implementation of the SDGs is that the “developing” countries are expecting massive funding from the IMF, World Bank and regional development banks, as well as western bilateral aid organizations, to implement these goals. But, as we know, these development assisting funds come with tight strings attached.
In the case of the SDGs, countries receiving foreign funding from the financial gods mentioned before, have to commit to following the rules and dictates of the Globalist agenda. i.e., the rules and narrative of the Great Reset. Plus, most of the funding comes in the form of loans. That means further debt-enslavement, further dependence on the west, the Global North, for trade and exploitation of their natural resources.
One may wonder, who needs more development the West / Global North or the Global South? – It depends on the criteria of development. It could be – the more digitized and uniformly controlled the world population is, the more developed it is. Or – alternatively, the more sovereign nations collaborate peacefully as independent nations, each with their own culture, their own money, their own fiscal policies and social coherence – the more developed, equal, just and peaceful the world will become.
You choose.
Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
January 22, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Environmentalism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, NATO, United States |
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Image source: fromliestotruth.com
To speak of a “Covid vaccine” is to enter into two falsehoods. As some have argued,1,2 the virus known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus two (SARS-CoV-2) has not actually been isolated and therefore cannot be proven to exist. This would of course be an advantage to those officials who can then blame any number of other illnesses, like influenza, on Covid 19. It is hard to prove something either is or is not there when you don’t know what it is. This is a crucial problem at the center of the “pandemic” narrative.
Dr. David Martin points out that the mRNA injection which is being called a vaccine “is a medical device designed to stimulate the human cell into becoming a pathogen creator. It is not a vaccine.”3 According to a British Health Agency, the active substance in the injection is made up of “RNA-containing lipid nanoparticles.”4 The nanoparticles seem to be a kind of software designed to manipulate human DNA. If the virus it is supposed to target has not itself been identified, this manipulation would have no known purpose. Pfizer/BioNTech claim their product encodes the full length of the viral S protein of SARS-CoV-2, but, according to Iain Davis, “the WHO protocols Pfizer used to produce the mRNA [for the vaccine] do not appear to identify any nucleotide sequences that are unique to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. When investigator Fran Leader questioned Pfizer they confirmed: ‘The DNA template does not come directly from an isolated virus from an infected person’.”5 If the virus has not been isolated, there is no foundation upon which to build a vaccine.
The “pandemic” itself is a house of cards — a disease which appears to have had no effect on all-cause mortality in comparison to other recent years, driven by a mysterious virus which no one can exactly define, a PCR test for the undefined virus which test can be amplified to produce a positive result no matter what it identifies6, and a liability-protected vaccine which has no specific target and which not only provides no immunity but has proven, a month after being rushed into emergency use, to be the cause of many serious adverse health effects, including death.7 As in the long history of conventional vaccine disasters, reported adverse effects of the mRNA injection have been attributed to “coincidence”.8 To complete the absurdity, deaths from the injection have simply been turned around and blamed on Covid.9
There can be no discussion of vaccines without mentioning the powerful and corrupt pharmaceutical industry, and the godfather, Bill Gates, who has been massively funding new entrants into that industry, like Moderna and BioNTech; not to mention UN agencies, government regulators, policy makers, academic institutions, mainstream media, and everyone else involved in the medical tyranny we are now living under. This homely czar of all world health matters is ubiquitous. He seems to be involved in every big money social engineering scheme on the planet. But there is one interesting thread in his story . . .
Gates made his fortune in the software industry with the Microsoft Corporation in the 1990s and 2000s. His expensive proprietary software was a corrupting influence on what could have been a free, cooperative, open source internet, but monopoly capitalism worked to help Gates rise to the top of the list of the world’s billionaires, and gave him the ability to buy influence everywhere he wanted (or was instructed) to go.
In 2003 Gates got involved with genetic modification (GM) research, in a supposed effort to feed the world through better agriculture. He later invested heavily in Monsanto10 and its development of genetically modified foods. Patented seeds — a kind of corollary to proprietary software –would make even more money for Gates via his investments in Monsanto, while small farmers in places like India lost their livelihoods to big business chemical-dependent agriculture totally foreign to them. Control of and patents on seeds, and control of agriculture in general, means control of food. As fellow psychopath Henry Kissinger once said, “control food and you control the people.” Henry Kissinger and Bill Gates are also both fellows in the Rockefeller school of population control, once known as eugenics.
In 2005 the Gates Foundation funded tetanus vaccinations for distribution by UNICEF in Africa. Nine years into this program, doctors and Catholic clergy in Kenya had the vaccine independently tested and found that it contained an antigen called human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) which renders women infertile.11 As the people targeted for the vaccine were exclusively women of child-bearing age, the only possible conclusion is that Gates and UNICEF were conducting a covert and criminal eugenics experiment. The Gates Foundation was also behind a polio vaccine that paralyzed 496,000 children in India. Almost everywhere he has gone with his philanthropy, Gates has ended up hurting people. As Robert Kennedy has pointed out, philanthropy for Gates is a way to donate to humanitarian projects with one hand while collecting a great deal more in business profits with the other, and he does all this even while harming people.12 Where harm is proven, as in these two cases, Gates has been exempt from any consequences, and has continued self-righteously lecturing the world about the benefits of vaccines.13
India has really taken a beating from Gates’ purported attempts to do good. In 2010 Gates got involved in a digital identity program called the Aadhar project, designed to give biometric IDs to no less than the entire population of India. Like all Gates Foundation projects, it was advertised as a philanthropic venture, but the real benefactors were financial institutions and government, not poor people supposedly lacking access to financial services. According to James Corbett,
the ID control grid is an essential part of the digitization of the economy. And although this is being sold as an opportunity for ‘financial inclusion’ of the world’s poorest in the banking system provided by the likes of Gates and his banking and business associates, it is in fact a system for financial exclusion. Exclusion of any person or transaction that does not have the approval of the government or the payment providers.14
There later came a related push to make India a cashless society — the dream of bankers and tyrants, but in practice a disaster for many of India’s poor who depend on cash. Gates went on to fund the ID2020 initiative, which has goals similar to the Aadhar project — namely, government control of peoples’ ability to trade freely and make a living. Through tracking, surveillance, and the power of government to cut off peoples’ money at will, we see once again the agenda of control.
Beside his involvement with (and massive abuse of) conventional vaccines, Gates has been the major funder of the development of a supposed “Covid vaccine” involving never-before-tried genetic manipulation and nano technology. The COVID-19 mRNA vaccine now being rolled out by Pfizer/BioNTech is not a vaccine; it is the beginning of an experiment on the human race, being openly conducted without informed consent, and in the absence of long-term testing required for conventional vaccines, which themselves have a terrible record of causing, not preventing, harm.
The mRNA injection plan seems to combine all of Gates’s previous pursuits in one — namely, introducing software into the human “operating system” which will eventually make it possible to identify and track entire populations, as in the India biometric project. The mRNA software is also proprietary. Since Gates is recommending that everyone on the planet should receive his “vaccine”, one would think the code should be “open source” — that is, open for all the world to see, since all of us are affected — but the way nanoparticles in the mRNA injection act as a kind of machine to promote self-replication of certain elements within cells is not made public by private, for-profit pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, nor do the many people now getting the injection have a good idea of exactly what it is that is being put into their bodies. In this area, public health agencies simply pass on the claims made by the manufacturer. What is at stake here? This nanotechnology could end up making human beings a new kind of genetically modified organism, much like Monsanto corn, soybeans, or cotton. With a sufficiently modified genome, the future GMO human may even be patentable, especially if he carries biosensor implants already patented by Microsoft.15 As Catherine Austin Fitts has observed, the plan is that every new virus to come along will require a software update which would be called a “vaccine”, much like the Microsoft business model where Gates began his empire.16 But now we see that Gates has moved from selling computer software to controlling the world’s population.
The thread running through Bill Gates’ history is that this man isn’t interested in feeding the poor or helping humanity through improvements in medicine and public health. His field is making computers perform tasks through software programs. He sees people as computers to be programmed to meet human behavioral and eugenic goals which he and the global elite find desirable. The software engineer has become a world-scale social engineer, but continues to use his original model. We should keep in mind, however, that within the larger program (post-MS-DOS), Gates has never been acting alone.
The use of technology to manipulate the human genome could open what Bill Joy, writing twenty years ago, called “Pandora’s boxes of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics” which could irreversibly change what it means to be a human being.17 Even if its intentions were benevolent, science should know better than to meddle in something it knows so little about, including the human immune system. You can never change just one thing, as everything is connected.
But when it comes to the oligarchs now ruling much of the world, it is hard to escape a picture of not mistaken use of science but actually malevolent use of science, and excessive power reaching into madness. There are other examples of this in history, such as the development of nuclear weapons in the 1940s, but this time many diverse actors are using technology which could be even more harmful and difficult to control. No one should ever have been allowed to amass the power which people like Bill Gates hold, not to mention those who back him. Clearly and urgently, these people must be stopped.
Footnotes:
1 “COVID vaccine secret, a stunner” by Jon Rappoport, January 15, 2021. https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2021/01/15/covid-vaccine-secret-a-stunner/
2 “They Want To Genetically Modify Us With The COVID-19 Vaccine.” Spiro Skouras is joined with Doctor Andrew Kaufman who explains how the SARS COV 2 virus has not actually been isolated. https://www.bitchute.com/video/r9MG7YY5CrpL/
3 ‘Focus on Fauci. “This is Not A Vaccine”’ By Sacha Stone, Rocco Galati, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Dr. Judy Mikovits, and Dr. David Martin, Global Research, January 11, 2021. Censored by YouTube but text available by using ‘search’ at https://www.globalresearch.ca/.
4 Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency: “Public Assessment Report Authorisation for Temporary Supply/ COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 (BNT162b2RNA)”, page 7. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/944544/COVID-19_mRNA_Vaccine_BNT162b2__UKPAR___PFIZER_BIONTECH__15Dec2020.pdf
5 “What Vaccine Trials? The most important, meaningful phase of CV-19 vaccine trials has barely begun, let alone been completed” by Iain Davis, Off Guardian, Jan 3, 2021. https://off-guardian.org/2021/01/03/what-vaccine-trials/
6 See “External peer review of the RTPCR test to detect SARS-CoV-2 reveals 10 major scientific flaws at the molecular and methodological level: consequences for false positive results.” What other scientists say about the Real Time Polymerase Chain Reaction test: https://www.cormandrostenreview.com/report/
7 “‘We see nothing alarming,’ says Norwegian drugs regulator, after 13 deaths linked to Pfizer vaccine jabs” RT, 15 Jan, 2021. https://www.rt.com/news/512586-norway-vaccine-elderly-deaths/
8 “Death by Coincidence?” by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., 01/14/21 “Declarations by health officials and vaccine makers that deaths and injuries following COVID vaccinations are unrelated coincidences are becoming a pattern. They’re also depriving people of the information they need to make informed decisions.” https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/death-by-coincidence/
9 “A Nursing Home had Zero Coronavirus Deaths. Then, It Vaccinates Residents for Coronavirus and the Deaths Begin.” by Adam Dick, January 10, 2021. http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/peace-and-prosperity/2021/january/10/a-nursing-home-had-zero-coronavirus-deaths-then-it-vaccinates-residents-for-coronavirus-and-the-deaths-begin/
10 “Behind The Mask Of Altruism: Monsanto And The Gates Foundation In Africa” By Colin Todhunter, 15 October, 2014, Countercurrents.org. https://www.countercurrents.org/todhunter151014.htm
11 “HCG Found in WHO Tetanus Vaccine in Kenya Raises Concern in the Developing World. October 2017”, Researchgate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320641479_HCG_Found_in_WHO_Tetanus_Vaccine_in_Kenya_Raises_Concern_in_the_Developing_World
12 #RobertFKennedyJr‘s Instagram post April 9th, 2020. https://fort-russ.com/2020/04/robert-f-kennedy-jr-exposes-bill-gates-vaccine-dictatorship-plan-cites-gates-twisted-messiah-complex/
13 “Agenda ID2020: The Diabolical Agenda within the Agenda. “Genetically Modified Humanity” By Peter Koenig, Global Research, August 21, 2020. To access, use ‘search’ at https://www.globalresearch.ca/.
14 “Who Is Bill Gates?” The Corbett Report, part 4. 05/01/2020. https://www.corbettreport.com/gates/
15 “The Global Takeover Is Underway” by Dr. Joseph Mercola, Global Research, November 24, 2020, Mercola 23 October 2020. Use ‘search’ at https://www.globalresearch.ca/.
16 “Catherine Austin Fitts | Full Interview | Planet Lockdown”, December 31st, 2020. How the “magic virus” fits into a plan to “dramatically centralize economic and political control.” 48 minute video. Search https://www.bitchute.com/.
17 “Why the future doesn’t need us. Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species” by Bill Joy, WIRED, 04/01/2000. https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
January 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, Gates Foundation |
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Determined to stamp out ‘wrongthink’ in all forms, the media establishment has declared a holy war against free speech. Once the bedrock of US society, it faces a redefinition into something more convenient – or oblivion.
If everyone is permitted to speak freely, their reasoning goes, people’s lives will be put at risk. Those whose opinions diverge from the mainstream should not be permitted to voice those opinions, lest their words hurt people – not just people’s feelings. Yet at the same time as this self-styled Ministry of Truth calls for free speech to be swept into the dustbin of history, it insists its victims’ freedom of speech is not under attack at all.
In the past few weeks, establishment outlets from the New York Times to NBC to the Independent have issued calls for the very idea of “freedom of speech” to be rethought – or better yet, scrapped altogether – because it is no longer in harmony with modern society. This is a tacit admission that the media establishment’s own opinions can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas, and that, despite their best efforts, they can’t censor their way out.
But at the same time as they insist this behavior does not curtail the free speech of the tens of thousands of social media users who’ve been given the boot in the past few months, they’ve called for the very idea of free speech to be retired, as it supposedly has no place in the 21st century.
The establishment’s cries for a bigger, better memory hole don’t stop at praising social media censorship, though there’s plenty of that – Twitter and Facebook’s decision to suspend US President Donald Trump’s accounts has been universally praised by the paper(s) of record. Amazon’s decision to kick the entire social media app Parler off its servers is right up there with storming the beaches of Normandy in the fight against fascism, according to these outlets. They’ve even moved on to demanding cable TV providers push conservative networks such as OANN and Newsmax overboard, and alternative platforms from Telegram to Minds are now in their crosshairs.
The media establishment blames “free speech” for the raid on the Capitol earlier this month, with the Hill skewering social media platforms for putting their dependence on “clicks and ratings” above some sort of higher calling – even though the media establishment’s own dependency on clicks and ratings has forced numerous outlets to merge, downsize, or even close offices as Facebook and Google eat their lunch. Even more absurdly, NBC claimed the FBI would have warned about the raid, except they had concerns about the First Amendment – as if the FBI hasn’t at some point designated almost every American as a domestic terror threat.
The entire argument has the air of something cooked up at the last minute to justify a long-desired end, and sure enough, the media have long been frustrated watching alt-media sites and YouTubers in their bedrooms producing quality content that also – in some cases, at least – has the added value of somewhat resembling the world its audience inhabits. Trying to deplatform the most popular content creators while pretending to uphold the noble mantle of the Fourth Estate has never been an easy balance to strike, and it must come as a relief to many establishment figures to finally dispense with the pretense of embracing freedom of speech.
While not everyone in the media establishment is on board with this new direction, many of those opposed are too scared to speak up, lest they lose their job or be shunned by colleagues. But this sort of cowardly behavior is what has turned the establishment into such a monster. In less than a decade, American liberalism was co-opted by a tiny fraction of screeching malcontents who shouted sanity into hiding with their insistence that “words are violence” and strong opinions they disagreed with were the literal equivalent of curb-stomping oppressed minorities.
Because the ‘silent majority’ (who, contrary to what has become the prevailing doctrine, were not all straight white males) were reluctant to go to war with the unhinged barbarians who’d shown up at their gates, “words [that I don’t like] are violence” became the official doctrine of the academy. Most of those who didn’t like it merely gritted their teeth, held their tongues, and groused in private about the excesses of their cultish colleagues while those colleagues indoctrinated class after class of impressionable young people. Their dogma now dominates the media establishment to the point that journalistic awards are given out not for groundbreaking reporting, but for demonstrations of ideological fealty – and indeed, truth just gets in the way. No wonder much of their audience has fled to YouTube and Twitter for their news.
It’s no longer a question of “if you can’t beat them, join them” – the establishment has issued its verdict, and those whose opinions do not fall within the ever-narrowing borders of the mainstream have been declared anathema. The only problem the narrative managers now face is convincing their targets they don’t have the advantage of numbers. Thus, if you can’t beat them, ban them. What’s the point of having absolute power over the media otherwise? However reality-averse their work may be, these zealots are keenly aware that their captive audience despises being lied to, demonized, and told that the most normal behaviors – from studying the classics to voting to gathering with loved ones in their homes – constitute racism, Nazism, and attempted genocide. There is no way to package such outrageous slanders that will convince those thus degraded to swallow them. So, the only option is to ban arguments from the “other side.”
Failure to triumph in the marketplace of ideas – by the topsy-turvy logic of the Words Are Violence crowd – merely means the marketplace needs stricter regulations. If two plus two cannot be persuaded to equal five, that’s only because math is racist.
In designating freedom of speech – once the foundation of American society – as a threat to democracy, the thought police running the media establishment have essentially completed the job of destroying everything that once made the country successful. The only question remaining is whether Americans are going to take this sort of insult sitting down.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
January 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | New York Times, United States |
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A team of legal experts is set to file the first cases against the NATO alliance on behalf of people who developed cancer after being exposed to depleted uranium munitions during the Serbian bombings in 1999.
The first lawsuit is expected to be filed before the Higher Court in Belgrade on Wednesday, following years of extensive work by a team of legal experts led by lawyer Srdjan Aleksic. Dozens of other lawsuits will be filed before other courts across the country as well. The team is seeking to win compensation of at least €300,000 ($363,500) for each Serbian victim who developed cancer.
“We are talking about the highest courts, to which we will file five lawsuits. The victims are natural persons – deceased and sick soldiers and police officers of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, who were in Kosovo in 1999. At the first stage, we want them to be identical cases, as in the Italian military,” Aleksic told Sputnik, referring to hundreds of Italian NATO soldiers who suffered from cancer and other severe conditions after being exposed to depleted uranium (DU) during the alliance’s campaign against Serbia.
The legal team has received support from Angelo Fiore Tartaglia, an Italian lawyer who successfully represented affected solders in court.
“He has 181 court rulings, which have already entered into force in Europe. He will be a member of my legal expert team,” Aleksic stated, expressing optimism over the cases’ prospects, given all the evidence the team has gathered.
“We have more than 3,000 pages of materials, including verdicts, expert opinions, materials of a special Italian government commission. We have collected enough evidence,” he said.
While the use of DU munitions in the Balkans has been openly admitted by NATO, proving a link between them and cancer proved to be an extremely difficult task, with the alliance denying any such correlation.
In its 2000 report on depleted uranium – which is used to make the hardened cores of armor-piercing rounds – NATO acknowledged that it used some 10 metric tons of the material during its Kosovo campaign, and 300 times more during the First Gulf War.
While the report acknowledged that the material poses a threat due to its toxicity in an “aerosol form” – basically, when the armor-piercing core is evaporated during a hit – it maintained that DU is not “particularly highly radioactive” and poses “practically no danger” when ingested or entering body directly through wounds.
At the same time, the alliance admitted that “in the vicinity of the impact point of DU ammunitions, it is not excluded that individuals unaware of the contamination… could have accumulated radiation doses and/or could have incorporated uranium quantities exceeding the internationally recognized limits.”
The use of DU was also acknowledged by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, but it said that “there is no specific treaty ban on the use of DU projectiles.”
January 20, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | NATO |
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On 11 January, Israel’s Lod District Court ruled against Palestinian film-maker Mahmoud Bakri, and ordered him to pay hefty compensation to an Israeli soldier who was accused, along with the Israeli military, of carrying out war crimes in April 2002 in the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
As reported by Israeli and other media, the case seemed to be a relatively simple matter of defamation of character and so on. To those familiar with the massive clash of narratives which emanated from the singular event known to Palestinians as the “Jenin Massacre”, the court’s verdict not only has political undertones, but also historical and intellectual implications.
Bakri is a Palestinian born in the village of Bi’ina, near the Palestinian city of Akka, now located in Israel. He has been paraded repeatedly through Israeli courts and censured heavily in the local mainstream media simply because he dared to challenge the official discourse about the violence in the Jenin refugee camp nearly two decades ago.
The director’s documentary Jenin, Jenin is now officially banned in Israel. The film, which was produced only months after the conclusion of this particular episode of Israeli state violence, did not make many claims of its own. It largely opened up a rare space for Palestinians to convey, in their own words, what had befallen their refugee camp when units of the Israel Defence Forces, with air cover provided by fighter jets and attack helicopters, pulverised much of the camp, killing scores of people and wounding hundreds more.
Israel claims to be a democracy, remember. For it to ban a film, regardless of how unacceptable its content is to the authorities, is wholly inconsistent with any definition of freedom of speech. To ban Jenin, Jenin, indict the Palestinian filmmaker who made it, and then compensate those accused of carrying out war crimes is outrageous.
The background of the Israeli decision can be understood within two contexts: one, Israel’s regime of censorship aimed at silencing any criticism of its occupation and apartheid; and two, Israel’s fear of a truly independent Palestinian narrative.
Israeli censorship dates back to the inception of the State of Israel atop the ruins of the Palestinian homeland in 1948. The country’s founding fathers painstakingly constructed a convenient story regarding the birth of the state, erasing Palestine and the Palestinians almost entirely from their narrative. The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said had this to say in his essay “Permission to Narrate“: “The Palestinian narrative has never been officially admitted to Israeli history, except as that of ‘non-Jews,’ whose inert presence in Palestine was a nuisance to be ignored or expelled.”
To ensure the erasure of the Palestinians from Israel’s official discourse, the state’s censorship has evolved to become one of the most elaborate and well-guarded programmes of its kind in the world. Its sophistication and brutality has reached the extent that poets and artists can be put on trial and sentenced to terms in prison for merely challenging Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism, or penning poems deemed offensive to Israeli sensibilities. While Palestinians have borne the brunt of Israel’s ever-vigilant censorship machine, some Israeli Jews, including human rights organisations, have also suffered.
The case of Jenin, Jenin is not one of routine censorship, though. It is a statement, a message, to those who dare give voice to oppressed Palestinians and allow them to speak directly to the world. These Palestinians, in the eyes of Israel, are certainly the most dangerous, as they demolish the layered, elaborate yet fallacious official Israeli discourse, regardless of the nature, place or timing of any contested event, starting with the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948.
My first book, Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion, was published almost simultaneously with the release of Jenin, Jenin. The book, like the documentary, aimed to counterbalance official Israeli propaganda through honest, heart-rending accounts from the survivors of the violence brought down upon the refugee camp. While Israel had no jurisdiction to ban the book, pro-Israel media and mainstream academics either ignored it completely or attacked it ferociously.
Admittedly, the Palestinian counter-narrative to the dominant Israeli version, whether on the “Jenin Massacre” or the Second Intifada which was still underway at the time, was humble, and largely championed through individual efforts. Still, even such modest attempts at narrating a Palestinian version were considered dangerous, and rejected vehemently as irresponsible, sacrilegious or anti-Semitic.
Israel’s true power — but also its Achilles heel — is its ability to design, construct and shield its own version of history, despite the fact that the narrative is hardly consistent with any reasonable definition of the truth. Within this modus operandi, even meagre and unassuming counter-narratives are threatening, for they poke holes in an already baseless intellectual construct.
Bakri’s story of Jenin was not attacked relentlessly and eventually banned simply as the outcome of Israel’s censorship, but because it dared to blemish Israel’s diligently fabricated historical sequence, starting with a persecuted “people with no land” arriving in the alleged “land with no people”, where they “made the desert bloom”. These are two of Israel’s most potent founding myths.
Jenin, Jenin is a microcosm of a people’s narrative that successfully shattered Israel’s well-funded propaganda. It sent (and still sends) a message to Palestinians everywhere that even Israel’s falsification of history can be challenged and defeated.
In her seminal book, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith brilliantly examines the relationship between history and power. She asserts that, “History is mostly about power… It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others.” It is precisely because Israel needs to maintain the current power structure that Jenin, Jenin and other Palestinian attempts at reclaiming history have to be censored, banned and punished.
Israel’s targeting of the Palestinian narrative is not simply official contestation of the accuracy of facts or of some kind of fear that the “truth” could lead to legal accountability. The colonial state cares nothing at all about facts and, thanks to Western support, it remains immune from international prosecution. Rather, it is about erasure; erasure of history, of a homeland, of a people: the people of Palestine.
Nevertheless, a Palestinian people with a coherent, collective narrative will always exist, no matter the geography, the physical hardship and the political circumstances. This is what Israel fears above all else.
January 19, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Film Review, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Britain’s Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer hired a former Israel spy to work in his social media team, The Electronic Intifada has revealed. Assaf Kaplan was hired as a “social media listener”, and worked formerly for the infamous 8200 cyber unit of the Israeli intelligence services. In a profile of Kaplan on an ex-employer’s website, he is described as a “Unit 8200 veteran”.
Unit 8200 specialises in cyber intelligence, and is known for its role in blackmailing and assassinating Palestinians, as revealed in a shocking Guardian report in 2014. Another former Unit 8200 officer revealed anonymously the extent of the activities undertaken by the unit, some of which resulted in the killing of an innocent child in the Gaza Strip. Operatives also used sexual preferences to blackmail Palestinians into becoming collaborators with the Israeli occupation authorities.
“Once when I was the unit representative, there was someone suspicious next to a weapons warehouse in Gaza and we thought he was our target,” explained the anonymous source. “It had taken us a long time to find him. Judging by his location, the time and similar data, we concluded it was him. After we assassinated him it turned out that he was a kid… I remember an image on the screen of him in an orchard, and the explosion on the screen, the smoke clearing and his mother running to him, at which point we could see he was a child. The body was small. We realised we had screwed up.”
Another pointed out that “any Palestinian” may be targeted and may suffer from sanctions such as the denial of permits, harassment, extortion or even direct physical injury. “Such instances might occur if the individual is of any interest to the system for any reason. Be it indirect relations with hostile individuals, physical proximity to intelligence targets, or connections to topics that interest 8200 as a technological unit.” Any information that might enable “extortion” of an individual is considered relevant information by the 8200 team. “Whether said individual is of a certain sexual orientation, cheating on his wife or in need of treatment in Israel or the West Bank, he is a target for blackmail.”
Kaplan was also involved in the latest General Election in Israel, working for Israeli Labor as deputy head of campaigns. The party suffered a catastrophic collapse in its share of the vote, and there are now rumours that it will be wiped out completely in the upcoming election in March.
Although some Twitter users have pointed out that Israeli citizens are subject to mandatory conscription into the Israeli army, the duration of national service is only two and a half years. Kaplan apparently served in Israeli intelligence for nearly five years, twice the normal conscription period. Other Twitter users have said that Kaplan is being singled out simply because he is an Israeli citizen, and that if it was any other intelligence service there wouldn’t be any problem.
January 19, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, UK, Zionism |
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When Noam Chomsky defended the academic freedom of a political science professor who made “The Case for Colonialism” in a journal article, I wondered if the famed MIT linguist and prominent anti-war [sic] activist might have other surprises up his sleeve.
Looks like the answer is no.
Chomsky made perhaps the most inapt comparison since our president-elect equated support for due process with white supremacy, telling a Stanford University audience that failure to wear a mask in public was analogous to going on a shooting rampage.
The Stanford Daily reports that Chomsky spoke virtually last week at the invitation of two student-run organizations, the Stanford Speakers Bureau and Stanford in Government.
Chomsky was classic Chomsky, wondering if “the human experiment [was] going to continue” as humans deal with climate change and nuclear weapons. He claimed the “super-rich fraction of 1 percent” has absorbed at least $47 trillion from “the lower 90 percent” since the Reagan administration.
But apparently prompted by moderator Rush Rehm, who teaches a class on Chomsky, the invited speaker waded into unfamiliar territory: current research on COVID-19 and mitigation methods.
The “legitimacy” of President Trump’s former coronavirus advisor Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, “has been called into question,” the Daily paraphrased Rehm. The newspaper noted an Atlas tweet, removed by Twitter, that started “Masks work? NO,” but the Daily failed to mention the context: Atlas recommended masks “when close to others, especially hi[gh] risk.”
Atlas made the same point when he denounced Stanford colleagues for claiming he was harming the university’s reputation and even violated the faculty code of conduct. He resigned from the White House task force a week later.
Chomsky claimed that people who oppose wearing masks are an “epidemic” in American politics, more concerned about protecting their freedoms than following science:
“I mean, do you have an individual right to take an assault rifle and go to the supermarket or mall and start shooting randomly?” he questioned. “That’s what it means not to wear a mask. It’s a strange kind of individualism.”
If Chomsky had bothered to read the research cited by Atlas before Twitter censored it, or followed the flood of research papers on COVID-19 mitigation practices in the past year, he would have known the case for mask mandates is incredibly weak, at best.
Even if the famed linguist were still convinced that wearing masks was a good idea, it’s baffling how he would connect two activities with enormously different risk profiles.
Opening fire with an “assault rifle” in a crowded space is highly likely to kill and seriously wound a lot of people. Not wearing a mask while shopping is far more nebulous. Even a person who tests “positive” for COVID-19 – using tests that are often unreliable – may not be infectious at all, particularly if they don’t show symptoms.
Finally, the vast majority of Americans are not at serious risk from COVID-19 even if they get infected. If Chomsky bothered to read the Great Barrington Declaration, he might consider that a “focused protection” approach actually makes the most sense holistically.
MORE: Stanford Daily falsely claims Atlas incited violence
January 19, 2021
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, United States |
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Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
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