The New York legislature is weighing a bill that would let the authorities take anyone suspected of having or being exposed to a contagious disease and hold them indefinitely – even forcibly medicating them.
Under the new law, New Yorkers may be dragged out of their homes and locked up on mere suspicion of having been ‘exposed’ to the novel coronavirus — no positive test or even symptoms necessary. Once imprisoned in one of the state’s purpose-built facilities, individuals may be forced to submit to a “prescribed course of treatment” including drugs and vaccines — and even then, freedom is not guaranteed.
The state’s nightmarish Assembly Bill A416 would see targets locked away for as long as 60 days without a hearing. And while the prisoner has a right to legal counsel, New York health authorities will have the ultimate say in deciding when – and if – they’re no longer contagious. Assuming they ever were in the first place, that is.
Given how unreliable the PCR tests used to screen for the coronavirus are, producing up to 90 percent false positives by some estimates, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s facilities will almost certainly be flooded with the contacts of healthy people erroneously deemed ‘cases.’ But like the governor’s decision to send Covid-19 patients into nursing homes, killing tens of thousands of elderly people, confining the healthy with the sick only guarantees that more of the healthy will fall ill with each passing day. The state thus gets a bump in case numbers, justifying further repression of its citizens under the guise of yet another virus ‘surge.’
Nor should the psychological effects of being indefinitely detained for no logical reason in a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare be underestimated. This set-up could keep victims locked away for months, even years. Germany and Switzerland have already begun targeting high-profile dissidents for institutionalization, including doctors and lawyers, and other countries have made it easier to have troublemakers hustled off to the asylum.
Last month, a California neurologist published a paper claiming that belief in Covid-19 “conspiracy theories” was the result of brain damage and hinting that institutionalization might be the only option for these incurable “patients.”
Unlike in a criminal case, authorities seeking to medically imprison some inconvenient figure need not supply proof of the individual’s contagious potential. Instead, they merely must show the person is a danger to themselves or others — deliberately vague criteria that leaves plenty of room for judicial abuses.
Indeed, merely posting criticism of New York’s totalitarian experiment could merit a stay in one of Cuomo’s detention centers. According to the World Health Organization and its many media mouthpieces, sharing unauthorized facts is driving an “infodemic” just as dangerous as the virus itself — meaning those sharing such content are harming others.
Under those guidelines, one could easily justify yanking a pregnant woman out of her home for posting ‘wrongthink’ on social media — and indeed, Australian police boasted about doing just that weeks ago.Lest New Yorkers believe this horrific bill is an aberration, it’s far from the only power grab the state assembly has launched. Another piece of pending legislation seeks to make vaccines mandatory “in certain situations” — an ominously vague stipulation that the bill’s author later clarified meant “all individuals or groups of individuals who… are proven safe to receive such a vaccine.” Don’t want to play guinea pig to Big Pharma? Too bad!
New York has already eliminated religious exemptions for vaccination and has previously attempted to force flu shots on all state healthcare workers – even though the jabs are notoriously ineffective.
But this time, the Cuomo administration is going further with plans to inoculate drug addicts in state facilities with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines — whether they want the jab or not. So much for ‘my body, my choice.’
The transformation of New York City from a mecca of arts and culture to a quivering jello-mold of an authoritarian hellhole would not have happened nearly so quickly if the authorities had encountered even minimal resistance at the start of the pandemic.
But New Yorkers, despite a reputation for being independent, strong-willed, and distrustful of authority, dropped those attributes like a hot potato and commenced industriously licking boot. The ruling class can’t believe its good luck — no need to coerce these supine rag dolls into doing our bidding! — so they’re letting their imaginations run wild while outsourcing surveillance duties to the ordinary people who’ve found their meaning in life snitching on their fellow man.
What will it take for New Yorkers to wake up to what’s being done to them in the name of eradicating a virus with a 99.7 percent survival rate? How many neighbors will have to be ‘disappeared’ into the quarantine system? These are not merely rhetorical questions. Americans will have to decide sooner or later what side they’re on.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
Despite some of the tireless coverage from those of us in the independent media over the years, there still seems to be a contingent of holdouts clung to the idea that their own government would not intentionally put the well being of its citizens at risk. Particularly with regard to the closing out of 2020, it seemed no better a time to provide some historical context to the contrary.
We will begin with example from the prohibition era of the previous century, in 1928. The United States government in an attempt to act as the sole arbiter of morality took it upon themselves to defy the basic human right of self ownership and prohibited the consumption of alcohol nationally. Naturally, this was not received well by millions of individuals who believed it was their inherent right to decide what they could and could not ingest in their own bodies.
As prohibition often does, this led to a boon in black market industry of speakeasies and bootleg alcohol manufacturing and distribution. Of course the all powerful government, ever influenced by its messiah complex did not respond well to this act of defiance. How dare the peasantry exercise their rights as free thinking individuals? Thusly the government took the only next reasonable step it could think of — to poison its own citizens.
That’s right, rather than come to the logical conclusion that people should be allowed to decide what’s best for them, the federal government decided in an ill-fated attempt to enforce compliance of state-mandated moral guidelines to “save people from themselves”, to contaminate millions of barrels of alcohol with poison to dissuade people from drinking it.
This seems outlandish but it is indeed a well-documented historical fact that, as pointed out in a previous article from TFTP, has been entirely scrubbed from the history books. The reason for this historical purge is quite clear when one reads into the consequences of this repulsive policy. As it has been estimated that due to this state-sponsored poisoning campaign, over 10,000 Americans lost their lives as a direct result from being murdered by their government for the “crime” of consuming alcohol.
Just this one instance alone, arguably the most repugnant atrocity the United States government has ever perpetuated on its own citizenry, should be enough for people to realize they should never blindly believe that the bureaucracy is a benevolent figure acting on behalf of their well-being. Unfortunately though, as we will see this is only one of several examples of the predator class purposefully endangering the health of the public that they had been trusted to protect.
Our next example is somewhat better known, yet just as egregious. A project known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. The Tuskegee program ran from 1932 to 1972, conducted out of Tuskegee University in Alabama by the United States Public Health Service & the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The aim of the program was to observe the natural progression of syphilis in African American men, and while entirely unethical was also deeply rooted in the racist ideologies of the pre-civil rights era. Specifically targeting poor and disenfranchised black communities of Macon County, Alabama as unknowing & non-consenting test subjects.
The individuals were coerced into the program after being told they were being treated for having “bad blood”, and promised free medical care. Over 600 men were involved in the study, more than half of which had syphilis yet remained undiagnosed despite treatments such as penicillin already being readily available at the time. They were instead treated with placebos.
For 40 years the PHS and CDC intentionally withheld medical care during this program and allowed this disease to ravage people and communities with zero regard for public safety or basic moral standards. And as a result, as one study noted, has had a long-standing and negative psychological impact on American black communities.
The Tuskegee Study abused public trust, and left many infected men to die and led to the infection of several others including wives and children who could have been saved from contracting the debilitating disease. All under the observation of supposedly trusted public health authorities.
Dishearteningly, however, this is not an isolated incident. As bad as these repugnant practices from the CDC are, they are not the only agency to engage in them. Since the end of the second world war ushered in the age of the military-industrial-complex, and the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, they too have conducted illegal and unethical experimentation against non-consenting American citizens.
Official documents declassified over the decades exemplify that these projects are innumerable, and a total disregard for public health and safety is government standard practice, despite their cover-up and assertion to the contrary.
A few pertinent examples include —
Operation Sea Spray, a biological warfare experiment carried out by the United States Navy in the San Francisco Bay area in 1950. The Navy released clouds contaminated with the bacteria serratia marcescens & bacillus globigii into a city of 775,000 inhabitants. The aim of the operation was to track the dispersal of biological agents in a major metropolitan area, as initially the Navy believed the bacteria was not harmful to humans. That all changed a week after the initial release however, when residents began flooding hospitals suffering from unknown adverse reactions ranging from the minor to severe. At least one man is officially known to have died. And it has been noted the program likely permanently altered the microbial ecology of the area.
Operation Large Area Coverage was a mass biological attack simulation carried out by the United States Army Chemical Corps from 1957 to 1958. Throughout the American Midwest from the Gulf of Mexico into Canada, it covered thousands of square miles. The goal of the experiment was to test dispersal patterns of biological agents and involved releasing compounds known to be radioactive and carcinogenic, primarily zinc cadmium sulfide among other harmful bacteria. Tens of thousands of Americans were unknowingly exposed to these compounds. Two cities where these tests were concentrated – St Louis, Missouri and Corpus Christi, Texas – received such heavy plumes of the contaminated aerosols they created an artificial overcast over the cities. To which point military officials deceptively informed the localities that they were merely conducting smokescreen tests. To this day St. Louis residents suffer from adverse health effects allegedly attributed to the experiments they were subjected to, ranging from respiratory illnesses to cancer.
Project MK ULTRA.
This may very well be the most notorious of anything mentioned in this article. Almost anyone may have likely heard of MK Ultra at one point or another. Though it is unlikely that many have done the extensive research necessary to fully grasp the treachery of this infamous operation. Documentation about MK Ultra and its numerous sub-projects is scarce, due to several documents pertaining to it having been ordered destroyed by Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms under the Nixon Administration. However those that do remain still paint quite grim picture. There were various sub-programs associated with the project that spanned the course of nearly two decades. Some the names being MK Naomi, MK Often, MK Search, MK Delta, and Artichoke, just to name a few. The operations had various goals and aims ranging from behavioral modification, to psychological manipulation, to the development of biological and chemical weapons and much much more. Through their duration the CIA relied heavily on both willing and unwilling participants who were subjected to various methodologies including but not limited to; psychological abuse, electroshock, physical torture, and being subjected to mind altering drugs. At least one death can be attributed to the program, Dr. Frank Olson, who committed suicide by jumping through the window of a high-rise building while on a CIA induced overdose of LSD.
All of the known officially released documents pertaining to MK Ultra and it’s sub programs have been obtained and painstakingly catalogued by the hard work of researcher John Greenwald on his website The Black Vault.
While one may look to these examples and believe them to be few and far between, in reality that is the farthest thing from the truth. In 1977 an investigation published in the Washington Post confirmed the Military had conducted 239 secret open air germ warfare tests just between 1949 & 1969. These included releasing bacteria in Washington bus terminals and airports, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and the New York subway system. This is known to be one of the most egregious among them given the sheer volume of people exposed. The illegality of these experiments is quite clear, as they completely violate the stipulations of the Nuremberg Code, requiring voluntary informed consent for all research participants.
Some others among these tests worthy of mention are Operation Dew I & Dew II, which were similar to Large Area Coverage in that they released large quantities of zinc cadmium sulfide over several states in the southeastern United States; Operation Big Itch, an entomological warfare experiment utilizing weaponized ticks that is suspected to have contributed to the spread of Lyme disease; Operation May Day, Operation Drop Kick, Operation Big Buzz, & Operation Bellwether, all of which were experiments to determine the potentiality to disseminate biological agents via the release of mosquitoes.
Some Army documents claim the released insects were uninfected. However the Army’s long history of research into yellow fever and dengue fever, as well as the subsequent outbreaks of the viruses in the same public areas used as testing grounds has led some researchers to theorize these programs contributed to the spread of these diseases throughout the United States.
This suspicion can be plausibly corroborated in that same article from The Post, when then Senator and future Secretary of Health and Human Services, Richard Schweiker (R-Pa.), testified at a Senate subcommittee hearing saying — “It is very risky indeed to assume that any living organism, reduced to germ warfare size and released in a populated area, is ever safe.”. That same report also confirmed that hundreds of military personnel and their families had contracted infections from the pathogens intentionally released on US military installations.
Undoubtedly, the reader may look at these numerous examples and say to oneself “but most of these happened in the 60s and 70s. They certainly couldn’t still be endangering the public on such a scale now”. But this is not the case either. As noted in a previous TFTP article, a recent study from 2018 found that these dismal practices are indeed being allowed to continue. —
“While the idea that the U.S. government would willingly poison its own citizens may seem shocking to some, it is not unprecedented. Earlier this year, a study found that the Pentagon has contaminated more than 40,000 sites across the United States, exposing hundreds of thousands of Americans to dangerous chemicals.
The investigation, which was conducted by ProPublica and Vox, revealed that by testing and disposing of deadly chemical weapons in the United States, the Pentagon has “poisoned drinking water supplies, rendered millions of acres of land unsafe or unusable, and jeopardized the health of often unwitting Americans.”
And in another piece, this time from 2017, we covered the story of a small Oklahoma town outraged that the Department of Homeland Security announced they would be conducting chemical spraying operations over the town. In what a DHS press release stated would be to — “gather data that enhances our predictive capabilities in the event of a biological agent attack”. All too reminiscent of disastrous programs of decades past.
At the previous mention of US service members & families also succumbing to these poisons, it brings me to my next point of transition. Despite the dire circumstances alluded to already, the American public are not the only ones utilized as unknowing guinea pigs or sacrificial lambs for the governments unethical experimentation & criminal negligence. Often times it is their own soldiers that are the first to suffer the consequences.
Many of the previous programs mentioned above did involve some degree of testing on military personnel but there have been several specifically dedicated to it. The first that comes to mind is Project112/ SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense). From 1962 to 1973 the SHAD project was conducted on the number of US Naval vessels to determine their ability to detect and respond to acts of biological chemical warfare. So, naturally, the United States military actually carried out an act of biological warfare against its own sailors.
In 2000, the Department of Defense became required to begin declassifying the documents of the project. These “tests” consisted of exposing approximately 6000 of their fighting men to numerous pathogens via released aerosol. Including sarin gas, and VX. Two of the most dangerous neurological agents known today. Despite numerous veterans filing complaints about the negative health effects they have suffered since, including some developing cancer, the Department of Veterans Affairs still asserts “there is no clear evidence of specific, long-term health problems associated with participation in Project SHAD”.
Sadly enough, this seems to be a regular pattern. As almost identical instances have occurred over the years, particularly in Vietnam with the usage of Agent Orange. While the DoD was comfortable committing war crimes in the South Pacific, they were also totally okay with exposing their own to the same deadly agents simultaneously.
Agent Orange was a powerful herbicidal chemical weapon, said to be “one of the deadliest concoctions ever created”, used indiscriminately against combatants and civilians alike in Vietnam. The disastrous effects of this toxin have been suffered by victims and administrators alike, who have not only felt the effects themselves but been witness to entire generations of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren born with the biological effect as well. Birth defects, heart conditions, leukemia, cancer, just to name a few have all plagued those and the descendants of those exposed to this ungodly weapon of mass destruction.
Even more disheartening is the fact that the same scenario is still being played out today in similar fashion. The company contracted to create Agent Orange, Monsanto (arguably one of the most dastardly corporations to ever exist), is still alive and well, still canoodling with government officials to maintain their monopoly, and still poisoning people.
In 2018 TFTP reported the landmark verdict in San Francisco which ruled Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide contained carcinogenic additives. What’s more, internal documents released during the trial proved that Monsanto knew the danger this chemical posed to the public, and covered it up regardless. Furthermore, in the same year the company merged with pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG — which has its own sinister history, including intentionally releasing drugs to the public contaminated with HIV.
To continue, despite the folly of Agent Orange it seems the military brass still has refused to learn a lesson from its own abhorrent history. The same methods, with a similar circumstance, are still being carried out to this day. Since the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan the usage of burn pits as the primary means of disposal for any and all trash and toxic waste has led to hundreds of thousands of American veterans that served in the Middle East in the past 20 years coming home developing respiratory and other illnesses due to the noxious fumes they were exposed to. An estimated 3.5 million veterans have been exposed to toxic burn pits and yet just as the case was with agent orange the VA still vehemently denies an overwhelming majority of these claims.
While operations involving the military and intelligence agencies are some of the most poignant instances, they’re far from the only ones. If targeting unknowing and non-consenting members of the general public, as well as their own dedicated fighting men and women wasn’t bad enough, a number of these institutions made it a point to target even more vulnerable members of society. Carrying out countless tests against persons incarcerated by the state, who were unable to object. And even worse still, specifically experimenting on children.
The cases of illegal experimentation carried out on prisoners and children – often orphaned, hospitalized, or mentally disabled – on behalf of both government and corporate entities are sickeningly abundant. This began with the Manhattan Project in the forties and lasted decades.
Newborn babies were injected with radioactive material, mentally challenged children were fed radioactive oatmeal, both in accordance with an experiment carried out by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Quaker Oats, and the Atomic Energy Commission. Irradiating the testicles of prisoners causing sterility and cancer; Vanderbilt University and the US Public Health Service dosing pregnant women with radiation without their knowledge; patients given high doses of radiation resulting in violent hemorrhaging, cancer, and premature death conducted by the University of Cincinnati Medical School — are but a few examples of the more than 100 experiments carried out on 9,000 subjects mentioned in this 1995 Los Angeles Timesexposé.
Overall a total of 4,000 radiation experiments — conducted on an estimated 20,000 unwitting victims had been carried out during this time period, claims the Alliance for Human Research Protection.
As stomach-churning as these revelations are, one must also keep in mind that those cases are only pertaining to radiation experiments. Those numbers still aren’t counting the various other kinds of tests and or mishaps that have occurred and were subsequently covered up.
Other miscellaneous yet no less relevant instances are equally as abominable. One that comes to mind in particular is the ghastly history of eugenics. In short, Eugenics is a ethnically biased selective breeding pseudoscience that originated in the United Kingdom, and found prominence in the United States in the 20th century.
Having not only played a role in the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow era, but also resulting in the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of American citizens, mostly lower class women, who were deemed “unfit for breeding”. This was carried out not by some fringe group, but as signed and approved by government legislature, and supposedly trusted public health authorities as an openly accepted common practice of the American medical establishment for the better part of a century.
This short section alone doesn’t nearly due the justice of fully elaborating the terrible scope of this obscene chapter of American history. I genuinely implore the reader to read the previous three cited sources to gain a better comprehension it this ignored portion of our not-so-distant past.
To close out this chronicling I would like to include just one last item. In my article prior to this I covered the story of a lawsuit involving the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer suing a man who had claimed to be injured by one of their products. In it, for context I also included quite a bit of history of a number of those entities involved highlighting their history of blatant wrong doing.
For relevancy I would like to shortly expand upon that here, as the history of those kind of activities is not a newly recent one. But in fact stretches back as far as many of these previously mentioned instances. For example, 1955 saw what was known as The Cutter Incident. When in San Francisco a mishap occurred in a laboratory developing the first polio vaccine. As a result tens of thousands of children received a jab contaminated with the live polio virus. 40,000 ultimately contracted the disease, hundreds were left paralyzed, and 10 died. This was a tragedy specifically attributed to human error, that may have possibly been avoided had lab workers scrutinized their colleagues just a little more heavily.
Despite some increases in oversight, this scenario would repeat itself on two more notable occasions. Between 1955 and 1963 once again polio vaccine development saw a horrible mishap occur. Hundreds of thousands of doses of the vaccine had become contaminated with a virus contracted from research macaques, called Simian Virus 40 (SV40) — known to be a probable carcinogen.
Decontamination procedures were not carried out properly, thusly the shot administered to 98 million Americans still carried the SV40 virus. Despite constant reassurance from the CDC that this was harmless, a 1999 study from the National Institute of Health concluded — “Our analysis indicates increased rates of ependymomas (37%), osteogenic sarcomas (26%), other bone tumors (34%) and mesothelioma (90%) among those in the exposed as compared to the unexposed birth cohort.”
Finally, one must bring attention to the 1976 “fiasco”, as The New York Timesputs it. In 1976, the Gerald Ford Administration was led to believe they were on the verge of a swine flu pandemic that would kill millions. However the evidence to substantiate this was scarce to say the least — and ultimately, it never happened. However this didn’t stop Ford and Congress from pushing through a mandate requiring a vaccine be rushed into production. In the end the entire campaign did more harm than good; Economically, with its strain on funds. Civilly, with its blatant disregard for civil liberty. And medically, as hundreds were harmed by the vaccine itself. As Discover magazine explained —
“Due to the urgency of creating new immunizations for a novel virus, the government used an attenuated “live virus” for the vaccine instead of a inactivated or “killed” form, increasing the probability of adverse side effects among susceptible groups of people receiving the vaccination. Furthermore, prominent American scientists and health professionals began questioning the campaign’s large expense and its drain on scarce public health resources.
With President Ford’s reelection campaign looming on the horizon, the campaign increasingly appeared politically motivated. The rationale for mass vaccination seemed to stem from only the barest of biological reasoning — it turned out that the flu wasn’t even related to the virus that caused the grisly 1918 epidemic and, indeed, those who were infected with the flu only suffered from a mild illness while the vaccine, for the reasons stated above, resulted in over four-hundred and fifty people developing the paralyzing Guillain-Barré syndrome.”
Consequently, the original NY Times article said it best — “The blame for such a result will have to fall on the politicians and bureaucrats who formed policy so hastily early this year, scorning the few voices that expressed skepticism and sought to raise questions about the program.”
As I conclude I wish to state even with as extensive as this article is it should be stressed that these are only a fraction of examples of these programs/ incidents. Admittedly, while writing I had a hard time deciding what to include or exclude due to the sheer volume examples found while researching for this piece.
Doing further in-depth study of these subjects indicate examples of public endangerment and criminal negligence like this number in the thousands and span much of our history. Case and point, even just this May, The Free Thought Project shared an article from The Rutherford Institute that provided examples of severalmore instances itself — including the military’s race-based testing of mustard gas on troops, & FEMA “inadvertently” exposing 10,000 first responders to the deadly compound ricin.
This report was an exhaustive one. And the track record is a repugnant one, but a clear one. Paired with critical analysis it shows perfectly why one would be very wise to always heavily scrutinize any of these institutions, particularly in times when they are demanding blind faith and unquestioning obedience.
We didn’t find out about the heinous acts committed between the 40s & 60s, until the 70s. And another decade to learn about the atrocities committed then. So on & so forth. And in the present day we are only just now learning about the health hazards subjected to the public in the 2000s. Transparency and accountability are not virtues that we can allow it to fall to the wayside. It begs the question that should be seen as a tale of caution — what are we being exposed to now, that they will neglect to tell us for another 20 years?
A word to the wise my friends, always practice due diligence. Healthy skepticism can be your best friend, and perhaps even save your life.
About the author – Don Via Jr. is an independent researcher and journalist from central Virginia, who has dedicated the last ten years to studying history, political science, geopolitics, and covert operations, and raising awareness about government corruption and abuses. He is the founder of the independent media outlet Break The Matrix. More of his work can be found there, as well as on associated social media on MeWe, Twitter, and Minds.
The country this year which has been most ravaged by Covid-19 – losing a shocking 1,600 people in every million to the virus at the time of writing – is Belgium.
That might come as something of a surprise. You could be forgiven for thinking it was America, thanks to Trump’s alleged ignorance of science. Or what about Britain, which locked down ‘too late’ because of its government’s short-lived but foolish belief in freedom? Or Brazil, whose right-wing leader complained that lockdowns and masks were for ‘fags’? If not those, then surely Sweden, where there has famously been no hard lockdown at all?
But no, it’s Belgium. There’s nothing particularly unusual about Belgium’s response. Nothing that diverged significantly from the consensus. It did the same thing as everyone else around the same time as everyone else. It even garnered praise for its testing capacity.
There’s one caveat: Belgium’s unparalleled death rate might be down to how the deaths are counted. Some say Belgium is merely the ‘most honest’ country – while others have accused officials of overcounting and including all kinds of deaths not caused by Covid.
But go down the list of deaths per million and you find more places you might not expect. Hard-hit Italy is in second place, but it was the first to get hit in the West so we should let them off. Then there’s Slovenia, which was relatively unscathed in the spring. After that, it’s Peru. Peru announced one of the earliest lockdowns in the world on 16 March – also the first in Latin America. The restrictions were some of the most stringent on the planet, enforced by the military. Masks were made mandatory in public. But by May, two months in, cases began to jump considerably. This was despite the country doing ‘everything right’ and ‘right on time’. There was some easing of the lockdown from June onwards. But social gatherings were still illegal in August, by which point 200 people were still dying per day.
Elsewhere in Latin America, Argentina experienced a similar mid-lockdown explosion in cases and deaths. Its lockdown began on 20 March and was supposed to be short and sharp. It ended up becoming the longest continuous lockdown in the world. In June, Time magazine hailed Argentina’s success in containing the virus. But not long after, cases began to surge. The deadliest day of its pandemic was on day 145 of lockdown.
Lockdowns have become central to any discussion of Covid-19. The assumption that lockdown is the only way to prevent Covid deaths has become embedded in mainstream thinking. Apparently, the only permitted questions are if we are locking down early enough, hard enough or for long enough. Lockdown has similarly become the default response to rises in cases (though sometimes these now take local rather than national form). But the conventional wisdom that more lockdown means fewer deaths simply does not hold true in the real world. There is globally no association, let alone causation, between lockdowns and Covid deaths.
And yet the harms of the policy are extreme. Developed countries have this year experienced record drops in economic output. Britain, for instance, has experienced its worst recession in 300 years (since the Great Frost of 1709, if you were wondering). The burden of this has fallen overwhelmingly on the poorest in society, while billionaires have watched their wealth multiply. In the developing world, the World Bank estimates that an additional 150million people will fall into ‘extreme poverty’.
Children have born a disproportionate brunt of the lockdowns – even though children face very minor risks from Covid and school closures are not associated with reduced transmission. Nevertheless, an estimated 1.5 billion children – 87 per cent – have been affected by school closures around the world. There is now an obscene gulf in access to education between rich and poor, between the privately and state educated, and between those with access to home learning via the internet and those without.
The effect on broader health has been similarly catastrophic. Hospital appointments, operations and screenings have been cancelled, often in cases where capacity was nowhere close to being reached. Patients took ‘stay at home’ messages far too much to heart and didn’t get serious illnesses checked out, including cancers which could have been detected and stopped. The number of Brits waiting for routine hospital treatment has risen from 1,613 to over 160,000 this year – a hundredfold increase.
In the developing world, where Covid itself has had a much lesser impact than in the West, lockdowns have disrupted an estimated 80 per cent of programmes aimed at treating tuberculosis. In 2019, TB killed 1.4million people worldwide. But this year, thanks to a 25 per cent reduction in case detections, 1.7million deaths have been projected.
One of the greatest costs – which cannot be quantified in lives lost or dollar signs – has been to freedom. And this goes deeper than the (hopefully) temporary curbs on everyday life. Our entire culture of freedom has collapsed. We now need and expect the state’s explicit permission for whatever limited activities we can do. Even Christmas can now be cancelled by the state.
None of this is to say we can throw off all the restrictions tomorrow and everything will be fine. But it is striking just how little questioning there has been of either the efficacy or the harms of the defining policy of the pandemic. Even if the lockdown debate becomes academic at some point in the new year, and despite the fact that lockdown has clearly failed, there is a danger lockdown becomes the default policy for the next pandemic – if not for some other threat. And there will be another one.
We cannot let this deadly, failed experiment be repeated. 2020 must be the last year of lockdown.
People everywhere are eager to bid farewell to 2020, a year in which our lives were turned upside down by power-mad elites who seized the Covid-19 pandemic as a chance to go full police state. But be careful what you wish for.
The year 2020 has proven things can always get worse, delivering a worldwide economic depression, a coronavirus pandemic, riots across the US, and unprecedented political division. It’s safe to say most of humanity is eager to close the book on it. But merely putting up a new calendar does nothing to address these issues, which seem certain to reach a breaking point. Humanity has been pushed to the limit with arbitrary rules, enforced poverty, and mandated isolation — it will only take a spark or two for things to explode.
It’s clear from the media establishment’s non-stop fear-porn broadcasts that Covid-19 isn’t going anywhere next year. Even as a growing body of evidence suggests lockdowns and mask-wearing have little if any effect on the spread of the novel coronavirus, governments will maintain these stringent behavioral controls, keeping the public terrified enough to beg for authoritarianism. But as vaccines are rolled out to the general public, the divide between those obeying the rules and the dissidents will only grow.
News outlets around the world have been pushing the narrative that ‘health passports’ outfitted with the bearer’s Covid-19 vaccination status will be required to travel, enter public spaces, and even get a job in the near future. These certificates are already being presented as the only possible route out of lockdown, even as the heads of both Pfizer and Moderna have admitted their vaccines probably won’t stop the spread of the coronavirus. Accordingly, those who decline to get the jab will be treated as pariahs, banned from some public spaces and told it’s their fault life hasn’t gone back to normal, just as so-called “anti-maskers” have been.
The same army of Karens that scream and point at anyone who dares leave home without their face covered will gleefully rise to the occasion of doxxing, outing, and tormenting vaccine skeptics. Anyone who isn’t thrilled by the idea of ingesting an experimental compound whose makers have been indemnified from any lawsuits will be deemed an enemy of the state, even separated from their children or removed from their home as a “health risk.” Neighbors will gleefully rat each other out for the equivalent of an extra chocolate ration, meaning even the most slavishly obedient individuals could end up in “quarncentration camps” for upsetting the wrong person.
Even those who’ve remained silent about masks and lockdowns, afraid of “making waves,” are unlikely to take involuntary inoculation lying down. Almost two thirds of Americans aren’t interested in taking the vaccine, meaning the Karens and the kapos may run into unexpected resistance.
In the US, the increasingly certain reality of a Biden presidency is also likely to push some people over the edge, though the [purported] president-elect seems to have realized that shoving his whole program down American throats at once will make the country choke. Even so, Biden and his vice president Kamala Harris have made enough statements on gutting the First and Second Amendments, turning the suburbs into mini-cities packed with government-subsidized housing, and adopting Green New Deal carbon controls that half the electorate sees their inauguration as a threat to their way of life.
Rumors of militia groups, veterans, and even active-duty military rising up against the supposed communist takeover may seem far-fetched, given such groups’ willingness over the last year to allow government to trample over such fundamental freedoms as the right to earn a living or even leave one’s house, but seeing Trump leave the White House could be the straw that broke the camel’s back. These groups are well-armed and will easily wipe out whatever Antifa cannon-fodder the neoliberal centrists can throw at them. Nor can the establishment necessarily count on police to save them, having spent the last several months calling for defunding law enforcement. Trump’s call for “wild protests” in January, coupled with his former national security adviser Mike Flynn cheering for martial law, have been interpreted as a green light to do whatever it takes to keep the White House out of Democrat hands.
The centrist establishment isn’t helping matters by declaring Trump supporters to be essentially subhuman and not worth conversing with. Worse, by promoting doxxing anyone who’s ever expressed the “wrong” ideas on social media, they’re only stirring up conservative resentment. The longer economic shutdowns last, the more likely disaffected Americans are to decide they have nothing left to lose and attempt to take a few establishment types out with them.
Not that all in opposition to Biden believe the sundowning centrist plans to install a dictatorship of the proletariat, of course. Many fear his use of the “Build Back Better” slogan popularized by proponents of humanity’s soulless “new normal” suggests his administration will be responsible for the US implementation of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset, a much more terrifying prospect than some milquetoast Marxism. This disturbing plan, devised by WEF CEO Klaus Schwab and a coterie of wealthy financiers and businessmen, aims to do away with private property, bodily integrity, familial bonds, and other pillars of western civilization, while shifting the world’s finances to blockchain-based Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and doing away with cash.
Coming off like a Bond villain straight out of central casting, Schwab has enthused about the coming merger of humans with technology, which will enable whole new spheres of individual and social control. From Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ plan to blanket the earth with spy satellites, to DARPA’s efforts to bring surveillance under the skin with “hydrogel” sensors that monitor vital signs and transmit the data to the cloud, the global technocracy these oligarchs seek will change what it means to be human – a feature, not a bug, in their eyes. And while the vast majority of western society seems utterly supine now, it’s unlikely they’ll sit idly by while the rich and powerful strip them of their humanity. The WEF’s smiley-faced propaganda (“Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, I have no privacy, and I couldn’t be happier”) may well be its epitaph.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Twitter @velocirapture23
At the start of the year, the world’s plutocrats gathered alongside their political allies in Davos for the World Economic Forum, and listened excitedly while special guest Greta Thunberg berated them for not going far enough in the fight to save the planet. It was a telling moment, capturing just how central environmentalism – especially today’s self-flagellating, end-of-days version – now is to the worldview of the West’s political, business and cultural elites.
It has been quite the rise. For much of environmentalism’s history, it was largely on the fringes of elite discourse, not at the centre. It was the counter-enlightenment preserve of landed aristocrats, disillusioned Tories (the origins of the Green Party), and the New Left. Not the mission statement of prime ministers, multinationals and the very institutions of globalist rule, from the EU to the UN.
But that is what it has become in recent decades: the hug-a-husky purpose of governments; the corporate social responsibility of international conglomerates; the cause to unite nations.
Two key factors account for its ascendency: the long-standing demoralisation of capitalism, and the emergence of essentially technocratic governments after the end of the Cold War. In the anti-modern narrative of environmentalism, these managerial elites found their raison d’etre: to manage the risks and the threats produced by industrial modernity. It even provided them with an ultimate aim: to manage us out of environmental disaster.
But environmentalism has always been more than just a story appended to ‘third way’ governing. It is itself essentially technocratic. It invests authority in ‘the science’ and the expert at the expense of the demos.
And it did so successfully until 2016. Until Brexit and Trump. Until, that is, so many across the West, disenfranchised for so long under this technocratic consensus, seized back some degree of control.
And this has had a tremendous effect on environmentalism. Ever since 2016, the tone has become shriller, the threat supposedly more urgent, the narrative more apocalyptic. Climate change is now a climate emergency. Al Gore’s merely inconvenient truth is now XR’s truth that must be told. And the future towards which we are forever tipping is catastrophic.
This is because environmentalism is no longer the handmaiden of technocratic rule; it is now a weapon in the fight to restore technocratic rule. Hence the presentation of climate change is now so aggressive, so hyperbolic, so threatening. Because it is being used to fight populism, frighten citizens back into obeisance and roll back the democratic gains of recent years. And that is what we have witnessed over the past 12 months, from the wilfully apocalyptic framing of Australia’s wildfires in Janaury through to the UN secretary general’s December demand that all nations declare a climate emergency: namely, the further elite turbocharging of environmentalism as a justification for the restoration of the pre-2016 consensus.
Admittedly, some environmentalists have been concerned that climate change would be pushed down the political agenda by Covid this year, just as it was after 2008 by the financial crisis. After all, some of XR’s planned stunts were shelved and the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) was postponed.
They needn’t have worried. The pandemic emergency has been treated as a climate emergency in miniature. A dress rehearsal, even. This is because it has largely been interpreted through the same risk-conscious prism as broader environmental problems have. Thus Covid has been conjured up as a by-product of baleful modernity, a symptom of our unsustainable lifestyles, a message from vengeful Gaia. As early as March, tireless green twerp George Monbiot was celebrating Covid as ‘nature’s wake-up call to complacent civilisation’. Prince Harry agreed, declaring ‘it’s almost as though Mother Nature has sent us to our rooms for bad behaviour, to really take a moment and think about what we’ve done’.
What’s more, Covid, like climate change in general, has also been relentlessly mobilised on behalf of the technocratic restoration against the populist revolt. Hence the death tolls in Britain and America have been deliberately attributed to their populist governments – proof, so the restorationist attack goes, that not listening to the experts, not heeding the warnings of science, is a fatal mistake. And vice versa. Listening to the science and locking down is proof of the merits of technocracy and the wisdom of its restoration. As Greta Thunberg put it, ‘It is possible to treat a crisis like a crisis, it is possible to put people’s health above economic interests, and it is possible to listen to the science’.
The implication of the pandemic is as clear to Thunberg as it is to the political, media and business elites who treat her as their outsourced conscience: climate alarmism builds on the pandemic, and further justifies the technocratic restoration. In other words, the short-term expert-led governance during the pandemic emergency now justifies the restoration of long-term expert-led governance during the climate emergency. And to hell with freedom, democracy and the rest of it.
A UN economist, Mariana Mazzucato, has even mooted the possibility of a ‘climate lockdown’, in which governments would limit car use, ban red-meat consumption, and shut down fossil-fuel companies.
While that green dream remains just that, we’re already seeing the fruits of this green restoration of the old technocratic order. Throughout the developed world, policies and long-term economic plans are now being drawn up according to the expert-defined imperatives of the climate emergency. A green future, it seems, is one colonised by today’s technocratic elites.
So US [proclaimed] president-elect Joe Biden, who has spent the year wielding the ‘existential threat’ of climate change as a stick with which to beat Trump voters, has promised to sign the US back up to the Paris Climate Agreement and create carbon-free electricity by 2035. And Ursula von der Leyen, the unelected head of the European Commission, has, as part of her Green New Deal, pledged ‘to rebuild our economies differently and make them more resilient’. Even Boris Johnson, knocked off his populist course by the pandemic and never possessing the most adamantine of backbones, has announced a ‘green industrial revolution’.
Of course, there will be no democratic debate about the nature of all this green-washed, post-Covid rebuild. That is being decided elsewhere, by experts, in the name of sustainability. And that should worry us. At the end of this wretched year, the green restoration of the managerial order is in full swing. The political response should be the same in the coming months as it was four years ago: we need more democracy, not less.
You know how it goes: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, et cetera…?
Suppose an entire society goes to smithereens, while our media elites stubbornly refuse to notice. What then?
Suppose the reporters and the pundits and the “experts” ignore the coup that has trampled our basic freedoms since last March.
Suppose they all assure us that defending democracy is “anti-science,” and preach to us that civil rights (except for Black Lives Matter protests) are nothing but a “death cult.”
Suppose, after an “election” conducted mainly in the press, on the basis of a torrent of worthless propaganda, a notorious corporate whore is about to be installed in the White House as carnival-barker-in-chief for scantily-tested vaccines – drugs being peddled by a gang of profiteers who wouldn’t even make the stuff until they were promised complete legal immunity for whatever they do to their victims.
Well? Does the murder of our liberties even make a sound?
Was there really such a year as 2020?
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2005, the playwright Harold Pinter had this to say about every atrocity concealed by the Western press:
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.
And so much never happened this past year!
Four-fifths of the United States of America suspended democracy and declared the Bill of Rights obsolete. The United Kingdom unleashed a new sort of “police” – faces masked, truncheons in their paws – to maul peaceful protesters for the crime of breathing. In parts of Australia, it became a criminal offense to tell other people the time and place of a political demonstration. Germany outlawed political protest.
But none of that happened. It wasn’t reported in the mainstream press. It was of no interest.
In just over nine months, economies in once-wealthy countries were reduced to ruin. Social media reeled under systematic thought-policing. Following a wave of “executive orders” that shuttered small businesses across the United States, an unprecedented number of Americans began to steal food to survive. In the U.K., UNICEF is distributing food to hungry children for the first time in more than 70 years. Around the world, people in need still can’t get medical treatment. Cultural institutions have been shattered. The performing arts have been banned. Singing was deemed a public health risk.
It didn’t matter.
This year, for the first time in history, more than 40 governors in the U.S. awarded themselves quasi-dictatorial powers – on the strength of laws hastily designed less than 20 years ago for massive bioterrorism attacks, pressed into service to counter a medical “emergency” that was never an emergency. By the end of 2020, most of the American population was still living under dictatorial rule.
That was of no interest.
Huge numbers of people, in Europe as in America, were placed (without a court order) under virtual house arrest. This was called a protective measure – and it was reported as such, though the practice violated civil-rights rulings going back nearly a century. Tens of millions of people saw their livelihoods snatched from them by officials they never even had the opportunity to confront.
Yes, a handful of states that did not imprison their populations or wreck their economies claimed to have medical results as good as – if not better than – neighboring states that did both. Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson went so far as to assert all this on May 5 in the editorial pages of the Washington Post, a main purveyor of coronavirus propaganda. But those claims were never investigated in the mainstream press. They didn’t matter.
Now the mega-corporations that supported the “lockdowns” are sucking the life out of the small-business economy that was once the mainstay of the free world. For restaurants, the picture is so bleak that chef and author Edward Lee calls it “the end of the independent restaurant era,” and warns that…
we will lose the culture of all of our American cities…. [W]e will become a nation of corporate chain restaurants that will look and taste the same in every city.
Culture is under attack from other directions as well. London’s theatres, heirs to one of the proudest dramatic traditions in the world, are closed for the first time in modern history – and whether they will ever open again depends upon the whims of politicians. Musicians and other artists have been devastated by “social distancing” rules that never made any sense and have never been obeyed by the powerful.
That doesn’t matter, either.
In respectable society, it can’t even be talked about.
The U.K. Labour Party’s Angela Rayner – last seen threatening to expel“thousands and thousands” of members who don’t think their country should be governed by Israel – is now grousing that…
[o]ur children should not have to rely on humanitarian charities that are used to operating in war zones and in response to natural disasters.
You’d never guess that the self-righteous Rayner actually supported the economy-wrecking madness that caused this deepening poverty – in fact, back in May, she wanted even stricter police-state tactics than those the government imposed.
Governments lied to us throughout the year about the nature of the medical threat we faced, about what they planned to do about it, and about what it was going to cost us.
Formerly-esteemed scientists tried to tell us that the hype made no sense. “We’re falling into a trap of sensationalism,” Stanford University’s John Ioannidis said as early as March 23. “We have gone into a complete panic state.” The interview containing those comments was soon banned by Youtube, even though Ioannidis is universally recognized as “one of the world’s foremost epidemiologists.”
Prominent scientists who signed the Great Barrington Declaration suffered a similar fate, smeared as fringe elements promoting “craven lunacy” and a “brutal” attempt to “let people die” – in other words, as Nazis.
But that wasn’t name-calling. And it wasn’t censorship, either – even though Reddit’s moderators promptly banned the Declaration. Such facts mustn’t be mentioned. Breathe the word “censorship” and you’re a right-wing fanatic.
Speaking of fanaticism, though: an 18-year-old American college student is behind bars at this moment in the Cayman Islands. Her crime? Watching – by herself – as her boyfriend competed in his last jet-skiing race of the year, after she had received not one but two negative tests for COVID19. It seems other people attending the race snitched on the woman, resulting in a four-month prison sentence for cutting short a fourteen-day “quarantine” – one that was issued without a court order, of course.
Once upon a time, we would have called those snitches “collaborators,” if not “heartless fanatics.” Now their actions are praised by newspapers and prosecutors alike: after all, they were protecting the public “health” by putting a young woman in prison.
New vaccines for COVID19 are another way of protecting the public health, of course – they have nothing whatsoever to do with the billions of dollars pharmaceuticals companies are likely to make from selling them.
Never mind that the Food and Drug Administration had to short-circuit its own rules in order to authorize their use. Never mind that the manufacturers had to be promised that “for the next four years, [they] cannot be sued for money damages in court over injuries related to the administration or use” of their new vaccines – a blanket legal immunity that is “very rare,” according to a prominent labor attorney. (Oh, and you can’t sue the FDA either.)
None of that matters. None of that is of interest.
That’s why CNN’s “political analyst,” Joe Lockhart, could recently insist that the government ought to prevent Tucker Carlson from stating inconvenient facts about those vaccines on his Fox News program. The First Amendment doesn’t matter any more, you see. Joe Lockhart says so. He’s a representative of a press outlet calling for government censorship of another press outlet – for expressing an opinion he doesn’t agree with.
And? Has anyone in the “free press” complained about Lockhart’s breathtaking treachery – attacking the Constitution’s press protections while handing over a colleague to the Thought Police? Not as far as I know.
Because, you see, none of it happened.
Just like the rest of the coronavirus coup. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening.
It didn’t matter that all the recent hysteria about COVID19 “cases” was based on the results of a manifestly unreliable testing procedure. It didn’t matter that inexpensive and effective treatment for the disease may already be available, with no serious side effects, from drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. When the highly-credentialed Dr. Pierre Kory tried to interest Congress in the use of these medications – from which no one stands to benefit except those suffering the worst cases of COVID19 – he was the target of an astonishing smear by the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
That was typical of official reaction, though: after a group of physicians announced the promising results of the same drugs on December 4…
no major U.S. media outlets reported [their] pleas for help from the federal government to act… Nor did any representative from the CDC, the NIH or the World Health organization contact them,
So the unproven vaccines will roll out everywhere; Big Pharma will get even richer; poor people will be allowed to die. As manufactured claims of rising “case” numbers stoke renewed hysteria, government after government will subject its citizens to further mass house arrests, even though the experience of Belarus – which did not impose “lockdowns” – strongly suggests that the mass-incarceration strategy does more harm than good.
To those in power, all this is of no interest. It didn’t matter. It never happened.
And to the rest of us?
That will depend, I suppose, on the steadfastness of people who care more about the truth than about conformity.
Those for whom words still have meaning, and facts still matter.
Those who are not ashamed to touch, nor afraid to stand up.
Those who will not swallow lies nor ingest a fraud.
Those to whom the word “freedom” isn’t an insult.
Those are the ones who have truly survived the ghastly year 2020 – and on whom our future depends.
Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His book Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014) was the first to focus on sex abuse cover-ups among Orthodox Jews; his first collection of poetry, Surfaces, was published by The High Window in 2019. He is also the author of a memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – published by Lincoln Square Books.
About 12,000 New York City students are being prevented from attending in-person learning because their parents “failed to sign consent forms for weekly random testing”, Bloomberg reported last week. The students are part of a larger group of 190,000 pre-school through elementary students who returned to classrooms in December.
While about 60,000 pre-school and kindergarten students are exempt from testing, there are still about 130,000 students who are required to participate in random testing.
Nathaniel Styer, a spokesman for the city Department of Education, said: “Due to the extensive efforts of our staff, 91% of students who need a consent form have one on file. Students without consent forms, and who do not have approved exemptions, are transitioned to remote instruction.”
Random testing is conducted on 20% of everyone in each school building, every week. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza are responsible for implementing the standards that went into place after NYC schools had previously shut down.
Meanwhile, high school and middle school students that are part of NYC’s 1 million plus student body are all receiving remote instruction. “Tens of thousands” of elementary school parents have voluntarily opted out of the random testing in favor of remote learning as well, Bloomberg concluded.
Indian authorities have arrested at least 75 Kashmiri political leaders and activists in anticipation of an uprising following the triumph of an alliance of Kashmir’s regional political parties in a local election, a senior police official unveiled.
Those arrested included pro-independence leaders and members of the banned Jamat-e-Islami group, who were rounded up in what the government described as preventive custody, the official told Reuters on the condition of anonymity.
The detentions challenge the verdict of the people, said Imran Nabi Dar, spokesman for regional party, the National Conference, and a key member of the alliance.
The District Council election that ended early this week was the first such exercise since the government of India’s ultra-nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked the special status of the Muslim-majority region under its control last year.
Authorities in New Delhi then waged a crackdown on opposition activists in the restive region and rounded up hundreds of people in purported efforts to forestall protests and violence.
The alliance’s latest victory confirms that Kashmiris have not accepted Modi’s decision to end Kashmir’s special status, said Omar Abdullah, a former chief minister and head of the National Conference.
Following their release from prolonged detention, Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, chief of the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party, announced the alliance in October aimed at seeking a peaceful restoration of Kashmir’s autonomy.
Meanwhile, the elections in Kashmir appear to have paved the way for other electoral processes in the volatile region. However, many say this ballot has made people of Kashmir politically aware of the fact that New Delhi is trying to thrust such an electoral process in order to create the impression that normalcy has taken hold after it stripped Kashmir of its autonomy, without actually working on building trust and bridging the gaps.
India last year scrapped the semi-autonomy of its part of Kashmir. New Delhi unilaterally introduced a slew of laws that locals say are aimed at shifting the region’s demographics and economically disempowering local residents.
Modi’s government revoked the New Delhi-controlled Jammu and Kashmir’s special status last year and claimed at the time that ending Kashmir’s special status was necessary for closer integration of the territory into the rest of India.
New Delhi’s approach towards the region has been widely criticized as being an extension of its tolerating instances of egregious discrimination and occasional deadly attacks against Muslims on the mainland.
Kashmir has long been a flash point between India and Pakistan, which have fought three of their four wars over the disputed Himalayan territory. Both countries rule parts of Kashmir while claiming it in full. Thousands of people have been killed since early 1990s.
While victims of the witch trials were usually tried by courts that weren’t directly linked to the church, some argue that the church is also to blame due to the nature of the accusations during such proceedings.
Catholic priests in the German city of Eichstätt have recently acknowledged the demise of around 400 people who were tortured and killed there between the 15th and the 18th century after being accused of witchery, The Independent reports.
Having promised to install a memorial plaque, Gregor Maria Hanke, the town’s bishop, described the events as a “bleeding wound in the history of our church,” with the newspaper pointing out that his church “has kept its mouth quite firmly shut on the matter for 400 or so years.”
“It’s good that they’ve done something but of course it’s not nearly enough,” said Wolfram Kastner, the man “credited with the Eichstätt diocese’s examination of its past,” and who launched his campaign back in 2017 after discovering “the original interrogation transcripts” in the city.
While victims of witch trials were usually tried by courts that weren’t directly linked to the church, the newspaper notes, campaigners say the church is also to blame, due “to the doctrine about witches and the devil” being used during such proceedings.
“The church was scared of the Reformation and the witch trials were a means to combat it,” said Hartmut Hegeler, a retired German pastor who started a campaign in 2011 that has witnessed over 50 towns apologising “for the part they had to play in witch burning.”
Hegeler also added that back then, people who turned away from Catholicism were “labelled as being in a league with the devil” and it worked.
Palantir has won a huge contract to continue its work on the NHS Covid-19 Data Store. But the British public will have no way of knowing how the private information the company has been granted access to will be used.
The potentially illegal two-year deal, which began on December 12, was awarded under the Crown Commercial Services G-Cloud 11 Framework, a ‘streamlined’ – i.e. much-accelerated – system typically used for minor contracts, which doesn’t require a tender to be published. Under the terms of the agreement, the store will rely on Palantir’s Foundry data until at least December 2022.
The store was established in March to manage Covid-19 data and inform the government’s response to the virus. Palantir was one of several tech firms hired for the project, for the princely sum of £1, and ever since has been granted access to sensitive data such as patients’ ages, addresses, health conditions, treatments and whether they smoke or drink, among other private information.
Such information is clearly a highly valuable commodity, exclusive oversight of which is fraught with opportunity for abuse, but Whitehall insists any personally-identifying details are aggregated or anonymized prior to being shared with Palantir et al.
Despite these reassurances, the deal did not go unchallenged – not least because the contracts underpinning the deal weren’t published until June, mere hours before a legal action brought by political campaigning website openDemocracy and law firm Foxglove to secure their release was due to commence.
A very secret weapon
An even cursory review of Palantir’s operations starkly underlines why so many should be concerned about its involvement with the NHS, and its access to such intimate patient particulars.
Co-founder Peter Thiel’s inspiration for the company was a desire to repurpose the fraud recognition systems of PayPal – which he also co-founded – for defense and security applications. Most established investors weren’t interested in his pitch, but it caught the attention of In-Q-Tel, the little-known venture capital wing of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which gifted the start-up US$2 million in 2004.
A decade later, Palantir was valued in the billions and pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, primarily from US government agencies, including the CIA, Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command.
The company’s ‘Gotham’ platform pools these entities’ disparate and sprawling databases and allows for the effective sorting, management and cross-referencing of information contained therein.
These capabilities can be put to predictive purposes – for example, soldiers in Afghanistan used the tool to combine maps, intelligence reports, and reports of roadside bombings to plan missions. As a result, Bloomberg dubbed Palantir the War on Terror’s “secret weapon,” and Gotham also became of intense interest to law enforcement agencies the world over.
Due to the veil of secrecy surrounding Palantir’s commercial activities, the total number of forces employing the technology globally is unknown – although the company isn’t only opaque about what services it provides to which clients, but has been outright dishonest at the nature of its government partnerships in the past.
Usage metrics
In 2018, it was revealed police in New Orleans utilized Palantir software to trace targets’ ties to gang members, link suspects’ criminal histories, analyze social media, and forecast the likelihood individuals would commit crimes or become a victim thereof.
Several high-profile convictions of violent, murderous drug gangs were secured in the process, although it was operated in total secrecy for five years until exposure by tech website the Verge, with even the city council totally unaware.
The tendency toward concealment may at least in part be attributable to public outcry over predictive policing programs, which exhibit seemingly invariable racial bias. Even algorithms that do not specifically use race as a metric have been found prone to this prejudice, due to the inclusion of ancillary variables such as socio-economic background, education, and location.
Still, significant light was shed on how authorities use Gotham, and what information it collates, in September 2020, when two Los Angeles Police Department training documents – ‘Intermediate Course’ and ‘Advance Course’ – used to instruct officers on the workings of the system were leaked.
The data collected on citizens – both law-abiding and those with criminal records, or suspected of having committed a crime, or even being connected in any way to individuals who have – includes sex, race, names, contact details, addresses, prior warrants, mugshots, surveillance photos, personal relationships, past and current employers, and even tattoos, scars, piercings and other identifying features.
According to an ‘LAPD Palantir Usage Metrics’ document, in excess of 5,000 officers – accounting for half the Department’s members – had access to Gotham in 2016, and in that year, they collectively ran around 60,000 searches through the system in support of over 10,000 cases.
Such a cutting-edge service doesn’t come cheap, with subscriptions running to millions of dollars annually. This sizable investment comes despite questions hanging over Palantir’s predictive policing effectiveness, which may suggest the software’s value to authorities doesn’t necessarily lie in its crime-fighting prowess.
Official figures indicate violent crime rates remained virtually unchanged in Los Angeles from 2009 to 2019, while aggravated assaults increased. However, non-violent crime did fall over the same period, in particular burglary and vehicle theft.
‘Without any safeguards
Troublingly, crucial portions of Palantir’s NHS contract are entirely redacted, including sections titled “limit of parties’ liability,”“authorised user groups,” and “data integration and analytics capability for self-service” – which covers how many “authorised users” are permitted to create and modify tools designed using the data, and the data sets involved.
In other words, the public presently has no way of knowing precisely what private information Palantir has been granted access to, how it will be used, and with who and what it can be shared with.
Shocking stuff indeed, yet the mainstream UK media and lawmakers alike have been almost entirely silent on what should at the very least be the subject of intense national debate. Amazingly, the company’s name has been mentioned a grand total of twice in parliamentary debates over the course of 2020, and only once in a critical context.
This wall of establishment silence stands in stark contrast to the US, where legislators – including Senator Elizabeth Warren – have prominently raised privacy concerns over Palantir’s participation in ‘HHS Protect’, a program launched by the Department of Health and Human Services to track the spread of coronavirus. Under its auspices, the company harvests data from a variety of federal, state and local government sources, healthcare facilities, colleges, and more.
“The inclusion of Protected Health Information in this database raises serious privacy concerns,” a coalition of Democratic senators wrote in July. “Neither HHS nor Palantir has publicly detailed what it plans to do with this, or what privacy safeguards have been put in place, if any. We are concerned that, without any safeguards, data in HHS Protect could be used by other federal agencies in unexpected, unregulated, and potentially harmful ways.”
While ministers claim life in the UK will begin returning to “normal” around Easter 2021, the length of the deal places Palantir in a position of immense and entirely unaccountable privilege at the heart of an institution which theoretically provides vital services to every British citizen, for the next two years and potentially beyond.
Readers may wish to ask themselves who or what their elected representatives are truly working for, and which interests they ultimately serve – or better yet, pose these queries to parliamentarians directly.
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
They say history is written by the victors, but the Crusades offer an interesting historical contrast: a two-century collision that produced not one history, but two parallel, irreconcilable realities. The dates and the battles are identical in both accounts, but the moral axis is entirely flipped.
In the traditional Western narrative, the Crusades are framed as a heroic, if tragic, epic. The First Crusade is a pious pilgrimage; the knights are romanticized figures of chivalry in shining armor, bravely holding the line in a hostile, exotic land. The eventual loss of the Holy Land is mourned as the “fall of Outremer,” a tragic retreat of European civilization. In this telling, the East is often reduced to a passive backdrop, its inhabitants viewed through a lens of mystique or backwardness, mere obstacles to a divine mandate.
But cross the Mediterranean, and the exact same timeline reads like a chronicle of foreign invasion and eventual, hard-won restoration against the barbarous northerners. The dates do not change, but the adjectives do. Here is the history as it is remembered in the Levant… continue
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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