Daily the news is pouring in: SARS-CoV-2 behaves like a textbook respiratory virus in its vectors of transmission and its conferring immunity. It is not and never was a strange and unfamiliar pathogenic meteor hitting the earth warranting panic to the point of shutting down the normal course of life.
The policy response should have followed the proven path of the past: vulnerable people protecting themselves while non-vulnerable populations go about life as normal with an expectation of exposure. This was the settled presumption of public health. This is what the Great Barrington Declaration said and it is what Public Health England is saying now.
Why did all this happen? Did sizable parts of the world fail to pay attention in 9th grade biology class when the subjects of viruses and immunity were discussed? For that matter, is this stuff not taught anymore?
I’m just not sure what accounts for this sudden loss of knowledge. I do know that people who specialize in political economy were blindsided last March with the policy response to pandemic. Nothing like widespread lockdowns had ever been attempted in the US, which accounts for why so little has actually been written about it. The result was that many intellectuals – on all sides! – found themselves unprepared. Subjects like cell biology and infectious disease are not topics usually examined by economists and philosophers, so many people decided to say nothing at all, thereby granting the lockdowners a free hand that dominated public discussion.
I had been variously writing on the topic of pandemic policy responses since 2006, but beyond the general conviction that government would only make things worse, I too was unprepared to deal with the specifics concerning viruses and their mitigation. Is it really true that closing restaurants and churches makes a contribution to stopping disease spread? Is forcing people apart actually a sound response to the presence of a pathogen? Is there no other path to minimizing the social harm of a virus other than waiting for a vaccine? For that matter, can a virus really be stopped?
Answering these questions takes more than political or ideological conviction. It requires at least some knowledge of cell biology, pathogens, pandemic history, public health practices, and immunological history. I scrambled to get up to speed so that I could understand more thoroughly and write in a more compelling way.
Mostly this consisted of reading as many medical studies on Covid as possible, in addition to listening to endless hours of talks online by specialists. That was essential. Even so, what I really needed was to embed myself in the bigger topic more deeply.
The books below provided me the most help on this intellectual journey.
The History of Public Health, by Paul Rosen. This fascinating treatise was first published in 1958 and reissued in 1993 with new material. It is a wonderful introduction to the whole concept of public health and how it evolved through the centuries. A major theme of the book is how poor understanding of disease dominated public health from the ancient world through the 19th century. Ignorance and fear led to a run-from-the-miasma mentality. Once the science of cell biology improved, so too did public health.
The last bout of medieval-style brutality toward disease was in 1918, after which public health got very very serious and swore that nothing like that would happen again. The turning point occurred when it became clear that large-scale collective efforts to beat back and hide from pathogens were futile and tremendously harmful. Instead, disease is something to be managed by doctors and their patients. The job of public health became to focus on clean sanitation and water and otherwise give a message of calm, and clear recommendations to people in light of medical resources.
The hardest challenge for public health was to get common people to understand the scalability of their own immune systems, so that people would stop fearing exposure as such but rather embrace evolutionary reality. After World War II, this became a major feature of public education.
Rosen further emphasizes how modern public health differs from ancient and medieval theory in that it is never about chasing away a single pathogen. Rather, public health must consider all aspects of health including economic and mental health. So panicking by running away from a germ is completely contrary to modern public health, to say nothing of lockdowns, which have zero to do with health.
One thing that slightly bothers is Rosen’s tendency to attribute all improvement in health to science and better policies. He has a whole chapter on the strange disappearance of a vast number of diseases after WWI. He thinks it is due to better sanitation and so on, which is undoubtedly true in part. But even while reading, I couldn’t shake Sunetra Gupta’s point that trade and migration vastly improved immune systems. It was a natural process of tossing off naive systems for exposed systems that made the largest contribution to longer lives and better health.
Molecular & Cell Biology For Dummies, by Rene Fester Kratz. This quick Kindle download provides an accurate look at the core of the topic at hand while minimizing the amount of technical and medical razzle-dazzle you would otherwise face with a first-year textbook from medical school. Not having an extensive background in this topic myself, I not only found the book fascinating; I was amazed that I found it fascinating! The human immune system shares features with any complex evolved system: as a reader you cannot help but be in awe of its workings and interactions with the world. In a year in which the lockdowners tried to pretend as if the immune is nonoperational without a vaccine, this introduction to disease basics is an outstanding corrective.
Smallpox: The Death of a Disease: The Inside Story of Eradicating a Worldwide Killer, by Donald A. Henderson. This is a spectacular history of one of the greatest triumphs in modern medicine. It is also beautifully written. Inoculation against smallpox has been around since the 18th century, and the vaccine since the late 19th century. The real challenges that met the eradicators – the author himself among the most famous and dedicated of them all – was about production, distribution, and administration. Here was what requires decades of work, and Henderson chronicles the litany of difficulties he faced around the world. I think of this book often these days given the completely predictable chaos of Covid vaccine distribution in 2021.
The Plague, by Albert Camus. This short but powerful book, written about the author’s own quarantine and published in 1947, is a work of fiction that speaks to the terrifying reality of lockdowns in the midst of a plague – the sort of plague that takes people down ferociously and brutally. He captures perfectly how the fear of sickness and death taps into a primal instinct and causes first denial and then panic. He speaks profoundly to the loss of direction and purpose in the midst of lockdown, the isolation and psychological damage that being cut off from the normal flow of life brings about. And he speaks to the loss of control felt both by citizens and officials when confronted with a mysterious pathogen, and just how disorienting it is to discover that the disease is smarter and more powerful than any of us.
Coronavirus and Economic Crisis, edited by Peter C. Earle. I am listing this one not because I have several essays in it, but rather because this book compiles some of the best research and writing from the early months of the pandemic lockdown. It is filled with white-hot passion and tremendous erudition. It also provides proof that what many of our writers predicted came true: tremendous social, cultural, and economic damage. We were warned at the time that we were acting too soon in publishing this, and it is true that AIER was just about first out the door with a book on the topic. But it turned out to serve as a great inspiration to others, and gave the principles that guided the opposition to lockdowns for the rest of the year. In the meantime, AIER released three additional books on the topic in addition to my own book Liberty or Lockdown.
Pandemic responses will continue to serve as a convenient rationale for government interventions in the future. Anyone who has a concern for human liberty and prosperity should be armed with intellectual ammunition to combat this huge increase in government power. We need more than ideological instincts here; to fully understand, we need to be aware of the sciences of infectious disease and the discipline of public health.
At this point, ignorance threatens everything we hold dear. We owe the cause of freedom some effort on our part to read up, learn, and be prepared for the long battle ahead.
“I don’t want to live in East Germany,” says Nigel Farage in a new video in which he expresses concern at where Britain is heading. He has a point; I was in the DDR in 1989 and found it to be less oppressive than Britain today.
It started with stamps. My interest in the ‘German Democratic Republic’ began when a very nice lady called Frieda, who lived on our road when I was a child, started to give me her old East German stamps for my collection. She was from the DDR, and went every year to visit her elderly mother there. She told my mother she was followed by the secret police when she went back. My apolitical fascination with this rather mysterious ‘Behind the Iron Curtain’ country grew. I had a pen friend who lived in Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz), and we exchanged football pennants and stickers. In September 1989, I was finally able to visit. It was some experience.
Without wishing to brush over or downplay in any way the negatives, which I will go into, I found the country was a lot less grim than popularly portrayed. Perhaps that was partly due to the gloriously sunny weather. But it soon became clear to me that, despite living in a ‘dictatorship’, people could still enjoy happy, meaningful lives. I remember packed bars and restaurants (including one self-service cafeteria that was open all night at Erfurt station, where my friend and I spent our first night on wooden benches).
We also witnessed a very joyous old-style wedding – with horse and carriage – in the centre of beautiful Wernigerode, the quaint little town in the Harz Mountains where we stayed. I travelled around on trains (including a wonderful old steam locomotive), buses, and trams. In Magdeburg, I went to a football match. I chatted with people wherever I went. I found everyone friendly and eager to enter into conversations. I was also struck by the very high general level of education. People loved talking about books.
It’s a sobering thought that things I could do in East Germany in 1989 I cannot do in the locked-down Britain of today. Pubs, restaurants, and nightclubs are shut, by Order of the State. Ditto theatres and other places of public entertainment. Football matches are played ‘behind closed doors’. Earlier this week, Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi appealed for people not to stop and chat to friends they bump into outside, and also told people not to sit on park benches! “Don’t go out and sit or have that opportunity of social interaction,” he said. Again, this is worse than East Germany. You could always meet your friends there, and make new ones too.
In less than 12 months, Britain has been transformed from a relatively free country into an authoritarian police state where physical social interaction is strongly discouraged, if not illegal. Last week, we saw a shocking video of police breaking into a home in Scotland after a ‘tip-off’ that there were ‘too many people’ there.
In Wales, a couple were given a fixed penalty notice for travelling seven miles to see the wife’s 94-year-old mother in a care home, a journey the police deemed ‘unnecessary’. “I feel like I’m living in some sort of dystopian novel after what happened,” a ‘mortified’ Mrs Carol Richards said afterwards (After much publicity, the fine was subsequently rescinded, but that still doesn’t excuse the police action).
Under the ‘rules’, people have even been prevented from visiting seriously ill loved ones in hospital. Just how inhuman is that?
The biggest bugbear people I spoke to had with life in the old DDR was the restrictions on foreign travel. But although we have no Berlin Wall, we have restrictions on travel in Britain today (at least for the plebs). When Home Secretary Priti Patel boasted about ending free movement, the left presumed she was talking about immigration. It transpired it was the British people’s free movement that was ending, under the guise of fighting a virus.
And with the World Economic Forum-sponsored roll-out of health passports – which the power behind the throne, Tony Blair, assures us “will” happen – will those who refuse to get vaccinated ever be able to leave the country again? It’s certainly a major concern.
East Germany had its Stasi, which we all know about; in ‘free democratic’ Britain, people are encouraged to call ‘hotlines’ and use ‘online portals’ to snitch on their neighbours if they believe they are breaching Covid regulations. My friend, the Oxford academic Mark Almond, tweeted that he has a friend who is a chairman of a gardening association here, but who was in East Berlin in 1983. Mark’s friend told him she had received anonymous denunciations of breaches of lockdown in the allotment! “Makes one nostalgic for the Stasi,” she remarked.
“Ah,” I hear some of you say… “But East Germany was a de facto one-party system, whereas Britain is a multi-party democracy. There’s really no comparison.” But what use is having opposition parties if they all toe the ‘official’ line and agree with the government on the biggest issues of the day? All of the parliamentary parties are pro-lockdown. The only opposition to the Conservatives from Labour has been on the lines of “You’re not locking down hard enough!” When Parliament debated the latest lockdown measures last week, just 16 MPs – out of a House of 650 – voted against. Not one Labour MP opposed.
It was the very wise French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery who noted in ‘The Little Prince’, “what is essential is invisible to the eye.” So it is with societies. We can cite GDP figures until we’re blue in the face, but the important thing about a country is how things feel. Are people happy? Is there joy to be had in everyday life?
The mood in East Germany in September 1989 was optimistic. Perhaps people thought positive change was on its way. Perhaps others were genuinely enthused by the 40 Jahre DDR celebrations. I don’t feel the same atmosphere in Britain today. People seem demoralised and depressed. That’s borne out by the news that antidepressant use soared in 2020, with six million people in England receiving anti-depressants in the three months to September – the highest figure on record.
The downbeat national mood is not at all surprising when you consider that people have been physically isolated from one another and we have been fed a 24/7 diet of fear-porn from the government and most of the media for the past nine months. Relentless psychological warfare has been waged on us. It has certainly taken its toll. Who wouldn’t be depressed if they watched Piers Morgan and ‘Good Morning Britain’ every day?
East Germany was an attempt to build a ‘workers’ state’ out of the ruins of the Third Reich. But although economically it represented a big change to what had gone on before, with a largely collectivised planned economy, the important point is that everyday life wasn’t that much different to how it had been for centuries. The basics remained the same.
People could still go out, socialise, have a laugh and a joke, a pint and a smoke, spend time with their families, and find love and romance and happiness in chance encounters. In other words, do all the things that make life worth living. But such simple pleasures – which we took for granted before March 2020 – are deprived to us in Britain today, where under the imposition of the ‘Great Reset’ we are being conditioned to accept as a ‘new normal’ an entirely abnormal way of living that goes against every human instinct.
As bad as things are in early 2021, even worse will follow, unless there is a massive pushback against the globalists’ dystopian agenda. An agenda which, as my fellow RT.com columnist Tomasz Pierscionek pointed out last week, is about constructing a “living hell that combines the worst of Communist totalitarianism with the worst of capitalism’s detached callousness towards those deemed expendable, perhaps topped off with liberal and woke militants cancelling those committing thought crimes.”
In a TV interview on Wednesday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock admitted he had no timetable for a lifting of lockdown even after vaccinations. Priti Patel has already told us“social distancing is here to stay.” Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty has said that lockdown (if it is ever eased) could be re-imposed next winter.
Is this really our future? Rolling lockdowns, bans on seeing our families and friends, and threats of even tougher restrictions hanging permanently over us? And all this while being told to ‘mask up’ and keep two or even three metres away from our fellow human beings – and of course not to chat to them. The utterly hellish and soul-destroying ‘New Normal’ designed for us by the Davos elites makes late 1980s East Germany – for all its well-documented faults – look like paradise on Earth. Just think about that for a moment.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66
Some legal experts are speculating about the possibility that people who participated in the January 6 Capitol melee could be charged with murdering Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, even though they did not participate in his killing. The felony-murder rule holds that if a person is involved in the commission of a felony in a conspiracy with others, he can be charged with murder even though others in the conspiracy did the killing.
When I read that, I immediately thought about the kidnapping and murder of Chilean General Rene Schneider, who was killed in 1970. In fact, it’s interesting that while the members of Congress and the mainstream press express shock and outrage over recent events in the Capitol, they have long been non-plussed by the shocking and outrageous violence that U.S. government officials instigated and in which they participated in 1970.
Schneider was the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. He was a man of deep integrity, had a family, and believed that it was the duty of the military to support and defend the constitution of the country.
In the 1970 presidential election, the Chilean people delivered a plurality of votes to a man named Salvador Allende, who U.S. officials reviled because he was a socialist. Like President Kennedy ten years before, Allende was interested in establishing friendly relations with the communist world, including the Soviet Union and Cuba, two official Cold War enemies of the U.S. national-security establishment. Keep in mind that in 1970, the Cold War was still continuing and that the communists were defeating U.S. military and CIA forces in the Vietnam War.
U.S. officials determined that Allende posed a grave threat to “national security” — not only the “national security” of the United States but also the “national security” of Chile. They decided to prevent his accession to the presidency, either through bribes to the Chilean congress or through a U.S.-supported coup that would install a right-wing military dictatorship in the country.
There was one big obstacle to a coup: Gen. Rene Schneider.
The Chilean constitution provided for only two ways to remove a duly elected president from office: by impeachment (and conviction) or through the next election. The Chilean constitution did not provide for a coup as a third way to remove a president from office.
The Chilean congress had been unable to secure enough votes to remove Allende from office through impeachment. That left the next election, which would have meant that Allende would stay in office for the next 6 years.
Schneider’s position was very simple: Since the Constitution did not provide for a coup to remove the president, the military could not act to remove him.
The U.S. national-security establishment’s position was different: While it too favored supporting and defending the U.S. Constitution, it held that there was an implicit exception to the rule, which was: Whenever a country’s president is determined to be a grave threat to the “national security” of his own country, it becomes the the moral duty of the national-security establishment to protect “national security” by removing the president from office. (As I point out in an upcoming article in FFF’s monthly journal Future of Freedom, this mindset has clear ramifications in the Kennedy assassination, which occurred ten years prior to Allende’s election.)
In order to achieve the coup, it was necessary to remove Schneider as an obstacle. Thus, U.S. officials within the CIA and other parts of the U.S. government entered into a conspiracy to kidnap Schneider.
Now, before a go further, I know what some of you are thinking: “Conspiracy theory, Jacob! Conspiracy theory! There is no way that officials of the U.S. government would ever conspire to violently kidnap an innocent man! It’s outrageous that you would even suggest such a thing about our government!”
But the fact is that that this conspiracy did in fact occur, notwithstanding the fervent mindset that some might have to deny its existence. The CIA secretly hired the kidnappers, paid them money, including hush money after the fact, and even smuggled high-powered weapons into the country, which they gave to their Chilean co-conspirators.
When the kidnappers attempted to kidnap Schneider on the streets of Santiago, he was armed and fought back. The kidnappers shot him and Schneider died three days later from his wounds.
The CIA claimed that it never intended to murder Schneider. It said that it just wanted to kidnap him. However, that claim has the word “lie” written all over it. After all, what could they have done with him after kidnapping him? They couldn’t return him, given that would have restored him as the obstacle to the coup. Moreover, if they returned him, he might have been able to lead law-enforcement personnel to the kidnappers and ultimately to the CIA. Thus, it is a virtual certainty that Schneider would have been killed by one of the kidnappers and that the CIA would have dutifully expressed shock.
Nonetheless, enter the felony-murder rule. Kidnapping is a felony. So is conspiracy to kidnap. Under the felony-murder rule, the U.S. conspirators were as responsible for Schneider’s murders as the actual killers.
The CIA and other U.S. officials who participated in the conspiracy tried desperately to keep their involvement in the conspiracy secret. People who suspected their complicity in the plot were undoubtedly labeled “conspiracy theorists.” But investigators in the private sector kept pushing and ultimately the truth came out: The CIA and other U.S. officials had participated in a felony, with the conspiracy taking place in both Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Nonetheless, the Justice Department has never charged any of the conspirators with kidnapping or murder or conspiracy to commit kidnapping and murder. Keep in mind that there is no statute of limitations for murder. But even if a federal grand jury were to return a criminal indictment, it is a virtual certainty that the federal judiciary would immediately dismiss it on grounds of “national security.”
It’s probably worth mentioning that when the family of Rene Schneider sued in federal district court for Schneider’s wrongful death, the federal courts threw them out on their ears, without even permitting them to take depositions that could have determined the full extent of the conspiracy. When it comes to extraordinary measures to protect “national security,” including kidnapping and assassination, secrecy in a national-security state is always paramount.
But that’s the nature of any national-security state: omnipotent power to inflict violence on innocent people with immunity and impunity, even while decrying violence committed by others.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.
Americans see corporate media stories about Muslim terrorism in the Philippines. This peaceful nation was declared a terrorist battleground by American President George Bush many years ago. A few hundred US troops are quietly based there to assist, but this war on terror is fake. Evidence suggests that the America CIA is responsible for some of the few random bombings each year used to justify an American presence. The Philippine army needs no help, and some terror attacks are the result of false flag operations to justify American aid. Ending America’s fake war on terror in the Philippines would improve relations, save money, curtail corruption, and lessen the violence.
“Report: Multiyear counterterror operation has failed to dislodge extremists from Philippines”; Seth Robson; Stars and Stripes; August 17, 2020; https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/…
Obama – er, Biden – pushed hard for the removal of Syria’s Assad and engineered US destabilization of Syria partly at the behest of Israel in 2011 and 2014 , in part to allow Israel free reign to annex the Jordan Valley and West Bank, in tandem with Israel’s long-standing annexation of the Golan. Yes, the Israeli Nile-to-Euphrates agenda is alive and quite well, not just among Israel’s 3rd templars, but within Biden’s proto-expansionist regime in the DC wings, too. Now, what’s that again about Russia Russia? Biden’s Russia, Russia? There’s just one problem for the Axis of Evil’s plan going forward: Russia’s continued opposition to the US plan in Syria.
Russia likely anticipated the complete destabilization of the Middle East by the US and its Israeli ally by design in 2014, where Takfiri malign infestation of the region not only threatened Europe, but Russia too, with a further militarist threat to Iran and West Asia. Russia stands in the way of that Imperial agenda, and that’s a big deal for Washington’s elite donor class. Russia also provided succor to Ed Snowden, when the DC shark pit would have crucified him alive; just as the same bloodthirsty pack will crucify Julian Assange too should they ever get their bloody incisors into him.
Now, rather than risk world war, the former US regime chose to tread a fine line with Russia in Syria, although outright war was much closer than the public realized or knew at the time. The current shape-of-things-to-come will test that envelope once more, and in a very big way. By definition, the reappearance of war-criminal and dinosaur Madeliene Albright, to re-blight a thoroughly blighted major media proves that intent. Albright’s abysmal record and advanced years have evidently not prevented her from seeking a new term within the putrefying endless expanse of DC’s Neoliberal cesspool.
Lately the voluble Albright has graced the CIA-corporate-led media to tout all subjects great and small, whether the contagion and failed US foreign policy, to the Balkans and somewhat erratic behavior of others. Apparently the non-apologetic self-acknowledged child-killer is safe for the time being for the DC establishment to trot out again — after all these years — and Albright holds her CIA-surveillance state brief well, even at the tidy age of 83.
Along with Albright and other foreign policy wonks littering the Biden-Harris space (Jen Psaki, Sam Power, and Wendy Sherman etc) Mike Morell’s reappearance has been as inspired and imaginative as his call to murder Russians (with Iranians thrown in for good measure, of course). Which apparently posed no problem for the incorporated CIA-run major media at the time; and whether Morell’s twitter account was ever suspended then for publicly threatening violence, remains unknown.
Notably the recent storming of the US bastille on January 6th caused our dear Mike to lament this failed example of democracy-in-action via a televised CBS news interview on that day, Mike posing that such brazen acts could be an inspiration for anti-American propaganda to be exploited by none other than… er, well, ahem… the Russians and RT! When a not-so-incredulous but mainly pandering CBS co-host pressed Mike about how Russia could possibly be running the Proud Boys to storm the capitol?? … our dear Mike back-pedaled a bit to say, well, like always (but never proven) the Russians definitely did hack Hillary in 2016 and cost her the election. Leaving hosts and viewers alike somewhat baffled, but fortunately the CBS ‘analyst’s’ cum CIA guy’s conversation moved on, saving further embarrassment.
If public consciousness were not just a few milliseconds, the irony of media claims that Trump’s allegations about voter fraud are baseless since proof has not yet been provided, would not be lost on the public, when compared to US intelligence claims that Russian collusion in 2015 cost Hillary the election when no proof or evidential record of that has ever been provided, either. But then again, Morell is a former CIA spy guy and CBS anchor, so that’s just how he rolls…
In closing we are left with one final perplexing and inevitable question: which CIA-led news network will pick up Gina Haspel and Mike Pompeo as news analysts going forward? CBS too? And who is the next Clinton-Obama dinosaur and war criminal to re-appear and pollute the new regime in DC?
For certain, we shall see.
Steve is an antiwar activist and a published scholar on the US monetary system.
Jeff Bezos is the founder and owner of Amazon.com, and in 2019 surpassed Bill Gates as the richest man in the world.
He just single-handedly destroyed Parler.com, the biggest competitor to Big Tech.
Since being censored on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other Big Tech networks, Health Impact News has enjoyed the most success on Parler.com where we have not been censored for criticizing Big Pharma. Even when we have criticized President Trump on the mainly Right Wing platform, we have enjoyed free speech to publish our articles.
All of that ends tonight, as Jeff Bezos and his company Amazon Web Services (AWS) has decided to kick Parler off of their Cloud-based server system.
ReallyGraceful did a documentary in 2020 about Jeff Bezos’ rise into the Big Tech Oligarchy that is now trying to take over America.
Hidden camera footage of PBS exec Michael Beller, in which he appears to wax poetic about ‘deprogramming’ Trump supporters’ kids and celebrates their parents’ death from Covid-19, has apparently gotten him fired.
Speaking to an undercover reporter for conservative muckraking outfit Project Veritas, Beller appeared to boast that “even if [president-elect Joe] Biden wins, we go for all the Republican voters, and Homeland Security will take their children away.”
“We’ll put them into re-education camps,” he continued, suggesting this was necessary because “kids who are growing up knowing nothing but Trump” would take after their Trump-supporting parents and presumably become pint-sized bigots.
They’ll be raising a generation of intolerant, horrible people -–horrible kids.
Once more, dear reader, I venture into the insane world where experts falsely claim they’ve proved SARS-CoV-2 exists. Within that world, they contradict themselves. They just can’t keep their story straight.
So let’s begin with Tony Fauci. We have him on video making the following statement: “… In all the history of respiratory borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks… Even if there’s a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit [the virus], an epidemic is not driven by an asymptomatic carrier.” [1]
Fauci is emphatic. People with no symptoms who are carrying a virus? Not a problem. They don’t spread the virus to other people. They don’t cause or maintain an epidemic.
Now let’s turn to the CDC. Jay Butler, CDC deputy director for infectious diseases just told the Washington Post, “The bottom line is controlling the COVID-19 pandemic really is going to require controlling the silent pandemic of transmission from persons without symptoms.” [2] [3]
Just the opposite of what Fauci said.
So now we have this:
ONE: People who carry the virus but have no symptoms don’t cause or maintain an epidemic.
TWO: Those very people ARE a major problem, and the epidemic can’t be controlled without controlling them—with masks, distancing, and lockdowns.
Follow the science? What science?
On the back of this gibberish, nations all over the world are seeing their economies destroyed, and hundreds of millions of lives ruined.
It’s a freak show, and the freaks are running it.
Of course, the experts can lie their way out of this. They can say, “Well, this is the FIRST TIME in human history that people with no symptoms are driving an epidemic. We’ve never seen it before…”
Right. This is a special case. Astounding.
If you believe that, I have condos for sale on the far side of the moon.
The truth is, the experts are starting backwards from an unexpressed premise, which is: WE WANT TO LOCK DOWN THE PLANET AND WRECK ITS ECONOMY, AS THE FIRST STEP TO CREATING A BRAND NEW WORLD OF TECHNOCRATIC CONTROL. NOW, WHAT DO WE HAVE TO SAY IN ORDER TO MAKE THAT HAPPEN?
This is how official science operates. It’s political and totalitarian, and it pretends to be objective.
So Jay Butler, the CDC deputy director, rounds off his statement to the Washington Post with this: “The community mitigation tools that we have [masks, distancing, lockdowns] need to be utilized broadly to be able to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 from all infected persons, at least until we have those vaccines widely available.”
Translation: We have to keep lying, to keep the global population under lock and key. Putting the Chinese model of control in place, in Western countries, takes time. Buy the con for another few years and we’ll have an iron grip on the population.
Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power.
The story they missed in DC; Covid injuries and deaths have begun; New Strain, New Pain; Doctor exposes testing and asymptomatic transmission; A glimmer of hope
CBS News, October 4, 2018: “Protesters opposed to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh took over a Senate office building on Thursday, with actresses Amy Schumer and Emily Ratajkowski among the demonstrators detained. The Senate will hold a procedural vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination on Friday, setting in motion a possible final vote on Saturday.”
“New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand addressed protesters, telling them, ‘This is a moment about all of you — all of you are speaking truth to power because you care about the future, you care about our children, you care about who is leading this country and who sits on the highest court in the land’.”
“Capitol police said about 300 people were detained. In a video shared widely on Twitter, Schumer said ‘I think we’re going to get arrested’.”
Women’s March tweeted: “We were planning to shut down the Capitol Building but the authorities were so scared of this #WomensWave that they shut it down for us. 1000+ women, survivors, and allies have gathered in the Hart Senate Building. Every hallway. Every floor.”
Very easy-going press coverage. No problem. No outrage. No accusations of Insurrection from the mainstream press.
It was a protest from the Left, covered by the Left. And the Capitol Police promptly shut down the original target: the Capitol Building. They didn’t lead the protestors INTO the Capitol, as they astonishingly did a few days ago, on January 6.
Here’s another item from 2018 on the same protest—ABC News: “Capitol Hill police said 128 people were arrested for ‘unlawfully demonstrating’ outside of senators’ offices and in the main rotunda of the Russell Senate Building. About half as many protesters were arrested for protesting Kavanaugh on Thursday.”
Ho-hum. Another day at the office. Not a word about “the desecration of our democracy.”
Now if you really want to revisit a chaotic moment in federal-building takeovers, let’s go back to 1954. The US House of Representatives Archives has an account:
“On March 1, 1954, while Members gathered on the House Floor for an upcoming vote, three men and one woman entered the visitor’s gallery above the chamber and quietly took their seats. All four belonged to the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and only hours earlier had traveled from New York City to Washington, DC.”
“The United States had annexed Puerto Rico in 1898, and the island’s relationship with the federal government had long been a point of contention. Some Puerto Ricans sought to maintain their relationship with the mainland, and others, like the four visitors in the House that day, argued for an independent Puerto Rico.”
“The Capitol had few security protocols at the time, and the four Puerto Rican nationalists entered the gallery armed with handguns. Around 2:30 p.m. they indiscriminately opened fire onto the House Floor and unfurled a Puerto Rican flag in a violent act of protest meant to draw attention to their demand for Puerto Rico’s immediate independence.”
“Five Congressmen were wounded in the shooting.”
“Members, House Pages, and police officers quickly helped detain three of the assailants outside the gallery, while the fourth escaped the Capitol and was apprehended later that afternoon.”
Joe Bartlett, a House Page at the time, recalls: “I had just had a bundle of bills and had just stepped out the center door, on my way to the Senate, with these bills. I heard what sounded like, a stack of folding chairs falling—these metal folding chairs… I turned around and ran right back into the chamber, and they were sorting out the casualties. They were scrambling in the gallery… it was a helter-skelter scene. I went down the center aisle, and as I went down the aisle, [Clifford] Davis of Tennessee was sitting there… Davis had been shot through the calf, and he had his foot up on the seat in front of him and holding both sides of a bullet wound… I walked right into the well, where poor Al [Alvin Morell] Bentley was stretched out there… the wound contributed to his early death years later. Bentley had been shot through the abdomen…Representative [Kenneth Allison] Roberts of Alabama probably suffered more, maybe longer than anyone. He was shot through the knee. And that bullet had come through the chair that Sam Rayburn, as the Minority Leader, had regularly sat in. Fortunately, Mr. Rayburn was not sitting there at that moment. The bullet shattered Roberts’ knee… Ben Jensen of Iowa was shot in the shoulder, and the bullet followed under his hide to his waist…”
The House of Representatives survived.
After what happened on January 6, 2021, Congress will survive.
So will the endless pompous posturing of the legislators and the press about the Capitol Building being “The People’s House.”
The squalid deals contrived and voted upon in that House have nothing to do with The People.
For the place to become The People’s House, a revolution would have to occur. I’m not talking about the January 6, 2021, false flag.
I’m talking about a vast decentralization of federal power, which would return the central government to its original role, as laid out in the Constitution.
In that revolution, individual liberty and freedom would be paramount. Again.
The main river of human history reveals a war for freedom has been fought from the beginning.
It is still being fought.
Pacified humanity is the disease.
We are the cure.
Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power.
Last week’s massive social media purges – starting with President Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter and other outlets – was shocking and chilling, particularly to those of us who value free expression and the free exchange of ideas. The justifications given for the silencing of wide swaths of public opinion made no sense and the process was anything but transparent. Nowhere in President Trump’s two “offending” Tweets, for example, was a call for violence expressed explicitly or implicitly. It was a classic example of sentence first, verdict later.
Many Americans viewed this assault on social media accounts as a liberal or Democrat attack on conservatives and Republicans, but they are missing the point. The narrowing of allowable opinion in the virtual public square is no conspiracy against conservatives. As progressives like Glenn Greenwald have pointed out, this is a wider assault on any opinion that veers from the acceptable parameters of the mainstream elite, which is made up of both Democrats and Republicans.
Yes, this is partly an attempt to erase the Trump movement from the pages of history, but it is also an attempt to silence any criticism of the emerging political consensus in the coming Biden era that may come from progressive or antiwar circles.
After all, a look at Biden’s incoming “experts” shows that they will be the same failed neoconservative interventionists who gave us weekly kill lists, endless drone attacks and coups overseas, and even US government killing of American citizens abroad. Progressives who complain about this “back to the future” foreign policy are also sure to find their voices silenced.
Those who continue to argue that the social media companies are purely private ventures acting independent of US government interests are ignoring reality. The corporatist merger of “private” US social media companies with US government foreign policy goals has a long history and is deeply steeped in the hyper-interventionism of the Obama/Biden era.
“Big Tech” long ago partnered with the Obama/Biden/Clinton State Department to lend their tools to US “soft power” goals overseas. Whether it was ongoing regime change attempts against Iran, the 2009 coup in Honduras, the disastrous US-led coup in Ukraine, the “Arab Spring,” the destruction of Syria and Libya, and so many more, big US tech firms were happy to partner up with the State Department and US intelligence to provide the tools to empower those the US wanted to seize power and to silence those out of favor.
In short, US government elites have been partnering with “Big Tech” overseas for years to decide who has the right to speak and who must be silenced. What has changed now is that this deployment of “soft power” in the service of Washington’s hard power has come home to roost.
So what is to be done? Even pro-free speech alternative social media outlets are under attack from the Big Tech/government Leviathan. There are no easy solutions. But we must think back to the dissidents in the era of Soviet tyranny. They had no Internet. They had no social media. They had no ability to communicate with thousands and millions of like-minded, freedom lovers. Yet they used incredible creativity in the face of incredible adversity to continue pushing their ideas. Because no army – not even Big Tech partnered with Big Government – can stop an idea whose time has come. And Liberty is that idea. We must move forward with creativity and confidence!
This past week saw a turbulent beginning of the end of the unprecedented term of President Trump. A rally in Washington supporting the president and calls to overturn the election turned violent. Protesters stormed both chambers of Congress and one was shot before being driven from Capitol Hill. Members of Congress returned to certify Joe Biden as president-elect. Meantime, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube took aggressive, new steps to clamp down hard on President Trump’s social media accounts. Among other objections, Twitter said President Trump violated policies in his video urging protesters to be peaceful and go home, because he reiterated claims about election fraud. Some welcome Big Tech’s crackdown; others say it’s a radical violation of free speech. It highlights a long-simmering battle over the control of information online. That’s the focus of our special investigation.
Zachary Vorhies was as an insider for more than eight years, a senior software engineer at Google and Google’s YouTube.
Sharyl Attkisson: Can you give sort of the short version of how you discovered or came to believe something wrong was going on?
Zachary Vorhies: Yeah. I was working at YouTube in 2016 and everything was really great. But then something happened. And what happened was Donald Trump won the election.
Vorhies: And after he won the election, the company just took a hard left and decided that they were going to abandon their liberal principles and start going towards an authoritarian sort of management of their products and services.
Sharyl: Can you describe how that manifested itself, this change in direction you describe?
Vorhies: It happened the first week after Donald Trump won the election. Google had an all hands meeting, which they usually do every week, called TGIF. The CFO broke down into tears recounting how she was communicating with the New York office about how they were going to lose this election. The founder Sergey Brin said that he was personally offended at the election of Donald Trump. And Sundar Pichai, the CEO, said that one of the most successful things that they had done in the election was applying machine learning in order to hide fake news.
Donald Trump’s candidacy didn’t only ignite a new trend of heavy handed manipulation and censorship at Google. Ten days after Trump was elected, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced efforts unheard of before. Facebook would begin judging and rating news organizations in terms of trustworthiness and attaching warning labels to content. It also changed how “trending topics” work, no longer reflecting the number of people discussing something.
The liberal propaganda group Media Matters, founded by Hillary Clinton supporter David Brock, took credit for convincing Facebook to take the drastic new steps.
Within days of the inauguration in January 2017 the whole strategy was outlined in in a confidential memo to donors by Media Matters and some of its affiliates, American Bridge, CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and ShareBlue.
The memo stated that Media Matters was a “partner” of Facebook and other Big Tech players to crack down on online information Media Matters didn’t like. “Facebook needed our help in fully understanding the problem and identifying concrete solutions. We’ve been engaging with Facebook leadership behind the scenes to share our expertise” with the goal of getting Facebook to “adjust its model” Media Matters also said it lobbied Google to “cut off access to revenue” of “40 of the worst fake news sites” —as identified by Media Matters, of course.
This leaked internal video shows the CEO of Google’s YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, discussing their new approach.
Susan Wokcicki (2017 video): We’re pushing down the fake news and demoting it, and we are increasing authoritative news and promoting it. Content that isn’t that we don’t think that is authoritative news it’s just kind of encouraging people to look at is not true. We work with Google news on that to define what reputable sources are.
Sharyl: And when you say ‘They bragged about effectively cracking down on fake news,’ that sounds like a good thing?
Vorhies: Yeah, you would think. But when I looked at the design documents, I started to notice something very interesting, which was a lot of the fake news that they were using as examples of things that they should censor were things involving Hillary Clinton. And I was sort of apolitical, but I started to think to myself, is this really fake news? Why is Google defining this as fake news in order to justify censorship of it? So once I realized that there was this fake news regimen that they were using and it seemed like it was political, I started looking for what that censorship execution could be. And I found it and the project was called Machine Learning Fairness.
Sharyl: What does Machine Learning Fairness describe?
Vorhies: Machine learning is a type of A.I. You’ve got A.I. that plays chess and checkers
Sharyl: Artificial intelligence?
Vorhies: Yeah.
Vorhies leaked a confidential Google document describing what he calls Artificial Intelligence censorship designed to rerank the entire internet by making “machine-learning intentionally human-centered” to “intervene for fairness.”
Sharyl: Do you think there’s evidence that the instructions that Google basically gave its program or machine on how to flag fake news was skewed unfairly, and in favor of liberal interests over conservative interests?
Vorhies: I mean, I wouldn’t even call them liberal because they’re kind of authoritarian, totalitarian right now. And yeah, the evidence of that is whenever you go to news.google.com or you type in a Google search, it’s always being directed towards anti-Trump sentiment. And the reason why, this is because they’re training these classifiers with people that are highly biased.
At the same time, Vorhies says Google was working on social reconstruction to correct what it calls “algorithmic unfairness.”
Sharyl: What is algorithmic unfairness?
Vorhies: Algorithmic unfairness is any sort of algorithm that reinforces existing stereotypes. So a really good question that was answered at Google is: Could objective reality be algorithmically unfair? And Google’s answer to that was actually yes. And the example that they give was let’s say you’re doing a search for CEOs. And let’s say Google returns a bunch of images and most of those images are images of men. Now, even if that reflects objective reality, this can still be considered algorithmically unfair and justify product intervention in order to fix.
Sharyl: And that was happening at Google?
Vorhies: That was happening at Google. And you could tell this because you can go into Google search and you can say, “men can”, and then let Google auto complete. And what it was doing is it was saying “men can have babies,” “men can have periods,” “men can get pregnant.” And then you try to do the same thing but for women, and Google returned results like “women can get drafted,” “women can do anything.” So it’s this inversion of the stereotypes that they were trying to enforce. And it wasn’t just them being equal. They were actually trying to reverse the gender roles. And this is what they think is an algorithmically fair engine.
Meantime, Vorhies says people within Google began organizing anti-Trump activism through an email list: “Resist at Google dot com.” and suggested chants like: “What do we want? JUSTICE! When do we want it? NOW!”
In June 2019, the next presidential campaign was gearing up. After more than eight years at Google, Vorhies says he decided to resign and blow the whistle.
Vorhies: I realized that I couldn’t remain silent anymore and that I had to go and seek out and disclose this to the public because it appeared that Google was attempting a coup on the president.
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.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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Some legal experts are speculating about the possibility that people who participated in the January 6 Capitol melee could be charged with murdering Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick, even though they did not participate in his killing. The felony-murder rule holds that if a person is involved in the commission of a felony in a conspiracy with others, he can be charged with murder even though others in the conspiracy did the killing.
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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