A New Era Of Mass Armies Approaches
BY IAN WELSH | SEPTEMBER 29, 2023
The army, or a part of it at the war college, has perked up and noticed some of the lessons of the Ukraine war, and that it’s a war that the US military could not fight. They’ve missed a lot of things, or felt they couldn’t/shouldn’t write about them, but they’ve figured some stuff out and written about them in a new report, “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force” by Lieutenant Colonel Katie Crombe, and Professor John A. Nagle.
The entire thing is worth reading, but I’m going to pull out three of the main points. The first is that a volunteer US military can’t fight a real war.
The Russia-Ukraine War is exposing significant vulnerabilities in the Army’s strategic personnel depth and ability to withstand and replace casualties.11 Army theater medical planners may anticipate a sustained rate of roughly 3,600 casualties per day, ranging from those killed in action to those wounded in action or suffering disease or other non-battle injuries. With a 25 percent predicted replacement rate, the personnel system will require 800 new personnel each day. For context, the United States sustained about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same number of casualties in two weeks. (emphasis mine)
Huh. Yeah, that seems bad. And it comes just as the US military is having trouble with volunteer recruitment, though even if wasn’t volunteer recruitment couldn’t keep up with the meat grinder of a real war.
The US Army is facing a dire combination of a recruiting shortfall and a shrinking Individual Ready Reserve. This recruiting shortfall, nearly 50 percent in the combat arms career management fields, is a longitudinal problem. Every infantry and armor soldier we do not recruit today is a strategic mobilization asset we will not have in 2031. The Individual Ready Reserve, which stood at 700,000 in 1973 and 450,000 in 1994, now stands at 76,000. These numbers cannot fill the existing gaps in the active force, let alone any casualty replacement or expansion during a large-scale combat operation. The implication is that the 1970s concept of an all-volunteer force has outlived its shelf life and does not align with the current operating environment. The technological revolution described below suggests this force has reached obsolescence. Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription. (emphasis mine).
If the US expects to fight Russia, China, or even Iran, they’re going to face a real war.
The US has spent 20 years fighting with air, artillery and surveillance supremacy, with clear communications. American veterans who went to Ukraine were unprepared for a war where the other side has, if not supremacy, air and artillery superiority, and the Ukraine war has been a meatgrinder. Plus, the current command methods the army use don’t work in an environment like the Ukraine:
Twenty years of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operationsin the Middle East, largely enabled by air, signals, and electromagnetic dominance, generated chains of command reliant on perfect, uncontested communication lines and an extraordinary and accurate common operating picture of the battlefield broadcast in real time to co-located staff in large Joint Operations Centers. The Russia-Ukraine War makes it clear that the electromagnetic signature emitted from the command posts of the past 20 years cannot survive against the pace and precision of an adversary who possesses sensor-based technologies, electronic warfare, and unmanned aerial systems or has access to satellite imagery; this includes nearly every state or nonstate actor the United States might find itself fighting in the near future
Back in 2012 I wrote an article titled “Drones are not weapons of the powerful.” I posited that they’re cheap, easy to make and everyone would eventually get them. We’re pretty much there, in terms of large group actors (the step after that is individuals, leading to an era where even a single person or small group can launch significant attacks.).
The authors of the article agree:
These systems, coupled with emerging artificial intelligence platforms, dramatically accelerate the pace of modern war. Tools and tactics that were viewed as niche capabilities in previous conflicts are becoming primary weapons systems that require education and training to understand, exploit, and counter. Nonstate actors and less capable nation-states can now acquire and capitalize on technologies that bring David’s powers closer to Goliath’s.
There are issues the authors don’t deal with, the main one is “designed in California, built in China.” The US’s weapon building capacity is massively degraded. As one example, the Chinese can build 3 ships per one the US builds, and the ships are probably better.
Since WWII, in every war the US has fought, they’ve had air superiority or supremacy and more advanced weapons than the enemy. They’ve also had more “stuff”. But the WWII “arsenal of democracy” is dead, it doesn’t exist any more.
Another issue is that the US military has outsourced too much of its capabilities. The corporate mantra of “outsource everything except your core competency” doesn’t work in a real war. All support functions should be run by the military and soldiers. (I may write an article on that in the future.) Contractors are too expensive and unwilling to really risk their necks, and outsourcing maintainance to non-army technicians is a disaster.
The US retains one huge advantage, however, its continental position makes it hard to attack the mainland. But this is also a disadvantage if the US loses air and naval supremacy. America’s enemies can only be reached by air and sea, after all.
Anyway, one takeaway is that conscription is likely to come back. I assume they’ll first make a huge push to recruit immigrants, undocumented or not, but that isn’t going to be enough. Get ready and remember, Empires rarely fade, they go down in huge conflagarations. The British Empire’s end involved two world wars.
Care homes – The evidence of harms
If you have a weak stomach don’t read this
By Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson | Trust the Evidence | September 30, 2023
We’ve written a lot about the systemic failings in government policy regarding care homes (see here, here and here).
However, a recent study on the transitions between hospitals and care homes caught our eye. The sort of study that bypasses the media: Two care home providers with 20 to 40 care homes each in the South West and the North East of England participated, and 70 participants were interviewed.
The study exemplifies the impact hospital discharge policies had: “… hospitals just wanted patients out, regardless of COVID status. To be brutally honest, they weren’t interested; they just wanted people out. In those early days, you know, it was very traumatic.”
And how hospitals desperately enacted a policy to clear the decks: “… we had a phone call from a nurse from the hospital to say that … this lady was lying beside somebody, less than two meters, who was COVID-positive.”
These instances highlight how thoughtless and reckless the government policies were. Driven by error-strewn modelling along with a chronic lack of capacity in the NHS, panic set in: hospitals would be quickly overwhelmed. Something had to be done to free up capacity – an easy target was found: the elderly and the most vulnerable and brutally the least able to stand up for themselves.
Hospital discharge service requirements were first published on 19 March,. On 2 April, the guidance said, “Some of these patients [admitted from a hospital or a home setting] may have COVID-19, whether symptomatic or asymptomatic. All of these patients can be safely cared for in a care home if this guidance is followed.
This policy, which saw discharges to care homes without testing, has been ruled unlawful by the High Court. In Gardner & Anor, R, Lord Justice Bean and Mr Justice Garnham found that government policy was “irrational” because it failed to consider the risk to elderly and vulnerable residents from asymptomatic transmission.
It took until 15 April to recommend testing and 14 days of isolation for admissions to care homes. Before this, negative tests were not required prior to transfers/admissions into the care home.
The study interviews show that care homes became no-go zones: “GPs or other healthcare professionals or multidisciplinary, like, podiatrists, everyone has difficulty coming to see the residents as of high demand or they can’t come for whatever reason, so COVID-19. They used to come, now they are no longer able to.”
The study also emphasises the inhumane practice of isolating vulnerable people ‘Strong feeling that isolating care home residents went against usual practice and, for some, was very hard to endure, especially when they needed human contact and emotional support from family and friends following a period of hospitalisation.’
We’ve written about “Confinement Disease”, which is likely more harmful than covid in care homes. ‘Among long-term care residents in the Southern Ile-de-France region, more than 24 covid deaths among 140 residents occurred in 5 days. None were due to acute respiratory distress syndrome, and death was mainly due to hypovolemic shock as residents were confined to their rooms for several days without assistance with eating and drinking.’
Confinement leads to feelings of being in prison: “… rather than keeping them in hospital we would send them [to the COVID-19 unit], and then once they’re 14 days clear, I know it’s 10 now, but it was 14, then they would go back to their original care home. But it’s just been carnage, to say the least.”
The study interviews also showed how degrading and impersonal confinement practices were “… so they couldn’t have their belongings until it had been left in a certain place and washed at a certain heat and 72 hours before you can have them back. You go in your room, and you can’t see anybody, and when you do, they’ve got masks and visors, and you cannot hear them, and you’ve got all of that.”
Socially distancing and isolating the most vulnerable comes with costs. The practice of rapidly discharging patients is unlawful, yet is anyone interested at a government level in how to better look after those in care?
Patients were discharged from high-resourced hospital settings – where some had time to do Tik-Tok dances – to low-resourced care homes, which worsened as staff went off in their droves—the opposite of what you need, as less care equates to more deaths. Then you isolate vulnerable people who can’t care for themselves – again, the polar opposite of what these people need, preventing much-needed personal care that can be life-saving. Even worse, at the end of life, were the restrictions on who could share that moment, hold a person’s hand as they drew their last breath, and prevent compassionate care at one of the most important times.
The potential for harm is exceptionally high in care homes; with quarantining, physical and mental deterioration occurs rapidly, and renal failure occurs swiftly in the face of dehydration – the ultimate price to be paid is a lonely death.
Online Censorship: Canada Continues Crackdown
Most media services must now “register for regulation”
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | October 2, 2023
On Friday the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission published new guidelines requiring media outlets to register with the service so their content can be “regulated”.
Under the new regulations all streaming services, social media companies and platforms that host podcasts would be [emphasis added]:
required to provide the CRTC with information related to their content and subscribership
This is the culmination of a “public consultation” launched back in May. For those unfamiliar with “public consultation”, it is a process by which government agencies use members of the public to tell them what they want to hear.
CRTC’s press release couches the move in faux-liberal talking points, referring to it as “modernising Canada’s broadcasting framework” and “ensuring online streaming services make meaningful contributions to Canadian and Indigenous content”, but that is clearly camouflage for an obvious power-grab.
It’s noteworthy that podcasting services are made a specific focus.
After all, these days anyone with a microphone and internet connection can start broadcasting whatever they want to whoever they want, with little to no “regulation” of their content. That’s a no-no for a burgeoning global dictatorship fixated on the world’s subjugation through the control of information.
Don’t be surprised if the Canadian government starts “reviewing content” from podcast services and saying things like…
“Podcast X is broadcasting hate speech/propaganda/misinformation about subject Y, you cannot stream any podcasts in Canada until X is removed from your service.”
That’s supposition, but hardly a stretch given the huge surge in censorship of all kinds from governments all around the world since the “pandemic”.
In fact, you can almost see this as a direct response to some of the propaganda failures of the mainstream media during the “pandemic”.
The alternative media was able to win a lot of battles during the Covid roll-out, and a push to “regulate” podcasts is a quasi-admission of this. As are the words of CRTC Chair Vicky Eatrides:
We are developing a modern broadcasting framework that can adapt to changing circumstances.
“Adapting to changing circumstances”… deliciously vague, but also fairly clear. They don’t have the power they need to regulate the growing voice of non-mainstream sources given rise by the internet.
The three measures announced on Friday are unlikely to be the last, the end goal is a fully “modernized” Broadcasting Act to be passed in late 2024.
What will that include? Who knows.
But considering the Canadian government has already blocked all news-sharing on social media, unpersoned and unbanked peaceful protesters, enforced “vaccines” and given a standing ovation to a literal member of the SS, you’d be forgiven for fearing the worst.
Israeli forces injure Palestinian school children in West Bank raid
Press TV | October 2, 2023
The Palestinian Ministry of Education has suspended classes in the village of Burqa due to the injury of a child in a raid by Israeli forces into a school.
Ghassan Daghlas, acting governor of the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, said on Monday the decision to close the school was to maintain the safety of students.
Local media reported that Israeli forces also directly fired stun grenades and tear gas canisters toward the Palestinian students inside the school during the raid a day earlier. Dozens of children also suffered from smoke inhalation.
Israeli forces also denied teachers of 27 schools access to classes in Masafer Yatta area, located south of the city of al-Khalil (Hebron). The regime forces placed barriers to block the roads leading to the education centers.
In recent months, Israeli forces have also demolished a number of schools across the occupied Palestinian territories.
The Palestinian Ministry of Education in an earlier statement said the demolition of schools was “a heinous crime.”
“These practices have become a flagrant violation of students’ right to safe and free education.”
U.S. Supreme Court to Weigh in on State Laws to Prevent Tech Giants From Censoring Social Media Content
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 29, 2023
The U.S. Supreme Court today said it will hear cases challenging Texas and Florida laws that prohibit social media companies from censoring content posted on their platforms, in what The New York Times said will lead to “a major ruling on how the First Amendment applies to powerful tech platforms.”
The two laws, both passed in 2021, and the Supreme Court’s decision to consider them, “could have nationwide repercussions for how social media — and all websites — display user-generated content,” CNN reported.
If upheld, the laws could open the door to more state legislation with similar obligations for social media sites.
Texas House Bill 20 (HB 20) and Florida Senate Bill 7072 (SB 7072) allow users to “sue social media platforms over allegations of political censorship” and “restrict companies from taking down or demoting certain kinds of content even when the platforms may decide it violates their terms of service,” according to CNN.
The laws also could make it harder for platforms to remove what they determine is “misinformation, hate speech or other offensive material,” CNN added.
According to USA Today, the laws “limit” platforms’ ability to regulate content, “even if those posts spread a foreign government’s misinformation or provide false medical advice.”
Two tech industry trade groups, NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, challenged the laws in 2021, saying that tech companies enjoy First Amendment protection which prevents the government from telling them “whether and how to disseminate speech,” the Times reported.
Both states’ laws were temporarily blocked by federal courts pending the completion of the appeals process.
According to The Associated Press (AP), the court’s announcement came three days before the start of its new term. A decision is expected in 2024, according to USA Today.
W. Scott McCollough, an Austin, Texas-based technology attorney, welcomed the news.
“I’m glad the Supreme Court picked up the case, because what both Texas and Florida were doing is, they required individualized protection — a consumer protection measure,” he said. “It required them to inform the parties that ‘we’ve done something to you.’”
McCollough added:
“The two states here recognize that these platforms have immense power. They purport to have the right to act unilaterally and subjectively to restrict posts as part of content moderation. So, the states are requiring them to give notice to the people they are censoring and tell them why they did it. This is reasonable at its face.
“If nothing else, I’ve always believed that these aspects of these two state statutes, in theory, should not have a First Amendment problem. States have forever engaged in consumer protection matters. Every state has consumer protection statutes.”
Laws intended to ‘combat Silicon Valley censorship’
Texas HB 20 regarding “censorship of or certain other interference with digital expression, including expression on social media platforms or through electronic mail messages,” passed on Sept. 9, 2021, and was set to take effect on Dec. 2, 2021.
According to Politico, HB 20 “would allow both the state of Texas and individual Texans to sue companies if they ‘censor’ an individual based on their viewpoints or their geographic location by banning them or blocking, removing or otherwise discriminating against their posts.” It would apply to platforms with at least 50 million active users.
Florida SB 7072, Social Media Platforms, also known as the Stop Social Media Censorship Act, was to take effect July 1, 2021. It sought to regulate the content moderation policies of social media platforms, barring them from banning users based on their political ideology.
According to the Times, “The sites in question are largely barred from removing posts based on the viewpoints they express, with exceptions for the sexual exploitation of children, incitement of criminal activity and some threats of violence.”
Supporters of the Florida and Texas laws “argue that the measures are needed to combat what they called Silicon Valley censorship,” including on issues like COVID-19 and claiming election fraud, the Times also reported.
Challenges to both laws resulted in conflicting rulings in federal courts.
In May 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit largely upheld a preliminary injunction freezing enforcement of the Florida law.
Also in May 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked enforcement of the Texas law pending completion of the appeals process. However, in September 2022, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed earlier court rulings that had blocked the law.
Judge Andrew S. Oldham of the 5th Circuit wrote, “Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say. The platforms are not newspapers. Their censorship is not speech.”
McCollough agreed, saying that prior legal precedent holding that “newspapers don’t have to post everybody’s letter to the editor” was based on the rationale that “there is not enough space in a newspaper to post everybody’s letter.”
The 5th Circuit is considering two other cases with First Amendment and free speech implications: Missouri et al. v. Biden et al. and Kennedy et al. v. Biden et al., in which Children’s Health Defense (CHD) is a plaintiff. The 5th Circuit heard oral arguments in Missouri et al. v. Biden et al. last month.
In July, the two cases were consolidated.
Legal experts said the consolidated case is likely headed to the Supreme Court after Associate Justice Samuel Alito earlier this month lifted an injunction that temporarily blocked certain Biden administration offices and officials from contact with social media giants.
The injunction, requested in the Missouri v. Biden case, on July 4 was granted by Judge Terry Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana Monroe Division and was later upheld under a Sept. 8 ruling by the 5th Circuit.
Justice Alito paused it after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted an emergency filing asking the Supreme Court to stay the injunction while the high court considers whether to hear the case.
The Supreme Court’s alignment in its 5-4 vote temporarily blocking the Texas law, was “unusual,” according to the AP, with liberal justice Elena Kagan joining three conservative justices — Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas — in the dissenting opinion that would have allowed the law to remain in effect.
In the dissent, Justice Alito wrote, “Social media platforms have transformed the way people communicate with each other and obtain news. At issue is a groundbreaking Texas law that addresses the power of dominant social media corporations to shape public discussion of the important issues of the day.”
Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD’s acting general counsel, highlighted the significance of the constitutional issues the Supreme Court will consider:
“We will be watching the two First Amendment cases out of Texas and Florida carefully. In these two cases, the social media companies are claiming their First Amendment rights are violated by these laws.
“In several cases in which CHD is involved, we argue that the social media platforms and the U.S. government violated the First Amendment rights of those posting to social media and the consumers of the posts.”
U.S. government claims First Amendment protects its ‘bully pulpit’
One of several legal matters at hand in the two cases pertains to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Passed in 1996, Section 230 gives internet providers legal protections for hosting, moderating and removing most user content.
According to the New York Post, Section 230 was designed to prevent internet companies from being treated as publishers by shielding them from lawsuits by anyone claiming to be wronged by content posted by another user — even though the platforms typically engage in moderation of user-posted content.
In his dissent, Justice Alito wrote, “It is not at all obvious how our existing precedents, which predate the age of the internet, should apply to large social media companies.”
Social media platforms have long argued that they are not publishers, in order to avoid legal liability for content posted by their users. However, in other instances, these same companies have claimed, in court, that they are publishers and have the right to exercise editorial control over content on their platforms.
For instance, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, recently argued that a subpoena from the District of Columbia’s attorney general interfered with its ability to exercise editorial control over content on its platform.
“Facebook has long had the same public response when questioned about its disruption of the news industry: it is a tech platform, not a publisher or a media company,” as the Guardian reported in 2018.
But in legal arguments, Facebook has repeatedly argued, it’s “a publisher, and a company that makes editorial decisions, which are protected by the First Amendment.”
Social media platforms “claim that they are not publishers and that they should not be liable for the information that shows up on their platforms,” McCollough said.
“You’re either a publisher or you’re not a publisher, and they’ve always said they’re not publishers. So why are they saying they’re publishers now? Are they publishers for the First Amendment and not publishers for Section 230? Explain that one,” he added.
Social media platforms’ First Amendment rights are also at issue. In a brief submitted to the Supreme Court, the State of Texas argued that HB 20 does not affect social media platforms’ free speech rights because “no reasonable viewer could possibly attribute what a user says to the Platforms themselves.”
“Given the Platforms’ virtually unlimited capacity to carry content, requiring them to provide users equal access regardless of viewpoint will do nothing to crowd out the Platforms’ own speech,” the brief also stated.
According to McCollough, “the big sexy issue” in this case involves content moderation. “Can a state basically prohibit discrimination based on viewpoint? And it ultimately comes down to whether, when these platforms are engaging in so-called content moderation, whether that is them ‘speaking’ — if that is a form of speech,” he said.
“We have always contended that that is not speech. It’s conduct. It’s the consumer, the one who is doing the posting, that is engaging in speech. By taking down speech that the platform may not approve of, that is not speech by the platform,” he added.
A policy principle known as common carriage is also implicated. The Communications Act of 1934, for instance, classifies telephone companies as “common carriers,” requiring those companies to make their services available to the public at affordable rates and regardless of viewpoint or other factors.
In a previous legal brief, Texas argued that social media platforms are “the twenty-first century descendants of telegraph and telephone companies: that is, traditional common carriers” — that must generally accept all customers without viewpoint discrimination.
In 2021, Justice Thomas compared social media platforms to communication utilities that are regulated under common carrier laws, on the basis that concentration in the industry gives these companies “enormous control over speech.”
McCollough said, “When you hold out to indiscriminately serve the public on uniform terms and conditions — in other words, if you say I’ll cover it if you just accept my pre-published terms and conditions, then that basically makes you a common carrier.”
The federal government has also asserted its own purported First Amendment rights.
Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar argues that lawsuits challenging government attempts to regulate social media content violate the First Amendment on the basis that the office of the president has a “bully pulpit to seek to persuade Americans … to act in ways that the President believes would advance the public interest.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that the Supreme Court asked the DOJ for its views regarding the Florida and Texas laws “as is typical in cases involving federal interests.” In a brief, Prelogar urged the court to hear the cases.
“When a social-media platform selects, edits and arranges third-party speech for presentation to the public, it engages in activity protected by the First Amendment,” she wrote, adding that “the act of culling and curating the content that users see is inherently expressive, even if the speech that is collected is almost wholly provided by users.”
Chris Marchese, litigation director for NetChoice, said “Online services have a well-established First Amendment right to host, curate and share content as they see fit.”
And Matt Schruers, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said, “It is high time that the Supreme Court resolves whether governments can force websites to publish dangerous content. … Telling private websites they must give equal treatment to extremist hate isn’t just unwise, it is unconstitutional, and we look forward to demonstrating that to the court.”
Tech companies, government using variation of ‘too big to fail’ argument
McCollough told The Defender that what the parties will be briefing and arguing is whether the two state statutes’ content moderation restrictions comply with the First Amendment — in other words, each state’s prohibition against viewpoint discrimination and whether that violates the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court will also hear arguments related to the “individualized explanation requirements” and the extent to which they “comply with the First Amendment.”
“What the solicitor general argued is that these platforms are just way too big,” McCollough said. “They have so many posts that it would be so burdensome on them to be reasonable with their consumers, and that this violates the First Amendment.”
McCollough called this “a variation of the ‘too big to fail’ argument … They’re too big, they do so much, that they just can’t be bothered with an individualized explanation.”
According to McCollough, the Supreme Court’s decision will have major implications for contemporary understandings of free speech and First Amendment rights.
“If you look at the position of the solicitor general and, therefore, the U.S. government, they are saying that the government has a right to free speech, the platforms have a right to free speech, but the people do not have a right to free speech.”
“From a policy perspective, what is the message being sent to Americans? Sit down, shut up, there’s nothing you can do about it, there’s nothing the state legislature can do about it,” he said. “And if they are right about the First Amendment, there’s nothing Congress can do about it.”
“Don’t sit down, don’t shut up, and yes, there is something you can do about it,” he said.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Five evidence-based early known Covid facts – ignored and censored
Highly acclaimed experts presented evidence-based facts on Covid-19 early in 2020, but were ignored and censored by authorities
BY THEO L. GLÜCK | FREEDOM RESEARCH | SEPTEMBER 26, 2023
The official narrative in the Covid crisis tried to persuade the public that various mandates and coercions, limiting people’s individual freedoms, were all based on science. The myth of this has visibly eroded, as it has been revealed how much of the strategies, influencing the lives of millions, was based on fear, pressure from media and political tactics. Reference to science was often enough used as a disguise.
Five evidence-based facts known already in 2020, but ignored by the authorities:
- The virus had spread much more widely and was far less dangerous than initially claimed by the authorities.
- The risk from Covid-19 differed by a factor of 1,000 for different age groups, and the risk was much higher for people with comorbidities (e.g. obesity, diabetes, anxiety disorders, etc.) and nutrition deficiencies.
- Those who had recovered from the disease had developed strong natural immunity, but this evidence-based fact was systematically ignored or downplayed by the authorities.
- Covid-19 vaccines received marketing authorisation without having been tested in clinical trials for virus transmission or infection.
- Covid-19 vaccines have considerable side effects that were already known during the clinical trials of the vaccines.
The closure of parks and playgrounds was part of lockdown policies, carried out with reference to science.
Already in 2020, there were a number of important and evidence-based facts about both Covid-19 and the response to the Covid crisis that were highlighted by many scientists and doctors. Consideration of these facts would have prevented the introduction of ill-considered and ineffective Covid measures and reduced the resulting harms.
The virus had spread much more widely and was much less dangerous than claimed
The SARS-Cov-2 virus was already much more widespread globally in early 2020 than official sources (including the World Health Organization, or WHO) claimed. Prof. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Eran Bendavid wrote on March 24, 2020, that fears of Covid-19 were based primarily on a miscalculated death toll reported by the WHO, which was vastly exaggerated as it did not take into account the actual rate of infection. This meant, in particular, that the mortality rate among those infected was much lower than initially claimed and the risk posed by Covid-19 to the vast majority of people, particularly those under 70, was many times lower.
A team led by professor John P. Ioannidis of Stanford University scientifically showed in a study published already in May 2020 that the risk of dying from Covid-19 for people under the age of 65, even in pandemic epicentres, was very low, and deaths amongst people under the age of 65 with no comorbidities were remarkably uncommon. They proposed that strategies focusing specifically on protecting high-risk elderly individuals should have been considered in managing the pandemic.
On October 14, 2020, the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation published a study by prof J. P. Ioannidis, according to which the median rate of deaths among people infected with Covid-19 in autumn 2020 was 0.23-0.27%, with a rate of 0.05% among people under 70 years of age, which was tens of times lower than official (including the WHO’s) estimates in March and April 2020.
Even though such evidence-based data were known early on, the authorities in many countries and the WHO continued to scare the public about the particular danger of a novel viral disease, and imposed restrictions on millions of healthy people. Among other things, many countries restricted people from exercising, staying outdoors and playing sports, thereby compromising people’s overall health and increasing the risk of developing all the diseases (including Covid-19) more severely.
Thousand-fold difference in the risk from Covid-19
Harvard University Professor Martin Kulldorff had already stated in April 2020 that it was clear from the data from Wuhan early on in the crisis that there was a thousand-fold difference in the risk from Covid-19 across different age groups, and that failing to account for this difference was one of the major flaws in the public response to the Covid crisis.
Prof Martin Kulldorff was quick to point out the thousand-fold difference in risk from Covid-19 (Thérèse Soukar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Among people exposed to Covid-19, people in their 70s had roughly twice the mortality of those in their 60s, 10 times the mortality of those in their 50s, 40 times that of those in their 40s, 100 times that of those in their 30s, 300 times that of those in their 20s, and a mortality that was more than 3000 times higher than it was for children. According to Kulldorff, public authorities should have taken this wide variation between age groups into account when designing Covid interventions. Counter measures specifically targeting the elderly, the highest risk group, would have not only protected them but other groups as well. Age-specific measures had to be part of the strategy, otherwise unnecessary mortality, hospital burden and economic losses followed.
Professor Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh also estimated early on that the elderly were 10,000 times more at risk from Covid-19 than those under 15. But it goes e ven further. It’s not just the elderly, it’s the elderly who are infirm, have comorbidities or are frail. These were the people who were particularly at risk, and the main target group that should have been addressed. In his view, this was also the most important and obvious reason why there were alternatives to social closures and other coercive state measures.
In addition, it was clear from quite early on that it were the people with serious comorbidities that would fall seriously ill. In one of Europe’s epicentres of the early outbreak, Italy, a report found as early as in March 20, 2020, that the median age of the 3200 deaths testing positive for Covid-19 was 78.5 years, and more than 95% of them had one or more comorbidities. A large-scale study in the US confirmed that over 95% of hospitalised adults were persons with at least one comorbidity condition and the main risks were obesity, anxiety and fear disorders and diabetes. However, it was also clear, for example, that the proportion of overweight people varied widely between countries, even within the same age groups. For example, obesity already affects 42% of the US population, but in Vietnam the same number is only 2%, in India 4% and <10% in most of the African countries.
The association of nutritional deficiencies with severe morbidity was also known before the Covid crisis. Vitamin D, for example, plays an important role in the immune system. Already in the first half and second half of 2020, studies showed a clear correlation between the low levels of vitamin D and the risk of severe Covid-19 disease. For that reason, many doctors and researchers stressed the need for adequate vitamin D intake in the autumn of 2020, ahead of the second wave, especially for older people at risk.
Although these facts were known early on, authoroties continued to scare the public by claiming, among other things, that the virus did not discriminate between infected people and could be fatal to anyone. Health authorities also failed to advise people to take important steps to support their general health, such as getting enough fresh air and sunshine, eating a healthy diet, controlling blood pressure and diabetes, losing weight, etc. On the contrary, authorities directed people indoors, in many countries penalised them for going outdoors, and just promoted vaccinations instead of various treatments and lifestyles.
In the UK, scary posters were used in large-scale campaigns to get people to follow the “rules”
Ignoring natural immunity
The importance of natural immunity was systematically downplayed by the health authorities, major vaccine manufacturers and the World Health Organisation (WHO). In some countries (such as the USA), it was not even taken into account in the implementation of Covid measures, while the authorities only reiterated the need to vaccinate as many people as possible.
At the same time, studies carried out before the vaccination campaigns started, i.e. by the end of 2020, clearly showed that recovery from the disease provides strong immunity for at least 8 months and most likely longer. By October 2021, at least 81 studies had already been published confirming immunity to Covid-19 conferred by recovery.
In addition, a number of studies at the beginning of the Covid crisis showed that a significant proportion of the population may have already had immunity to Covid-19, as SARS-Cov-2 was only one of several coronaviruses. Nearly half of the unaffected individuals had the corresponding T-cells, indicating the body’s previous exposure to coronaviruses and ability to cope with them.
Many doctors and scientists, including Dr. Robert W. Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, Dr Marty Makary, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Tess Lawrie, Dr. Richard Urso, Dr. Paul E. Alexander, Prof Norman Fenton, Prof Martin Neil and others found it puzzling that health officials chose to ignore the scientific fact that infection provided long-lasting and strong protection to millions of people who had recovered from Covid-19. Prof. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Prof. Martin Kulldorff have stressed that while natural infection may not have provided permanent infection-blocking immunity, it offered, in high likelihood, permanent anti-disease immunity against severe disease and death. However, scientists who during the Covid crisis stressed the importance of natural immunity and asked to take into account when divising public policies, were not only ignored but censored and cancelled.
Ignoring natural immunity has had serious consequences, including avoidable vaccine complications and harms, loss of lives, financial and other collateral damage, and loss of credibility of the public health authorities.
Vaccines were not tested for reduction of virus transmission or infection
Covid-19 vaccines, which were introduced at warp speed, were not tested in clinical trials to see if they reduced infection or transmission. Shortly before their vaccine was granted emergency marketing authorisation in the US (on 3 December 2020), this fact was admitted by the CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, and later by a Pfizer official during an official hearing at the European Parliament, although the vaccine manufacturers gave the public an impression that the vaccines protected against infection and transmission.
To the experts who looked closely at the design and results of the Covid-19 vaccine clinical trials, the fact that the vaccines were not tested for reduction of virus transmission or infection was evident already in late 2020. For example, the editor of British Medical Journal (BMJ) Dr. Peter Doshi stated on October 21, 2020, that none of the vaccine clinical trials had been designed to detect the efficacy of these vaccines on reducing any serious outcomes such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Neither did they examine the efficacy of vaccines for their ability to interrupt transmission of the virus.
Dr Peter Doshi considers it wrong that primary data from clinical trials are not available (screenshot from Youtube)
Prof. William A. Haseltine drew attention to the serious shortcomings of these clinical trials on 23 September 2020, after Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson had published their vaccine trial protocols. According to him, the trials seemed to be designed to prove that their vaccines worked, even if the measured effects were minimal, as they mainly investigated only how well could the vaccines prevent mild Covid-19 symptoms. Haseltine pointed out that a closer look at the protocols made it clear that these trials did not provide confidence in vaccine efficacy in protecting against serious illness or in preventing an infection of Covid-19. It also appeared that these trials were intended to pass the lowest possible barrier of success. Haseltine concluded that these vaccines were not the “silver bullet” that would end the Covid crisis.
Yet tens of millions of people around the world were subjected to compulsory vaccination, and many lost their jobs because of non-compliance, severely restricting their individual freedoms and fundamental rights.
Ignoring the side effects of the vaccines
Data on the side effects of the vaccines were already available in documents published by the vaccine manufacturers on their clinical trails in late 2020, although few were able to or considered it important to look at them in depth. This was made considerably more difficult by the fact that vaccine manufacturers refused to publish the raw data needed for an objective assessment. Raw data from clinical trials have still not been fully disclosed.
For example, the Pfizer vaccine trial was designed, conducted, analysed and compiled by Pfizer staff and all the raw data belong to the company. The BMJ editorial board believes that refusing to disclose the original data is morally unacceptable for any clinical trials, but especially those involving major public health interventions. The BMJ has been calling on vaccine manufacturers for years to disclose the original data from clinical trials, since clinical trial data must be available for independent scrutiny.
Nevertheless, experts pointed out many inconsistencies and questionable findings in the Covid-19 vaccine trial reports already in early 2021, such as the facts that:
- higher-risk target groups (elderly and immuno-compromised individuals) were clearly under-represented in the trials,
- a number of subjects were withdrawn for unknown reasons,
- even the officially reported rate of adverse reactions was several times higher than it was, for example, for flu vaccines.
In addition, it has come to light that the vaccine manufacturer Pfizer was aware of several serious side effects amongst the vaccine participants in clinical trials in early 2021, but chose to conceal them, such as the case of 12-year-old Maddie De Garay, who became disabled in the trial and is now partially paralysed, requiring a wheelchair and feeding tube. None of her 35 adverse reactions were mentioned in the New England Journal of Medicine article reporting on the vaccine trial.
Regardless of all that, since the beginning of 2021, mass vaccination campaigns were launched in many countries of the world, which in a short period of time transformed from an attempt of vaccinating the vulnerable target groups (the elderly) into an increasingly massive effort to vaccinate as many people as possible, even up to with children and infants, providing no rational argument or evidence base to do so.
A new expert analysis of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine trial papers published in 2022 clearly found that participants in these clinical trials were more likely to experience a serious adverse reaction to vaccination than to be hospitalized for Covid-19.
Summary
As shown above, there is ample reason to argue that the evidence base for the decisions made in the greatest global health crisis of recent decades was severely deficient. Covid measures were determined not on the basis of evidence nor reasonable assumptions, but rather on the basis of emotional reactions and political tactics, fuelled by fear and media pressure. Societies were under constant pressure from global organisations (WHO, European Commission, etc.), authorities and the mass media – which included the increasingly loud rhetoric of maximizing lockdown, maximizing masking, maximizing vaccination etc.
However, there were also those in power who relied on knowledgeable experts (e.g. in the US, states such as South Dakota, Florida, Texas, etc.), as did some who were in charge of public health institutions (for example in Sweden), succeeding to resist irrational and unscientific pressures while enduring media bashing, vilification and unpopularity. At said places, the decision-makers generally avoided locking down the society and did not impose coercive state measures (compulsory mask mandates, compulsory vaccination, etc.). Thanks to their non-conformist and common sense approach, we now know much about which measures worked and which didn’t, the mistakes every society should avoid in future health crises, and how the slogan of ‘follow the science’ was often used as propaganda to subjugate societies to the dictates of a line of authority.
Media and Architects of Online Censorship Law Heap Pressure on Rumble After it Defends Principle of Neutrality
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | September 25, 2023
Media outlets and architects of the UK’s censorship law, the Online Safety Bill, are increasing the pressure on neutral video sharing platform Rumble after it refused to bow down to the UK Parliament’s pressure to demonetize comedian Russell Brand.
The pressure to demonetize Brand came after anonymous sexual assault allegations were made against him. Brand has denied the allegations and has not been arrested, charged, or convicted of any of the allegations made against him.
Several companies, including YouTube, took action against Brand after the allegations surfaced, despite Brand having no content violations on YouTube. But Rumble stood up to the pressure and rejected the UK Parliament’s request to cut off Brand’s monetization, with CEO Chris Pavlovski noting that the allegations against Brand have “nothing to do with content on Rumble’s platform.”
Now, several media outlets and people who helped craft the UK’s online censorship law, the upcoming Online Safety Bill, are targeting Rumble’s stance.
Lord Allan of Hallam, a former Facebook executive who advised on the Online Safety Bill, branded Rumble a “crazy American platform” and expressed disdain at Rumble’s philosophy of allowing free expression.
He and internet law expert Professor Lorna Woods, an architect of the Online Safety Bill, also complained about Rumble’s refusal to bow down to pressure from UK officials and framed it as “grandstand[ing] before the press.”
The Times also took aim at Rumble by noting that under the Online Safety Bill, Rumble will have to “prevent children from seeing pornography… material that promotes self-harm, suicide or eating disorders… violent content… material harmful to health, such as vaccine misinformation” and “take down material that is illegal, such as videos that incite violence or race hate.”
However, Bryn Harris, the Chief Legal Council for The Free Speech Union, pointed out that The Times’ article doesn’t actually provide examples of any of the alleged illegal or harmful to kids content on Rumble.
Additionally, the Associated Press piled in on Rumble after it stood up to the demands of UK officials by claiming that Rumble is a “haven for disinformation and extremism.”
This mounting pressure comes days after the UK passed the Online Safety Bill — one of the most sweeping censorship laws to ever be introduced in the UK. The controversial censorship and surveillance bill is set to come into law next month.
The censorship provisions in the Online Safety Bill can be aimed at both citizens who post speech that’s deemed to cause “harm” and companies that fail to censor this so-called harmful content. The harms in the bill extend beyond physical or direct harm and into the realms of “psychological” harm and “potential” harm. Certain types of “false” communications are also prohibited under the bill.
As UK officials heap pressure on Rumble, reports have revealed that several UK politicians have ties to the pro-censorship Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and the UK politician that pressured Rumble to demonetize Brand received a donation in kind from Google.
The US Military Is Laying the Groundwork to Reinstitute the Draft
By Zachary Yost | Mises Wire | September 25, 2023
The most recent edition of the U.S. Army War College’s academic journal includes a highly disturbing essay on what lessons the U.S. military should take away from the continuing war in Ukraine. By far the most concerning and most relevant section for the average American citizen is a subsection entitled “Casualties, Replacements, and Reconstitutions” which, to cut right to the chase, directly states, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”
An Industrial War of Attrition Would Require Vast Numbers of Troops
The context for this supposed need to reinstate conscription is the estimate that were the U.S. to enter into a large-scale conflict, every day it would likely suffer thirty-six hundred casualties and require eight hundred replacements, again per day. The report notes that over the course of twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. suffered fifty thousand casualties, a number which would likely be reached in merely two weeks of large-scale intensive combat.
The military is already facing an enormous recruiting shortfall. Last year the army alone fell short of its goal by fifteen thousand soldiers and is on track to be short an additional twenty thousand this year. On top of that, the report notes that the Individual Ready Reserve, which is composed of former service personnel who do not actively train and drill but may be called back into active service in the event they are needed, has dropped from seven hundred thousand in 1973 to seventy-six thousand now.
Prior to the Ukraine war, the fad theory in military planning was the idea of “hybrid warfare,” where the idea of giant state armies clashing on the battlefield requiring and consuming vast amounts of men and material was viewed as out of date as massed cavalry charges. Instead, these theorists argued that even when states did fight, it would be via proxies and special operations and would look more like the past twenty years of battling nonstate actors in the hills of Afghanistan. In a recent essay in the Journal of Security Studies, realist scholar Patrick Porter documents the rise of this theory and the fact that it is obviously garbage given the return of industrial wars of attrition.
As military planners have woken up from the fevered dream of imagining that modern war consisted of chasing the Taliban through the hills with complete and overwhelming airpower, they have similarly started to wake up to the idea that industrial war has vast manpower requirements and that seemingly the only way to fill these requirements is by forcing young people into the ranks. That has certainly been the only way Ukraine has been able to maintain its forces, although it has required increasingly draconian measures to do so as conscripts face attrition rates of 80 to 90 percent by Ukraine’s own admission.
Obviously, the reintroduction of conscription is an extremely disturbing prospect given America’s propensity for getting involved in meaningless wars that accomplish nothing other than empowering our enemies, killing and maiming our soldiers, and wasting vast resources.
This is especially true given the unstated assumptions implicit in this paper. Who is the enemy that would be inflicting thirty-six hundred casualties a day? A war in the Pacific against China would primarily be a naval and airpower war with an extremely limited role for the army (even the current inept regime seems unlikely to be stupid enough to try and wage a land war against China) which obviously leaves Russia as the main adversary that would require the U.S. Army to round up conscripts to feed into the attritional meat grinder.
There Is No American National Interest That Requires a Standing Army
However, while these manpower shortages may be a valid concern for someplace like Russia, Ukraine, or Poland, we here in the U.S. are quite fortunate that we have no compelling national interest that would require us to engage in an industrial war of attrition in Eastern Europe.
To the extent we are at risk of becoming involved in such a disastrous mess, it is entirely of our own doing via the entangling alliance known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and our leader’s own messianic gnostic crusades for democracy or whatever pseudo religious ideology is presently in vogue.
The U.S. is blessed as being the most secure power in history. We are the hegemon of the western hemisphere, with vast moats in the form of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that no other state has the capability to project military force across, and all our neighbors are weak and relatively friendly. We are not at any risk of being forced to fight an industrial land war on the home front. Any war the army would be used in would be as an expeditionary force fighting in the eastern hemisphere, where we have no compelling defensive need to do so.
From the beginning of the U.S., there have been warnings against the dangers of both entangling alliances and standing armies. The best solution to the military recruitment crisis is to simply abolish the standing army and not plan to wage a costly and pointless war on the other side of the planet that would result in trillions of dollars down the drain and who knows how many tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans being killed, maimed, and psychologically scarred.
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Who Runs Our World?
Netanyahu addresses US Congress
By Richard Hugus | January 4, 2019
Our world is run by oligarchs, the holders of vast wealth from monopolies in banking, resource extraction, manufacturing, and technology. Oligarchs have such power that most of the world doesn’t even know of their influence over our lives. Their overall agenda is global power — a world government, run by them — to be achieved through planned steps of social engineering. The oligarchs remain in the background and have heads of state and entire governments acting in their service. Presidents and prime ministers are their puppets. Bureaucrats and politicians are their factotums.
Who are politicians? Politicians are people who work for the powerful while pretending to represent the people who voted for them. This double-dealing involves a lot of lying, so successful politicians must be good at it. It’s not an easy job to make the insane agenda of the powerful seem reasonable. Politicians can’t reveal this agenda because it almost always goes against the interests of their constituents, so they become adept at sophistry, mystification, and the appearance of authority. For example, wars for Israel have been part of the agenda of the powerful for years. Since 2001, wars for Israel have been sold as “the war on terror” and lots of lies had to be made up as to why the war on terror was a real thing. The visible faces promoting the war on terror were neoconservatives in the US, almost all of whom were advocates for Israel, or Zionists. Zionists are not the only members of the oligarchy, but they seem to be its lead actors. ... continue
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