One hundred years ago, representatives from a few powerful countries convened at San Remo, a sleepy town on the Italian Riviera. Together, they sealed the fate of the massive territories confiscated from the Ottoman Empire following its defeat in World War I.
It was on April 25, 1920, that the San Remo Conference Resolution was passed by the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council. Western Mandates were established over Palestine, Syria and ‘Mesopotamia’ – Iraq. The latter two were theoretically designated for provisional independence, while Palestine was granted to the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish homeland there.
“The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the (Balfour) declaration originally made on November 8, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” the Resolution read.
The Resolution gave greater international recognition to Britain’s unilateral decision, three years earlier, to grant Palestine to the Zionist Federation for the purpose of establishing a Jewish homeland, in exchange for Zionist support of Britain during the Great War.
And, like Britain’s Balfour Declaration, a cursory mention was made of the unfortunate inhabitants of Palestine, whose historic homeland was being unfairly confiscated and handed over to colonial settlers.
The establishment of that Jewish State, according to San Remo, hinged on some vague ‘understanding’ that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
The above addition merely served as a poor attempt at appearing politically balanced, while in reality no enforcement mechanism was ever put in place to ensure that the ‘understanding’ was ever respected or implemented.
In fact, one could argue that the West’s long engagement in the question of Israel and Palestine has followed the same San Remo prototype: where the Zionist movement (and eventually Israel) is granted its political objectives based on unenforceable conditions that are never respected or implemented.
Notice how the vast majority of United Nations Resolution pertaining to Palestinian rights are historically passed by the General Assembly, not by the Security Council, where the US is one of five veto-wielding powers, always ready to strike down any attempt at enforcing international law.
It is this historical dichotomy that led to the current political deadlock.
Palestinian leaderships, one after the other, have miserably failed at changing the stifling paradigm. Decades before the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, countless delegations, comprised those claiming to represent the Palestinian people, traveled to Europe, appealing to one government or another, pleading the Palestinian case and demanding fairness.
What has changed since then?
On February 20, the Donald Trump administration issued its own version of the Balfour Declaration, termed the ‘Deal of the Century’.
The American decision which, again, flouted international law, paves the way for further Israeli colonial annexations of occupied Palestine. It brazenly threatens Palestinians that, if they do not cooperate, they will be punished severely. In fact, they already have been, when Washington cut all funding to the Palestinian Authority and to international institutions that provide critical aid to the Palestinians.
Like in the San Remo Conference, the Balfour Declaration, and numerous other documents, Israel was asked, ever so politely but without any plans to enforce such demands, to grant Palestinians some symbolic gestures of freedom and independence.
Some may argue, and rightly so, that the ‘Deal of the Century’ and the San Remo Conference Resolution are not identical in the sense that Trump’s decision was a unilateral one, while San Remo was the outcome of political consensus among various countries – Britain, France, Italy, and others.
True, but two important points must be taken into account: firstly, the Balfour Declaration was also a unilateral decision. It took Britain’s allies three years to embrace and validate the illegal decision made by London to grant Palestine to the Zionists. The question now is, how long will it take for Europe to claim the ‘Deal of the Century’ as its own?
Secondly, the spirit of all of these declarations, promises, resolutions, and ‘deals’ is the same, where superpowers decide by virtue of their own massive influence to rearrange the historical rights of nations. In some way, the colonialism of old has never truly died.
The Palestinian Authority, like previous Palestinian leaderships, is presented with the proverbial carrot and stick. Last March, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told Palestinians that if they did not return to the (non-existent) negotiations with Israel, the US would support Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.
For nearly three decades now and, certainly, since the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993, the PA has chosen the carrot. Now that the US has decided to change the rules of the game altogether, Mahmoud Abbas’ Authority is facing its most serious existential threat yet: bowing down to Kushner or insisting on returning to a dead political paradigm that was constructed, then abandoned, by Washington.
The crisis within the Palestinian leadership is met with utter clarity on the part of Israel. The new Israeli coalition government, consisting of previous rivals Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, have tentatively agreed that annexing large parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley is just a matter of time. They are merely waiting for the American nod.
They are unlikely to wait for long, as Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said on April 22 that annexing Palestinian territories is “an Israeli decision.”
Frankly, it matters little. The 21st century Balfour Declaration has already been made; it is only a matter of making it the new uncontested reality.
Perhaps, it is time for the Palestinian leadership to understand that groveling at the feet of those who have inherited the San Remo Resolution, constructing and sustaining colonial Israel, is never and has never been the answer.
Imagine if you will a ship from a nation not at war with anyone sailing in international waters on a quiet June day being suddenly attacked by unidentified warplanes and torpedo boats, their markings covered up to conceal their country of origin. The vessel under attack had little with which to defend itself, but its crew heroically made sure that a large national flag was hoisted to demonstrate that it was not a belligerent in anyone’s conflict. The attackers noted the nationality of the vessel, but persisted in their aggression in a clear attempt to sink the ship and kill all its crew. The officers on the ship radioed that they were under attack and asked for help, but even though friendly fighter aircraft were within striking distance and were automatically dispatched, they were then mysteriously recalled. The attacks lasted for two hours, longer than the Pearl Harbor attack that brought about American entry into World War 2, killing and wounding more than two hundred of the crew. Life rafts lowered into the water as the vessel seemed to be sinking were machine gunned by the attacking aircraft and torpedo boats to make escape or evacuation of the wounded impossible but the captain and survivors worked heroically, and successfully, to keep the ship afloat. When the vessel finally made it back to port, the officers and crew were sworn to silence by their own government and a cover-up was initiated that has persisted to this day. Many of the ship’s survivors have died since that day 53 years ago, and the attempts of the remainder to see justice before they are also gone have been ignored.
I am, of course, referring to the Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, which took place on June 8, 1967, nearly 53 years ago. The anniversary of the attack is coming up in a month and the remaining officers and crew will hold a ceremony at the Navy memorial in Washington D.C. to honor the memory of their thirty-four shipmates killed and the 172 who were wounded. Seventy per cent of the crew were casualties, the highest percentage of casualties on any ship that remained afloat in the history of the U.S. Navy. The lightly armed intelligence gathering vessel Liberty and its heroic crew emerged from the near destruction as the most decorated ship for valor in a single action in the United States Navy.
Israeli willingness to attack and kill Americans unnecessarily, apparently to send a message, has been noted before. There is the case of Rachel Corrie run over by an Israeli bulldozer and of Furkan Dogan, a Turkish-American who was, like the crew of the Liberty, killed in international waters when he sailed on the Gaza relief vessel Mavi Marmara. But in spite of that, the deliberate attempt to destroy the Liberty, which, according to former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, was clearly approved at the highest level of the Jewish state’s government, still has shock value.
Israel’s apologists, a virtual fixture at all levels in the U.S. government as well as in academia and the media, have long been making the argument that the attack on the Liberty was some kind of “friendly fire” accident. But the relatively recent discovery that a Navy spy plane intercepted and recorded Israeli both helicopter and fighter pilots mentioning the American flag displayed by the ship during the attack suggests otherwise. Other recordings made of the Israeli communications revealed that some of the pilots did not want to attack. One pilot said, “This is an American ship. I can see the flag. Do you still want us to attack?” Israeli ground control responded, “Yes, follow orders. Hit it!” before admonishing the pilots to “finish the job.”
But while one expects the Israelis to behave abominably, based on any assessment of the years of war crimes committed in places like Lebanon and what remains of Palestine, the greatest crime against the Liberty crew was committed by the United States government itself. President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara reportedly were informed of the attack shortly after it began and it was Johnson who twice personally ordered the recall of the U.S. fighter planes going to rescue the Liberty. Admiral Lawrence Geis, commander of the carrier group in the Mediterranean that the planes had launched from, objected and McNamara responded testily that “President Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors.” It was McNamara, again acting on LBJ’s orders, who had the crew sequestered after the ship made it to Malta, issuing a “gag-order” over the incident with the understanding that anyone who spoke up would be secretly court martialed and imprisoned.
To maintain the cover-up, Captain William McGonagle, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his role in saving the ship, had his medal awarded without any publicity in a private ceremony at the Washington Naval Yard rather than at the White House as was otherwise normal. The President of the United States did not make the award, yet another dismissal of the valor of the Liberty crew.
Normally an attack on a U.S. Navy vessel would have mandated an official Court of Inquiry, but in the case of the Liberty an improvised team consisting of Admiral Isaac Kidd and Chief Counsel Ward Boston was pulled together in the Mediterranean under orders from Admiral John S. McCain, father of Senator John McCain, who was based in London. The Navy’s official ‘Court of Inquiry’ therefore consisted in reality of just Kidd and Boston making a quick visit to the Liberty at sea and then rushing back to Washington via London, where McCain endorsed the 700 page draft document without reading it. The hastily prepared report bypassed all ordinary fact-finding and legal review procedures and no one knows what channels the ‘Findings of the Court of Inquiry’ followed in Washington.
Acting under orders from the White House, the inquiry had been given only a week to prepare its report, a procedure that normally requires six months. The result was also predetermined by McNamara acting for LBJ, who ordered that the conclusion would be that the attack on the Liberty had been a “case of mistaken identity.”
No crewmen from the Liberty were even allowed to provide formal testimony during the inquiry proceedings. Nevertheless, the inquiry’s chief counsel Ward Boston subsequently confirmed in a sworn affidavit that he and Kidd had strongly disagreed with the coerced findings, believing instead that Israel had staged an unprovoked attack intending to sink the ship and kill all the crew. Admiral Kidd referred to the Israelis as “murderous bastards.” Boston also observed that the transcript of the court of inquiry that was subsequently released had been altered, presumably by someone acting on behalf of the White House, to delete and change testimony damaging to Israel.
As is often the case, there is a back story to what happened to the Liberty. In the years prior to the attack on the Liberty, President John F. Kennedy was concerned over powerful and wealthy American Jews attempting to hijack U.S. foreign policy to favor Israel. He also took steps to prevent Israeli development of nuclear weapons. After he was assassinated, his successor as president Lyndon B. Johnson, who has been described as having a political career “interwoven with Jews,” saw things quite differently. He turned a blind eye over the Israeli nuclear program and surrounded himself with Jewish friends and advisors who were actively engaged in promoting the Zionist agenda, some of them plausibly as actual agents of Mossad.
Most prominent among that group were the Krims, Arthur and Mathilde, he a leading media lawyer and studio head who was a Democratic Party fundraiser and she a geneticist, a Swiss born convert to Judaism who had lived in British Mandate Palestine with her first husband, an Irgun terrorist. Jewish terror was a cause which she actively supported. The Krims were regular companions of LBJ throughout his presidency, with a reserved room in the White House and a house near his ranch in Stonewall Texas when he was on vacation there. Johnson also stayed at their mansion in New York.
At the time of the Six Day War when the Liberty was attacked, the Krims were constantly at the side of LBJ and it is generally accepted that they were both working on behalf of the Israeli government to cultivate a decisive presidential tilt towards Israel. Johnson, in fact, was informed of the Israeli intention to go to war against its neighbors in advance and gave the green light, even agreeing to come to the aid of the Jewish state if things went wrong. To seal the deal, Mathilde was even having an affair with LBJ, a situation well known to White House staff and to the Secret Service.
Since 1967, there have been a number of documentaries, books and unofficial inquiries regarding the attack on the Liberty, but resistance from the usual suspects has meant that the story has not become better known. Meanwhile Congress, the Pentagon and the White House have refused to authorize fair and impartial formal hearings that would recognize the deficiencies in the 1967 inquiry and which would include testimony from the remaining Liberty survivors. Senator John McCain was notorious for his offhand treatment of entreaties from the survivors as was then congressman and now governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, a former Navy Seal. DeSantis now calls himself the most pro-Israel governor in the United States.
The most serious unofficial inquiries have involved former military officers. In 2003, Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, formed an independent commission of inquiry to look into the attack. It produced Loss of Liberty, a documentary that included actual interviews with survivors. The commission, which included Rear Admiral Merlin Staring, Marine General Ray Davis, and Ambassador James Akins, reviewed all documentary evidence in the case and interviewed both survivors and other naval officers who were involved indirectly. They learned that the Liberty had been surveilled by the Israelis for at least eight hours prior to the attack and that the ship was both clearly marked as American and was unmistakable as a uniquely configured and immediately recognizable intelligence collection vessel, not even close to the profile of an Egyptian horse transporter as Israel subsequently claimed. During the carefully planned attack, Israeli used radio jamming in an attempt to prevent the Liberty from radioing its predicament.
Moorer’s commission concluded that Israel had deliberately attacked the Liberty and sought to sink it and kill its entire crew. The crewmen who were killed were “murdered” by Israel while the U.S. should have regarded the attack as an act of war and responded appropriately. The cover-up of what had taken place was ordered by the White House and the fact that the truth about the incident continues to be hidden is a “national disgrace.” In an op-ed Moorer wrote in 2004, he concluded by asking “Did our government put Israel’s interest ahead of our own? If so, why?”
In October 2003 the Moorer commission presented its report on Capitol Hill, though its audience was often limited to congressional staffers rather than the understandably fearful members. One year later Representative John Conyers of Michigan overcame considerable resistance to have the report and some accompanying information entered into the Congressional Record. Moorer and Admiral Staring, a former Judge Advocate General of the Navy, who had been the legal officer in the McCain office in London who had not been allowed to carefully review the Court of Inquiry report, continued to advocate for an honest investigation of the attack on the Liberty until they died in 2004 and 2013 respectively.
Which leads us to the present and the question of justice for the U.S.S. Liberty survivors who will be gathering next month. The tale of the Liberty demonstrates that even fifty-three years ago the United States government was betraying its own people out of deference to Jewish power and to the state of Israel. If anything, as horrific as the killing of 34 personnel on board of the Liberty was, the situation has gotten even worse as Washington sends billions of dollars to the Jewish state annually while also giving its kleptocratic government a green light to commit war crimes and other aggressions that will ultimately draw in the United States, and could plausibly bring about our ruination. It is unpleasant to say the least to watch an unrestrained and unprincipled client state do terrible damage to a much larger patron enabled by the machinations of a dual-loyalty fifth column, but that is what we are seeing.
And the actual rot really began with the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, when patriotic Americans died at the whim of a feckless president who loved a foreign country more than his own. One hopes he is rotting in hell. Today few Americans even know about the Liberty even though they are now facing an election in which two presidential candidates will seek to outdo each other in expressing their love for Israel. Trump and Biden should instead take pause and first demand as a sine qua non justice for the survivors of the U.S.S. Liberty.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
In January, well before the coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis would result in lockdowns, quarantines and economic devastation in the United States and beyond, the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon were working with the National Security Council to create still-classified plans to respond to an imminent pandemic. It has since been alleged that the intelligence and military intelligence communities knew about a likely pandemic in the United States as early as last November, and potentially even before then.
Given this foreknowledge and the numerous simulations conducted in the United States last year regarding global viral pandemic outbreaks, at least six of varying scope and size, it has often been asked – Why did the government not act or prepare if an imminent global pandemic and the shortcomings of any response to such an event were known? Though the answer to this question has frequently been written off as mere “incompetence” in mainstream media circles, it is worth entertaining the possibility that a crisis was allowed to unfold.
Why would the intelligence community or another faction of the U.S. government knowingly allow a crisis such as this to occur? The answer is clear if one looks at history, as times of crisis have often been used by the U.S. government to implement policies that would normally be rejected by the American public, ranging from censorship of the press to mass surveillance networks. Though the government response to the September 11 attacks, like the Patriot Act, may be the most accessible example to many Americans, U.S. government efforts to limit the flow of “dangerous” journalism and surveil the population go back to as early as the First World War. Many of these policies, whether the Patriot Act after 9/11 or WWI-era civilian “spy” networks, did little if anything to protect the homeland, but instead led to increased surveillance and control that persisted long after the crisis that spurred them had ended.
Using this history as a lens, it is possible to look at the current coronavirus crisis to see how the long-standing agendas of ever-expanding mass surveillance and media censorship are again getting a dramatic boost thanks to the chaos unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic. Yet, this crisis is unique because it also has given a boost to a newer yet complimentary agenda that — if fulfilled – would render most, if not all, other government efforts at controlling and subduing their populations obsolete.
DARPA Dystopia
For years, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has remained largely out of sight and out of mind for most Americans, as their research projects are rarely covered by the mainstream media and, when they are, their projects are often praised as “bringing science fiction movies to life.” However, there have been recent events that have marred DARPA’s often positive portrayal by media outlets, which paint the agency as a beacon of scientific “progress” that has “changed the world” for the better.
For instance, in 2018, a group of European scientists accused the DARPA’s “Insect Allies” program of actually being a dystopian bioweapons program that would see insects introduce genetically modified viruses into plants to attack and devastate a targeted nation’s food supply. DARPA, of course, maintained that its intent to use these insects to genetically modify plants was instead about “protecting” the food supply. Regardless of DARPA’s assertions that it is merely a “defensive” program, it should be clear to readers that such a technology could easily be used either way, depending on the wielder.
Though DARPA’s futuristic weapons of war often get the most attention from media, the agency has long standing interests in tinkering with, not just the biology of plants, but of humans. DARPA, which is funded to the tune of approximately $3 billion a year, has various avenues through which it pursues these ambitions, with many of those now under the purview of the agency’s “Biological Technologies Office” (BTO), created in 2014. As of late, some of DARPA’s human biology and biotech projects at its BTO have been getting a massive PR boost thanks to the current coronavirus crisis, with recent reports even claiming that the agency “might have created the best hopes for stopping Covid-19.”
Most of these technologies garnering positive media coverage thanks to Covid-19 were developed several years ago. They include the DARPA-funded platforms used to produce DNA and RNA vaccines, classes of vaccine that have never been approved for human use in the U.S. and involve injecting foreign genetic material into the human body. Notably, it is this very class of vaccine, now being produced by DARPA-partnered companies, that billionaire and global health “philanthropist” Bill Gates recently asserted has him “most excited” relative to other Covid-19 vaccine candidates. Yet, key aspects regarding these vaccines and other DARPA “healthcare” initiatives have been left out of these recent positive reports, likely because they provide a window into what is arguably the agency’s darkest agenda.
“In Vivo Nanoplatforms”
In 2006, DARPA announced its Predicting Health and Disease (PHD) program, which sought to determine “whether an individual will develop an infectious disease prior to the onset of symptoms.” The PHD program planned to accomplish this by “identifying changes in the baseline state of human health through frequent surveillance” with a specific focus on “viral, upper respiratory pathogens.”
Three years later, in 2010, DARPA-funded researchers at Duke University created the foundation for this tool, which would use the genetic analysis of blood samples to determine if someone is infected with a virus before they show symptoms. Reports at the time claimed that these “preemptive diagnoses” would be transmitted to “a national, web-based influenza map” available via smartphone.
Following the creation of DARPA’s BTO in 2014, this particular program gave rise to the “In Vivo Nanoplatforms (IVN)” program. The diagnostics branch of that program, abbreviated as IVN:Dx, “investigates technologies that incorporate implantable nanoplatforms composed of bio-compatible, nontoxic materials; in vivo sensing of small and large molecules of biological interest; multiplexed detection of analytes at clinically relevant concentrations; and external interrogation of the nanoplatforms without using implanted electronics for communication.” Past reports on the program describe it as developing “classes of nanoparticles to sense and treat illness, disease, and infection on the inside. The tech involves implantable nanoparticles which sense specific molecules of biological interest.”
DARPA’s IVN program has since helped to finance and produce “soft, flexible hydrogels that are injected just beneath the skin to perform [health] monitoring and that sync to a smartphone app to give the use immediate health insights,” a product currently marketed and created by the DARPA-funded and National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded company Profusa. Profusa, which has received millionsupon millions from DARPA in recent years, asserts that the information generated by their injectable biosensor would be “securely shared” and accessible to “individuals, physicians and public health practitioners.” However, the current push for a national “contact tracing” system based on citizens’ private health data is likely to expand that data sharing, conveniently fitting with DARPA’s years-old goal of creating a national, web-based database of preemptive diagnoses.
Profusa is also backed by Google, which is intimately involved in these new mass surveillance “contact tracing” initiatives, and counts former Senate majority leader William Frist among its board members. They are also partnered with the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The company also has considerable overlap with the diagnostic company Cepheid, which recently won FDA approval for its rapid coronavirus test and was previously awarded lucrative government contracts to detect anthrax in the U.S. postal system. As of this past March, Profusa again won DARPA funding to determine if their injectable biosensors can predict future pandemics, including the now widely predicted “second wave” of Covid-19, and detect those infected up to three weeks before they would otherwise show symptoms. The company expects to have its biosensors FDA licensed for this purpose by early next year, about the same time a coronavirus vaccine is expected to be available to the general public.
“Living Foundries”
Another long-standing DARPA program, now overseen by BTO, is known as “Living Foundries.” According to DARPA’s website, Living Foundries “aims to enable adaptable, scalable, and on-demand production of [synthetic] molecules by programming the fundamental metabolic processes of biological systems to generate a vast number of complex molecules that are not otherwise accessible. Through Living Foundries, DARPA is transforming synthetic biomanufacturing into a predictable engineering practice supportive of a broad range of national security objectives.”
The types of research this “Living Foundries” program supports involves the creation of “artificial life” including the creation of artificial genetic material, including artificial chromosomes, the creation of “entirely new organisms,” and using artificial genetic material to “add new capacities” to human beings (i.e. genetically modifying humans through the insertion of synthetically-created genetic material).
The latter is of particular concern (though all are honestly concerning), as DARPA also has a project called “Advanced Tools for Mammalian Genome Engineering,” which – despite having “mammalian” in the name – is focused specifically on improving “the utility of Human Artificial Chromosomes (HACs),” which DARPA describes as a “fundamental tool in the development of advanced therapeutics, vaccines, and cellular diagnostics.” Though research papers often focus on HACs as a revolutionary medical advancement, they are also frequently promoted as a means of “enhancing” humans by imbuing them with non-natural characteristics, including halting aging or improving cognition.
DARPA is known to be involved in research where these methods are used to create “super soldiers” that no longer require sleep or regular meals, among other augmented “features,” and has another program about creating “metabolically dominant” fighters. Reports on these programs also discuss the other, very disconcerting use of these same technologies, “genetic weapons” that would “subvert DNA” and “undermine people’s minds and bodies.”
Another potential application being actively investigated by DARPA is its BioDesign program, which is examining the creation of synthetic organisms that are created to be immortal and programmed with a “kill switch” allowing a synthetic, yet organic organism to be “turned off” at any time. This has led some to speculate such research could open the doors to the creation of “human replicants” used for fighting wars and other tasks, such as those that appear in the science fiction film Bladerunner.
However, these genetic “kill switches” could also be inserted into actual humans through artificial chromosomes, which – just as they have the potential to extend life – also have the potential to cut it short. Notably, it was revealed in 2017 that DARPA had invested $100 million in “gene drive” research, which is involves the use of genetic modification to wipe out entire populations, explaining why it it often referred to as a “genetic extinction” technology.
In addition, other DARPA experiments involve the use of genetically modified viruses that insert genetic material into human cells, specifically neurons in the brain, in order to “tweak” human brain chemistry. In one example, DARPA-funded research has altered human brain cells to produce two new proteins, the first allowing neural activity to be easily detected by external devices and the second allowing “magnetic nanoparticles” to “induce an image or sound in the patient’s mind.”
“Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology”
Changing human brain chemistry and functionality at the cellular level is only one of numerous DARPA initiatives aimed at changing how human beings think and perceive reality. Since 2002, DARPA has acknowledged its efforts to create a “Brain-Machine Interface (BMI).” Though first aimed at creating “a wireless brain modem for a freely moving rat,” which would allow the animal’s movements to be remotely controlled, DARPA wasn’t shy about the eventual goal of applying such brain “enhancement” to humans in order to enable soldiers to “communicate by thought alone” or remotely control human beings (on the enemy side only, so they say) for the purposes of war.
The project, which has advanced greatly in recent years, has long raised major concerns among prominent defense scientists, some of whom warned in a 2008 report that “remote guidance or control of a human being” could quickly backfire were an adversary to gain access to the implanted technology (opening up the possibility of “hacking” a person’s brain), and they also raised concerns about the general ethical perils of such technologies. Work began in 2011 on developing “brain implants” for use in human soldiers, officially with the goal of treating neurological damage in veterans, and such implants have been tested on human volunteers in DARPA-funded experiments since at least 2015.
Concerns, like those raised by those defense scientists in 2008, have been regularly dismissed by DARPA, which has consistently claimed that its controversial research projects are tempered by their in-house “ethical experts.” However, it worth noting how DARPA’s leadership views these ethical conundrums, since they ultimately have the last word. For example, in 2015, Michael Goldblatt, then-director of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office (DSO), which oversees most aspects of the agency’s “super soldier” program, told journalist Annie Jacobsen that he saw no difference between “having a chip in your brain that could help control your thoughts” and “a cochlear implant that helps the deaf hear.” When pressed about the unintended consequences of such technology, Goldblatt stated that “there are unintended consequences for everything.”
Thus, it is worth pointing out that, while DARPA-developed technologies – from human genetic engineering to the brain-machine interfaces – are often first promoted as something that will revolutionize and improve human health, DARPA sees the use of these technologies for such ends as being on the same footing as other dystopian and frankly nightmarish applications, like thought control. BMIs are no exception, having first been promoted as a way to “boost bodily functions of veterans with neural damage or post-traumatic stress disorder” and to allow amputees to control advanced prosthetics. While these do indeed represent major medical advances, DARPA’s leadership has made it clear that they see no distinction between the medical use of BMIs and using them to exert near total control over a human being by “guiding” their thoughts and even their movements.
Such stark admission from DARPA’s leadership makes it worth exploring the state of these current “brain-machine” interface programs as well as their explicit goals. For instance, one of the goals of DARPA’s Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program involves using “noninvasive or minimally invasive brain-computer interfaces” to “read and write” directly onto the brain.
According to one recent report on DARPA’s N3 program, one example of “minimally invasive” technologies would involve:
“an injection of a virus carrying light-sensitive sensors, or other chemical, biotech, or self-assembled nanobots that can reach individual neurons and control their activity independently without damaging sensitive tissue. The proposed use for these technologies isn’t yet well-specified, but as animal experiments have shown, controlling the activity of single neurons at multiple points is sufficient to program artificial memories of fear, desire, and experiences directly into the brain.”
Though the purported goal of N3 is related to creating “thought-controlled” weapons that react and fire based on a soldier’s thoughts, the fact that the technology is also bidirectional, opens up the disturbing possibility that efforts will be made to control and program a soldier’s thoughts and perceptions as opposed to the other way around. This may be more of the plan than DARPA has publicly let on, since official military documents have openly stated that the Pentagon’s ultimate goal is to essentially replace human fighters with “self-aware” interconnected robots “who” will both design and conduct operations against targets chosen by artificial-intelligence systems. This weapons system of the not-so-distant future seems to have little room for human beings, even those capable of “controlling” weapons with their minds, suggesting that futurist military planners see soldiers with BMIs as a “weapon” that would also become connected to this same AI-driven system. It is also worth pointing out that DARPA has been attempting to create an “artificial human brain” since 2013.
In addition, reports on DARPA’s BMI efforts have suggested that this bidirectional technology will be used to “cloud the perception of soldiers” by “distancing them from the emotional guilt of warfare,” a move that would set a dangerous precedent and one that would surely result in a marked jump in war crimes.
Of course, these are just the admitted, potential “military” applications of such technology. Once this technology moves from the military to the civilian sphere, as several DARPA inventions have in the past, their use for “remote guidance”, “thought control” and/or the programming of thoughts and experiences is more than likely to be misused by governments, corporations and other power-brokers in the U.S. and beyond for the purposes of control.
The entrance of BMIs into the civilian sphere isn’t very far away, as DARPA executives and researchers who have worked on the N3 and other DARPA-backed BMI programs have since been “scooped up” by Verily (a Google-GlaxoSmithKline partnership), Elon Musk’s Neuralink and Facebook’s Building 8 – all of which have been working to bring “neuro-modulation” devices and BMIs to market.
“Human Bio-reactors”, “Nanotherapeutics” and DARPA-funded gene vaccines
As detailed above, DARPA often frames the controversial technologies it develops as being developed to mainly advance medicine and healthcare. Aside from the technologies already discussed, it is important to note that DARPA has been very interested in healthcare, specifically vaccines, for sometime.
For instance, in 2010, DARPA began developing a class of vaccine that could “inoculate against unknown pathogens,” a component of its Accelerated Manufacture of Pharmaceuticals program. The vaccine would inject thousands of synthetic antibodies, such as those developed through DARPA’s “Living Foundries” program, into the human body. These synthetic antibodies or “synbodies” would then “create an immunity toolkit that can be combined in myriad ways to tackle virtually any pathogen.”
That same year, DARPA began funding efforts to create “multiagent synthetic DNA vaccines” that would be delivered into the human body via “noninvasive electroporation” and was quickly promoted in media reports as a way to quickly produce vaccines compared to traditional vaccine production methods. This category of vaccine would involve the same type of synthetic DNA that DARPA was also simultaneously researching for the purposes of both “enhancing” and “subverting” human beings at the genetic level. It was also this year, 2010, that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also began heavily funding DNA and RNA vaccines.
DNA vaccines, which were first created in 2005, have never been approved for human use in the United States and past studies have warned that they “possess significant unpredictability and a number of inherent harmful potential hazards” and that “there is inadequate knowledge to define either the probability of unintended events or the consequences of genetic modifications.” Another long-standing issue with such vaccines is mitigating “unwanted immune reactions” that result from natural immune response to the foreign genetic material they contain.
In 2011, DARPA announced its “Rapidly Adaptable Nanotherapeutics” program, which seeks to create a “platform capable of rapidly synthesizing therapeutic nanoparticles” aimed at combatting “evolving and even genetically engineered bioweapons.” DARPA’s plan for these nanoparticles, which media reports described merely as “tiny, autonomous drug delivery systems,” was to combine them with “small interfering RNA (siRNA),” which are snippets of RNA that can target and shut downspecific genes. As Wired wrote at the time: “siRNA could be reprogrammed ‘on-the-fly’ and applied to different pathogens,” allowing nanoparticles to “be loaded up with the right siRNA molecules and sent directly to cells responsible for the infection.”
The creation of this program was shortly followed by DARPA’s decision in 2013 to fund Moderna Therapeutics to the tune of $25 million to develop their synthetic RNA vaccine production platform. DARPA funded the project to “develop platform technologies that can be deployed safely and rapidly to provide the U.S. population with near-immediate protection against emerging infectious diseases and engineered biological weapons.”
Then, in 2015, DARPA’s research into vaccines involving synthetic antibodies and synthetic genetic material expanded, with them giving $45 million to the DNA vaccine company, Inovio Pharmaceuticals. This same year, DARPA-funded RNA and DNA vaccines began to be framed differently by both DARPA researchers and the media – who described the technology as transforming the human body into a “bio-reactor.”
In the years since, DARPA-backed DNA and RNA vaccine companies, including Moderna, Inovio as well as Germany’s CureVac, have been unable to get their products licensed for human use, largely due to the fact that their vaccines have failed to provide sufficient immunity in human trials. Examples of these ineffective vaccines include CureVac’s attempt at a rabies vaccine and Moderna’s efforts to create a vaccine for the Zika virus (which was funded by the U.S. government).
Several workarounds for this issue have been proposed, including vaccines where the genetic material (RNA or DNA) “self-amplifies.” However, the workaround of choice to this lack of immune response and other obstacles for DNA/RNA vaccines is the incorporation of nanotechnology into these vaccines. As a result, the use of nanoparticles as the carriers for the genetic material in these vaccines has been widely promotedand studied, as well as touted as the best way to improve their stability, increase their targeted delivery ability and enhance the immune response they provoke.
The combination of DNA or RNA vaccines with nanotechnology has already become reality thanks to the companies leading that field. For instance, the DARPA-backed DNA vaccine company Inovio Pharmaceuticals utilizes what reports refer to as “DNA nanotechnology” in their line of synthetic vaccines branded as “SynCon” by the company, which uses an undisclosed computer algorithm to design its vaccines. It is an interesting coincidence, then, that the Inovio “SynCon” vaccine for Covid-19 now appears to be ahead of the rest of the pack, with backing from Bill Gates, DARPA, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and other government agencies.
DARPA – Saving us from Covid-19?
In January, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced it would begin funding vaccine candidates for the coronavirus outbreak, long before it became a major global issue. CEPI describes itself as “a partnership of public, private, philanthropic and civil organizations that will finance and co-ordinate the development of vaccines against high priority public health threats” and was founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That month, CEPI only chose two pharmaceutical companies to receive funding for their efforts to develop a vaccine for Covid-19 – Moderna and Inovio Pharmaceuticals.
As previously mentioned, these two companies are DARPA-backed firms that frequently tout their “strategic alliance” with DARPA in press releases and on their websites. DARPA has also provided these companies with significant amounts of funding. For instance, the top funders behind Inovio Pharmaceuticals include both DARPA and the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the company has received millions in dollars in grants from DARPA, including a $45 million grant to develop a vaccine for Ebola. They were also recently awarded over $8 million from the U.S. military to develop a small, portable intradermal device for delivering DNA vaccines, which was jointly developed by Inovio and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), which also manages the “biodefense” lab at Fort Detrick.
In addition, the German company CureVac, which is also developing a CEPI-backed RNA vaccine for Covid-19, is another long-time recipient of DARPA funding. They were one of DARPA’s earliest investments in the technology, winning a $33.1 million DARPA contract to develop their “RNActive” vaccine platform in 2011.
In Moderna’s case, DARPA financed the production and development of their RNA vaccine production platform and their RNA therapy candidate for Chikungunya virus (their first for an infectious disease) was developed in direct collaboration with the agency. Since 2016, Moderna’s RNA vaccine program has received $100 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation has since poured millions directly into both Moderna’s and Inovio’s Covid-19 vaccine efforts.
Gates’ backing of DNA and RNA vaccines is significant, given that Gates – a billionaire with unparalleled influence and control over global healthcare policy – recently asserted that the best options for a Covid-19 vaccine are these same vaccines, despite the fact that they have never before been approved for use in humans. Yet, thanks to the emergency authorizations activated due to the current crisis, both Moderna’s and Inovio’s testing for these vaccines has skipped animal trials and gone straight to human testing. They are also set to be fast-tracked for widespread use in a matter of months. Moderna’s clinical trial in humans began in mid-March, followed by Inovio’s in the beginning of April. Thus, they are not only Gates’ favorites to be the new vaccine, but are also slated to be the first to complete clinical trials and garner emergency U.S. government approval, especially Moderna’s vaccine which is being jointly developed with the government’s NIH.
The rapid rise to prominence of Moderna’s and Inovio’s Covid-19 vaccines has resulted in several media articles praising DARPA as having provided our “best hope” for thwarting the coronavirus crisis. In addition to its backing of Moderna’s and Inovio’s own efforts, DARPA itself, specifically DARPA’s BTO, is set to have a “temporary” vaccine for Covid-19 available in a matter of weeks that will involve the production of synthetic antibodies that would ostensibly provide immunity for a few months until a longer-lasting vaccine (such as those produced by Moderna and Inovio) is available.
DARPA’s antibody treatment for Covid-19 is pursuing two routes, including the “human body as bio-reactor” approach that would involve synthetic DNA or RNA being injected in order to prompt the body to produce the necessary antibodies. Defense One notes that DARPA’s Covid-19 treatment would utilize techniques that had resulted from the agency’s investments in microfluidics (the manipulation of liquids at the sub-millimeter range), nanotechnology fabrication and “new approaches to gene sequencing.”
Persistent Concerns
While most media reports have painted these DARPA-led efforts as entirely positive, it is worth noting that concerns have been raised, though these concerns have hardly gotten the coverage they warrant. For instance, Nature recently noted some key points regarding safety issues related to the race for a Covid-19 vaccine, including the fact that all “previous coronavirus vaccines have not all proven appropriate or even safe,” with some past attempts at coronavirus vaccines having resulted in antibody dependent enhancement (ADE). ADE results in cells more rapidly taking up the virus and speeding up the virus’ replication, increasing its infectiousness and virulence.
Nature also noted that the two coronavirus vaccines for SARS that managed to pass phase 1 trials ended up, in subsequent studies, causing immune hypersensitivity in mice “resulting in severe immunopathology,” i.e. permanent defects or malfunctions in the immune system. In addition, Nature also pointed out that it is unknown how strong an immune response is needed to confer immunity for Covid-19 and coronaviruses in general, making it incredibly difficult to gauge if a vaccine is even effective.
Another issue worth noting involves concerns raised about Inovio Pharmaceuticals by investment research firm Citron Research, which compared Inovio to Theranos, the disgraced medical technology company that had initially promised to offer diagnoses for numerous diseases via a simple blood test, but was later revealed to be a sham. Citron asserted that “It’s been over 40 years since Inovio was founded, yet the company has NEVER [sic] brought a product to market, and all the while insiders have enriched themselves with hefty salaries and large stock sales.”
Citron Research went on to say that the company’s claim to have designed their Covid-19 vaccine in only 3 hours based on a computer algorithm was hard to believe, stating that “Inovio has a ‘computer algorithm’ that no one else in the world has and is arguably one of the greatest breakthroughs in vaccine discovery in the past 100 years, and yet this ‘computer algorithm’ is not mentioned once in any of its 10-K’s or 10-Q’s? Sounds like Theranos to us.” It also noted that Inovio’s partnerships with pharmaceutical companies Roche and AstraZeneca ended up failing with those two companies canceling the partnership despite claims from Inovio’s CEO that whey would “continue to thrive.”
A Not-So-Hidden Agenda
Of course, these are just concerns focused on corporate behavior and obstacles towards making a Covid-19 vaccine in general. As this report has already shown in detail, DARPA’s other experiments with the same technologies (particularly genetic engineering, synthetic chromosomes, and nanotechnology) that are being used to produce RNA and DNA vaccines for Covid-19 are arguably more concerning. This is especially true given that DARPA-backed companies that describe themselves as “strategic partners” of the agency are those manufacturing these vaccines. In addition, thanks to backing from the U.S. government and Bill Gate, among others, they are are also slated to be among the first vaccines (if not the first)approved for widespread use.
It is certainly troubling that media coverage of DARPA’s efforts and the efforts of Moderna and Inovio have thus far not included critical reporting regarding the different branches of DARPA’s research that has produced the technology involved in creating these vaccines, leaving little room for public scrutiny of their safety, efficacy and their potential for unintended effects on human genetics.
This is particularly alarming given that, over the past several weeks, efforts have been taking shape in many countries to enforce mandatory vaccinations once a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available. In some countries, it appears likely that the Covid-19 vaccine will not be made mandatory per say, but will be required for those who wish to return to any semblance of “normalcy” in terms of public gatherings, working certain jobs, leaving one’s home for longer periods of time and so on.
Would those involved in creating such a mandatory vaccine, e.g. DARPA, pass up the opportunity to utilize the same technologies involved in producing the vaccine for some of their other admitted goals? This question, of course, has no obvious answer, but the fact that the arc of DARPA’s research is aimed at the weaponization of human biology and genetics in a way that is ripe for misuse, suggests very worrying possibilities that warrant scrutiny. Indeed, if one merely looks at how the crisis has been a boon for the Orwellian plans of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) and the federal government’s current efforts to dramatically increase its powers amid the current crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to give government agencies like DARPA and their corporate partners like Moderna and Inovio the benefit of the doubt.
This is especially true given that – without a major crisis such as that currently dominating world events – people would likely be unreceptive to the widespread introduction of many of the technologies DARPA has been developing, whether their push to create cyborg “super soldiers” or injectable BMIs with the capability to control one’s thoughts. Yet, amid the current crisis, many of these same technologies are being sold to the public as “healthcare,” a tactic DARPA often uses. As the panic and fear regarding the virus continues to build and as people become increasingly desperate to return to any semblance of normalcy, millions will willingly take a vaccine, regardless of any government-mandated vaccination program. Those who are fearful and desperate will not care that the vaccine may include nanotechnology or have the potential to genetically modify and re-program their very being, as they will only want the current crisis that has upended the world to stop.
In this context, the current coronavirus crisis appears to be the perfect storm that will allow DARPA’s dystopian vision to take hold and burst forth from the darkest recesses of the Pentagon into full public view. However, DARPA’s transhumanist vision for the military and for humanity presents an unprecedented threat, not just to human freedom, but an existential threat to human existence and the building blocks of biology itself.
Question Everything, Come To Your Own Conclusions.
Boston University’s director of the Elie Wiesel archive, Bar-Ilan University’s Institute of Holocaust Research historian Joel Rappel has discovered the origin of the infamous “6,000,000” number: a 1944 meeting of Zionist pioneering organizations in what is now known as the state of Israel.
For years, supporters of the Holocaust narrative have held that the number first appeared at the Nuremberg trials using highly discredited testimony by Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss. The 6,000,000 figure was again repeated by Adolf Eichmann, who was kidnapped by the Mossad and forced to participate in an internationally televised 1962 show trial in Israel.
According to documents in the Central Zionist Archive, the first mention of the 6 million claim was at a meeting of high ranking Zionist political figures in Palestine on January 19th, 1944 — more than a year before the war in Europe ended and a census could be taken, and a year before the Red Army entered Auschwitz.
Rappel names Eliezer Unger, a Polish-Jew who helped lead the Hashomer Hadati religious Zionist youth organization, as the major figure in developing the count of Jews killed by the Nazis. Unger claimed to have escaped from his Polish ghetto through Eastern Europe. After arriving in Palestine, he stated his intention “to shock the entire world, all of humanity and our brothers the Children of Israel in particular.” Unger had no evidence for what he was saying, but he did not believe Rabbi Stephen Wise’s assertions in the international media in 1943 of 2 million Jews being killed was making enough of an impact.
After Unger met with the Jewish groups and got them all on the same page, Haaretz published a small article a few days later that for the first time put the 6 million figure on the record, preceding German military leaders tortured into making confessions after the war. It doesn’t appear that Unger mentioned anything about homicidal gas chambers.
The Haaretz article ends the revelation by quoting Eichmann’s chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner, who on the 6 million number stated: “In the consciousness of the nation the number 6 million has become sanctified. It’s not so simple to prove that. We did not use this number in any official document, but it became sanctified.” In other words, it’s a lie.
After decades of killing, imprisoning, firebombing and bankrupting Holocaust revisionists, it seems that the Jewish community is now being forced to recalibrate their narrative and give more and more ground. That they are now beginning to concede that the “6 million” is nothing more than Zionist propaganda is a major blow to the myth.
If you’ve spent any time around the conspiracy realists who understand the true nature of the central banking fraud, the political fraud, the war on terror fraud and all of the other deceptions that are sold to the public by their misleaders, you’ve no doubt heard some iteration of the following remark:
“As long as Joe Sixpack and Jane Soccermom have their football and their cheeseburgers, nothing’s ever going to change.”
The implication is that if we can halt the flow of mindless entertainment that distracts the masses and the chemically-processed garbage that keeps them fat and sluggish, we could have a revolution by the morning.
Be careful what you wish for.
The sports were the first to go. (In fact, the cancellation of the NBA season was the moment I realized they were going to go all the way with the plandemic psyop.)
And now, in case you hadn’t noticed, the cheeseburgers are disappearing.
The latest news is that McDonald’s is now taking direct control over how much beef and pork each franchisee will receive. This comes on the back of ominous statements from major McDonald’s suppliers like Tyson Foods, whose chairman is now warning that “millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain” as the plandemic starts to cripple food processing plants.
Now, there are no doubt many people who are relieved to hear that McDonald’s may be forced to limit the sales of its chemical-laden, poisonous garbage “food products” (and, trust me, I’m one of them). And there are no doubt many who are relieved to hear of the impending collapse of the factory food processing system that has so utterly disconnected us from the real sources of our food.
But, once again, I must warn you to be careful what you wish for. What is happening right now is not cosmic revenge for the poisoning of the public with toxic garbage that the factory food processors and fast food purveyors have been engaging in for decades; it is actually the next step in the complete reengineering of the food supply and the fundamental transformation of the human experience that such a reengineering entails.
First, we have to understand that this is no mere American phenomenon. It is happening in Canada. And the UK. And Europe. And China. And Japan.
And it’s not just beef and pork supplies that are being disrupted. It’s milk. And produce. And rice. And wheat.
And it’s not just the food processors whose entire industry is being upended by this chaos. It’s wreaking havoc for farmers. And truckers. And supermarkets. And restaurants.
And to make it all even more horrific, the crisis won’t just effect the food supply itself. It will effect all of those workers in these industries who are being laid off as a result of the disruption, who now find themselves among the ranks of the recently unemployed who are lining up at food banks, which, as you might imagine, are struggling to keep up with the record demand on their dwindling reserves.
In case you can’t see the bigger picture yet, what is already in the process of happening is a fundamental disruption of the entire food chain that much of the world relies on. The impact of this disruption is only just now beginning to be felt, and the ripples caused by this cascading chain of failures and crises will directly effect every single person reading these words at some point in the near future.
Demand for food aid is already leading to stampedes in Kenya and protests in Bangladesh and looting in Colombia and clashes in South Africa. Given that we’ve already seen supermarket freakouts and shopping brawls breaking out in the US and Australia and the UK, can there be any doubt that severe food shortages will cause widespread chaos in the streets of the developed world? (In case there is any doubt, I’ll just leave this here.)
If only the Problem that is causing this Reaction had an easy Solution!
Oh, wait! There is! It’s called “lab-grown meat” and it’s being served up by Bill Gates and his corporate cronies.
Yes, as James Evan Pilato and I discuss in the latest edition of New World Next Week, everyone’s favorite billionaire philanthropist just happens to have a burning desire to help the planet by switching them over to lab-grown meat for some reason. (Hmmm. Funny, that. Must be part of that same selfless impulse that motivates him to inject as many poor, starving children as possible with his experimental vaccines.)
Before the vegans in the crowd start celebrating the realization of their dream to get the world to stop eating meat, we should all realize this for what it is. This is not a kumbaya moment where the world acts to reduce animal suffering, but the ultimate achievement of the global food corporatocracy’s wildest dream: to replace the food supply with a fully synthesized, patented, corporate product that cannot be grown in the field or raised in a farm. If this corporate takeover of the food supply happens of your food will come directly from Big Food, Inc.
In fact, not only was Gates an important early backer of “Impossible Burger” and its lab-grown synthetic biology food substitute, but, as Corbett Report member Camille of PleaseStopTheRide points out, he is also investing millions into “hacking your microbiome” to reengineer your gut bacteria. You see, as it turns out, researchers are discovering that the microbiome—the mixture of bacteria, fungi and viruses that develop in the gut—can have serious effects on children’s physical and mental development, especially in the first year of life. So the same man who is extremely concerned about overpopulation is also plowing millions of dollars into researching how food supplements can help poor third world children grow up big and strong. What could go wrong?
But don’t worry about Gates; his investments are already paying off. The “fake meat” industry is raking in the cash in the corona world order, with Impossible Foods Inc. in particular using the generated crisis as an opportunity to expand into 777 more grocery stores across the US. (Hey, at least it wasn’t 666 more stores!)
And there you have it: Problem – Reaction – Solution, food supply edition.
But if you’re interested in this controlled demolition of the food supply chain, I have some advice for you: Don’t post it to Twitter. They’ve already thrown talk about food shortages into the same category as warnings about the safety of 5G technology and banned it from their platform. If there was any greater sign that this is going to become an issue of vital importance in our lives in our very near future, I don’t know what it is.
Michael Moore is estimated to be worth 50 million dollars. He is a wealthy man. His political support is for the Democratic Party. He has stumped for Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in New York and for Rashida Tlaib in Michigan (does one need to say more?). Moore is essentially a brand.
Moore came to prominence with Roger and Me, but became a part of the cultural zeitgeist with Bowling for Columbine. Moore was satirized in TV cartoons like South Park (a sort of cultural marker for brand success), but despite his celebrity there has been in subsequent films a gradual yet inexorable expression of the law of diminishing (box office) returns.
He has now granted his imprimatur as producer (a bit like Nike is now branding medical face masks. Well… OK… not exactly like that, but still…) on a new documentary by Jeff Gibbs: Planet of the Humans.
Now, the essential and overriding two problems with this film can be generalized as absence of class analysis, and an absent analysis of western Imperialism.
More succinctly, the military is never mentioned, not ever. And the open Malthusian meme ‘we are the problem’, or what is often called ‘the overpopulation argument’ (or Pogo argument) is a profoundly reactionary and racist idea based on classic eugenics, and the one glaring omission and the other rather disturbing ideology, eclipse the genuine (though limited) truths of the film.
And I say limited because while, yes, Al Gore is a ruling class vulture and Bill McKibben an opportunistic self-promoting liar, and pointing this out is correct and even satisfying, these points are subsumed by Gibbs greater political mystifications.
The curious result of these missing ideas and the criticism of them and by extension the film, means that finds oneself aligned, however fleetingly, with people who hate the film for exactly the wrong reasons — the pro capitalist DNC linked pro climate justice. Green energy supporters, among whom one can count Alexandria Ocasio Cortez who producer Michael Moore supports and campaigns for (cognitive dissonance exhibit A) and all the myriad other corporate interests that Cory Morningstar painstakingly catalogues in her Wrong Kind of Green blog.
There have been hysterical attacks on Gibbs from these people, and they are wrong. And their egregious *wrongness* here still doesn’t mean its not a flawed film.
But herein lies the real issues that need to be carefully tweezed apart. Even Cory Morningstar linked to the film on the above-mentioned blog.
On an importantly positive note, the stuff that Gibbs gets right is important and one wishes dearly he were a more sophisticated political thinker. And that he wasn’t working with Moore. But details on industrial energy, palm oil, all the massive destruction caused by solar and wind power. That the hype for renewable energy is dishonest and manipulative. Gibbs is exactly right (though a bit late to the party one has to say).
The attacks on him from the proto-capitalist green energy people are cynical and dishonest.
The film is not without poignancy. The image of an 800-year-old Joshua Tree being ground up will not soon leave you, nor the image of the Orangutan – that Orangutan – this is the future under capitalism. There is no escape from it.
I want to return to the nature of the acute ambivalence this film elicits, but first, another factor needs to be noted. Timing.
That this film (which was rejected, apparently, by major distributors, although I have no direct evidence of this) is released during the Corona panic (for free), during the global house arrest (and this, in turn, means a necessary sidebar on Bill Gates) is troubling.
One of the most prevalent themes being repeated ad nauseam in media is one that depicts the suddenly clean waters of the Venice canals, the return of wildlife to the suburbs of America and northern Europe, and the generally breathable air of previously polluted big cities. And the message is, like the Gibbs film, “we are the problem”. Get rid of people, or keep them inside, and voila… an Edenic Gaia. The film then becomes tantamount to a marketing campaign for depopulation simply by virtue of its release date.
This, in turn, links to another problem with Planet of the Humans, and that is that it is very white. And I find a surprising number of (surprise) white people who either will object to this description, or simply tell you it has no meaning. But it does have meaning and it has history.
A history where twelve presidents owned and worked slaves. A history in which the U.S. Army gave out blankets, infected with smallpox, to native american tribes. Ponder that. The U.S. history is so interwoven with its slave-owning and genocidal past; add Manifest Destiny, and the Monroe doctrine, and sixty years of intense anticommunism and covert CIA coups – many of which targeted post-independence Africa – that history is inseparable from any cultural or political product.
THAT history colours all cultural discussion, it cannot be escaped. And there is an unsettling sense of privilege (even if not literally true) in listening to a white guy intone for a hundred minutes.
So, when white men narrate films where nearly all humans are white, it is ipso facto problematic. White men with apparently no politics beyond ‘trees are nice’.
Now, having said this, the subject Gibbs is tackling is important. Many of his conclusions are correct, but only up to a point because looming over everything is the spectre of de-population. And this Malthusianism is so threadbare at this point, so utterly at odds with the facts, that for Gibbs to promote it means he loses credibility for everything. And it’s sinister.
There are not too many people; thats simply not true, and in fact across the planet birth rates are cratering (why is IVF such big business?) But again, if one reads the reviews in corporate-owned media (Vox, or Salon et al.) it’s enough to make one root for and defend Gibbs… almost.
In fact, reading the mainstream press on the topic of this film is an object lesson in how propaganda is disseminated. It is a perfect illustration of the internalizing of the meta-narrative for climate, as it is for Covid 19. They can’t be separated, just as drone assassination and US/NATO Imperialist wars cannot be separated from SWAT teams kicking in doors in south-central.
The fact that the U.S. has over two million people in prison, which is the most per capita and real in the world, and that two million with a disproportionate number of black prisoners, is also suggestive of a deep intractable terror of a planet with dwindling white power.
But cutting across this, as I say, is the frightening erosion of democracy in the Covid 19 emergency. Never mind Malaria killed 400,000 last year, or that even the slimy frontman for Gates and his friends, Dr Fauci, admits the case mortality rate will be very low. It doesn’t matter because this stopped being about the virus long ago.
Here is essential reading regarding Gates…. two pieces. One from Jake Levich and the next from Alison McDowell.
I read in social media how people are so inspired about ‘frontline medical workers’ (you see there is always a new vocabulary, much like with climate and carrying capacity and wet bulbs and 6th mass extinction etc) and yet, in fact, huge numbers of hospitals are closing (likely to never reopen) and those doctors and nurses and now among the growing mass of unemployed in the US.
It seems the American bourgeoisie want to believe this is a dire threat. They want to self isolate. Perhaps this massive quarantine is a time of leisure that they don’t often get. I have no idea, honestly. But I do know for certain the quarantines will kill far more than the virus, in the long term, and that the new mass upticks in surveillance and invasions of privacy won’t ever be rolled back. But the bigger question is in terms of global travel and the Gates agenda (see Fourth Industrial Revolution, smart cities, etc).
What Gates wants is everyone to carry a certificate (or microchip) that indicates if they have had this or that vaccination. This is exactly what your dog has to have when you fly them out of the country.
I am deeply sorry Gibbs did not resist, or maybe actively joined, the agenda of the eugenicists. And as to the lack of mention of the military, well, I honestly don’t know how that is even possible if you claim to be making a documentary about destruction of the planet. The US war machine cuts across ever aspect of human existence today. That is not hyperbole. And yet Gibbs ignored it. I want to defend Gibbs against the corporate attacks against him, but I find it hard. And a final thought on all this.
The white liberal educated class so hate Trump that all rational perspective is lost. Anything that throws shade on Trump is a good thing. And this hatred is being enjoyed far too much; it is as if Trump came along and answered their unconscious prayers for active exercise of a deep soul-crushing hate. It bonds people, a negative bonding to be sure, but that is better than nothing.
The pimps for lockdown seem impervious to the loss of millions of jobs (just today in Norway SAS airlines cut 5000 jobs, and nobody expects them back. Or in Hollywood, as shooting resumes, crews are decimated. Thousands of jobs that likely won’t return). The importance of specific facts in Planet of the Humans are undeniable. I sincerely hope people will watch it, but watch it with an educated critical eye. For Gibbs is in bed with this man.
Two multi-millionaires performing the role of concerned citizens, and confused, confused I tell you, why people don’t want to lose their jobs and ability to feed their families.
Cory Morningstar wrote just the other day:
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that, while tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the #coronavirus pandemic, America’s ultra-wealthy elite have seen their net worth surge by $282 billion in just 23 days.”
There seems an almost class divide actually, for both climate discourse and corona discourse. The working-class fear loss of food and shelter far more than an only moderately lethal virus. They fear the excesses of federal bureaucracies, and the boot-heel of domestic US city police departments, not to mention custodial supervision. The white educated bourgeoisie fear but are also exhilarated by this contagion. As the lockdown began the top viewing film on Netflix that week was Contagion (Soderbergh, 2011).
This is exciting they think, and it allows yet another new vocabulary. So in social media where once one was confronted with endless white guys who were getting to play being scientists and climatologists, now one is running into a constant stream of Epidemiologists, infectious disease specialists and biologists.
I’m going to quote myself here, with apologies, from a recent blog post:
The pandemic is fetishized and much like the climate alarmism associated with Greta and The Guardian paper, there is a curious fetishized and cultic response in much of the population. And it is the latent masochism of the already terrorized. It also feels like a faint cry of Puritan angst, a call to piety. This is a very American sensibility, this punitive moralism.
And I want to quote Paul Haeder, who is a social worker and writer in Oregon. This is a comment he made on his blog (which you should all read) here:
And the underlying message is population control. The great white hope of Michael Moore and I guess Jeff Gibbs is really the underpinning of the flick – and no credence is given to the millions upon millions of people fighting this bastardization of humanity, of life, called Western Capitalism. There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of groups that Gibbs could have put front and center who are local, indigenous, part of the peasant movement, others, who are real forest protectors and water protectors and life protectors.
The for Evidence-Based Medicine (Oxford University) has the infection fatality rate at between 0.1% and 0.36%. That is pretty much what seasonal flu comes in at. [It should be noted that SARS-CoV-2 is far more transmissible, and that populations still lack immunity, making comparison with influenza based simply on the infection fatality rate fundamentally wrong (.36% of 7 billion is over 25 million)]. Something many of us said a month ago. The comparisons between the climate discourse and the Covid discourse are striking. One might even think there was an agenda here. But such topics are nowhere to be seen in the Gibbs film.
Which is fine, I suppose, if he only had viewed the lies and venality of the boosters for New green capitalism in something like a political frame. His obvious personal disappointment ends up feeling like, again, privilege.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is one meant to permanently eliminate humans from their work and livelihoods. This is the dream of the 1%. The fact that western capital continues to promote the “we are the enemy” meme should make us suspicious. It does not seem to have made Gibbs suspicious at all.
What is the point of U.S. foreign interventionism?
Why are U.S. troops killing and dying in faraway countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Somalia?
Why does the U.S. government have 165,000 troops stationed in more than 150 foreign countries?
Why is the U.S. government enforcing economic sanctions and embargoes against the people of Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and other countries?
Why are U.S. officials waging trade wars against foreign nations?
Why do the CIA and the Pentagon assassinate foreigners?
Why are U.S. officials provoking conflicts with Iran and Venezuela?
Why is regime change a core feature of U.S. foreign policy?
Why do U.S. officials partner with tyrannical foreign regimes?
Why does the U.S. government tax hard-pressed American citizens in order to send money to foreign regimes, including dictatorial ones?
Why does the U.S. government initiate wars of aggression against countries that have never invaded or even threatened to invade the United States?
Why do U.S. officials spend taxpayer money on foreign interventionism?
Why do U.S. troops inflict death, suffering, and destruction in foreign lands?
What are U.S. troops dying for in faraway lands?
After all, let’s acknowledge the obvious: No nation-state is invading the United States. No nation-state has the money, resources, personnel, equipment, and supplies to cross the ocean and invade and conquer the United States. There is no possibility of an invasion and conquest of the U.S. by Canada or any Latin American country.
Therefore, what is the purpose of all that U.S. meddling in overseas countries? We don’t like foreign regimes meddling in American affairs. Why should U.S. officials be meddling in the affairs of other countries, especially when the meddling involves the infliction of death, suffering, and destruction?
Consider Switzerland. It doesn’t have troops in the Middle East and Afghanistan. It doesn’t send foreign aid to regimes. It doesn’t assassinate people. It doesn’t initiate wars of aggression against Third World countries. It just devotes itself entirely to defending Switzerland against an invasion. And no one ever jacks with the Swiss.
In fact, have you ever wondered why U.S. officials call the Department of Defense by that name? I can see why Switzerland would use such a name. But the U.S.? it seems to me that the more truthful name would be the Department of Foreign Interventionism.
The Swiss model of non-intervention was actually the founding foreign policy of the United States. This was reflected by John’s Quincy Adams’ profound Fourth of July, 1821, speech to Congress entitled “In Search of Monsters to Destroy.” In that speech, Adams observed that if America were ever to abandon her founding foreign policy of non-intervention, “She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”
In fact, that was one of the reasons why the Framers and our American ancestors had such a deep antipathy for what they called “standing armies,” by which they meant large, overgrown military-intelligence establishments, or what President Dwight Eisenhower would later label “the military-industrial complex,” or what we call today a “national-security state.” The Framers and our ancestors didn’t want a “standing army” large enough to engage in foreign interventionism.
Where to go from here? Isn’t the answer obvious?
This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Who is Bill Gates? A software developer? A businessman? A philanthropist? A global health expert? This question, once merely academic, is becoming a very real question for those who are beginning to realize that Gates’ unimaginable wealth has been used to gain control over every corner of the fields of public health, medical research and vaccine development. And now that we are presented with the very problem that Gates has been talking about for years, we will soon find that this software developer with no medical training is going to leverage that wealth into control over the fates of billions of people.
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Who is Bill Gates? A software developer? A businessman? A philanthropist? A global health expert?
This question, once merely academic, is becoming a very real question for those who are beginning to realize that Gates’ unimaginable wealth has been used to gain control over every corner of the fields of public health, medical research and vaccine development. And now that we are presented with the very problem that Gates has been talking about for years, we will soon find that this software developer with no medical training is going to leverage that wealth into control over the fates of billions of people.
GATES: [. . .] because until we get almost everybody vaccinated globally, we still won’t be fully back to normal.
Bill Gates is no public health expert. He is not a doctor, an epidemiologist or an infectious disease researcher. Yet somehow he has become a central figure in the lives of billions of people, presuming to dictate the medical actions that will be required for the world to go “back to normal.” The transformation of Bill Gates from computer kingpin to global health czar is as remarkable as it is instructive, and it tells us a great deal about where we are heading as the world plunges into a crisis the likes of which we have not seen before.
This is the story of How Bill Gates Monopolized Global Health.
Until his reinvention as a philanthropist in the past decade, this is what many people thought of when they thought of Bill Gates:
NARRATOR: In the case of the United States vs Microsoft, the US Justice Department contended that the software giant had breached antitrust laws by competing unfairly against Netscape Communications in the internet browser market, effectively creating a monopoly. Bill’s first concern was that the prosecution could potentially block the release of his company’s latest operating system, Windows 98.
STEVE JOBS: We’re going to be working together on Microsoft Office on Internet Explorer on Java and I think that it’s going to lead to a very healthy relationship. So it’s a package announcement today. We’re very, very happy about it, we’re very very excited about it. And I happen to have a special guest with me today via satellite downlink, and if we could get him up on the stage right now.
DAN RATHER: Police and security guards in Belgium were caught flat-footed today by a cowardly sneak attack on one of the world’s wealthiest men. The target was Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, arriving for a meeting with community leaders. Watch what happens when a team of hitmen meet him first with a pie in the face.
[GATES HIT IN THE FACE WITH PIE]
RATHER: Gates was momentarily and understand to be shaken but he was not injured. The hit squad piled on with two more pies before one of them was wrestled to the ground and arrested, the others at least for the moment got away. Gates went inside, wiped his face clean, and made no comment. He then went ahead with his scheduled meeting. No word on the motive for this attack.
But, once reviled for the massive wealth and the monopolistic power that his virus-laden software afforded him, Gates is now hailed as a visionary who is leveraging that wealth and power for the greater good of humanity.
KLAUS SCHWAB: If in the 22nd century a book will be written about the entrepreneur of the 21st century [. . .] I’m sure that the person who will foremost come to the mind of those historians is certainly Bill Gates. [applause]
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that Bill Gates is singularly—I would argue—the most consequential individual of our generation. I mean that.
JUDY WOODRUFF: At a time when everyone is looking to understand the scope of the pandemic and how to minimize the threat, one of the best informed voices is that of businessman and philanthropist Bill Gates.
The process by which this reinvention of Gates’ public image took place is not mysterious. It’s the same process by which every billionaire has revived their public image since John D. Rockefeller hired Ivy Ledbetter Lee to transform him from the head of the Standard Oil Hydra into the kind old man handing out dimes to strangers.
MAN OFF CAMERA: Don’t you give dimes, Mr. Rockefeller? Please, go ahead.
More to the point, John D. Rockefeller knew that to gain the adoration of the public, he had to appear to give them what they want: money. He devoted hundreds of millions of dollars of his vast oil monopoly fortune to establishing institutions that, he claimed, were for the public good. The General Education Board. The Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research. The Rockefeller Foundation.
Similarly, Bill Gates has spent much of the past two decades transforming himself from software magnate into a benefactor of humanity through his own Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In fact, Gates has surpassed Rockefeller’s legacy with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation long having eclipsed The Rockefeller Foundation as the largest private foundation in the world, with $46.8 billion of assets on its books that it wields in its stated program areas of global health and development, global growth, and global policy advocacy.
And, like Rockefeller, Gates’ transformation has been helped along by a well-funded public relations campaign. Gone are the theatrical tricks of the PR pioneers—the ubiquitous ice cream cones of Gates’ mentor Warren Buffett are the last remaining hold-out of the old Rockefeller-handing-out-dimes gimmick. No, Gates has guided his public image into that of a modern-day saint through an even simpler tactic: buying good publicity.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spends tens of millions of dollars per year on media partnerships, sponsoring coverage of its program areas across the board. Gates funds The Guardian‘s Global Development website. Gates funds NPR’s global health coverage. Gates funds the Our World in Data website that is tracking the latest statistics and research on the coronavirus pandemic. Gates funds BBC coverage of global health and development issues, both through its BBC Media Action organization and the BBC itself. Gates funds world health coverage on ABC News.
When the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer was given a $3.5 million Gates foundation grant to set up a special unit to report on global health issues, NewsHour communications chief Rob Flynn was asked about the potential conflict of interest that such a unit would have in reporting on issues that the Gates Foundation is itself involved in. “In some regards I guess you might say that there are not a heck of a lot of things you could touch in global health these days that would not have some kind of Gates tentacle,” Flynn responded.
Indeed, it would be almost possible to find any area of global health that has been left untouched by the tentacles of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
It was Gates who sponsored the meeting that led to the creation of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, a global public-private partnership bringing together state sponsors and big pharmaceutical companies whose specific goals include the creation of “healthy markets for vaccines and other immunisation products.” As a founding partner of the alliance, the Gates Foundation provided $750 million in seed funding and has gone on to make over $4.1 billion in commitments to the group.
Gates provided the seed money that created The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a public-private partnership that acts as a finance vehicle for governmental AIDS, TB, and malaria programs.
When a public-private partnership of governments, world health bodies and 13 leading pharmaceutical companies came together in 2012 “to accelerate progress toward eliminating or controlling 10 neglected tropical diseases,” there was the Gates Foundation with $363 million of support.
When The Global Financing Facility for Women, Children and Adolescents was launched in 2015 to leverage billions of dollars in public and private financing for global health and development programs, there was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a founding partner with a $275 million contribution.
When the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations was launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2017 to develop vaccines against emerging infectious diseases, there was the Gates Foundation with an initial injection of $100 million.
The examples go on and on. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s fingerprints can be seen on every major global health initiative of the past two decades. And beyond the flashy, billion-dollar global partnerships, the Foundation is behind hundreds of smaller country and region-specific grants—$10 million to combat a locus infestation in East Africa, or $300 million to support agricultural research in Africa and Asia—that add up to billions of dollars in commitments.
It comes as no surprise, then, that—far beyond the $250 million that the Gates Foundation has pledged to the “fight” against coronavirus—every aspect of the current coronavirus pandemic involves organizations, groups and individuals with direct ties to Gates funding.
From the start, the World Health Organization has directed the global response to the current pandemic. From its initial monitoring of the outbreak in Wuhan and its declaration in January that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission to its live media briefings and its technical guidance on country-level planning and other matters, the WHO has been the body setting the guidelines and recommendations shaping the global response to this outbreak.
But even the World Health Organization itself is largely reliant on funds from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The WHO’S most recent donor report shows that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the organization’s second-largest donor behind the United States government. The Gates Foundation single-handedly contributes more to the world health body than Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Russia and the UK combined.
What’s more, current World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is in fact, like Bill Gates himself, not a medical doctor at all, but the controversial ex-Minister of Health of Ethiopia, who was accused of covering up three cholera outbreaks in the country during his tenure. Before joining the WHO he served as chair of the Gates-founded Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and sat on the board of the Gates-founded Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Gates-funded Stop TB Partnership.
The current round of lockdowns and restrictive stay-home orders in western countries were enacted on the back of alarming models predicting millions of deaths in the United States and hundreds of thousands in the UK.
HAYLEY MINOGUE: Imperial College in London released a COVID-19 report and that’s where most of our US leaders are getting the information they’re basing their decision making on.
[. . .]
The report runs us through a few different ways this could turn out depending on what our responses are. If we don’t do anything to control this virus, over 80% of people in the US would be infected over the course of the epidemic, with 2.2 million deaths from Covid-19.
The work of two research groups was crucial in shaping the decision of the UK and US governments to implement wide-ranging lockdowns, and, in turn, governments around the world. The first group, the Imperial College Covid-19 Research Team, issued a report on March 16th that predicted up to 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million deaths in the US unless strict government measures were put in place.
The second group, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Bill Gates’ home state of Washington, helped provide data that corroborated the White House’s initial estimates of the virus’ effects, estimates that have been repeatedly downgraded as the situation has progressed.
Unsurprisingly, the Gates Foundation has injected substantial sums of money into both groups. This year alone, the Gates Foundation has already given $79 million to Imperial College, and in 2017 the Foundation announced a $279 million investment into the IHME to expand its work collecting health data and creating models.
Anthony Fauci, meanwhile, has become the face of the US government’s coronavirus response, echoing Bill Gates’ assertion that the country will not “get back to normal” until “a good vaccine” can be found to insure the public’s safety.
ANTHONY FAUCI: If you want to get to pre-coronavirus . . . You know, that might not ever happen, in the sense of the fact that the threat is there. But I believe with the therapies that will be coming online, and with the fact that I feel confident that over a period of time we will get a good vaccine, that we will never have to get back to where we are right back now.
Beyond just their frequent collaborations and cooperation in the past, Fauci has direct ties to Gates projects and funding. In 2010, he was appointed to the Leadership Council of the Gates-founded “Decade of Vaccines” project to implement a Global Vaccine Action Plan, a project to which Gates committed $10 billion of funding. And in October of last year, just as the current pandemic was beginning, the Gates Foundation announced a $100 million contribution to the National Institute of Health to help, among other programs, Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ research into HIV.
Also in October of last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with the World Economic Forum and The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to stage Event 201, a tabletop exercise gauging the economic and societal impact of a globally-spreading coronavirus pandemic.
NARRATOR: It began in healthy-looking pigs months, perhaps years, ago: a new coronavirus.
ANITA CICERO: The mission of the pandemic emergency board is to provide recommendations to deal with the major global challenges arising in response to an unfolding pandemic. The board is comprised of highly experienced leaders from business Public Health and civil society.
TOM INGLESBY: We’re at the start of what’s looking like it will be a severe pandemic and there are problems emerging that can only be solved by global business and governments working together.
STEPHEN REDD: Governments need to be willing to do things that are out of their historical perspective, or . . . for the most part. It’s really a war footing that we need to be on.
Given the incredible reach that the tentacles of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have into every corner of the global health markets, it should not be surprising that the foundation has been intimately involved with every stage of the current pandemic crisis, either. In effect, Gates has merely used the wealth from his domination of the software market to leverage himself into a similar position in the world of global health.
The whole process has been cloaked in the mantle of selfless philanthropy, but the foundation is not structured as a charitable endeavour. Instead, it maintains a dual structure: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation distributes money to grantees, but a separate entity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, manages the endowment assets. These two entities often have overlapping interests, and, as has been noted many times in the past, grants given by the foundation often directly benefit the value of the trust’s assets:
MELINDA GATES: One of my favorite parts of my job at the Gates Foundation is that I get to travel to the developing world, and I do that quite regularly.
[. . .]
My first trip in India, I was in a person’s home where they had dirt floors, no running water, no electricity, and that’s really what I see all over the world. So in short, I’m startled by all the things that they don’t have. But I am surprised by one thing that they do have: Coca-Cola. Coke is everywhere. In fact, when I travel to the developing world, Coke feels ubiquitous.
And so when I come back from these trips, and I’m thinking about development, and I’m flying home and I’m thinking, we’re trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations, you know? Coke’s success kind of stops and makes you wonder: How is it that they can get Coke to these far-flung places? If they can do that, why can’t governments and NGOs do the same thing?
AMY GOODMAN: And the charity of billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda is under criticism following the disclosure it’s substantially increased its holdings in the agribusiness giant Monsanto to over $23 million. Critics say the investment in Monsanto contradicts the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s stated commitment to helping farmers and sustainable development in Africa.
LAURENCE LEE: The study from the pressure group Global Justice now paints a picture of the Gates Foundation partly as an expression of corporate America’s desire to profit from Africa, and partly a damning critique of its effects.
POLLY JONES: You could have a case where the initial research is done by a Gates-funded institution. And the media reporting on how well that research is conducted is done, the media outlet is a Gates-funded outlet, or maybe a Gates-funded journalist from a media program. And then the program is implemented more widely by a Gates-funded NGO. I mean . . . There are some very insular circles here.
LEE: Among the many criticisms, the idea that private finance can solve the problems of the developing world. Should poor farmers be trapped into debt by having to use chemicals or fertilizers under written by offshoot of the foundation?
This is no mere theoretical conflict of interest. Gates is held up as a hero for donating $35.8 billion worth of his Microsoft stock to the foundation, but during the course of his “Decade of Vaccines,” Gates’ net worth has actually doubled, from $54 billion to $103.1 billion.
The Rockefeller story provides an instructive template for this vision of tycoon-turned-philanthropist. When Rockefeller faced a public backlash, he helped spearhead the creation of a system of private foundations that connected in with his business interests. Leveraging his unprecedented oil monopoly fortune into unprecedented control over wide swathes of public life, Rockefeller was able to kill two birds with one stone: moulding society in his families’ own interests even as he became a beloved figure in the public imagination.
Similarly, Bill Gates has leveraged his software empire into a global health, development and education empire, steering the course of investment and research and ensuring healthy markets for vaccines and other immunisation products. And, like Rockefeller, Gates has been transformed from the feared and reviled head of a formidable hydra into a kindly old man generously giving his wealth back to the public.
But not everyone has been taken in by this PR trick. Even The Lancet observed this worrying transformation from software monopolist to health monopolist back in 2009, when the extent of this Gates-led monopoly was becoming apparent to all:
The first guiding principle of the [Bill & Melinda Gates] Foundation is that it is “driven by the interests and passions of the Gates family.” An annual letter from Bill Gates summarises those passions, referring to newspaper articles, books, and chance events that have shaped the Foundation’s strategy. For such a large and influential investor in global health, is such a whimsical governance principle good enough?
This brings us back to the question: Who is Bill Gates? What are his driving interests? What motivates his decisions?
These are not academic questions. Gates’ decisions have controlled the flows of billions of dollars, formed international partnerships pursuing wide-ranging agendas, ensured the creation of “healthy markets” for big pharma vaccine manufacturers. And now, as we are seeing, his decisions are shaping the entire global response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Next week, we will further explore Gates’ vaccination initiatives, the business interests behind them, and the larger agenda that is beginning to take shape as we enter the “new normal” of the Covid-19 crisis.
This April 16th, Dr. Luc Montagnier became a household name around the world. This occurred as the controversial virologist decided to publicly state his support for the theory that Covid-19 is indeed a laboratory-generated creation and not a naturally occurring effect of viral evolution.
Referring to a study published at the Kusama School of Biology in New Dehli on January 31st, Montagnier (the 2008 Nobel Prize winner for his 1983 discovery of the HIV virus) made the point that the specific occurrence of HIV RNA viral segments spliced surgically within the COVID-19 genome could not have originated naturally and he described it in the following words:
“We have carefully analyzed the description of the genome of this RNA virus. We weren’t the first, a group of Indian researchers tried to publish a study showing that the complete genome of this virus that has within the sequences of another virus: that of HIV.”
While the Indian team was induced to retract their publication under immense pressure from the mainstream medical establishment (which never bothered to seriously refute the content of the study’s research but rather used the “random-mutation-makes-anything-possible” argument), Montagnier stated “scientific truth always emerges”.
Not China: Montagnier Misdiagnoses the Culprit
Montagnier’s political ignorance became all too clear when he was asked who the culprit could possibly be.
By asserting his belief that China’s BSL4 lab in Wuhan was the source, Montagnier has fallen into a trap set by Anglo-American Intelligence circles which have been promoting a military confrontation between the USA and China for a very long time.
Now even though Montagnier denies that China released this virus with malicious intent (unlike many fanatical droves of neoconservatives currently itching for war), the “Wuhan Lab origin” hypothesis completely ignores the reality of the Pentagon’s globally extended 25 bioweapons laboratories which have openly created novel coronaviruses including varieties that arose in bats as journalist Whitney Webb’s remarkable February 2020 paper demonstrated.
Even though a 2014-2017 temporary ban on “dual-use” funding was imposed onto America’s bioweapons research, nothing prevented this work from occurring internationally or even covertly within the 11 military labs on American soil itself and tied to the same Fort Detrick that was shut down in July 2019 under suspicious circumstances. As I pointed out in my previous paper The Project for a New American Century, 9/11 and Bioweapons, over $50 billion has been spent on bioweapons research since 2001 which the Project for a New American Century manifesto claimed would play a major role in the arsenal of 21st century warfare stating: “advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool”.
Luc Montagnier’s Wave Therapy: Quackery or Brilliance?
The most powerful aspect of Montagnier’s April 16th intervention into world politics in my view is not really found in his support for the laboratory-origins theory, but rather in the scientist’s often overlooked proposition for an international crash program in something called electromagnetic wave therapy. Rather than investing in vaccines, Montagnier has explained that it would be much wiser for nations of the world to launch a crash project into a very different approach to viral treatments than is currently common in polite society saying:
“I think we can make interference waves which are behind the RNA sequences that can eliminate those sequences with waves and consequently stop the pandemic”
Before brushing this off as “quackery” as so many are wont to do, one should keep in mind that President Trump himself has indicated his interest in Montagnier’s approach in his April 23rd briefing telling reporters:
“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous … whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light. And I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you are going to test it… And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you are going to test it.”
While Trump has been vilely attacked as “unscientific” for these utterances, it is only due to the vast ignorance of Montagnier’s incredible discoveries into the electromagnetic properties of life that such mockery can go unchallenged. Montagnier’s innovations into “bleaching therapy” which Trump referenced in the same speech are also much more complex than mainstream detractors assume and has nothing to do with simply “injecting”disinfectants into the blood stream. These therapies are highly interconnected with the electromagnetic waves emitted by certain types of bacteria which Montagnier has discovered to be the most likely driving mechanism to many of the diseases both chronic and acute plaguing humanity. More will be said on that below.
What is Optical Biophysics and What did Montagnier Discover?
Optical biophysics is the study of the electromagnetic properties of the physics of life. This means paying attention to the light emissions and absorption frequencies from cells, DNA, and molecules of organic matter, how these interface with water (making up over 75% of a human body) and moderated by the nested array of magnetic fields located on the quantum level and stretching up to the galactic level.
Not to discount the bio-chemical nature of life which is hegemonic in the health science realm, the optical biophysician asks: which of these is PRIMARY in growth, replication, and division of labor of individual cells or entire species of organisms? Is it the chemical attributes of living matter or the electromagnetic properties?
Let me explain the paradox a bit more.
There are approximately 40 trillion highly differentiated cells in the average human body, each performing very specific functions and requiring an immense field of coherence and intercommunication. Every second approximately 10 million of those cells die, to be replaced by 10 million new cells being born. Many of those cells are made up of bacteria, and much of the DNA and RNA within those cells is made up of viruses (mostly dormant), but which can be activated/deactivated by a variety of methods both chemical and electromagnetic.
Here’s the big question:
HOW might this complex system be maintained by chemical processes alone- either over the course of a day, month or an entire lifetime?
The simple physics of motion of enzymes which carry information in the body from one location to another simply doesn’t come close to accounting for the information coordination required among all parts. This is where Montagnier’s research comes in.
After winning the 2008 Nobel Prize, Dr. Montagnier published a revolutionary yet heretical 2010 paper called “DNA Waves and Water” which took the medical community by storm. In this paper, Montagnier demonstrated how low frequency electromagnetic radiation within the radio wave part of the spectrum was emitted from bacterial and viral DNA and how said light was able to both organize water and transmit information! The results of his experiments were showcased wonderfully in this 8 min video:
Using a photo-amplifying device invented by Dr. Jacques Benveniste in the 1980s to capture the ultra low light emissions from cells, Montagnier filtered out all particles of bacterial DNA from a tube of water and discovered that the post-filtered solutions containing no material particles continued to emit ultra low frequency waves! This became more fascinating when Montagnier showed that under specific conditions of a 7 Hz background field (the same as the Schumann resonance which naturally occurs between the earth’s surface and the ionosphere), the non-emitting tube of water that had never received organic material could be induced to emit frequencies when placed in close proximity with the emitting tube! Even more interesting is that when base proteins, nucleotides and polymers (building blocks of DNA) were put into the pure water, near perfect clones of the original DNA were formed!
Dr. Montagnier and his team hypothesized that the only way for this to happen was if the DNA’s blueprint was somehow imprinted into the very structure of water itself resulting in a form of “water memory” that had earlier been pioneered by Jacques Benveniste, the results of which are showcased in this incredible 2014 documentary “Water Memory”.
Just as Benveniste suffered one of the most ugly witch hunts in modern times (led in large measure by Nature Magazine in 1988), Montagnier’s Nobel prize did not protect him from a similar fate as an international slander campaign has followed him over the past 10 years of his life. Nearly 40 Nobel prize winners have signed a petition denouncing Montagnier for his heresy and the great scientist was forced to even flee Europe to escape what he described as a culture of “intellectual terror”. In response to this slander, Montagnier stated to LaCroix magazine: “I’m used to attacks from these academics who are just retired bureaucrats, closed off from all innovation. I have the scientific proofs of what I say”.
Describing the greatest challenges to advancing this research, Montagnier stated:
“We have chosen to work with the private sector because no funds could come from public institutions. The Benveniste case has made it so that anyone who takes an interest in the memory of water is considered… I mean it smells of sulphur. It’s Hell.”
Casting Montagnier’s Research in a New Light
In a 2011 interview, Dr. Montagnier recapitulated the consequences of his discoveries:
“The existence of a harmonic signal emanating from DNA can help to resolve long-standing questions about cell development, for example how the embryo is able to make its manifold transformations, as if guided by an external field. If DNA can communicate its essential information to water by radio frequency, then non-material structures will exist within the watery environment of the living organism, some of them hiding disease signals and others involved in the healthy development of the organism.”
With these insights in mind, Montagnier has discovered that many of the frequencies of EM emissions from a wide variety of microbial DNA is also found in the blood plasmas of patients suffering from influenza A, Hepatitis C, and even many neurological diseases not commonly thought of as bacteria-influenced such as Parkinsons, Multiple Sclerosis, Rheumathoid Arthritis and Alzheimers. In recent years, Montagnier’s teams even found certain signals in the blood plasmas of people with autism and several varieties of cancers!
These results imply again that certain hard-to-detect species of light emitting microbes are closer to the cause of these ills than the modern pharmaceutical industry would like to admit.
A New Domain of Thinking: Why Big Pharma Should Be Afraid
As the filmed 2014 experiment demonstrated, Montagnier went even further to demonstrate that the frequencies of wave emissions within a filtrate located in a French laboratory can be recorded and emailed to another laboratory in Italy where that same harmonic recording was infused into tubes of non-emitting water causing the Italian tubes to slowly begin emitting signals! These DNA frequencies were then able to structure the Italian water tubes from the parent source a thousand miles away resulting in a 98% exact DNA replica!
Standing as we are, on the cusp of so many exciting breakthroughs in medical science, we should ask: what could these results mean for the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industrial complex which relies on keeping the world locked into a practice of chemical drugs and vaccines?
Speaking to this point, Montagnier stated:
“The day that we admit that signals can have tangible effects, we will use them. From that moment on we will be able to treat patients with waves. Therefore it’s a new domain of medicine that people fear of course. Especially the pharmaceutical industry… one day we will be able to treat cancers using frequency waves.”
Montagnier’s friend and collaborator Marc Henry a professor of Chemistry and Quantum Mechanics at the University of Strasbourg stated:
“If we treat with frequencies and not with medicines it becomes extremely cost effective regarding the amount of money spent. We spend a lot of money to find the frequencies, but once they have been found, it costs nothing to treat.”
Whether produced in a lab as Montagnier asserts or having appeared naturally as Nature Magazine asserts, the fact remains that the current coronavirus pandemic has accelerated a collapse of the world financial system and forced the leaders of the world to discuss the reality of a needed new paradigm and new world economic order. Whether that new system will be driven by Pharmaceutical cartels, and sociopathic bankers running global health policy for a technocratic elite of social engineers or whether it will be driven by nation states shaping the terms of that new system around human needs, remains to be seen.
If nation states manage to stay in the driver’s seat of this new system, then it will have to be driven by certain fundamental principles of healthcare for all, science practice reform and broader political/economic reform whereby the sacredness of human life is placed above all considerations of monetary profit. In this light, such crash programs into long term projects in space science, asteroid defense, and Lunar/Mars development will be as necessary in the astrophysical domain as crash programs in fusion energy will be in the atomic domain. Uniting both worlds, is the domain of life sciences that intersects the electromagnetic properties of atoms, cells and DNA with the large scale electromagnetic properties of the Earth, Sun and galaxy as a whole.
In 2019 bird researchers published Rosenberg et al “Decline of the North American Avifauna”, reporting a decline in 57% of the bird species. They estimated a net loss of nearly 2.9 billion birds since 1970, and urged us to remedy the threats, claiming all were “exacerbated by climate change”, and we must stave off the “potential collapse of the continental avifauna.” Months before publication the researchers had organized an extensive media campaign. Typical doomsday media like the New York Times piled on with “Birds Are Vanishing From North America” and Scientific American wrote, “Silent Skies: Billions of North American Birds Have Vanished.”
As I have now been sheltering in place, I finally had ample time to thoroughly peruse Rosenberg’s study. I had a very personal interest in it, having professionally studied bird populations for over 20 years and had worked to restore their habitat. I also had conducted 20 years of surveys which were part of the study’s database. Carefully looking at their data, a far more optimistic perspective is needed. So here I join a chorus of other ecologists, as reported in Slate, that “There Is No Impending Bird Apocalypse”. As one ecologist wrote, it’s “not what’s really happening. I think it hurts the credibility of scientists.”
First consider since 1970 many species previously considered endangered such as pelicans, bald eagle, peregrine falcon, trumpeter swan, and whooping crane have been increasing due to enlightened management. Despite being hunted, ducks and geese increased by 54%. Secondly, just 12 of the 303 declining species account for the loss of 1.4 billion birds, and counterintuitively their decline is not worrisome.
Three introduced species – house sparrows, starlings and pigeons – account for nearly one half billion lost birds. These birds were pre-adapted to human habitat and are considered pests that carry disease and tarnish buildings and cars with their droppings. Across America, companies like Bird-B-Gone are hired to remove these foreign bird pests. Furthermore, starlings compete with native birds like bluebirds and flickers for nesting cavities, contributing to native bird declines. The removal of starlings is not an omen of an “avifauna collapse”, but good news for native birds.
When European colonists cleared forests to create pastures and farmland or provide wood for heating, open-habitat species “unnaturally” increased. Previously confined to the Great Plains, brown‑headed cowbirds quickly invaded the newly opened habitat. Unfortunately, cowbirds parasitize other species by laying its eggs in their nests. A cowbird hatchling then pushes out all other nestlings, killing the parasitized species’ next generation. The loss of 40 million cowbirds only benefits our “continental avifauna”.
Several bird species had evolved to colonize forest openings naturally produced by fire, or floods or high winds. Those species “unnaturally” boomed when 50% to 80% of northeastern United States became de-forested by 1900. Still, eastern trees will reclaim a forest opening within 20 years, so open habitat species require a constant supply of forest openings. However as marginal farms and pastures were abandoned, fires were suppressed and logging reduced, forests increasingly reclaimed those openings. With a 50% decline in forest openings, their bird species also declined; now approaching pre-colonial numbers. Accordingly, birds of the expanding forest interior like woodpeckers are now increasing.
White-throated Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos quickly colonize forest openings but then disappear within a few years as the forest recovers. Those 2 species alone accounted for the loss of another quarter of a billion birds; not because of an ecosystem collapse, but because forests were reclaiming human altered habitat. Nonetheless those species are still 400 million strong, and juncos remain abundant in the open habitat maintained by suburban back yards. If environmentalists want to reclaim the abundance of their boom years, they must manage forest openings with logging or prescribed burns.
Insect outbreaks also create forest openings. For hundreds of years forests across Canada and northeastern US have been decimated every few decades by spruce bud worm eruptions. So, forest managers now spray to limit further outbreaks. Today there are an estimated 111 million living Tennessee Warblers that have specialized to feed on spruce bud worms. But the warbler’s numbers have declined by 80 million because insect outbreaks are more controlled. Still they have never been threatened with extinction. Conservationists must determine what is a reasonable warbler abundance while still protecting forests from devastating insect infestations.
The grassland biome accounted for the greatest declines, about 700 million birds. Indeed, natural grasslands had been greatly reduced by centuries of expanding agriculture and grazing. But in recent times more efficient agriculture has allowed more land to revert to “natural” states. However fossil fuel fears reversed that trend. In 2005 federal fuel policies began instituting subsidies to encourage biofuel production. As a result, 17 million more acres of grassland have been converted to corn fields for ethanol since 2006.
Although still very abundant, just 3 species account for the loss of 400 million grassland birds: Horned Larks, Savannah Sparrows and Grasshopper Sparrows. Horned Larks alone accounted for 182 million fewer birds due to a loss of very short grass habitats with some bare ground. To increase their numbers, studies show more grazing, mowing or burning will increase their preferred habitat.
It must be emphasized that the reported cumulative loss of 2.9 billion birds since 1970, does not signify ecosystem collapses. But there are some legitimate concerns such as maintaining wetlands. And there are some serious human-caused problems we need to remedy to increase struggling bird populations. It is estimated that cats kill between 1 to 3 billion birds eachyear. Up to 1 billion birds eachyear die by crashing into the illusions created by window reflections. Collisions with cars and trucks likely kill 89 to 350 million birds a year. Instead of fearmongering ecosystem collapse, our avifauna would best be served by addressing those problems.
Questioning Bird Models
Population estimates for most land birds are based on data from the US Geological Surveys Breeding Bird Surveys (BBS). I conducted 2 BBS surveys on the Tahoe National Forest for 20 years. Each survey route consists of 50 stops, each a half‑mile apart. At each stop for a period of just 3 minutes, I would record all observed birds, the overwhelming majority of which are heard but not seen. Many birds can be missed in such a short time, but the BBS designers decided a 3-minute observation time allowed the day’s survey to cover more habitat. Each year on about the same date, the BBS survey was repeated.
Each BBS route surveys perhaps 1% the region’s landscape. To estimate each species’ population for the whole region, the survey’s observations are extrapolated and modeled. However, models rely on several assumptions and adjustments, and those assumptions can inflate final estimates. For example, in 2004 researchers estimated there were 6,500,000 Rufous Hummingbirds. By 2017, researchers estimated there were now 21,690,000. But that larger population cannot be deemed a conservation success. That tripling of abundance was mostly due to new adjustments.
Because singing males account for most observations, the number of observed birds is doubled to account for an unobserved female that is most likely nearby. Furthermore, it is assumed different species are more readily detected than others. The models assume that each stop will account for all the birds within a 400‑meter radius. Because a crow is readily detected over that distance, no adjustments are made to the number of observed crows. But hummingbirds are not so easily detected. The earlier surveys assumed a hummingbird could only be detected if it was within an 80‑meter radius. So, to standardize the observations to an area with a 400‑meter radius, observations were multiplied by 25. Recent survey models now assume hummingbirds can only be detected within 50 meters, so their observations are now adjusted by multiplying by 64.
Thus, depending on their detection adjustments, one real observation could generate 50 or 128 virtual hummingbirds. That number is further scaled up to account for the time‑of‑day effects and the likely number of birds in the region’s un-surveyed landscapes.
Setting aside assumptions about the regional homogeneity of birds’ habitat, one very real problem with these adjustments that has yet to be addressed. If one bird is no longer observed at a roadside stop, the model assumes that the other 127 virtual birds also died.
Survey routes are done along roadsides and up to 340 million birds are killed by vehicles each year. Many sparrows and warblers are ground nesters and will fly low to the ground. Many seed eating birds like finches will congregate along a roadside to ingest the small gravel needed to internally grind their seeds. Every year I watched a small flock of Evening Grosbeaks ingesting gravel from the shoulder of a country road, get picked off one by one by passing cars. Roadside vegetation often differs from off-road vegetation. Roads initially create openings that are suitable for one species but are gradually grown over during the lifetime of a survey to become unsuitable habitat. So, it should never be assumed that the loss of roadside observations represents a decline for the whole region.
The larger the models’ detectability adjustments are for a given species, the greater the probability that any declining trend in roadside observations will exaggerate a species population loss for the region. The greatest population losses were modeled for warblers and sparrows and most warbler and sparrow data are adjusted for detectability by multiplying actual observations 4 to 10-fold. It is worth reporting good news from recent studies in National Parks that used a much greater density of observation points and were not confined to roadsides. Their observation points were also much closer together and thus required fewer assumptions and adjustments. Of the 50 species they observed, all but 3 populations were stable.
Pushing a fake crisis, Rosenberg et al argued that declining numbers within a species that is still still very abundant doesn’t mean they are not threatened with a quick collapse. He highlighted the Passenger Pigeon was once one of the most abundant birds in North America and they quickly went extinct by 1914. That doomsday scenario was often repeated by the media. But comparison to the Passenger Pigeon’s demise is a false equivalency. Passenger Pigeons were hunted for food when people were suffering from much greater food insecurity.
Rosenberg et al summarized their study with one sentence: “Cumulative loss of nearly three billion birds since 1970, across most North American biomes, signals a pervasive and ongoing avifaunal crisis.” But it signals no such thing. Wise management will continue. With better accounting of the natural causes of each species declines, plus more accurate modeling, it will be seen that Rosenberg’s “crisis” was just another misleading apocalyptic story that further erodes public trust in us honest environmental scientists.
Fifty years ago, I helped organize Earth Day #1 programs on my college campus, calling attention to serious pollution problems that afflicted much of the USA. Over the ensuing decades, laws, regulations, and changed attitudes, practices and technologies reduced most of that pollution, often dramatically.
I didn’t buy the 1970 end-is-nigh, doom-and-gloom, billions-will-die hysteria that Ron Stein and Ron Bailey recapture so deliciously, including the manmade global cooling crisis. I don’t buy it today, either – certainly not this year’s Earth Day focus on the alleged manmade global warming crisis, also blamed on emissions of carbon dioxide and water vapor, the same gases that humans and animals exhale, and plants use to grow. We’re told the crisis is unprecedented, and poses existential threats to humanity and planet.
What I find fascinating in all this is the steadfast, often nasty determination of scientists, politicians and interest groups promoting alarmist themes – and profiting immensely from them – to reject and deny any science, history and evidence that undermines their claim that nothing like this ever happened before.
The “highest ever” temperatures may be just a few tenths or even hundredths of a degree above previous records set many decades ago. The United States may have enjoyed a record 12-year respite from Category 3-5 hurricanes, ended finally by Harvey and Irma in 2017. Violent tornadoes may be far fewer during the last 35 years than during the 35 years before that, and the complete absence of violent twisters in 2018 may have been truly unprecedented. Modern day floods and droughts may be nothing compared to past floods or the multi-decade droughts that devastated Anasazi, Mayan and other civilizations.
However, alarmists insist, Earth’s climate and weather were stable and unchanging until humans began using coal, oil and natural gas. We must eradicate fossil fuels now, they say, regardless of what impacts biofuel, battery, wind and solar replacements (and mining for raw materials to manufacture them) might have on wildlife, scenery, environmental values or human rights. The disconnect from reality is truly amazing.
Equally fascinating is the notion that melting glaciers are something new. It amounts to asserting that everything was just peachy until American, European and Greenland glaciers started melting a few decades ago, threatening us with catastrophic sea level rise. It amounts to claiming the glacial epochs never happened; their mile-high ice sheets never blanketed a third of the Northern Hemisphere, multiple times, with balmy periods in between; and seas haven’t risen some 400 feet since the Pleistocene ice age.
It amounts to claiming the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods never happened, and weren’t followed by the Little Ice Age, when priests performed exorcisms, asking God to keep glaciers from inundating villages in the Alps of Europe. It’s as though we couldn’t possibly be finding what we are finding today.
In the latest example, government and university researchers recently found numerous Viking-era artifacts along a Norwegian mountain pass that had been heavily traveled for at least 700 years, but then was buried beneath the ice and lost to history for 1,000 years. Locals used the rough 2,200-foot-long pass to travel between summer and winter lodgings, while long-distance trekkers used it as a trade route.
Among the treasure trove were tunics, mittens, horse shoes and bits, remnants of sleds used to haul food and gear over winter snow, a small shelter, and even the remains of a dog with a collar and leash. They all came to light because the glacial ice is again receding, as Earth continues its post Little Ice Age warming.
Alarmists insist the warming is due to fossil fuels, and deny that it is just part of natural climate cycles. Much more evidence of past warming and cooling periods has also come to light in recent years.
In 1991, German hikers found the incredible mummified and heavily tattooed remains of “Oetzi the Ice Man” sticking out of the ice in the Oetzal Alps near the Italian-Austrian border, at an altitude of some 10,000 feet. A partial longbow, bearskin hat and other artifacts were found nearby. He had died about 5,300 years ago from an arrow wound and had the blood of four different people on his clothes and weapons. He is further evidence of human habitation in these alpine areas during past warm periods.
Tourists and archeological teams have also discovered parts of shoes, leather clothing, fragments of a wooden bowl and numerous other items from 3000 to 4500 BC (BCE) that have emerged from the alpine ice. They are among the oldest objects ever found in the Alps. A Bronze Age pin, Roman coins and early Medieval artifacts have also been found. They show how these mountain passes and trails, impassible during cold, more glaciated periods, served as vital trade routes in periodic warmer centuries.
Norwegian ice fields show shrinkage and growth patterns similar to those of the alpine glaciers, says Norwegian glacial scientist Atle Nesje. The archaeological findings “seem to fit quite nicely with our glacier reconstructions,” he adds, which helps us understand past, present and future climate changes.
Years of research by Swiss and other scientists have produced similar findings – sometimes human artifacts, but also plant and animal remains, in areas of newly melted ice. In one location in the Swiss Alps, University of Berne geology professor Christian Schluechter found pieces of wood 12-24 inches thick and the remains of a moor. Melting waters had flushed them out from under the glacier. That means the ice there is hardly “perpetual,” he says. There were multiple periods of warmer weather and less ice.
In fact, carbon-14 dating shows ten “clearly definable time windows” over the last 10,000 years – times when glaciers were limited to regions up to 1,000 feet higher in the Alps than today. This means that, for multiple long periods of time, “the Alps were greener than they are today,” Schluechter concludes.
Inca children sacrificed 500 years ago in Argentina’s Andes have also emerged from melting glaciers.
Off the Florida coast, the Mel and Deo Fisher archeological diving team didn’t just find the famous Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which sank during a ferocious 1622 hurricane, or only the British slave ship Henrietta Marie, which went down during a 1700 hurricane, after leaving 190 Africans in Jamaica, to be sold as slaves. They also found charred tree branches, pine cones and other remnants from a forest fire 8,400 years ago, when this vast ocean area was still well above present day sea levels!
Even an entire forest has been discovered, protruding from the melting Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau, Alaska – an area I visited several years ago. Roots, stumps and large segments of entire upright spruce or hemlock trees have been found across several acres already. They are the remains of a forest that thrived there for as long as 2,350 years, until it was buried by glacial ice around 1,000 years ago.
The chronicle of amazing discoveries yielded by melting glaciers goes on and on. Their most important lesson is that our current climate is but a snapshot in time, on a vibrant planet where climate change and extreme weather have been “real” since time began. Only a science-denying climate alarmist would refuse to recognize this. Simply put, there is nothing “unprecedented” about what we are seeing today.
Now it may be that carbon dioxide and water vapor from wheezing, snorting horses, oxen and humans – laboring at the edge of exhaustion doing what our fossil-fuel-powered vehicles and equipment do for us today – caused these past climate changes. But it’s far more likely that they were due to a complex and still poorly understood combination of solar and other powerful natural forces.
Climate alarmists may not want to recognize or discuss these natural fluctuations. But the rest of us should. Improving our knowledge of what these forces are and how they work together will enable us to better predict, prepare for and adapt to future climate changes. Continuing to focus on carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases,” as the primary or sole cause of climate changes and weather events, will ensure that we never get beyond the politically driven battles in which we are now engaged.
But just last year, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.
In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.
…
Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.
…
The NIH research consisted of two parts. The first part began in 2014 and involved surveillance of bat coronaviruses, and had a budget of $3.7 million. The program funded Shi Zheng-Li, a virologist at the Wuhan lab, and other researchers to investigate and catalogue bat coronaviruses in the wild. This part of the project was completed in 2019.
A second phase of the project, beginning that year, included additional surveillance work but also gain-of-function research for the purpose of understanding how bat coronaviruses could mutate to attack humans. The project was run by EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit research group, under the direction of President Peter Daszak, an expert on disease ecology. NIH canceled the project just this past Friday, April 24th, Politico reported. Daszak did not immediately respond to Newsweek requests for comment.
The project proposal states: “We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential.”
In layman’s terms, “spillover potential” refers to the ability of a virus to jump from animals to humans, which requires that the virus be able to receptors in the cells of humans. SARS-CoV-2, for instance, is adept at binding to the ACE2 receptor in human lungs and other organs.
According to Richard Ebright, an infectious disease expert at Rutgers University, the project description refers to experiments that would enhance the ability of bat coronavirus to infect human cells and laboratory animals using techniques of genetic engineering. In the wake of the pandemic, that is a noteworthy detail.
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A decade ago, during a controversy over gain-of-function research on bird-flu viruses, Dr. Fauci played an important role in promoting the work. He argued that the research was worth the risk it entailed because it enables scientists to make preparations, such as investigating possible anti-viral medications, that could be useful if and when a pandemic occurred.
The work in question was a type of gain-of-function research that involved taking wild viruses and passing them through live animals until they mutate into a form that could pose a pandemic threat. Scientists used it to take a virus that was poorly transmitted among humans and make it into one that was highly transmissible—a hallmark of a pandemic virus. This work was done by infecting a series of ferrets, allowing the virus to mutate until a ferret that hadn’t been deliberately infected contracted the disease.
The work entailed risks that worried even seasoned researchers. More than 200 scientists called for the work to be halted. The problem, they said, is that it increased the likelihood that a pandemic would occur through a laboratory accident.
HEAT exposure could drive a dramatic rise in cardiovascular disease (CVD) burden across the USA over the next 25 years, with researchers warning that climate change and population ageing may combine to reverse decades of progress in heart health.
Heat Exposure Threatens Future Heart Health A new modelling study estimated that heat-attributable CVD burden could more than triple by 2050 under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, disproportionately affecting older adults and economically disadvantaged communities. … Full article
… Climate change and land use conversion have the potential to increase the frequency of encounters between snakes and humans. This situation arises due to changes in temperature and rainfall, the loss of natural habitats, and shifts in food sources, which drive snakes to move into areas closer to human activity.
Prof Mirza Dikari Kusrini, a lecturer in the Department of Forest Resource Conservation and Ecotourism, Faculty of Forestry and Environment (Fahutan) at IPB University, explained that climate change affects snakes’ behavior, distribution, and movement patterns. … Full article
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