The close attention widely paid to the recent election campaign in the United States is understandable. We are talking about a change in the leadership of a country, which continues to occupy the position of one of the main pillars of the modern world order.
Leaving aside the theme of the nature of the “democratic procedure” in the United States (which caused “disappointment” for many, to put it mildly), let us note the main thing in this context: each of the other significant participants in the world political game associated some of their own expectations attached to it. In this regard, the first reaction of the three leading Asian countries (China, India and Japan) to the preliminary results of the American elections seems to be remarkable.
First, attention was drawn to the haste of expressing congratulations to Joe Biden, in which the prime ministers of India and Japan did not lag much behind their European counterparts. At the same time, no official reaction followed from Beijing to the democratic candidates declaration of “victory”. Apparently, it will not even be until the official announcement of the results of the elections held in the USA. Despite the fact that the Chinese press is actively discussing everything that is somehow connected with them.
First of all, it is noted that Donald Trump leaves American policy to his successors in a state of “degradation”. This implies an internal political situation, in the catastrophic deterioration of which Trump, however, is definitely less to blame than his opponents.
As for Washington’s course in the Chinese direction, it is to Donald Trump that US-China relations owe the extremely important ‘Phase 1 Agreement’ in the field of trade. The parties are implementing the main provisions of this document without interruption, despite understandable restrictions due to the coronavirus pandemic and the aggravation of the political sphere of bilateral relations. Moreover, the latter is more likely a product of the “creativity” on the part of the US political establishment (represented in the current administration by M. Pompeo), over which Trump never managed to establish control.
It is precisely because of the extremely poor state of the political relations with the United States that the Chinese Global Times looks to the future with more than a small amount of skepticism. Believing, however, that there are resources for their improvement, which both sides should not waste.
The NEO has repeatedly noted that the highest ranking of these resources are trade and economic ties between the United States and the PRC (People’s Republic of China). In bilateral trade, the volume of which exceeds 600 billion dollars, there are serious problems, with the solution being aimed at the Agreement of the “1st Phase”. The main supporter of the further development of relations with the PRC remains American business.
China drew attention to the fact that at the third international exhibition the China International Import Expo (CIIE) (Shanghai, November 5 – 10) 197 American companies (5 more than the previous one, CIIE-2019) occupied the most extensive exhibition area. According to the Global Times, foreign exhibitors welcomed the message about J. Biden claim to victory in the recent elections.
But even if an intention to improve bilateral relations appears on the part of the new Washington administration, the “Taiwan problem” has become extremely aggravated in recent years.
In this regard, Taiwan’s reaction to the results of the American elections was remarkable. At first, it was almost mourning in nature, because just during the presidency of Donald Trump, the trend (to one degree or another always present in American politics) to provide comprehensive support to the Taiwanese leadership to acquire a full-fledged statehood for the island increased sharply. In recent months, special importance had been attached to the defense sphere of bilateral cooperation.
However, Taipei’s initial sadness was quickly replaced by official joy expressed in congratulations sent to Joe Biden by President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan. A similar metamorphosis in the camp of “Taiwanese separatists” provoked caustic comments from the same Global Times.
In the assessments of Indian experts on the results of the elections held in the United States and against the background of all sorts of speculations about the half-Indian K. Harris as vice president of the United States (which states, however, that she is a “proud American”), there is obviously a factor of a possible improvement in US-China relations.
The fact is that it was during the presidency of Donald Trump that the Indian leadership took a number of important steps towards the United States. Especially in the last six months a sharp aggravation of relations with China due to the conflict in Ladakh. In the wake of the (hypothetical) improvement in US-China relations, Delhi will be faced with a difficult question: how to proceed with Beijing?
Japan, in an absolutely obvious way, is sincerely (unlike many others) happy with Joe Biden, more for the expected departure of Trump as leader of a key ally. Which, as they say, “really got” Tokyo.
First, by regularly spoiling the mood with reminders of the US trade deficit with Japan of $ 70 billion annually. This is a good fact for Tokyo, but it is better to keep it as least noticeable as possible. In addition, the matter was not limited to talk, and the persistent D. Trump set a deadline (at the end of this year) for taking specific measures to correct the “obvious disgrace”.
Washington’s deliberate aggravation of US-China relations (and even against the background of the coronavirus pandemic) reduces the global economic situation, which negatively affects the foreign business of Japanese companies in general and in China in particular.
According to the Yomiuri Shimbunnewspaper, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is going to discuss all these and other issues with Joe Biden during his visit to the United States, which is due to take place immediately after the inauguration of the US president, scheduled for January 20, 2021.
Finally, it is not superfluous to comment (with a short excursion into recent history) on the ostentatious joy that the allies and closest partners of the United States are expressing with unprecedented speed to the (potential) new American president. Let us recall that when at one time the overseas “knight without fear and reproach” courageously fought against windmills (that is, “with communism” and all kinds of “totalitarian regimes”), his allies made a not so small profitable deal.
Four years ago, they suddenly felt like an abandoned wife, who, in anger and tears, exclaimed: “Come back, I will forgive everything”.
And now, when a ray of hope has dawned, the “abandoned” says, smiling and wiping away her tears: “Dear, let’s forget the old and start all over again?”
It will not work. In any case, on the same scale. For Donald Trump is not a one-time aberration in the political life of the United States. Expressed in a style popular at the time, four years ago America “breathed in the long-awaited air of freedom” and is unlikely to allow itself to once again throw on the yoke of obligations to cunning allies and all sorts of “independent” rogues.
Because it is not clear with whom and in the name of what to fight today. More precisely, it is already clear that there is no one with whom and for what. Moreover, the problems inside the country are “through the roof”.
However, one should not underestimate the factor of the possible return to the American administration of one of those “three witches” who at one time whispered and prophesied to the then American “Macbeth”, that is, President Barack Obama, the prospect of a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Libya.
After that, the United States was drawn into the military adventure of its European allies, the real catastrophic consequences of which the people of Libya are still unraveling.
Since the world game is shifting to Asia, a sharp strengthening of the “humanitarian” component of American foreign policy can be expected here. Moreover, the aforementioned second face of the new US administration was also marked with a “humanitarian” diagnosis. The formation of another trio of American political “witches” may complete the candidacy for the post of Secretary of Defense.
However, in connection with the situations in XUAR, Tibet, Hong Kong, the mentioned diagnosis of American policy in the Asian direction manifested itself quite clearly and “under the devil-Pompeo”. That is, with the coming to power in the United States of the new administration, one should hardly expect immediate and radical shifts in the regional political puzzle. As for the non-“immediate” and not “radical” ones, it is too early to say anything definite about them today.
Vladimir Terekhov is an expert on the issues of the Asia-Pacific region.
The brief history taught to Americans about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis is that evil Soviets conspired with evil Castro to secretly place nuclear armed ballistic missiles in Cuba to threaten the United States. The United States military uncovered this plot, so President John Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba. The commies backed down and removed the missiles. This is true but leaves out key facts: 1) The United States had installed 45 nuclear armed Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey in 1961. 2) The Americans were unaware that nuclear armed missiles were ready to launch from Cuba during this crisis, and that Castro had ordered these missiles launched should the United States attack. 3) The captain of a Soviet submarine concluded war had begun and ordered the launch of a nuclear torpedo. 4) Millions of Americans were almost killed.
Last month, Townhall.com columnist Marina Medvin published a column about letters allegedly written by Leon Morin, a 29-year old soldier who helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp in 1945. In his letters, Morin made a number of eyebrow-raising claims about Dachau—claims that Medvin swallowed uncritically:
The camp contained a gas chamber disguised as a shower room.
The gas chamber exterminated inmates using chlorine gas.
There were at least 20 camps just like Dachau on German soil.
Today, no historian—mainstream or revisionist, Jewish or gentile—would agree with these claims. According to the official Dachau website, “Killing people on a mass scale through poison gas never took place in the Dachau concentration camp.” According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Germans operated only five extermination camps: Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. All were located in Poland, not Germany. Neither mainstream historians nor revisionists believe that chlorine gassings occurred at any of the camps.
In his letter, Morin claimed that Dachau’s prison guards gassed thousands of inmates in a three-hour period just before U.S. troops arrived, of which “more than half” were “half cremated.” The point, we are led to believe, was to kill as many Jews as possible immediately before the camp was liberated and to conceal the dead bodies from the U.S. soldiers. If the point was to conceal evidence of gassings, we are left to wonder why the Germans would go to the trouble of half cremating bodies rather than fully cremating them. It is also curious that the guards waited until the very last minute to administer these alleged executions when there would have been ample opportunity to do so earlier.
According to Morin, the gas chamber had a capacity of 250. To gas 2,000 inmates thus would require eight separate gassings. It takes time to load 250 people into a small room. It takes time for a gassing to kill a group of people. And it takes time to drag 25,000+ pounds of human flesh out of that room. To administer 8 or more gassings in three hours the German guards and their staff would have had to average one gassing every 22.5 minutes.
Even more remarkable was the pace at which the gassed bodies were allegedly cremated. According to Morin, there were six crematories at Dachau—two that “can hold three bodies and four more who can hold six apiece.” This appears to be false: there were apparently only two crematoria ever built at Dachau and it is not clear that both were functional when Dachau was liberated. The official Dachau website shows only one crematorium building, referred to as “barrack X.”. Morin presumably meant to say that there were six ovens in this one crematorium and is claiming—improbably—that multiple bodies could be shoved into each oven. For the sake of argument, let’s accept this questionable claim and do the math. To simplify the analysis, we will make the following assumptions: It takes one hour to fully cremate bodies in an oven, no matter how many bodies are crammed inside; it takes half an hour to half cremate a body; time spent moving bodies to the crematorium from the gas chamber and loading them into the ovens is zero; time spent unloading half-cremated bodies from the ovens is zero; time spent moving half-cremated bodies out of the crematorium is zero. So, that gives us:
2 ovens that can hold three bodies each = 6 bodies fully cremated per hour
4 ovens that can hold six bodies each = 24 bodies fully cremated per hour
= Total of 30 bodies fully cremated per hour
= 60 bodies half cremated per hour
= 180 bodies half cremated in three hours
Under more realistic assumptions, the numbers might look something like this:
6 ovens that can hold 1-2 bodies body each = 6-12 bodies cremated per hour
= 18-24 bodies fully cremated in three hours
= 36-48 bodies half-cremated in three hours
Of course, if we take into account time spent dragging corpses from the gas chamber to the crematorium, loading them into the ovens, removing half-cremated bodies from the ovens, and hauling half-cremated bodies out of the crematorium, the number would be even lower. It is also reasonable to assume that some time would be required to cool the oven before removing half-cremated bodies. Even under the most generous assumptions, Morin’s claim—more than a thousand half-cremations in just three hours, or one half-cremation every 10 seconds or so—obviously is impossible.
Some of Medvin’s readers attempted to rebut Morin’s false allegations, but it appears that their comments have been deleted by Townhall staff. (So much for the idea that conservatives support free speech.)
In a follow-up column, Medvin highlighted Morin’s claim that camp guards used bloodhounds to torture Dachau inmates. She states that this claim is backed by “historic photos” which “show Dachau prisoners fighting the ravenous dogs with clubs to survive.” The only photo she linked to, however, shows no such fight—only a pair of inmates sitting near a dead dog. For all we know, the dog may have died of starvation or old age. Curiously, Medvin has not written about similar allegations directed at Israel (see here, here, here, and here).
If it is real, Morin’s letter is historically significant. It is not evidence that there were gas chambers at Dachau (as Medvin believes), but does illustrate a post-war propaganda campaign designed to vilify Nazi Germany—a propaganda campaign that continues to this day.
I’ve read comments from several folks claiming that despite the COVID lockdowns reducing emissions, there’s been no corresponding decrease in the airborne CO2. Here’s a typical claim, complete with graphic, saying that this proves that human emissions aren’t the reason for the gradual increase in airborne CO2.
The COVID shutdown reduced man’s emissions of CO2 by about 20%. Yet the growth of CO2 in the atmosphere then was almost EXACTLY what it was during preceding years.
What didn’t change was natural emissions. So much for Willis’s [saying] “it’s man made”, and settled science.
Hmmm … y’all who know me know that I’m a data guy. So I thought I’d take a look at the situation. I reasoned that a “year-over-year” comparison would be much more valuable than the more general graph above. A year-over-year comparison is a graph showing, for each month in the record, how much the CO2 level increased over the same month in the previous year. If we want to understand changes in CO2, we need to look at changes in CO2, not the absolute values the commenter used above. Airborne CO2 has been growing at about 2.5 ppmv per year or so. Figure 1 shows recent data detailing the year-over-year growth in airborne CO2.
Figure 1. “Year-over-year” analysis of airborne CO2. Each data point shows how much the airborne CO2 increased over the same month a year previous. Units are parts per million by volume (ppmv). Photo is of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, location of the CO2 measuring station.
Hmmm … didn’t really expect that the variation would be quite that large. The big peak in the middle is from the El Nino/La Nina of 2015-2016. The peak and drop at the start if from the Nino/Nina of 2009-2010. What causes the other variations is far from clear. What is clear is that the values vary from smallest to largest by no less than four hundred percent, from an annual increase of less than one part per million by volume (ppmv) to an increase of over four ppmv … a large natural variation.
Next, we have to ask the question the commenter who I quoted above didn’t ask—just how much would we expect the CO2 to change due to the lockdowns?
Now, the author of the comment above says there’s been a 20% decrease in 2020 emissions … but that makes my Bad Number Detector start ringing. In general, carbon emissions for the globe, as well as the resulting changes in global atmospheric CO2 levels, are a linear function of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The GDP is the sum of all of the goods and services produced during the year.
And as you’d expect, if we increase the amount of stuff we make, we increase the CO2 emissions correspondingly. (For the math inclined, global annual carbon emissions ≈ 6.3 Gtonnes + .4 * global GDP (trillions of constant 2010 $).
Looking around the web, I see estimates for the lockdown-caused drop in 2020 GDP of from 4.5% up to 5.3%. And since emissions and the resulting atmospheric levels are a linear function of GDP, that would mean that the year-over-year CO2 increase should be smaller by something on the order of five percent.
This lets us calculate what the increase in CO2 would have been if there were no lockdowns. Over 2020 you’d expect CO2 emissions, and thus the resulting annual airborne CO2 increase, to have been 5% greater if there had been no lockdowns.
So to be very conservative in our estimate, let’s say the lockdowns actually decreased emissions by twice that, or 10%. If we use ten percent as our figure, our results will be solid.
So … what would the Figure 1 graph above look like without that 10% drop in 2020 emissions? Figure 2 shows that result. Just for interest’s sake, I’ve also added what a 20% difference in emissions would look like. That’s four times the actual ~ 5% change expected from the drop in GDP.
Of course, up to 2020 there is no change …
Figure 2. As in Figure 1, but with lines added showing a 10% (yellow) and a 20% (orange) increase in CO2 no-lockdown emissions would look like.
Again … hmmm. Gotta say, in a system that variable, a 10% or even a 20% difference is not distinguishable from the background. I mean, any one of those three lines is totally believable.
Conclusions
My main conclusion is that despite the huge, almost incalculable human cost of the lockdowns, the change in the rate of increase of CO2 is lost in the noise … which certainly doesn’t prove anything either way about whether the increase is human-caused.
My other conclusion is that this should give great pause to those who are blithely recommending totally restructuring the global economy to replace fossil fuels … look at the real-world costs of the lockdowns all around you, and look at the meaningless CO2 benefits in the graph above. Not worth doing on any planet.
In 2016, a media firestorm erupted when Tribeca Film Festival abruptly censored its documentary selection, VAXXED: FROM COVER-UP TO CATASTROPHE, amid pressure from pro-pharmaceutical interests.
In response to media silence on CDC whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson, who admitted to fraud on a pivotal vaccine safety study, VAXXED catapulted to notoriety and became a worldwide trending topic, opening to sold-out theater audiences nationwide.
Stunned by the immense volume of parents lining up outside the theaters with vaccine injury stories to share, VAXXED producer Polly Tommey began to Livestream worldwide reaching millions, and a community that had once been silenced were empowered to rise up.
In VAXXED II: THE PEOPLE’S TRUTH, Polly and the team travel over 50,000 miles in the USA and around the world. Interviews of parents and doctors with nothing to gain and everything to lose exposed the vaccine injury epidemic and asked the question on every parent’s mind, “Are vaccines really as safe and effective as we’ve been told?”
The Covid-19 virus had been active in Italy months before it was first officially detected, new research has found, raising further questions about the true origins, extent and actual duration of the ongoing pandemic.
The new groundbreaking study, conducted by scientists with Milan Institute of Cancer and the University of Siena, was published this week by the Tumori Journal. The research is based on the analysis of blood samples from 959 people, collected during lung cancer screening tests conducted between September 2019 and March 2020.
More than 11 percent of the tested – 111 people – turned out to have had coronavirus-specific antibodies. All the tested people were asymptomatic and were not showing any signs of the disease. Some 23 of the positive results date back to September 2019, suggesting that the virus was actually present in the country as early as during last summer – some six months before the pandemic ‘began’ and ‘reached’ Italy.
The new research is poking new holes in the already well-battered belief that the novel coronavirus emerged from the Chinese city of Wuhan around December 2019 and that it turned into pandemic in January 2020. The data from Italian researchers is particularly valuable, as it’s based on actual blood samples, as compared to the earlier, less conclusive findings that also suggested that the established pandemic timeline could be wrong.
The study’s conclusions appear to be consistent with the reports of severe respiratory symptoms and “atypical flu” rampant among Italy’s elderly late in 2019. Another study, published by Italian scientists back in June, showed that traces of the coronavirus were found in sewage water analyzed as early as last December.
Similar findings have been made by scientists from other countries as well. Spanish researchers have claimed they’ve traced coronavirus in sewage samples taken as early as March 2019.
Analysis of hospital records from late 2019 in the US has also suggested the unusual amount of ‘flu’ patients, many of whom experienced heavy “coughing” and other severe respiratory symptoms.
Globally, the number of registered Covid-19 cases has gone past the 54-million mark, while more than 1.3 million people have perished, the latest figures by the Johns Hopkins University show. With the mounting evidence that the outbreak began well before its ‘official’ start, it’s becoming more likely the true extent of the pandemic will one day be revised.
Susan Rice is another one of the recycled Clinton people, and in fact the Democratic Party had her going back even before that.
Her mother has been around. She helped design Pell Grants. She had been with Brookings since ‘92 which is about when Susan graduated into the Clinton administration (in 1993) and went directly to the National Security Council.
She was with Bill Clinton for his administration. Obama had her – first at the UN, and then as his National Security Adviser (I think). She’s about as inside as it gets. She has blood on her hands in Africa, Rwanda.
The people’s understanding of the Rwandan genocide in the United States is exactly upside down. There was a genocide there, but it was the side that the US-backed, not surprisingly, and that was Susan Rice’s project. She was a member of the National Security Council to do international affairs and that was one big act of the Clinton administration – that move to pivot to Africa, around Rwanda.
It was also the enabling of their so-called humanitarian interventions, and in any way that’s her child.
At the United Nations, she helped bring us the destruction of Libya, enabled the situation in Syria to the extent that she could, and tried to sell authority for the US to bomb the hell out of Syria as well.
It’s going to be more war, really.
Let me remind people when Trump took office in January of 2017 the foreign policy that Susan Rice and Barack Obama and the Clintons, and John Kerry had set in motion had us where we were having war games at Russia and China’s borders from the Baltics to the Korean peninsula, on a constant basis, with a number of international incidents – including NATO members shooting down Russian pilots over Syria – any of which could have escalated, and really turning on a dime into a global thermonuclear war.
Trump for all the things he has done does not leave us – if he’s leaving – in that situation. But what they’re doing is installing the very people who created that condition to start from day one to bring us right back to the brink with Russia and China.
I think it’s very scary that Susan Rice is being considered for this. I don’t think it’s a surprise at all. Anyone who knows who Joe Biden is not surprised.
Don DeBar is an American journalist and political commentator based in New York.
In 2009 the WHO declared a ‘pandamic’ of a new strain of influenza – Swine Flu 2009. However, in order to create a ‘pandemic’ the WHO/GAVI alliance had to implement political structures that would give them the power to control the populations of 193 member countries when the pandemic was called. These political structures are described in detail in Ch.10 of my book or PhD thesis, however I will provide a summary in point form of the major events needed for an elite group to use medical knowledge to protect their own vested interests in the development of global health policies:
Make sure you change the defintion of a pandemic so that you can call a ‘pandemic’ even when the new virus is not causing serious harm to most of the population. The WHO changed the definition of a ‘pandemic’ in May 2009 (ch 10 PhD thesis or my book)
The new definition removed the following clause: “A pandemic may occur when a new influenza virus appears … resulting in epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness……” A ‘pandemic’ in 2020 can be called simply if “A disease epidemic occurs when there are more cases of that disease than normal.” In this definition a “case” is defined as the presence of the virus (infection) in the person without any symptoms of disease or if it is diagnosed on symptoms only (clinical diagnosis) then there is no proof that the disease (COVID19) was caused by the new mutated coronavirus 2019. So a pandemic in 2020 can be called simply on the detection of the virus in the person – no serious symptoms required – or ‘flu-like symptoms’ with no virus identified and this gives the medical-industry complex, with vested interests in these health policies, the power to control populations with medical testing and vaccines.
The professional medical board must have control over diagnosing disease and death without accountability. This gives them the power to protect any vested interests because the classification of the main cause of death is a grey area of science. There are many co-morbidities (multiple illnesses) that can contribute to the cause of disease/death and the decision on the main cause of death can be subjective – and there is no accountability or transparency to the public for the classification of death by medical practitioners. This gives practitioners power over the lives of individuals if the board controls this medical knowledge without transparency to the public. A change in the criteria of one disease and extra surveillance of the infectious agent can result in an increase in the cases of one disease and a decrease in an another. For example, if COVID19 is diagnosed using clinical diagnosis only (‘flu-like symptoms’) then many other causes of the death eg pneumonia (bacteria), lung edema, heart disease or cancer tumours can be ignored but they may have been the main reason why the patient was more seriously ill – not the actual virus.
The media simplifies this science (and the context of the death) and promotes new strains of influenza viruses using ‘fear’. For example, in 2009 the new strain of influenza was part human H1N1, part bird and part pig. However, the media called this “swine-flu 2009” even though the strain was never endemic in pigs. The first case of the influenza in pigs was thought to be transmitted from humans to pigs. Scientists also have the technology to genetically engineer viruses and we are now using many genetically engineered vaccines.
Use the mainstream media to make the population fearful that humans will have little or no resistance to the virus. This was done in 2009 despite the fact that swine-flu 2009 contained part human strain H1N1 that is the most common strain of influenza found in humans and many people had immunity to this strain. This has been done again in 2020 by naming the virus SARSCov2 even though it is a mutated coronavirus – viruses that cause the common cold in humans every year.
Publicise all cases where the virus has been detected. That is, set up surveillance stations everywhere and notify the community of every case of the virus found in the population – even if the infection does not cause any disease, or even serious disease in the person. These are called the ‘notifications’ of a disease (incidence in the population) and this statistic is not indicative of a true pandemic because you are publicising ‘cases’ of infection that may never have any symptoms and/or is not serious and would otherwise go undetected.
The WHO has sleeping contracts in place with its 193 member countries and when these contracts, that have emergency powers, are triggered by the declaration of a severe international public health incident, the countries are required to follow a set of actions that have been designed by the GAVI alliance: a body that includes industry-government partnerships and economic institutions with vested interests in health policies.
Australia was the first country to pull this emergency trigger in 2020 and call a ‘pandemic’ when there were no cases of this disease in Australia (21 January 2020). On this date there was only one case in Thailand and 41 cases in China stated to be caused by the new mutated coronavirus 2019. Public health policy is never designed on the experience of infectious agents in other countries because of the different public health systems and environments in each country.
So why did the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, call a ‘pandemic’ in January 2020, without any experience of the virus under Australian conditions, and when the WHO did not declare this virus to be a ‘pandemic’ until 11 March 2020? And why would the Prime Minister be so concerned about a new mutated influenza virus in another country in 2020 when new mutated influenza viruses have not represented a risk to public health in developed countries, like Australia, since 1950?
The directives enacted under the emergency powers that were designed by the Bill Gates funded, GAVI alliance, set off a train of events that frightened the population with extreme media campaigns, forced the healthy population to be locked down and get sicker and cost the country billions of dollars. The reason for these directives that oppose all the well established knowledge of the control of infectious diseases has not been justified to the public. It is not acceptable to claim that this was a ‘reasonable precautionary measure’ to prevent a pandemic in Australia’ when there is no evidence that the disease would have become a ‘pandemic’ in Australia.
On the 19th March 2020 the UK government Public Health England downgraded the SARSCov2 (novel coronavirus 2019) virus stating this virus was no longer considered a high consequence infectious disease (HCID). Further, the Australian government did not have this virus listed as a notifiable disease on its communicable disease National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS). So why did Scott Morrison destroy Australia’s economy and our health by calling a pandemic for a disease that was not even in the country (21 January) and when the WHO had not declared the virus to be of pandemic potential until March 2020?
The fact that the medical-industry body can control the diagnosis of disease and death, without accountabilityor transparency, enables them to act with impunity in the control of the population with respect to medical ‘knowledge’ and medical interventions.
The WHO prepared themselves for this ‘pandemic’ for decades by putting political structures in place and Bill Gates, a significant contributor to the WHO’s political decisions on vaccines through the GAVI alliance, was able to predict this ‘pandemic’, even to its place of origin in China before anyone had heard of the ‘novel coronaviris – COVID-19′ that suddenly emerged in January 2020.
The WHO is now stating that “… as the World Health Organisation classes the latest coronavirus outbreak as a global health emergency, the race is on to find a vaccine.”
The ethical code of medical conduct set by the World Medical Association (WMA) states that doctors must not use their knowledge to remove human rights yet western governments and medical practitioners are now violating this conduct with pandemic policies that allow them to protect their vested interests in these policies and to control human behaviour.
This is called a medical tyranny and every country needs legislation in their constitution that prevents any profession from using the control of scientific knowledge to remove human rights and control human behaviour (Benjamin Rush stated this in the US in 1788).
Humans are not living in a free society if they cannot control what is injected into their own bodies. It is time for the public on whom these policies are being enforced to make the governments and medical profession accountable for the public interest in these policies and not the vested interests of corporations, powerful media moguls and entrepreneurs.
The complaint filed in Pennsylvania by the Trump campaign is a superb piece of legal craftsmanship.
It was filed in federal court, not state. The gist is that some of the state’s actions, and particularly the exclusion of Republican poll-watchers during the counting of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots, violated federal constitutional requirements.
The point is obvious enough once one thinks of it, but it’s brilliant all the same. It shifts the focus from state law, where a politicized Pennsylvania court has the last word, to federal law, where the U.S. Supreme Court rules.
As for the obviousness of the point, consider as a thought experiment a state law requiring that all votes be counted in secret by an unelected board named by the party in power. Could it survive a constitutional challenge?
As my old Harvard constitutional law professors would have said, “to ask the question is to answer it.” It is hard to count all the constitutional guarantees violated here: Equal Protection, Due Process, Privileges and Immunities. Indeed, the complaint stacks up the Supreme Court precedents supporting its arguments, including the long line of ringing statements in the chain of one-person-one-vote decisions.
Even the late Justice Ginsburg, who never met a progressive argument she could not support, would have trouble upholding such a law.
Given this framework, the historic decision in Bush v. Gore becomes useful but unimportant. The problem there was that the Florida Supreme Court pretended to be interpreting state law, and the legal convention is that the U.S. Supreme Court must defer on state issues, even though the Florida court was making up new law as it went along and changing its mind shamelessly.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore was muddled by the need to wiggle around this problem without addressing it head-on, because it would not do to cast doubt on the integrity of fellow judges. (The union is strong.) Only a three-justice concurrence said flatly that the Florida Court was contradicting the Legislature, and that would not do. Four justices went off on an opaque Equal Protection argument.
A result of this muddle, say friends in academia, is that progressive legal scholars are contemptuous of the decision and dismiss it as irrelevant.
Trump’s Pennsylvania case does not have the complication of the state versus federal law interaction because it jumps over the state law and, as noted, relies on a host of U.S. SCOTUS cases about the importance of voting.
The complaint has much more, designed to bolster its central point. Many other instances of fraudulent activity are cited, which lends credibility to the main accusation. They are also indispensable to establish a factual case — that the exclusion not only occurred, but mattered, because thousands of ballots were counted in secret.
Reading the news reports, it appears likely that similar complaints are going to be filed in other swing states and that perhaps we are seeing the exposure of a broad-based effort to corrupt the election. Joe Biden claimed that the Democrats were mounting the biggest voter fraud effort in history, and a good rule for living is that when someone tells you he is about to screw you over, believe him.
It is possible, then, that a number of cases will hit the Supreme Court in about three weeks.
Everyone in the legal world assumes that the justices, bruised by the excoriation the Court has received over Bush v. Gore (even though the result was right), would never put itself in the position of reversing the apparent results of a presidential election. This assumption is the reason for the Democrats’ efforts to create an irresistible bandwagon effect, but the president’s lawyers may have out-maneuvered them. The justices may have no choice except to decide the election, one way or the other, and to be put to the choice of reversing the media-claimed results or ratifying massive fraud.
The legitimacy of the Court could survive through, and even be enhanced by, a carefully explained reversal of initial results. It could not survive a mealy-mouthed ratification of obvious fraud. If Trump’s lawyers make their case factually, the Court must agree.
As Lincoln said: “we cannot escape history. We … will be remembered in spite of ourselves … in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”
James V DeLong lives in the Shenandoah Valley and is a former editor of the Harvard Law Review.
One problem with all the trials of statins is that they look at the probability of still being alive after x years. But that’s not really the question patients want answered. Patients want to know how much longer they can expect to live if they take a statin every day for the rest of their lives. Is it weeks? months? years? decades?
Considering that statins do have known side effects, with muscle pain being the most common and widely recognized, and considering that many people think it’s annoying to have to take a pill every day, they generally want to know the size of the benefit before they decide whether to take the drug or not. Unfortunately, the answer to that question is hard to extrapolate from the studies, due to the way in which they have been designed. Saying that a drug decreases your risk of dying by x over five years doesn’t really tell you anything about how much longer you can actually expect to live.
In 2015, a group of researchers looked at the data from the statin trials and re-calculated the effect in terms of increased longevity. The study was published in the British Medical Journal, and it was funded by the University of Southern Denmark. One of the authors had significant conflicts of interest, having received money from multiple different pharmaceutical companies that produce statins.
All randomized trials comparing statins to placebo, and that also fulfilled the following three criteria, were included: They had to have at least 1,000 participants, they had to follow patients for at least two years, and they had to provide a survival curve. The reason a survival curve was necessary was because the increase in longevity was extrapolated by calculating the area between the survival curves for the statin group and the placebo group. I think the other two criteria are also reasonable – statin studies looking at mortality with less than 1,000 participants and that don’t even follow patients for two years are leaving too much up to chance.
The authors identified eleven studies that fulfilled the criteria, of which six were investigating statins for primary prevention (i.e. to treat people without known atherosclerotic disease) and five were investigating statins for secondary prevention (i.e. to treat people who had already had heart attacks, or in some other way clearly manifested atherosclerotic disease). These eleven studies together included a total of 92,135 patients, so the data are robust. Participants in the studies were followed for between two and six years. Most of the major statin trials (4S, WOSCOPS, ALLHAT, LIPID, ASCOT-LLA, JUPITER) were included in the analysis.
So what were the results?
Life was prolonged by between -5 and 19 days in the primary prevention trials (yes, that’s -5, as in minus five. In one of the studies people taking a statin lived five days shorter than people taking a placebo). In the secondary prevention trials life was prolonged by between -10 and 27 days (yes, again that’s -10, as in minus ten).
When everything is averaged out, people taking a statin for primary prevention lived three days longer than people in the placebo group. People taking a statin for secondary prevention lived four days longer than people in the placebo group. The average follow-up period in these studies was around four years, so if you assume that statins have a linear life-prolonging effect that grows with time (rather than petering off after a while, which is likely), then you can expect to live around one day longer for each year of treatment.
Huh? That’s disappointing. You take a drug dutifully, which your doctor has told you is vitally important, and it prolongs your life by mere days. The results are especially disappointing when you consider that most of the eleven trials were industry funded, and industry funded trials usually show better results than are seen in the real world. So most likely the real world benefit is even smaller than the tiny benefit found in these trials.
And remember, this analysis was done by people with financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. If even people who are friendly with industry say that statins only prolong life by mere days, we can probably trust that the benefit really is that tiny.
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, statins are not completely free of side effects. So even if you are willing to take a drug every day that has an extremely marginal effect on longevity, then that benefit needs to be weighed against the risk of side effects.
Researchers in Norway are expanding a major ongoing study to determine whether cod liver oil can help fight off Covid-19 or whether those who take the supplement anyway tend to lead healthier lives in general.
Previously, the major national Covid-19 study (‘Koronastudien’) that began this spring, found that cod liver oil users had a lower risk of catching the virus.
“Preliminary data from our ongoing COVID-19 study, Koronastudien, suggest that cod liver oil users may have a reduced risk of COVID-19 and a lower risk of severe disease outcomes if they are infected,” says Arne Søraas, physician-scientist at the Department of Microbiology, Oslo University Hospital.
Now researchers want to expand the study into a “randomized, parallel-group treatment, quadruple masked, two-arm study” to test cod liver oil’s mettle and determine if it can help prevent or reduce both Covid-19 infections as well as other seasonal viral diseases like flu and the common cold.
The research team is calling for 70,000 volunteers to participate, half of whom will be dosed with the cod liver oil and the other given a placebo (corn oil) from November until April next year.
This hypothesis is in line with current prevailing findings in the scientific literature regarding omega-3 fatty acids and vitamin D, both found in cod liver oil, and how they help prevent respiratory tract infections and Covid-19.
Cod liver oil is one of the few natural sources of vitamin D for most Norwegians, whose dark winters usually limit the body’s natural production of the substance through exposure to sunlight.
The randomized study aims to determine whether cod liver oil might be a cheap but effective weapon that could easily be distributed worldwide with life-saving consequences for limited cost.
The researchers are also hoping to gain further insight into demographic-specific Covid-19 infections and whether cod liver oil doses might be of particular use to certain sections of the population.
“The target group is those who have a vitamin D deficiency. We know that people with darker skin more often have such a deficiency. So it’s very important that the study recruits as many people with a vitamin D deficiency, or with dark skin, so we can see the effects more clearly,” Saumia Shankar, a doctor at Oslo University Hospital, said.
Richard Stengel, the top state media appointee for US President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, has enthusiastically defended the use of propaganda against Americans.
“My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist,” Stengel said in 2018. “I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”
At the State Department under President Barack Obama, Stengel boasted that he “started the only entity in government, non-classified entity, that combated Russian disinformation.” That institution was known as the Global Engagement Center, and it amounted to a massive vehicle for advancing US government propaganda around the world.
A committed crusader in what he openly describes as a global “information war,” Stengel has proudly proclaimed his dedication to the careful management of the public’s access to information.
Stengel outlined his worldview in a book he published this June, entitled “Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It.”
Stengel has proposed “rethinking” the First Amendment that guarantees the freedom of speech and press. In 2018, he stated, “Having once been almost a First Amendment absolutist, I have really moved my position on it, because I just think for practical reasons in society, we have to kind of rethink some of those things.”
The Biden transition team’s selection of a censorial infowarrior for its top state media position comes as a concerted suppression campaign takes hold on social media. The wave of online censorship has been overseen by US intelligence agencies, the State Department, and Silicon Valley corporations that maintain multibillion-dollar contracts with the US government.
Stengel’s appointment appears to be the clearest signal of a coming escalation by the Biden administration of the censorship and suppression of online media that is seen to threaten US imperatives abroad.
From Obama admin’s “chief propagandist” to Russiagate-peddling MSNBC pundit
Before being appointed as the US State Department’s “chief propagandist” in 2013, Richard Stengel was a managing editor of TIME Magazine.
In the Obama administration, Stengel not only created the Global Engagement Center propaganda vehicle; he also boasted that he “led the creation of English for All, a government-wide effort to promote the teaching of English around the world.”
After leaving the State Department in 2016, Stengel became a strategic advisor to Snap Inc., the company that runs the social media apps Snapchat and Bitmoji.
Stengel also found time for a fellowship at the Atlantic Council, a think tank closely linked to NATO and the Biden camp which has received funding from the US government, Britain, the European Union, and NATO itself, along with a host of Western weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel corporations, Gulf monarchies, and Big Tech juggernauts.
Stengel worked closely with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a dubious organization that has fueled efforts to censor independent media outlets in the name of fighting “disinformation.”
Stengel left MSNBC this November to join Biden’s presidential transition. The campaign announced that he was tapped to lead the Biden-Harris agency review team for the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM).
Agency review teams are an integral part of the transition process, responsible for evaluating the operations of federal agencies.
Our teams are composed of diverse experts with deep policy expertise, ready to ensure we’re prepared to lead on Day One.https://t.co/2gY1E0Ey5k
— Biden-Harris Presidential Transition (@Transition46) November 10, 2020
USAGM is a state media propaganda organization that has its origins in a Cold War vehicle created by the CIA to spread disinformation against the Soviet Union and communist China. (The agency was previously called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG, until it rebranded in 2018.)
An agency shakeup this year produced revelations that USAGM provided clandestine assistance to separatist activists during the protests that consumed Hong Kong in 2019. The program earmarked secure communications assistance for protesters and $2 million in “rapid response” payouts for anti-China activists.
Richard Stengel’s “obsessive” crusade against Russian “disinformation”
When Richard Stengel referred to himself as the State Department’s “chief propagandist,” advocated the use of propaganda against the American people, and proposed to “rethink” the First Amendment, he was participating in a May 3, 2018 panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
During the CFR event, titled “Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News,” Stengel hyped up the threat of supposed “Russian disinformation,” a vague term that is increasingly used as an empty signifier for any narrative that offends the sensibilities of Washington’s foreign policy establishment.
Stengel stated that he was “obsessed with” fighting “disinformation,” and made it clear he has a particular obsession with Moscow, accusing “the Russians” of engaging in “full spectrum” disinformation.
Joining him on stage was political scientist Kelly M. Greenhill, who mourned that alternative media platforms publish “things that seem like they could be true… that’s the sphere where it’s particularly difficult to debunk them… it’s this gray region, this gray zone, where it’s not traditional disinformation, but a combination of misinformation and play on rumors, conspiracy theories, sort of gray propaganda, that’s where I think the nub or the crux of the problem lies.”
Stengel approved, adding, “By the way those terms, the gray zone, are all from Russian active measures, that they’ve been doing for a million years.”
The panelists made no effort to hide their disdain for independent and foreign media outlets. Stengel stated clearly that a “news cartel” of mainstream corporate media outlets had long dominated US society, but he bemoaned that those “cartels don’t have hegemony like they used to.”
Stengel made it clear that his mission is to counter the alternative perspectives given a voice by foreign media platforms that challenge the US-dominated media landscape.
“The bad actors use journalistic objectivity against us. And the Russians in particular are smart about this,” Stengel grumbled.
He singled out Russia’s state-funded media network, RT, lamenting that “Vladimir Putin, when they launched Russia Today, said it was an antidote to the American English hegemony over the world media system. That’s how people saw it.”
Ben Decker, a research fellow at the Misinformation Project at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, lamented that “RT is invading every weekly finance media space.”
But Decker was cheered by the proliferation of US oligarchs committed to retaking control of the narrative. “In America and across the world,” he stated, “the donor community is very eager to address this problem, and very eager to work with communities of researchers, academics, journalists, etc. to target this problem.”
“I think that there is an appetite to solve this from the top down,” he continued, urging the many academics in the audience “to apply for grant money” in order to fight this Russian “disinformation.”
The CFR panel culminated with an African audience member rising from the crowd and confronting Stengel: “Because what is happening in America is what the United States flipped on the Global South and in the Third World, which we lived with, for many, many years, in terms of a master narrative that was and still is propaganda,” the man declared.
Rather than respond, Stengel rudely ignored the question and made his way hurriedly for the exit: “You know what, I hate last questions. Don’t you? I never, I usually just want to end something before the last question.”
The video of the revealing confrontation caused such a furor that CFR’s YouTube account disabled comments and made the video unlisted. It cannot be found in a search on Google or YouTube; it can only be found with the direct link.
The video of the full discussion is embedded below:
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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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.
Aletho News
