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Regulatory agencies, says Encyclopedia Britannica, are a uniquely American institution. Though conceptualized as mere advisory bodies at the time of their emergence in the late 19th century, federal regulatory agencies have since acquired comprehensive legislative powers and even quasi-judicial powers — exercising “social control through rulemaking” with “almost no supervision by other branches of government.”

As legal scholars tamely explain, “unique pressures and influences … invariably push [regulators’] actions, and their decisions on policy questions, in a direction favored by regulated firms.”

This phenomenon, known as regulatory capture, has become the norm — not least because lucrative “revolving door” jobs generally await tractable regulators once they exit their government posts.

In the crowded field of captured agencies, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is one of the standouts. FDA gets 45% of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry, and fast-tracks more than 50% of the drugs it approves.

Consumer watchdog groups accuse the FDA of having evolved from a “hard-charging tiger of an agency” a century ago, to a “pliant pussycat” today.

FDA states that drug recalls are initiated either “by FDA request” or “on a company’s own initiative.” According to the consumer website Drugwatch, however, FDA “can only recommend” but not force a recall.

Vaccine recalls, too, are “almost always initiated voluntarily by the vaccine manufacturer.” In 1976, public outcry forced the government to pull the plug on a dangerous swine flu vaccine after just 10 weeks, but only after 40 million Americans had received it.

Although manufacturers do withdraw dangerous drugs, vaccines and consumer products from the market from time to time (sometimes after FDA has obligingly looked the other way for decades), many observers believe such recalls represent the tip of the iceberg — a placatory bone thrown to persuade the public that the nation has a functional oversight system.

Is the FDA at least scrupulous about which drugs and vaccines it lets out of the starting gate?

As a long line of drug fiascoes suggests, the clear answer is no — experimental COVID vaccines are the latest example.

The still timely tale of thalidomide

Thalidomide never received FDA approval, but the saga illustrates how, even 60 years ago, the FDA had already cast its lot with industry.

In the late 1950s, German firm Chemie Grünenthal (now Grünenthal) developed thalidomide with the help of former Nazi scientists (including Hitler’s IG Farben adviser on chemical warfare), promoting the drug for nausea and other discomforts of pregnancy.

In some countries, thalidomide was an ingredient in children’s cough syrups. Chemie Grünenthal sold thalidomide in 46 countries for five years before admitting the drug posed risks of severe birth defects, including missing or deformed limbs and injuries to major organs.

In the U.S., Chemie Grünenthal gave two pharmaceutical giants (companies that dominate the American market to this day) permission to manufacture thalidomide: first Smith Kline & French (now GlaxoSmithKline) and then Richardson-Merrell (now Sanofi).

Richardson-Merrell expected smooth regulatory sailing, but after it ignored repeated requests for pregnancy safety data from Dr. Frances Kelsey — a newly minted FDA employee with untarnished integrity — Kelsey “took a bold stance against inadequate testing and corporate pressure” and refused to approve thalidomide’s U.S. release.

Mistakenly confident that “corporate pressure” would eventually bear fruit, the company went ahead and distributed, “in an uncontrolled fashion,” more than 2.5 million doses of thalidomide to 20,000 pregnant women under cover of “clinical trials.”

When Kelsey still would not approve the drug, the company was forced to give up, but threatened to sue Kelsey after she tried to track down thalidomide babies. Neither the FDA nor the U.S. attorney backed up Kelsey.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy shone a light on Kelsey’s efforts by giving her a President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service. Even so, thalidomide survivors allege the FDA and Richardson-Merrell kept the full story of thalidomide buried for decades.

In fact, not only did FDA squelch efforts to locate thalidomide victims, but it produced a whitewashed report stating that Richardson-Merrell’s “unauthorized marketing program” had produced just 17 thalidomide babies — a bogus estimate emphatically denounced by survivors.

At some point, FDA appears to have quietly changed its tune. In an undated presentation on its website, the agency states: “By late 1961, it was obvious that thalidomide had caused serious birth defects in thousands of children.”

In 2013, a GSK researcher published a surprisingly frank dissection of the thalidomide disaster, describing how the drug established a template for industry and regulatory behavior that is still relevant today:

“Strong marketing pressure in an industry hungry for new medicines brought an inadequately tested drug to the market, targeted outsourcing quickly expanded the client base and finally market forces prevented timely withdrawal, even when evidence was emerging of disastrous side-effects. […] [M]any of the pressures that led to the thalidomide disaster exist today with record high management and shareholder pressures to achieve success, parallel worldwide marketing, increased numbers of targeted outsourcing by small companies forming alliances with ‘Big Pharma’ and…a breakdown in the system of checks and balances that have existed in the regulatory authorities …”

In the intervening decades, thalidomide has undergone a “dramatic revitalization.” Undaunted by its horrific teratogenic track record and other serious adverse effects such as blood clots, nerve damage and neurotoxicity, the U.S. today permits thalidomide as a treatment for multiple myeloma. The hunt is also on for dermatological and other uses.

DES and Vioxx

Self-congratulatory regulators claim the thalidomide disaster gave birth to stricter regulations and safer drugs. However, it is not hard to find examples that undermine this assertion.

For instance, despite numerous danger signals, it took the FDA until 1971 to issue a warning about pregnant women’s use of diethylstilbestrol (DES) — a drug the FDA approved in 1947, in the pre-thalidomide era.

No ban accompanied FDA’s soft-pedaled 1971 warning, however, so mothers-to-be continued to receive DES for at least another decade.

Scientists now acknowledge DES provokes calamitous epigenetic effects in future generations, with DES grandchildren showing increased risks of preterm delivery, neonatal mortality, cerebral palsy and “malformations of any type.”

Merck’s infamous painkiller Vioxx is another example of FDA foot-dragging — a “cautionary tale of masterful public relations, aggressive marketing and ineffective regulation.”

Just six months after Vioxx’s May 1999 approval, an FDA-convened data and safety monitoring board identified a “disconcerting” trend of serious heart problems and deaths in patients taking Vioxx  — a risk confirmed one month later to be twice as high as that in the group taking a comparison painkiller.

Despite this early evidence, the FDA said little, leaving it up to well-paid Merck consultants to massage the data.

According to subsequent independent analyses, Vioxx produced elevated cardiovascular riskseven with short-term use, and the risks persisted long after the individual stopped taking the drug.

At its peak, Vioxx was marketed in 80-plus countries.

In September 2004, after roughly 20 million Americans had taken the drug — credited with causing tens of thousands of premature deaths from heart attacks and strokes in the U.S. alone — Merck finally withdrew Vioxx.

That same month, FDA reviewer Dr. David Graham blamed the FDA for failing to protect public safety, telling the Senate Finance Committee that his agency’s “procedures and culture made it impossible to adequately investigate drugs.”

In Europe, a Scottish scientist characterized the episode as “quite possibly” one of the worst drug disasters in history.

Describing the FDA’s willingness to turn a blind eye to the drug’s harms as “the equivalent of allowing ‘two to four jumbo jetliners’ to crash every week for five years,” Graham noted he had been “ostracized,” asked by superiors to “soften his conclusions” and “subjected to veiled threats” and “intimidation.”

The FDA’s response to safety concerns, Graham also asserted, was “almost always one of denial, rejection and heat.”

Recall roulette

Readers ready to dismiss the examples of thalidomide, DES and Vioxx as ancient history should check out the FDA’s webpage of more recent drug recalls.

From Aug. 30, 2017 to Oct. 1, 2021, manufacturers have recalled 381 drugs or drug lots — an average of approximately eight recalls per month. Notable entries include drugs or products by COVID vaccine makers Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and AstraZeneca (or their subsidiaries).

In 2015, Pfizer acquired Hospira, “the world’s leading provider of injectable drugs and infusion technologies.” At the time, Hospira’s track record was less than stellar, with more than 40 recalls in the prior three years.

The conservative FDA recall list shows at least 12 more Hospira recalls since September 2017. Other “urgent” Hospira recalls have not yet appeared on FDA’s list.

Nearly all of the Pfizer-Hospira recalls have been for potentially life-threatening production failures — such as mislabeling of one product for another, microbial contamination, cracked vials(and other defects jeopardizing product sterility) and presence of particulates (including glass and human hair).

Kaiser Health News reported in early 2021 that “a decade’s worth of FDA inspection reports” had flagged one of Pfizer’s Hospira manufacturing plants as a “repeat offender” for bacterial and mold contamination.

Pfizer also appears several other times on the FDA recall list:

• In July and August of this year, Pfizer began recalling lots of its prescription anti-smoking drug Chantix due to the presence of carcinogenic nitrosamines above the “acceptable daily intake level.” By September, Pfizer had expanded the recall to include all lots. The FDA acknowledges the “potential increased cancer risk” but says that smoking is worse.
• In August 2019, Pfizer issued an urgent recall of some lots of its migraine drug, Relpax, due to “potential microbiological contamination.” The contamination, the company stated, poses a risk of “bacterial dissemination from the gut to the bloodstream potentially resulting in serious, life-threatening infections.”
• In August 2018, Pfizer recalled one lot of children’s Advil due to product mislabeling and “concerns the mislabeling could potentially cause an overdose.” The FDA did not publish its own announcement of the recall until March 2020.

Over the past two decades, merger-happy Pfizer has spearheaded three of the ten largest pharmaceutical mergers in history, with Wyeth (2009), Pharmacia (2003) and Warner-Lambert (2000).

In August 2021, Pfizer added cancer drug maker Trillium Therapeutics to its roster — right around the time concerned health providers were reporting an uptick in aggressive cancers in COVID mRNA vaccine recipients.

Wyeth was the manufacturer of two notorious diet pills recalled in 1997 for causing long-lasting heart valve injuries — fenfluramine (Pondimin) and dexfenfluramine (Redux), both part of the “fen-phen” cocktail of diet drugs.

Pondimin had been allowed to remain on the market for 24 years before being pulled. One year after Pfizer’s acquisition of Wyeth, Pfizer also issued a recall of Wyeth’s fatal and liver-damaging leukemia drug, Mylotarg, which had received accelerated FDA approval a decade earlier.

More speedy approvals on the horizon

The FDA is far from the only captured agency. Many critics of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, blame the EPA’s “completely broken” and “reckless” safety review process for prioritizing corporate profits over public health and encouraging use of some of the world’s most dangerous pesticides, including glyphosate.

Unfortunately, new opportunities for FDA corruption are emerging, particularly in the arena of “biosimilars.” Biosimilars are biologics (such as vaccines) that the FDA considers “highly similar to and [with] no clinically meaningful differences from an existing FDA-approved reference product.” As such, they are eligible for an “abbreviated licensure pathway.”

In 2016, biosimilars were projected to become “the single fastest-growing biologics sector.”

American vaccine scientists are salivating over the prospect of proving biosimilarity for future mRNA vaccines. Though the legal terrain has yet to be consolidated, biosimilarity would guarantee lightning-fast approvals.

Coincidentally or not, Pfizer’s Hospira subsidiary is a “global leader in biosimilars.”

Japan, which has some of the most cautious vaccine policies in the world, recently recalled 1.6 million doses of Moderna’s mRNA injection against COVID, after two men injected with stainless-steel-contaminated batches died.

Don’t expect anything similar to happen in the U.S. No matter how shoddy Pfizer’s or Moderna’s manufacturing practices may be, and no matter the safety signals, the FDA’s primary goal seems to be to ensure an endless profit pipeline for the vaccine and drug manufacturers that are the agency’s own bread and butter.

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“The Facebook outage was a planetary-scale demonstration of how essential the company’s services have become to daily life” headlines the New York Times, pointing out that Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger are fundamental to the economy, politics, education, and health care. Worldwide, about 2.8 billion people, on average, use at least one Facebook product per day.

Facebook collects billions of pieces of information every day from all over the world in its data centers, 13 of which are located in the United States, 3 in Europe and 1 in Singapore. In a similar way Google works, with its platform Youtube whose users have risen to 1.9 billion. This immense amount of data, centralized in the U.S., serves not only economic purposes but political purposes, giving increasing power of control to those who manage them. For example, Facebook removed more than 20 million posts for “violating the Covid-19 misinformation rules.”

The 2Africa Pearls undersea cable 

This power of control is now being greatly enhanced by a Facebook project that is well underway: the 2Africa Pearls undersea cable, more than 45,000 km long (more than the Equator), connecting 33 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Europe. According to Facebook, it will “bring high-speed, affordable Internet” above all to Africa. However, it does not explain how it will be used by the over 600 million inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa who do not have electricity.

What this broadband network will be used for in Africa is demonstrated by the partnership that Facebook has established with the Atlantic Council, an influential “nopartisan organization” based in Washington that “promotes US leadership and commitment in the world”. Through the network, the Atlantic Council “will ensure the proper use of Facebook in African elections, helping media and politicians uncover fake news, educate citizens and civil society.”

The reliability of the Atlantic Council, which is particularly active in Africa, can be deduced from the official list of donors who fund it: the Pentagon and NATO, Lockheed Martin and other war industries (including Italy’s Leonardo), ExxonMobil and other multinationals, Bank of America and other financial groups, the Rockefeller and Soros Foundations.

(Topic covered on October 8 on Grandangolo, international press review on national TV channel 262 Byoblu)

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent vaccine rollout, pharmaceutical giants including Pfizer and Moderna have substantially increased their lobbying efforts, a National Pulse investigation has revealed.

The lobbying apparatuses at both vaccine-reliant companies – in terms of the number of lobbyists hired and the overall budget deployed to influence government officials – have seen dramatic increases since 2019.

The news comes one day after hidden camera footage revealed a Pfizer scientist admitting: “Basically, our organization is run on COVID money now.”

Democrat Operatives Turn Vax Lobbyists.

Many of the new Big Pharma hires have come from consulting firms with deep and historical links to the current White House, and President Joe Biden himself.

In October alone Pfizer tapped Sudafi Henry, Joe Biden’s former legislative affairs director from his days as Vice President.

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT ARE: VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN; BRUCE REED, CHIEF OF STAFF TO THE VICE PRESIDENT; SUDAFI HENRY, ASSISTANT TO THE VICE PRESIDENT FOR LEGISLATIVE AFFAIRS; AND ROB NABORS, ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR LEGISLATIVE AFFAIRS. (OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY DAVID LIENEMANN)

Another recent hire is Kwabena Nsiah, a former staffer for Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra and top aide to director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

Nsiah also worked in Congress for over eight years, most recently as Policy Director for the Congressional Black Caucus and on the Joint Economic Committee as a Senior Policy Advisor.

RINOs Turn Vax Lobbyists, Too.

Among Pfizer’s robust lobbying team are alumni of Republican presidential administrations and Congressional offices.

Justin McCarthy, who served under George W. Bush as a Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs, and Ben Howard, who served as a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Legislative Affairs under Donald Trump, both lobby for the pharmaceutical giant.

David Schiappa, a longtime Republican staff member of the Senate holding the role of Secretary for Leader Mitch McConnell, is also lobbying for Pfizer.

Pfizer, which recently received approval for a third booster dose of its COVID-19 vaccine, has substantially increased its lobbying budget. In 2019, the company spent $11,000,000 on lobbying efforts before increasing the total to $13,150,000 – the highest total since 2010.

In 2019, the company retained 77 lobbyists before the total grew to a team of 102 lobbyists in 2020. So far in 2021, Pfizer has declared 92 lobbyists.

PFIZER LOBBYING.

While Moderna retained just one lobbyist throughout all of 2019 and added one lobbyist the following year, in 2021, the company has already hired an additional twelve lobbyists, representing a 600 percent increase in the company’s total lobbying force.

In 2019, Moderna spent $40,000 on lobbying and $280,000 in 2020, and just halfway into 2021, the company has already spent $290,000.

MODERNA LOBBYING.

The real scandal, however, is represented in the sheer number of political operatives who have recently gone on to work for Big Pharma, from both Democrat and Republican offices.

The National Pulse has assembled a list of those declared by Pfizer and Moderna alone, below. The list includes their previous jobs or affiliations. Of the 83 listed below, many come from high level backgrounds such as the White House, presidential candidates, the Speaker of the House’s office, and a number of congressional offices.

The swamp, revealed:

Pfizer.

1. Justin McCarthy, Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs under President George W. Bush
2. Brian Arthur Pomper, Chief International Trade Counsel to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus
3. Bill Morley, General Counsel to Senator Arlen Specter
4. Remy Brim, Senior Health Policy Advisor to Senator Elizabeth Warren
5. Mark Mioduski, Democratic Clerk for the Committee on Appropriations in the U.S. House of Representatives
6. Brian Griffin, Senior Leadership Advisor and Floor Policy Director for Democratic Policy Committee Chairman Senator Byron Dorgan
7. Ben Howard, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Legislative Affairs under President Donald Trump
8. Kate Keating, Chief of Staff to Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus Congressman Joseph Crowley
9. David Schiappa, Secretary to Senate Republican Leaders
10. Lavita Legrys, Director at the Office of Legislative Affairs in the Department of Homeland Security under President Barack Obama
11. Mike Mckay, Senior Policy Advisor to Congressman Gregory Meeks
12. Cristina Antelo, Legal Fellow with the Senate Democratic Steering Committee
13. Tom Davis, former Congressman
14. Michael Werner, Policy Advisor to Senate Democrats Policy Committee
15. Daniel Elling, Staff Director for the House Committee on Ways and Means
16. Cookab Hashemi, Chief of Staff to Representative Raul Ruiz and Representative Jackie Speier
17. Robert Holifield, Staff Director of the Senate Agriculture Committee
18. Hannah Smith, Legislative Correspondent to Senator Blanche Lincoln
19. Blanche Lincoln, Former Senator and Congresswoman
20. Colin Roskey, Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services under President Trump
21. Thomas Scully, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Bush.
22. Brian Diffell, Legislative Director to Senator Roy Blunt
23. Kelli Briggs, Chief of Staff to Representative Pat Tiberi
24. Anne Wilson, Legislative Director to Representative Anna G. Eshoo
25. Peter Wallace, Legislative Correspondent to Representative Ric Keller
26. Katharine Hayes, Legislative Correspondent to Representative Mark Schauer
27. Akshai Datta, Senior Legislative Assistant to Representative Ami Bera
28. Darrel Thompson, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intergovernmental and External Affairs to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
29. Shanti Ochs Stanton, Floor Assistant to the Democratic Leaders Office
30. Natalie Farr, Chief of Staff to Senator Cory Gardner
31. Steven Elmendorf, Chief of Staff to House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt
32. Steven Irizarry, Senior Counsel for Senate Special Committee on Aging
33. Stephen Northrup, Health Policy Advisor to Senator Michael Enzi
34. Jennifer Swenson, Deputy Legislative Director to Senator Pat Roberts
35. Catherine Robinson, Law Clerk on the Committee on Ways and Means
36. Emily Mueller, Deputy Legislative Director to Senator Pat Roberts
37. Stephen Claeys, Trade Counsel on the Committee on Ways and Means
38. Paula Burg, Director and Senior Advisor for Health and Entitlements on the Senate Budget Committee
39. Elissa Alben, Senior Counsel for International Trade and Competitiveness on the Senate Committee on Finance
40. Karissa Willhite, Deputy Chief of Staff to Senator Robert Menendez
41. Gordon Taylor, Chief of Staff to Representative Chris John
42. Tucker Shumack, Tax and Finance Counsel to Senator Olympia Snowe
43. Todd Novascone, Chief of Staff to Senator Jerry Moran
44. Jerome Murray, Chief of Staff to Representative Stacey Plaskett
45. Moses Mercado, Deputy Chief of Staff to Representative Richard Gephardt
46. Tim McGivern, Chief of Staff to Senator Jim Brownback
47. Chris Giblin, Chief of Staff to Representative John Carter
48. Tony Bullock, Chief of Staff to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
49. Dee Buchanan, Chief of Staff to House Republican Conference
50. Dean Aguillen, Advisor to Speaker Nancy Pelosi
51. Eden Shiferaw, Representative Marcia Fudge
52. Jane Loewenson, Senior Health Policy Advisor to Democratic Leader Tom Daschle
53. Andrea LaRue, Counsel to Democratic Leader Tom Daschle
54. Brady King, Chief of Staff to Congresswoman Kendra S. Horn
55. Joshua Fay Hurvitz, Legislative Director to Representative Anthony D. Weiner
56. Lisa German Foster, Senior Policy Advisor to Senator Jack Reed
57. Irene Bueno, Special Assistant to President Bill Clinton in the Domestic Policy Council and Chief of Staff’s Office
58. Ashley Gunn,  Senior Director of Cabinet Affairs to President Trump
59. Monica Popp, Chief of Staff to Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn
60. Hazen Marshall, Policy Director to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell
61. Christopher Wilcox, Staff Assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
62. Marti Thomas, Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs under President Clinton
63. Karina Lynch, Legislative Director to Representative Scott McInnis
64. Cheryl Jager, Senior Health Policy Advisor for House Republican Leadership
65. Matthew Hoekstra, Legislative Director for Senator Ben Lujan
66. Susan Hirschmann, Chief of Staff to Representative Van Hilleary
67. Christopher Hatcher, Legislative Director to Representative Scott McInnis
68. Ann Marie Buerkle, Congresswoman
69. Shimon Stein, Senior Advisor to House Majority Leader/Republican Whip
70. Kristi Remington, Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the Department of Justice under President Obama
71. Malloy McDaniel, Policy Advisor to Senator Mitch McConnell
72. Craig Kalkut, Chief Counsel of Senate Antitrust Subcommittee
73. Ashley Davis, Special Assistant to Director of Homeland Security Tom Ridge under President Bush
74. Greg Nickerson, Tax Counsel to Representative Bill Thomas

Moderna.

1. Darren Willcox, Assistant to Speaker Dennis Hastert for Health Policy
2. Erin Strawn, Legislative Associate to Representative Joe Cunningham
3. Valerie Henry, Senior Policy Advisor to Congressman Greg Walden
4. James Derderian, Chief of Staff to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce
5. Carmencita Whonder, Advisor on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee to Senator Chuck Schumer
6. Marc Lampkin, General Counsel for the House Republican Conference
7. Araceli Gutierrez, Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Graduate Fellow
8. Emily Felder, Counsel to the House Energy and Commerce Committee
9. Nadeam Elshami, Chief of Staff to Representative Nancy Pelosi

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In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character.

We must begin to ask: Why are there forty million poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable affluence?

– Martin Luther King Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? [p141]

The usage of the term ‘woke’ has spread rapidly in the last ten years from meaning awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination to describing the identity politics of various ethnic groups in the USA. The term has a long history reaching back to the 1930s when Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly finished a song advising people with the words to ‘best stay woke, keep their eyes open.’

The history of ethnic- or identity- based politics has long been a long one in the United States going back to the ethnocultural (ethnic, religious and racial identity) politics of the 19th century. Identity- based politics resurfaced in the 1960s with the Black Panther Party (BPP) (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense), a Black Power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in 1966. In the 1970s, identity politics were seen with the Black feminist socialist group, Combahee River Collective, and spread with the LGBT movements of the 1980s. Today ‘wokism’ is associated with identity-based groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM).

The complexity of identity politics in all its positive and negative forms has become more prevalent in recent years with the production of many ‘woke’ films. These could be described as films that have women in leading positions, gender or racial swaps, and the inclusion of gay characters in a diverse cast, etc. However, prior to this change in ideology there was also the identity politics of dominant heterosexual white men, so for some there is also the satisfaction and feeling of social justice with the depiction of racial and gender reversals.

One prominent and popular TV series to look at both sides of the complexity of identity politics was The Sopranos. The episode “Christopher” is the 42nd episode and the third of the show’s fourth season. The teleplay was written by Michael Imperioli, from a story idea by Imperioli and Maria Laurino and was directed by Tim Van Patten. It aired on September 29, 2002. Imperioli, who played Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos, is an American actor, writer, and director, and it seems he was also impressed with Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States which this episode is based on.

He even has Tony Soprano’s son reading the book for school over breakfast at home. The episode focuses on Columbus day and the different perceptions of Columbus by individuals of various ethnic backgrounds. The influence of the book on this episode can be seen in the historical and political awareness of the history of identity politics that is depicted. Imperioli not only shows the complexity of various  identities in the USA but  also how these identities are manipulated to foment strife between different groups both on the street and in the mass media.

Agent provocateur in combats, black jacket and black beanie

This is very cleverly done in a scene where the Sopranos arrive at an anti-Columbus demonstration being held by Native Americans and students. A bottle is thrown and fighting ensues. It is interesting to see how the different characters are picked out in this scene. The Native Americans look generally like Native Americans (skin color, hair etc), the students (long hair, denim) and the character who threw the bottle is distinguished by combats, black jacket and black beanie (connoting the military, the state, undercover i.e. agent provocateur). This scene happens so fast it is almost an easter egg (I had to slow it down frame by frame to get a screenshot). Thus, like in real life, the provocateur gets lost in the mayhem and the later clashes seen on the news are described as ‘tragic’.

Ralphie holds up poster of Iron Eyes Cody

The complexity of ethnic identity feeds some of the humour in the show, when, for example, Dr. Del Redclay doesn’t realise that Iron Eyes Cody who portrayed Native Americans in many Hollywood films was actually Italian; Pauli didn’t know that James Caan’s heritage is German, not Italian; and Chief Doug Smith, ‘Tribal chairman of the Mohonk Indians and CEO of Mohonk Enterprises’, announces: “Frankly, I passed most of my life as white until I had an awakening and discovered my Mohonk blood. My grandmother on my father’s side, her mother was a quarter Mohonk.” Even Redclay’s TA, Maggie Donner, turns out to be one-eighth Italian – her “great-great something-or-other”.

Chief Doug Smith, ‘Tribal chairman of the Mohonk Indians and CEO of Mohonk Enterprises’

The same humour is used in the title of Maria Laurino’s memoir, Were You Always an Italian?, which was a national bestseller and explored the issue of ethnic identity among Italian-Americans.

Chief Doug Smith represents the use of ethnic identity for private gain. In the 1970s the Supreme Court had ruled that only Indians have the authority to tax and regulate Indian activities by Indians on Indian reservations. Academia does not get off lightly either, as Professor Longo-Murphy, who is invited to give a lunch-time talk on modern Italian-ness to the Italian community, is obviously half Irish.

By having Tony’s son read about Columbus and his encounters with the ‘savages’, Tony’s power position as dominant white male is illuminated as he defends Columbus’s actions and thereby shutting down any real discussion of the realities of history while maintaining ethnic group myths (“in this house Christopher Columbus is a hero. End of story.”)

Tony’s son reads Howard Zinn’s book A People’s History of the United States

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It is useful to identify and examine the many facets and the all encompassing nature of American/Western propaganda systems in our efforts to better understand why so many people have great difficulty in sorting truth from fiction regarding the “covid pandemic” narratives.  The following outline and commentary are an effort to more clearly identify the ubiquitous nature of Western covid propaganda in order to better understand its impacts on the public mind.

One method of propaganda dissemination during the promotion of the covid narratives has been major medical journals printing false covid related disinformation posing as “science.”  Early in the propaganda operation both The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine had to retract fraudulent articles dismissing the efficacy and falsely inflating the danger of using hydroxychloroquine in treatment of covid patients. (1). MSM widely promoted the fraudulent claims, but of course expressed no interest in their subsequent retractions.

That two of the world’s most widely esteemed medical journals were both guilty of publishing what were essentially disinformation pieces rife with conflicts of interest and essentially constituting what MSM calls “fake news” shines a bright light on the corruption of objective science which has now been captured by powerful monied pharmaceutical and commercial interests.

Print and web based legacy media such as the NYT, WAPO, Guardian, BBC, etc. have all been engaged in credulous daily promotion of the “official” covid narratives. They have done so while refusing to publish counter-narratives even by world renowned scientific experts, and while shaming, demeaning, and ridiculing any who question the “official science” of the CDC and WHO.

The official covid narratives are also promoted daily on all mainstream television news outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, FOX, PBS, BBC, etc. as well as on their web-based presence on platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Adding to the seamless nature of public exposure to the official covid propaganda narratives are their constant presence in mainstream print (and web based) specialty and/or alternative media such as  Daily Beast, Politico, TYT, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, National Geographic, Scientific American. (2)

The radio airways provide yet another means for our ingestion of the endless daily repetition of the official covid propaganda narratives.  These include of course all MSM radio affiliates, ubiquitous talk radio, and of course NPR. (3)

As if one has not been subject to enough official covid propaganda by bedtime, the late night comedians continue the daily onslaught often during their monologues.  A standard format in this aspect of propaganda promotion is that one must have properly ingested one’s daily dose of covid propaganda in order to “get the joke” and thus be able to identify with one’s favorite comedian.  Covid propaganda is simply the background “wallpaper” on the shows of the “hip” late night comedians such as Trevor Noah, Steven Colbert, John Oliver, etc.  

However, propaganda as “humor” sometimes moves beyond simple recitation of official narratives and the shaming of the unvaccinated.  In some cases it engages in the more sinister openly proclaimed dehumanization of the unvaccinated as “other” to be shunned, scorned and even denied medical care as evidenced by the recent monologue comments of late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel. (4)

Sports reporting both web and radio based also act as outlets for official covid narratives, including the shaming of those who question such narratives and/or who refuse to be vaccinated.  This is true of sports pundits for a variety of outlets.  Youtube based sports pundit Rich Eisen recently used his platform to confront Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors basketball team because Green dared to defend the right of one of his team-mates Andrew Wiggins to exercise his freedom to make his own decision on rejecting a vaccine.  Wiggins has since succumbed to pressure and accepted the vaccine. (5)  

Escaping the pernicious presence of the official covid narratives is virtually impossible unless one simply swears off all contact with the major forms of Western media. 

Censorship & Demonization of Dissenting Voices 

To insure proper absorption of the official propaganda narratives a regime of outright censorship has become normalized.  This includes the removal of specific  examples of “offending” material from web based platforms like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, etc. This sort of open censorship, of even expert scientific opinion, has become part of the so called “new normal.”  Offenders are often put on notice that further such violations of “community standards” for example, will lead to further sanctions.

Youtube interviews with world renowned scientists have been demonetized and/or  removed due to such scientists simply sharing their own scientific opinion.  This is done should that expert opinion differ from the “official narrative” according to the censors employed by Tech platforms. One of the co-inventors of the mRNA vaccine technology Dr. Robert Malone experienced such censorship several months ago. (6)  Three days after being censored and removed from Youtube for expressing his concerns about the safety of vaccines delivered by technology he helped create, Wikipedia suddenly rewrote Dr. Malone’s biography in the process hiding his contribution to the creation of mRNA technology. (7).  One can be forgiven for wondering if this was done by Wikipedia in a nod to Orwell’s 1984 “Party” maxim – “Ignorance is Strength.”

Image on the right: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Complete de-platforming on web based social media of well respected voices is also now becoming normative.  A recent example is the complete removal from Youtube of the site of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s Children’s Health Defense and Dr. Mercola’s medical site, along with others who challenge the official covid narratives. (8).  Similar removal/de-platforming of medical professionals and scientists on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other web based media have also occurred.  

Another area of web based censorship is the removal of user generated Facebook groups created by those wishing to share their negative post-vaccination reactions with others given the silence and lack of support from within the medical community itself for such individuals. (9).  Multiple such user groups have been banned from Facebook for simply providing a forum for users to share their own personal experiences.

The impact of such overt censorship has been to put all who post material and opinions on platforms like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter to consciously engage in self-censorship in order to not risk being de-platformed.  News and analysis sites like Jimmy Dore, Dark Horse Podcast, Joe Rogan, and many others now openly discuss avoiding using or discussing certain words, phrases, or topics related to the official covid narratives that might lead to “warnings” or de-platforming.  Self censorship has become yet another aspect of our new normal.  

An invisible and too seldom discussed stealth method of the censorship of any of us who are questioning the official covid narratives is the Big Tech use of internet search algorithms designed to suppress or completely hide the existence of the material challenging official narratives.  I find my own Google searches for topics such as “covid vaccine adverse reactions” end up providing endless pages of material  simply censoring out and/or debunking the very idea that such adverse events could be anything but “fake news.” 

I have found that the suppression of any articles questioning the official narratives that isn’t presented as “fake news” is almost virtually complete in my own Google searches.  This means one must know before one searches the actual name of the post you are looking for or of the name of an alternative independent media site like Global Research or OffGuardian, because it appears that Google will now routinely use its algorithms to do everything in its power to avoid taking you to anything but articles and sites supporting the official narratives.

We now live in a world in which MSM outlets across all platforms routinely refuse to publish general articles, opinion pieces, video interviews, or even reference peer reviewed scientific journal articles by world renowned scientists if that material diverges from the official CDC/WHO opinion and stated policy.  One cannot help but note the rather seamless nature of this entire propaganda operation.  It is indeed impressive from a prospective of totalitarian narrative control. 

However, even this massive ability to dominate narrative construction and dissemination appears not to be sufficient in the opinion of those at the helm of the oligarch controlled structures of media power.  Thus independent popular media platforms are subject to what appear to be well orchestrated and coordinated attacks from MSM outlets should they report material that questions or in any way challenges MSM covid reporting. 

A recent example of such attacks was the MSM wide disinformation campaign aimed at popular Youtube personality Joe Rogan who self-reported his own positive Ivermectin experience in treating his covid.  His use of Ivermectin was not only widely panned and demeaned across MSM, but was also routinely intentionally and deceitfully distorted to suggest he had used the “animal version” of the drug scornfully referred to in MSM reports as a “horse dewormer.”  This disinformation was widely disseminated even though Rogan had clearly stated he received the Ivermectin prescription from his own doctor. (10).  

Such MSM attacks are designed to intimidate and although they likely did no significant damage to someone with Rogan’s large audience base, they may certainly cause others in independent media who have smaller audiences to hesitate to share their own similar experiences for fear of such negative repercussions. 

Such attacks by MSM, and censorship by Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, are now normative even when reporting the results of peer reviewed scientific journal articles that suggest possible efficacy of Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine in covid treatment.  Clearly it is not “the science” that MSM is protecting with such attacks, but the official propaganda narrative.

Medical professional organizations, medical licensing boards, hospitals and related entities are now literally threatening doctors with loss of hospital privileges and/or license to practice for simply having and sharing a medical opinion that diverges from the official narratives. (11)

Newsweek reported “a joint statement issued by the American Board of Internal Medicine, the American Board of Family Medicine and the American Board of Pediatrics” pointed out quite clearly exactly what type of “medical opinion” by a practicing physician might endanger his/her license to practice.  “The evidence that we have safe, effective and widely available vaccines against COVID-19 is overwhelming. We are particularly concerned about physicians who use their authority to denigrate vaccination at a time when vaccines continue to demonstrate excellent effectiveness against severe illness, hospitalization and death.” (11)

The need for such an overt threat from these higher levels of the medical establishment makes clear that at least some physicians retain both independence of thought and the moral integrity required to form their own opinion.  However, the issuance of such a ham-handed threat based upon clearly unscientific and unsupported reassurances of “vaccine safety” suggests that these higher echelons of the medical establishment in the United States are now captive to monied interests, thus completely undermining the integrity of American medical practice.

My own medical care is through a large southern California university based consortium.  I recently asked my physician if she would prescribe a prophylactic dose of Ivermectin that I could keep on hand should I begin to develop covid symptoms.  She explained she was not allowed to do so, but that she would forward my request to the consortium’s “infectious disease specialist” who promptly responded that my doctor could not in fact prescribe Ivermectin for me because “the reliable evidence available does not support the use of Ivermectin for treatment or prevention of COVID-19.”  My own research into the available information on Ivermectin suggests this contention is clearly not accurate, but there is of course no recourse to challenge this institutional policy.

I cannot help but reflect on the irony that this same medical practice can and does continue to prescribe statin medications for their patients in spite of the now massive scientific research indicating that “the reliable evidence does not support” statin use for a large percentage of those who will continue to be put on statins, in spite of the many known dangerous side-effects.

Although I have great respect for my own primary care physician, she is literally not allowed to practice medicine independently in treating covid, but must instead seek permission to simply prescribe a globally used medication known to be safe that has clearly shown great efficacy around the world in covid treatment.  Instead the official opinion of the higher-ups controlling my physician’s medical practice appears to be “If you get sick enough show up at the ER, but otherwise we refuse to treat you.” Needless to say even while refusing to issue an Ivermectin script, I continue to receive regular email notices from my medical consortium reminding me to “schedule my covid vaccination.” 

Many doctors are now expressly forbidden from publicly discussing or reporting vaccine adverse reactions, and are forbidden to use their professional expertise in order to treat their own patients should that entail prescribing officially “demonized” medications such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.  

Clearly we have never seen such draconian attempts at controlling the treatment options available to physicians and thus to their patients.  Nor have we seen the professional opinions of highly respected front-line acute-care medical providers who actually “treat” covid on a daily basis overtly demeaned in MSM.  Bedside acute-care physicians are thus being thwarted using overt threats to their licensure in order to enforce such “new normal” Orwellian control. 

Meanwhile, the demonization of the unvaccinated in MSM using these widely varied methods of propaganda dissemination is now ubiquitous.  There are now two relatively new categories of “human beings” inhabiting planet earth – the righteous and obedient “vaccinated” and the unclean, unworthy and dangerous “unvaccinated.”  This represent the latest in oligarchy’s endless efforts at “divide and conquer.”   

Clearly much appears to be at stake in the opinion of said global oligarchy.  The uber-wealthy and their public representatives seem to be pushing all of their chips to the center of the table as they place massive bets on this covid propaganda campaign.  Those bets are wagered against the credibility of what now amounts to almost all Western institutions.  Given the completely fatuous nature of the official covid narratives one can assume a significant level of desperation must exist among our global elites.  They appear to be dedicated to finding some means, any means, that might allow them to maintain their own power and control in the world.  A world in which a literal “house of cards” global economy, combined with ever greater ecosystem degradation and dis-regulation, is able less and less to ensure their continued future dominance.

Manipulation of Data and Definitions to Support the Propaganda Narratives 

One cannot help but notice the importance of language in any propaganda operation.  Words have meaning, as do those sets of words we call “definitions.”  What are we to make of the WHO changing the definition of “herd immunity” so that herd immunity is no longer achieved through a population being exposed to a pathogen and developing a protective immune response, but rather is now to be understood in terms of “vaccines?”(12) 

The new WHO definition reads: “herd immunity,’ also known as ‘population immunity,’ is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” (12)  Since when has this EVER been the definition of herd immunity?  Answer, since the WHO changed the definition during the covid propaganda operation. 

In a public presentation the WHO director general explained this Orwellian decision to change the definition using suitably Orwellian double-speak: “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic.  It is scientifically and ethically problematic.” (12)  

Of course the simple unassailable “reality” here on planet earth is that we have as a species ALWAYS relied historically over endless millennia on the development of herd immunity by surviving whatever pathogen we were collectively exposed to.  It is only at this very moment in time, in the midst of the covid propaganda operation, that it has ever been necessary to “deny” that rather elementary fact of our collective human history.  

Additional examples of changing an official institutionally based definition to support the covid propaganda narratives is the CDC changing its definition of both “immunity” and “vaccine.” (13)

A final example on altering definitions and of data manipulation is the WHO changing how the actual cause of death on death certificates is reported, done clearly in order to inflate covid deaths thus promoting the official “pandemic” narrative. (14) (15). These changes smack of a Three-Stooges level of slapstick absurdity when it comes to simple common sense.  Under the new rules one could have essentially been perfectly healthy one moment, but had just been exposed by proximity to someone with a covid infection the next, or given a false-positive PCR at 45 cycles, and then immediately struck by a bolt of lightening and killed.  Then, by the new definitions, while in defiance of all common sense, the coroner would be given enough wiggle room so that he could still make a case for “death by covid” on one’s death certificate. (16)  “Orwellian” doesn’t quite do justice to this level of unscientific absurdity.

Manipulation of what constitutes a covid ‘case’ has been an essential propaganda tool in creating the “impression” of a pandemic. The pandemic hysteria itself is based more than anything upon fraudulent “false positives” obtained with the PCR test.  MSM quickly shifted early in the propaganda rollout from concern about supposed covid deaths, to focusing more on such false-positive “cases” which they dishonestly portrayed as actual illness. These daily touted “cases” appear to be primarily people registering a false positive on a PCR test given at a grossly inflated and therefore meaningless 35-45 cycles.  

Massive numbers of such false positive or “asymptomatic cases” were thus created out of thin air.  Voila!  Instant proof of a pandemic.  Most of these supposed “cases” were admittedly “asymptomatic,” but not because they had a mild version of the illness. They were most likely asymptomatic because they were not sick at all.  Thus the pandemic narrative has been fueled by simply defining “well people” as “sick people” based upon a known fraudulent testing regime. (17)

How do we know the use of PCR testing at 35-45 cycles was known by authorities to be fraudulent?  Because now that the vaccine program has been rolled out the vaccinated are only given PCR tests at a reasonable 28 cycles, while the unvaccinated continue to be subjected to the fraudulent 35-45 cycle PCR testing. (18). This of course deceptively insures that the unvaccinated continue to generate completely asymptomatic false positives, and can then be made to appear to be driving the spread of the illness.  

Meanwhile the vaccinated are much less likely to test positive given their testing is now, indefensible by any scientific measure, conducted at the lower 28 cycle threshold when compared to the unvaccinated conducted at 35-45 cycles.  The MSM promotion of the “trust the science” phrase has become simply a new addition to Orwellian “double-speak.”  To the Party slogans from Orwell’s book 1984, “War is Peace,” “Love is Hate,” and “Ignorance is Strength,” we can now officially add “Trust The Science.”

Covid death numbers have been even further inflated by the use of false positive PCR tests to label patients who are already terminally ill from other diseases (i.e. cancer, COPD, renal failure, etc) as “covid deaths” in official reporting because they died within 28 days of a meaningless fake ‘false positive’ PCR test.  Even in the complete absence of covid symptoms a hospice patient dying from another illness can be called a “covid” death in official data collection. (19)

Further distortion and manipulation of data in support of the official narratives involves not counting someone as “vaccinated” until 14 days after the “second dose” in two dose vaccines.  Thus someone who dies after the first dose, or within 14 days of the second dose, is “defined” as “unvaccinated” and can be counted fraudulently in that category. (20). This of course further promotes the narrative that it is mainly the “unvaccinated” who are being hospitalized and are dying.  One is hard pressed to imagine a more blatantly corrupt and amoral “public health policy.”  This is a policy which is designed of course to minimize the association between the vaccines and post-vaccination deaths, while simultaneously blaming the unvaccinated as being those who are hospitalized and dying. 

The weekly updated VAERS data from the CDC clearly shows massive numbers of both serious adverse vaccine reactions and deaths though it is known to vastly undercount such events.  However this highly concerning VAERS data is being silently ignored by the CDC itself, the MSM, the political class, and most of the medical establishment. (21). Meanwhile a consistent propaganda theme is one of omission in which the MSM either completely fails to report on such obviously important health data, or dismisses the idea that the VAERS reports themselves justify any further scrutiny.

A party interested in truth rather than in promoting propaganda would surely ask where autopsies are for those who died unexpectedly in close proximity to vaccination.  The MSM in support of the official narrative simply of course never poses such a logical straight forward question, as it would unravel the entire charade.  Clearly if the CDC does not “look for” possible links between vaccinations and unexpected deaths it will certainly be guaranteed “not to find them.”  

One is reminded how NIST proclaimed there were no explosives involved in the demolition of the three World Trade Center buildings, only to have to admit that they NEVER LOOKED for any evidence of explosives.  The CDC is taking the same tack in simply refusing to do autopsies on the many thousands who have died post-vaccination while the MSM pretends any discussion of such deaths is “fake news” by “conspiracy theorists” and “anti-vaxxers.”

Another rather telling mode of propaganda promotion is the complete fabrication out of thin air of “news” that supports the covid narrative. This involves the subsequent spreading of such fabricated stories throughout MSM, and even failing to retract them once they are proven completely false. A recent such fabricated article in the magazine Rolling Stone that was widely repeated throughout MSM is a case in point. (22).  The story was that ERs in Oklahoma were overrun with people over-dosed on the livestock version of Ivermectin, thus denying even gunshot wound victims access to emergency care.  The story was shown to be a complete fabrication.  It was an obvious disinformation piece, yet was credulously repeated throughout MSM.  

This episode in blatant “fake news” propaganda, since it supported the official narratives demonizing Ivermectin, of course aroused no noticeable concern among those who proclaim to find such fake news unacceptable. The MSM pundits and the big tech platforms supposedly devoted to censoring “fake news,” appeared to have no problem with this blatantly fabricated disinformation piece posing as news.  Clearly fake news in support of the propaganda operation is simply standard operating procedure.  Another example of “the new normal.”  

Invisible Psychological Operations 

In a previous article I discussed the implications of Terror Management Theory (TMT) in promoting and assisting the public’s unconscious acceptance of the official covid propaganda. (23)  I continue to think that TMT offers an important window into understanding how the manipulation of our natural fears of death makes us more vulnerable to being propagandized.  It does so by over-riding one’s normal ability to think critically and rationally when such death fears are being repeatedly triggered day after day. 

Reminders of death and our mortality, delivered both consciously and unconsciously, have shown in hundreds of TMT experiments to increase unconscious support for, and greater compliance with, our underlying cultural norms.  This drives the population toward an unconscious position of becoming more trusting of institutional authorities, causing people to engage in more compliant behavior with the dictates of such authorities.

When recalling the initial propaganda images out of China depicting people standing in public places who suddenly simply fell over dead I am reminded of the astute observation made by Daniel Boorstin in his 1962 book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.”  As Boorstin explained, “Strictly speaking, there is no way to unmask an image.  An image, like any other psuedo-event, becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it.”

Are those being propagandized more likely to believe the images they see with their own eyes?  Or to believe those of us who are trying to “unmask” and “debunk” those images?  The power of such covid propaganda images should not be underestimated, in part because they seamlessly trigger the TMT “death fears” that so effectively short-circuit our ability to think clearly and critically.  Images of people falling over dead, images of piles of bodies, images of hospitals over-run, images of the faceless masked, are immensely powerful propaganda tools because of their deep psychological impacts often experienced not only consciously, but also at quite unconscious levels. 

Lastly, and perhaps the most frightening aspect of these psychological propaganda operations comes from large segments of the population being vulnerable to the covert behavioral modification techniques associated with simply “being connected” in our modern web-based world.  Professor Shoshana Zuboff provides a very detailed and chilling examination of the operant/instrumental conditioning techniques now routinely used by what she terms “surveillance capitalism” in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power” (24)  

Professor Zuboff painstakingly outlines the almost unimaginable extent to which big tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are surreptitiously capturing (“rendering” as Zuboff calls it) vast amounts of our personal data from literally all electronic web based devices.  However, it is not the loss of privacy that is of greatest concern in her analysis.  Rather, it is the ever increasing ability of big tech companies to compile, aggregate and with ever more powerful AI tools to utilize that data in order to shape and change our behavior through means that are literally beyond our own conscious awareness.  

Behavioral change is accomplished utilizing these ever more powerful AI tools in conjunction with continuously analyzing the behaviors and responses of billions of people across the globe. It is the ability to analyze personal opinions, then provide a new psychological “reward” or “punishment,” and then again measure those opinions, over and over with ever more powerful tools, in close to real-time, that poses the most dangerous threat to our ability to resist propaganda.  This level of “shaping” and “manipulating” the public mind both for the profit of corporations which Zuboff refers to as surveillance capitalism, and in service to the hidden agendas of the State intelligence apparatus, is not part of some future sci-fi world, but is an invisible aspect of our current reality, whether we are aware of that reality or not.

Already surveillance capitalism has shown the ability to surreptitiously modify and shape human thinking and behavior in marketable ways in pursuit of profit.  These operations are being conducted by the same big tech companies Edward Snowden outed almost a decade ago for their deep cooperation with and connections to the Western intelligence apparatus.  These were intelligence agencies engaged in propaganda operations aimed at Western citizenry. (25)  Much has changed in the world since Snowden shed light on these operations, including the development of ever more powerful AI based programs that capture our personal data, monitor our behavior, AND then shape our behavior beyond our human awareness. 

Zuboff’s book, Snowden’s revelations, and the implications of that convergence deserve a much more thorough detailing and discussion in the future.  However, I will for today end with what I feel is perhaps the most insidious aspect of what is implied through this coalescence of unseen forces.  Which is that we can be both surreptitiously monitored, and our thinking and behavior shaped, in what increasingly approaches close to real-time fashion.  Connected to the ubiquitous “web,” our thoughts and behaviors are no longer our own.  They can be, and are being, manipulated and modified outside of the realm of our conscious awareness.  This is not being done to meet our needs, but rather to meet the agendas of those who comprise a new class of “surveillance capitalists” who work in conjunction with the massive power of the Western intelligence gathering services.

In spite of all the wide-ranging aspects of the covid propaganda promotion I detailed earlier, I don’t think any of them alone or in combination hold as much potential to control and shape public consciousness as the ever more powerful tools of surveillance capitalism combined with the means and methods of the intelligence services.  

It is inconceivable to me that these tools are somehow not in continuous use 24/7, monitoring real-time public responses on web platforms and social media, to our searches, to what we read, to what we share with others, to our comments, spanning everything from new lockdown measures in a particular city, to the loosening of restrictions somewhere else, from responses to various forms of vaccination mandates in one part of the country compared to another, etc. 

No doubt there is consistent monitoring and evaluation examining which AI based interventions are most effective in “tuning, herding, nudging and shaping” (24) our perceptions and behaviors toward the propaganda ends of the oligarchic system of control.   For a very simple unsophisticated example it is child’s play for Facebook using the tools already at its disposal to insure you see nothing but posts from your Facebook “friends” who have gotten the vaccine, and no material from anyone who refused it.  This can be done in an effort to shape your behavior toward the desired end of you “making your own decision” to eventually do what you are being manipulated to do, to get the vaccine.  Why wouldn’t you submit to the vaccine since literally “all of your ‘friends’ are doing so” and since not doing so will put you in the cognitively uncomfortable position of now being in a publicly demonized “out group.”

I fear however that Zuboff’s and Snowden’s revelations portend something much darker and more sinister than my simple and rather obvious example touches upon.  A world in which much of humanity is manipulated, shaped, and controlled in both thought and behavior 24/7 without conscious awareness that this is happening.  Our thoughts someone else’s, but experienced as our own.  We don’t really need more information or another whistleblower like Edward Snowden to know where we stand.  What we do need is a much deeper familiarity and understanding of these hidden tools and processes in order to unmask them, publicize them, and resist their ever growing impacts.

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Gary Weglarz retired in 2014 from practice as a clinical social worker.  He worked with, and learned from, Alaskan Native peoples who were attempting to heal the damage inflicted by the collective ongoing intergenerational trauma of colonization.  Currently he is engaged in research and writing regarding the relationship between past mass trauma in Western societies, and the subsequent colonial violence that has characterized the behavior of Europe and her colonies. He was actively involved in Central American solidarity efforts throughout the 1990’s, traveling with human rights delegations to Nicaragua, El Salvador and Colombia. 

Notes

(1) https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giuseppe-Calcaterra/publication/343379182_An_expression_of_concern_on_research_misconduct_during_the_corona_virus_disease-2019_pandemic/links/5f7037c492851c14bc9a53e5/An-expression-of-concern-on-research-misconduct-during-the-corona-virus-disease-2019-pandemic.pdf

(2) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/breakthrough-infections-do-not-mean-covid-vaccines-are-failing/

(3) https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/

 (4) https://nypost.com/2021/09/08/jimmy-kimmel-says-unvaxxed-americans-dont-deserve-icu-beds/

(5) https://www.nbcsports.com/video/rich-eisen-warriors-draymond-green-wrong-about-covid-19-comments

(6) https://www.yahoo.com/now/single-most-qualified-mrna-expert-173600060.html

(7) https://thebl.com/us-news/wikipedia-censors-real-inventor-of-mrna-technology-over-vaccine-warnings.html

(8) https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2021/09/29/youtube-is-banning-prominent-anti-vaccine-activists-and-blocking-all-anti-vaccine-content/

(9) https://twitter.com/peterrowen_/status/1376798789097377792?lang=en

(10) https://www.yahoo.com/now/joe-rogan-considers-suing-cnn-190606533.html

(11) https://www.newsweek.com/medical-boards-threaten-doctors-spreading-covid-misinformation-decertification-1629157

(12) https://www.abc10.com/article/news/verify/verify-changes-who-definition-herd-immunity-not-secret/507-f90c0199-c88e-4c66-8313-b4ae6e2a72ad

(13) https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article254111268.html

(14) https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/02/counting-covids-deceptive-deaths/

(15) https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/Guidelines_Cause_of_Death_COVID-19.pdf

(16) https://cbs12.com/news/local/man-who-died-in-motorcycle-crash-counted-as-covid-19-death-in-florida-report

https://www.globalresearch.ca/anyone-any-disease-alberta-counted-covid-case/5757739

https://denver.cbslocal.com/2020/12/15/grand-county-covid-deaths/

(17) https://off-guardian.org/2021/08/03/repeat-after-me-the-pcr-tests-dont-work/

(18) https://off-guardian.org/2020/12/18/who-finally-admits-pcr-tests-create-false-positives/

(19) https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/questions-over-the-accuracy-of-how-the-state-tracks-covid-deaths/283-0b1b7b6c-695e-4313-92cf-a4cfd7510721

(20) https://www.globalresearch.ca/cdc-allows-hospitals-classify-dead-vaxxed-people-unvaccinated/5757502

(21) https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/vaers-cdc-deaths-injuries-covid-vaccines/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=9470f062-0cf2-4251-ae09-99ed0c9dbe0d

(22) https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/rolling-stones-botched-ivermectin-story-raises-questions-about-the-nature-of-misinformation/

(23) https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-do-so-many-believe-official-covid-narratives/5752602

(24) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For A Human Future At The New Frontier Of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019.

(25) https://theintercept.com/collections/snowden-archive/

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It was announced today that Pfizer has now petitioned the FDA in the United States to give them emergency use authorization to begin injecting the COVID-19 shots into children between the ages of 5 and 11.

FiercePharma reports that while there is “significant resistance by parents to vaccinate their children,” Pfizer went ahead and requested permission to start injecting children between the ages of 5 and 11.

This will broaden their market in the U.S. to another 28 million people who will now be able to get the shots, all children.

Pfizer and BioNTech have asked the FDA to authorize their vaccine for children aged 5 to 11, the companies revealed on Thursday.

An FDA advisory committee has scheduled a meeting on Oct. 26 to discuss authorization. The submission potentially sets up the vaccine for emergency use approval late October or early November, but the companies may face a tough sell trying to convince parents that the shot is safe. (Source.)

Pfizer is undoubtedly counting on support from people like California Governor Newsom, who just decreed that all children in public and private schools will need to be injected with COVID-19 shots to get an education.

I wonder how much money Pfizer is spending to get government officials mandating their shots to children as a condition for receiving an education?

If you are a parent and you allow your children to be injected with the experimental COVID-19 shots, you and you alone will be responsible before God for their injuries and/or deaths.

Ignorance of the risks is no excuse, and neither is rolling the dice on their lives just because it is too inconvenient for you to keep your children home and educate them yourselves.

As we have previously reported here at Health Impact News, using the government’s own data on adverse reactions to the COVID-19 shots, teens are 50x more likely to develop heart disease, and teenagers have 7.75 X more deaths, 15 X more disabilities, 47 X more ER visits, and 46 X more hospitalizations than all other FDA-approved vaccines COMBINED that these teenagers are receiving. (Source.)

I have produced this video report of teenagers and young people who have died or suffered crippling injuries after being injected with a COVID-19 shot, including testimonies from grieving parents who deeply regret their choice to allow their child to receive one of these shots.

This is on both our Bitchute and Rumble channels.

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In a recent lecture, Dr. Peter McCullough presented alarming data related to COVID vaccines, the fraud of national health authorities, the ‘Therapeutic Nihilism’ being exercised in hospitals, and the urgent necessity of active resistance.

Prominent physician Dr. Peter McCullough recently provided a well-documented lecture on the “catastrophe” of COVID-19 “gene-transfer” vaccines, the “loaded weapon” of the spike protein they produce, and the high effectiveness early treatments.  

He also detailed the malfeasance, fraud, and conflicts-of-interest committed by U.S. medical officials. 

McCullough, who has made the case that he is the world’s foremost authority on the topic, set the tone for his remarks when he began to address a full hotel ballroom in Michigan on September 24. 

“I think the reason why everybody’s here is we have a sense that something very bad is going on in the world. And I’m here to tell you, I think it is,” he said.  

“If you feel tension right now and you feel some emotional distress and if you feel as if things aren’t going right … I think your perceptions are correct,” the physician continued. 

“And if your perceptions are correct, now’s the time for action.” 

McCullough calmly explained how his professional titles are being taken from him. 

“Today I was stripped of the editorship of Cardiorenal Medicine, a Swiss-based journal and in the last year, I have lost my job at a major health system, with no explanation and no due process,” he said. 

“I’ve been stripped of every title that I’ve ever had in that institution. I’ve received a threat letter from the American College of Physicians, [and] a threat letter from the American Board. 

This has happened because of his “lawful” participation “in a topic of public importance,” he said. 

“What we are doing is lawful,” he told the packed ballroom.  

“What’s not lawful, and what’s not right, is what’s happening with respect to censorship and the threat of reprisal.” 

McCullough predicted that the eight professional acronyms behind his name, “will be progressively erased.” This is “going to happen because there’s powerful forces at work, far more powerful than we can possibly think of, that are influencing anybody who is in a position of authority.” 

Explaining his background further, he described how in his distant past he was “on President Clinton’s advisory panel to healthcare,” and had been “on C-SPAN for seven hours getting fried by the senators.” And thus, he explained, “I’m not new to the national scene.” 

Needing “a window to America,” McCullough recently started his own radio program and podcast on America Out Loud. Now he can get important medical information out quickly;   medical journals, of which he is an editor of two, are aimed at doctors and take a long time to publish. 

Absence of safety reports ‘a gamble of extraordinary implications’  

McCullough emphasized that safety is of paramount importance in every industry, including the automotive and building sectors. He said it was ‘beyond astonishing” that “there has been an injection of a substance into half of Americans’ bodies and there’s yet to be a report to America on safety.” 

This “wasn’t the case back in 1976” for the Swine Flu vaccination campaign, he said. After the emergence of 25 deaths and 550 cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome, the government shut it down. Although it was debated whether or not the vaccine caused the damage, “it didn’t matter,” the physician recalled.  

“Unexplained deaths [occurred, so it] didn’t matter. Shut down the program, [it’s] not safe. It was considered a debacle.” 

Today, in testing out new technology on, not just the nation, but the world, the government and big pharmaceutical authorities are taking “a gamble of extraordinary implications,” McCullough said. 

“The gamble is genetic gene-transfer technology. The FDA [Food and Drug Administration] considers the current American vaccines, Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, as gene-transfer tech.” 

McCullough explained how these gene transfer technologies work. He also voiced his concern that, although “normally a messenger RNA is used once and disposed of,” with these mRNA injections by Pfizer and Moderna, messenger RNA is “used over and over … again and stays in the cells for a [very] long time.” 

“We are working with scientists all over the world, and there is a belief now that the messenger RNA can survive cell division, [and] so a parent cell can give it to daughter cells,” he explained. 

“For the first time in human history, we have a biologic product that’s telling our body to produce an abnormal protein,” he said. 

The mRNA enters cells and causes them to create spike proteins, a “kind of a ‘loaded weapon,’ if you will. … It’s now known that the spike protein itself is independently pathogenic: it causes damage itself” to the cells in which it is produced, and then circulates in the body for about two weeks. 

“As this protein circulates, it damages organs, it damages endothelial cells, blood cells, causes blood clotting,” McCullough said.  

“There is nothing about the spike protein that’s good. They’re lethal.” 

‘Colossal misstep’ of omitting independent safety monitor boards 

 McCullough decried the lack of independent safety regulators in monitoring the situation. 

“If we don’t have safety boards, data safety monitoring boards, critical event committees, human ethics committees, assigned to these programs, we have no hope of shutting this down or even evaluating for safety,” he said. 

“I’m not fooling around when I say our governments owed it to us from the beginning to have a Data Safety Monitor Board (DSM). Where’s the DSM?”  

The only monitors right now are the FDA, the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], and pharmaceutical companies with a stake in the outcome, he explained.  

“We never let the company decide on causality of a problem. We never let a company tell us if a product is safe,” McCullough said. 

“Not having a Data Safety Monitoring Board will go down in history as a colossal misstep in public health,” he continued.  

“How in the world can we take the sponsors of the program, the FDA, the CDC, Pfizer, Moderna, and let them be in charge of safety? And even worse, how can we let them not ever produce a safety report? We never do a safety press briefing, nothing.” 

The eminent physician also described doctors he meets as ashamed and confused, particularly about injecting pregnant women with the experimental jabs. 

“I have a lot of interaction with doctors,” McCullough said.   

“I don’t [know] a single doctor who can look me in the eye and support what’s being done to pregnant women. What I see in their eyes is fear, shame, guilt. They know they’re wrong, but they’re confused.” 

According to McCullough, many doctors and medical personnel are currently “in a trance.”  

“They’re in a mass psychosis, and it’s worldwide,” he declared. 

“They’re in lockstep. They’re thinking the same way. They’re frightened. They’re confused. They’re kind of scrambled. They can’t really explain or justify what they’re doing.” 

When pressured to take the vax, focus on the lack of safety reporting 

McCullough has chaired 24 data safety monitoring boards, and he advises those who are asked what they think of the new vaccines to focus on the lack of safety reporting.  

“’Listen, I’m concerned there’s been no report card,’” he suggesting saying.

“The CDC and FDA hold all the data. You don’t. They hold all the data. Where’s the report card? They work for us. Demand it,” he continued.  

“Every time you’re confronted with this, ‘Oh, my employer wants me to take a vaccine.’ [Ask] ‘Where’s the report card from the CDC and FDA?’ Demand a report card. Until we get transparency of data, this thing is not going to be corrected.” 

To underscore the importance of safety, he cited a paper which demonstrates that the chance of a youngster being hospitalized with myocarditis because of the gene-based injections “is greater than that child being hospitalized with COVID-19.”  

“You can’t make this thing up,” McCullough marveled. “It’s not a proposition that anyone would take.” 

The physician also takes a dim view of authorities minimizing the seriousness of vaccine injuries. 

“The other thing I think is malfeasance is to call anything ‘rare,’” he said.  

“We never do that in clinical research. Never. The correct term in safety pharmacovigilance is ‘tip of the iceberg,’ he explained.  

“Whatever we’re seeing now in sporadic reporting is ‘tip of the iceberg.’ VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] could be an underrepresentation by a hundredfold, or even more.  

“When we think we’ve done some analysis on this, using CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service], we think on mortality—maybe it’s a multiplier of five—but the point is, we never would say ‘rare.’  And what the CDC has done … very disingenuously, is when they had 200 cases [of myocarditis] in June, they divided it by everybody who took the vaccine and said, ‘It’s rare.’ Well, you can’t do that unless you check everybody for myocarditis, unless you do an EKG and troponin. You can’t declare they don’t have myocarditis unless you check for it.”  

Early treatment more effective than vaccination 

McCullough also discussed the importance of early treatment compared to the effectiveness of the experimental vaccines. 

“You know what determines who gets hospitalized or doesn’t get hospitalized in the United States? If they got early treatment,” he said.  

“That’s what makes a difference, not a vaccine. Take a look at these papers. Every single paper that makes a claim a vaccine prevents hospitalization and death, your next question [should be] ‘Who received early treatment [and] who didn’t?’”

The physician then presented evidence that the Pfizer vaccine has “completely and totally failed,” using data from Israel to predict what can happen in the U.S.  

“Israel’s post-vaccination curve in their country is bigger than their pre-vaccination curve,” McCullough said.  

“If you had asked the question, ‘Would Israel have been better off not to vaccinate a single person?’ the answer is, ‘Yes,’ from an epidemiology perspective. Yes, [the Pfizer vaccine] is a complete and total failure,” he continued.  

“Yet, what are they doing in Israel? Doubling down. Boosters. They’ve got 11 million people in the country, [and] they’ve already boosterized two million people.”  

Nevertheless, these boosters have failed as well. 

Early treatment vs Therapeutic Nihilism 

When many more serious cases of vaccine injuries started emerging in the U.S., the authorities  created a narrative blaming busy hospitals on patients who refused the vaccines. 

“… The CDC made some decisions [on] May 25th of what’s called biased asymmetric reporting,” McCullough said. 

“This fabricated the books. It cooked the books to make the vaccine failures look small and make the problem starting May 25th forward look like it was going to be a ‘crisis of the unvaccinated’,” he continued.  

“And we started to hear talking points like ‘Oh my gosh, the hospitals are filling up and they’re all unvaccinated,’ and people would kind of say ‘unvaccinated’ with kind of a snarl.” 

Furthermore, Dr. Anthony Fauci has lied about ivermectin, McCullough alleged.  

 “…Ivermectin is supported by over 60 studies, over 30 clinical trials,” the Texas physician said.  

“When our director of the national allergy and immunology branch [Fauci] … got on TV and said categorically there is no evidence supporting ivermectin, he was committing fraud,” he charged.  

“You don’t say, ‘No evidence’ when there are over 30 randomized trials in aggregate that support it.” 

 In addition, hospitals are refusing to use hydroxychloroquine. 

“Do you know hydroxychloroquine [HCQ] today is not used in a single hospital despite a high-quality study [having confirmed its effectiveness]? It’s a crime,” McCullough said.  

“What’s going on is absolutely a crime against humanity.” 

Meanwhile, there should be nothing to stop physicians from prescribing these early treatments, for doctors are “completely entitled to prescribe hydroxychloroquine [and] ivermectin … according to regulatory law,” McCullough added. 

In Italy, “they have announced zero cases, but they use a hydroxychloroquine-based program,“ he stated.  

“In one of the major Indian provinces, just two days ago, they announced zero deaths with an ivermectin-based protocol. [The successful] Mexico City [results also used an] ivermectin-based protocol,” he explained. 

McCullough classifies the general denial of early treatments practiced by much of the medical industry today as Therapeutic Nihilism.

“Therapeutic Nihilism is this intent to do nothing” when facing the threat of a potentially fatal disease,” he explained.  

“With such an omission we promote fear, suffering, isolation, hospitalization, and death.” 

The physician called this approach unethical, immoral, and illegal.  

“It’s called malpractice, and there will be judgment for this,” he promised. 

Therefore, McCullough believes that the “the best place in the world” to have COVID-19 is by a doctor willing to treat patients “early with a sequence multi-drug approach.  

“Demand it, and tell your family members to demand it,” he advised. “Vaccinated or not, demand it.” 

As one example of Therapeutic Nihilism, McCullough flagged a news story about a California woman who sued a hospital to force doctors to treat her ailing husband with ivermectin. 

“Since when do we actually have to sue hospitals to use simple affordable generic medicines that may help patients of which we have some randomized trials to support?” McCullough asked.  

He revealed that the last time he treated a patient with a big heart attack in the ICU, he and the patients’ family negotiated “drugs all day long.”  

“Suddenly, with COVID, there’s no negotiation,” he said.   

“None. ‘No, sorry, we’re not going to do it.’ Therapeutic Nihilism. It’s in the minds of doctors, hospital administrators, nurses and others to actually cause harm,” he continued, 

“And that thought pattern is something you need to smell out, recognize, call out, and we’ve got to extinguish [it].” 

McCullough discussed the importance of “natural immunity.” He believes that early treatment and the large numbers of people soldiering through the illness will get the world to that state. 

“Natural immunity is the way out of this. Listen, if we don’t recognize natural immunity, when is this going to end?,” he asked. 

Recognition of natural immunity must by demanded of the CDC and the government, he added.  

“We have to … be relentless on this.” 

“Medical freedom is related to social freedom is related economic freedom.” 

McCullough urged his hearers to convince others that “freedom is at risk.”  

“We’re at the beginning of, I think, a dark time,” he said.  

“Now is the time to talk about it … to get activated … and [start] talking to as many people [as you can]. And you have to try to clear their eyes… conversation by conversation.” 

McCullough recalled what rock musician Eric Clapton, who came to his home after suffering  a COVID-19 vaccine injury, told him about the relationship of medical freedom to other freedoms. 

“He said, ‘Listen, there’s a circle of medical freedom, and if this is broken, then it’s going to break social freedom, and then economic freedom. So, right now, we have got to shore up that medical circle no matter what’.” 

This medical circle includes “medical freedom to get the treatment that people need, medical freedom to demand good care in the hospital and get it, and medical freedom to decide what goes in your body,” McCullough said. 

“It’s very very important: No one, under any circumstances at all—approved, unapproved, I don’t care—no one can receive any pressure, coercion, or threat of reprisal for [accepting] something injected into your body that you can’t take out, period.” 

“That is the line.”   

McCullough has discouraged patients who ask him which vaccine is best, just wanting to get through the ordeal to save their jobs.  

“I said, ‘How much is this going to buy you? … Are they going to guarantee you 10 years of employment? …You’re not guaranteed anything for taking a vaccine.” 

McCullough warned that censorship is harming medical science, and pointed to the so-called “trusted news initiative,” including the BBC, CNN, MSNBC and all big social media.   

The physician believes that these organizations have virtually said,

“We are going to do everything to promote the vaccine, and we’re going to do everything to crush any vaccine hesitancy, including crushing early treatment and crushing anything on vaccine safety.”  

“That’s the reason why we haven’t heard anything [about] vaccine safety,” he stated.  

“Everything is wide open, there’s no trickery here.” 

McCullough also informed his hearers of incidents of conflict of interest, alleging that key players have profited personally from choices that have harmed Americans.  

“Rick Bright, the guy who blocked hydroxychloroquine inside the White House, and starved America of hydroxychloroquine, he has joined the Rockefeller Foundation,” the doctor stated. 

“Stephen Hahn, the FDA Commissioner who put all these negative blankets on hydroxychloroquine and the other drugs, he has joined the Venture Capital firm who basically is the funder of Moderna.”  

Regarding the National Institutes of Health, for which Fauci and Francis Collins work, McCullough said that “they co-own the patent for the Moderna vaccine.”  

“It’s in the wide open. Scott Gottlieb, former chairman of the FDA is on the board of Pfizer. This is in the open,” he added. 

“The conflict of interest is absolutely unavoidable and is crushing the lifeblood of medicine.”   

‘We’re in the middle of a major biological catastrophe’ 

McCullough said that he and his audience were not alone in the knowledge that we are in dark times.

“I’m telling you, we are not the only ones who realize that we’re in the middle of a major biological catastrophe,” he said.  

He explained that he has recently been called by at least one head of state, by two individuals “up pretty high in the Vatican,” and individuals at the federal reserve bank. 

Knowledge can be dangerous. After showing his audience a letter from the American Board of Internal Medicine threatening to revoke his medical license, the eminent internist said that medical boards are going to “hunt” doctors like him. 

“And the question is, how far are they going to go, and how much are we going to lose?” he said.    

“I can tell you, personally, I’m willing to lose it all.” 

McCullough warned that if Americans don’t get active now, the future holds the same lockdowns, oppression and violence that has happened in Australia.  

“There are powerful forces in place that want this to happen, very powerful forces,” he said. 

“The challenge is to break [them], and the only way to break these powerful forces is to just say ‘no’.” 

People as high-profile as FOX News’s Tucker Carlson have asked McCullough what is behind this crisis. Although he could not answer, the eminent doctor did promote a new book by Peter and Ginger Breggin titled COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We are the Prey.  

“It has a thousand references; it’s meticulous,” McCullough said.   

“It’s largely going to tell you who’s profiting from this and the web of stakeholders here and what’s driving it. I don’t think it’s the root cause, but I think it’s who’s behind a lot of what’s going on. I can tell you, everything we’re living through right now was planned.” 

McCullough confesses that he is being so outspoken because he doesn’t know what else to do.  

“I can’t save every person who calls me, but if I can actually help you and help others and help everybody who comes into my circle, we can get some awareness and awakening,” he said.  

“We are going into a really bad time right now. We have very little time left to get active, [and] I mean really active.” 

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“Burning all fossil fuels would create a different planet” (Hansen, 2016)

While at present the world is necessarily investing in medical research in order to save the lives of millions, global warming is threatening the lives of billions over the century. Yet, authorities are hardly listening to what climate science is projecting regarding the lives of billions, as the Earth is heating.

Since the Paris climate conference in April 2016, when the mean atmospheric carbon dioxide level reached 403.3 ppm, induced by annual emissions of some 400 billion tons of CO₂, the atmospheric level has risen to near 420 ppm, growing at peak rates of 2.5-3.0 ppm/year, the highest recorded since the dinosaur mass extinction of 66 million years ago.

Although the target of the Glasgow meeting is to reach agreement for limiting mean global temperature to 1.5⁰C, due to the short-term mitigating effect of ~0.5–1.0⁰C by aerosols on global temperatures mean global warming is already tracking toward 2⁰C (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Extreme heatwaves, like the one that affected Europe in the summer of 2006, are projected to become widespread at 1.5 degrees Celsius warming. This map, derived from NASA MODIS Terra satellite data, depicts the July 2006 land surface temperature anomaly with regard to the period from 2000-2012.

Hopes that the coming Glasgow climate meeting would help avert a disastrous climate catastrophe depend on:

1. Binding agreements for a drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions rates to pre-peak rates of about ~1ppm/year or lower, requiring world-wide transformation of agricultural, industrial and transport systems.
2. Attempts at sequestration/drawdown of CO₂ to near-350 ppm or lower (Hansen et al. 2013). Although the engineering efforts and the costs of such attempts cannot be overestimated, in principle such attempts could be achieved by a diversion of funds from the astronomical budgets invested in the military-industrial complex world-wide, currently just under $2 trillion, an underlying factor in previous world wars and ultimately aimed at future wars.

A sequestration of CO₂ is essential due to the amplifying feedbacks of global warming, which is pushing temperatures up in a chain reaction-like process, as follows:

• The polar albedo decline due to large-scale lateral and vertical melting of ice;
• Reduced CO₂ intake by the warming oceans. Currently the oceans absorb between 35-42 percent of all CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere and around 90 percent of the excess heat from the rise in greenhouse gases;
• Warming, desiccation, deforestation and fires over extensive and areas;
• Release of methane from melting of permafrost and from polar sediments;
• An increase in evaporation, particularly in arid zones, raising atmospheric vapor levels enhance the greenhouse gas effect.

Mean global temperature however do not represent an accurate picture of the effects of global warming. According to NOAA the impacts of climate change haven’t been spread evenly around our planet … the strongest warming is happening in the Arctic during its cool seasons, and in Earth’s mid-latitude regions during the warm season.” (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Global climate changes to 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius. Temperature change is not uniform across the globe. Projected changes are shown for the average temperature of the annual hottest day (top) and the annual coldest night (bottom) with 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming (left) and 2 degrees Celsius of global warming (right) compared to pre-industrial levels.

The acceleration of warming due to amplifying feedbacks from land and oceans, envisaged by Wally Broecker and others, leads a climate chain reaction such as is believed to have pertained about 55 million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum (PETM). Peter Ward and others refer to early examples of mass extinctions triggered by biological processes related to ocean anoxia, acidification, release of methane (CH₄) and hydrogen sulphide (H₂S), and development of “purple” and “green” algae and sulphur bacteria. In a similar sense anthropogenic global warming constitutes a biological process which the originating organism, Homo sapiens, has not to date been able to limit.

The critical factor which drives climate change, namely the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, which rose by near-50% since pre-industrial time, is only rarely mentioned by the media and by politicians. Nor are other quantitative measures of climate change, such as the level of methane and nitrous oxide, which were elevated about 3-fold, being highlighted. While opinions by journalists, politicians, economists and social scientists are widely promulgated, less attention is given to what is indicated by climate science, a reluctance rendering the global response to the looming climate calamity increasingly irrelevant.

Many scientists are reluctant to warn the public of the full implications of global heating for the habitability of Earth. Issuing public warnings Cassandra-like may incur a heavy price, including social and professional isolation, psychological effects and loss of professional position. Many either self-censor or were suppressed or dismissed within institutions. This includes a common reluctance by the media to publish climate articles.

According to John Schellnhuber, Germany’s former chief climate scientist: “The Earth system’s responses to climate change appear to be non-linear… If we venture far beyond the 2 degrees guardrail, towards the 4 degrees line, the risk of crossing tipping points rises sharply”.

According to Hansen (NASA’s former chief climate scientist) et al. (2012)

“Burning all fossil fuels would create a different planet than the one that humanity knows. The palaeoclimate record and ongoing climate change make it clear that the climate system would be pushed beyond tipping points, setting in motion irreversible changes, including ice sheet disintegration with a continually adjusting shoreline, extermination of a substantial fraction of species on the planet, and increasingly devastating regional climate extremes”.

Considering that the last glacial termination (LGT), i.e. the transition from the last ice age to the Holocene, incurred a rise of about 4 to 5 degrees Celsius over a period of about 7.5 kyr (0.00053 to 0.00066⁰C/year), the Anthropocene global warming (~+1.5⁰C in 270 years; 0.0055⁰C/year) is reaching an order of magnitude faster than the LGT within a century or so, constituting a recipe for a global disaster.

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Dr Andrew Glikson is an Earth and Paleo-climate scientist, Canberra, Australia. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

 

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For 26 long years the UN and their tame media have promoted their expensive annual climate carnivals. This month they will flock to Glasgow for COP 26 but they will not arrive on Shetland ponies, penny farthings or sailing boats – hydro-carbon energy will get most of them there and keep them warm and well fed.

These jamborees are designed to spread climate lies and green energy propaganda.

In the beginning, the witch-doctors of the global warming religion spread lurid tales of drowning polar bears, rising sea levels, dying corals and spreading deserts – all blamed on the wicked coal, oil, cattle and cars that they claim are destroying our green planet. Those disasters never happened. Now truant school kids (who learn their version of climate “science” from smart-phones and social media) are promoting emission reduction by gluing themselves to roads.

The media love scare stories. But despite alarming model projections, decades have passed with no unusual global warming, so their shock stories changed to “wild weather” and every cyclone, tornado, drought, bushfire or flood was trumpeted as proof of looming disaster. “Storms” morphed into “super-storms”, “bushfires” became “fire-storms” and now the media can report “super-tornadoes” without defining them.

It’s time for: “Truth-telling in Glasgow”.

The coming northern winter will confirm the first energy truth – wind, solar, batteries and electric vehicles will not keep people warm and well fed.  The soaring demand for hydrocarbon fuels, the coming electricity blackouts and rationing, and bare grocery shelves will reveal what the media won’t. In the interests of accuracy, COP26 should be rebranded “Cut Our Power 26”.

It’s also time for truthful climate models. Even with sneaky revisions of past records and reinvention of the Hockey Stick, the model forecasts have been wrong for over 40 years – there is no dangerous global warming.

It’s also time to bury the myth that “the science” supports global warming alarm. Hundreds of thousands of qualified and experienced scientists have joined sceptic lists over many years.

The Glasgow tourists should take a pre-COP trip to cold Norway where yet another group of sceptical scientists will launch at the University of Stavanger on the 12th of October.

Maybe they will get a chance to take pictures of iced-up wind turbines or snow-covered solar panels. However the one-eyed media probably prefers pictures of immature school girls chanting slogans and blocking roads?

It looks likely that Glasgow will kick some spectacular own goals. Only an incompetent alarmist would organise a Global Warming meeting in cold Glasgow, with winter approaching and with threats of food, electricity and fuel shortages. Maybe Boris is secretly on our side?

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On August 23rd, 2021 during a town hall meeting, Dr. Rochagné Kilian resigned her clinical position at the five hospital Grey Bruce Health Services (G.B.H.S.) system, where she was employed as an emergency physician, IN PROTEST of the impending vaccine mandate.

In this groundbreaking interview, Dr. Rochagné Kilian, MB.Ch.B, C.C.F.P., C.C.F.P.(E.M.) reveals what led up to her decision to resign in protest, recounting her shocking observations and experiences as the “pandemic” unfolded and eventually the “vaccine” rollout occurred. The South African born and trained emergency medicine specialist and infectious disease expert details to Dr. Sam Dubé, M.D., Ph.D. the horrific contrast between her extensive clinical training, experience & observations, with the contradicting, suppressive, deceptive, and downright harmful protocols and policies enacted by the hospital system in which she was employed.

In addition, it is revealed that upon seeing an explosion of what appeared to be vascular issues among vaccinated patients presenting to the ER, Dr. Kilian independently initiated d-dimer testing (similar to Dr. Charles Hoffe and Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi) with disturbing results….

Finally, Dr. Kilian also addresses much of the unscientific, non-evidence-based and harmful government oversight of the pandemic, from the mandating of injections for our children, to the existence yet suppression of effective treatment modalities, to the blatant lack of informed consent and the backwards policy of isolating the young and healthy to protect the vulnerable (contrary to The Great Barrington Declaration), personified by her poignant question, “Did we ever ask Granny what she wanted?”

NOTE: The last 26 minutes of this video consists of this town hall meeting, where you can hear Dr. Kilian’s objective and expert questioning of the President & C.E.O. of G.B.H.S. regarding the mandate, and the subsequent deflections, “buck passing”, unsubstantiated and unscientific declarations, and blatant misinformation given as actual answers.

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COVID vax contents are beginning to be exposed by various independent doctors around the world. In previous articles, I covered the evidence and/or analysis presented by Dr. Robert Young and Dr. Carrie Madej, which included the discovery that some of the COVID fake-vaccines included graphene, metallic nanoparticles, PEG and parasites such as self-aware critters and threads. In this article, I will present the findings of 2 other doctors who have conducted their own research and analysis. The findings are, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, horrific. On the one hand, they further validate what Young and Madej have already shared with the world. On the other hand, they introduce new never-before-seen substances to the world. The more we know about the COVID vax contents, the more it becomes apparent these concoctions are full of dangerous toxins and synthetic life that absolutely, under no circumstances, belong inside the human body.

COVID Vax Contents: Dr. Zandre Botha

Dr. Zandre Botha from South Africa, a certified live and dried blood analyst of 15 years, appeared on the Stew Peters show to discuss her recent images relating to the COVID non-vaccine. Botha studied both the COVID vax itself as well as the blood of COVID-vaccinated patients. She used vials of COVID vax (Johnson and Johnson) in her analysis. Botha confirmed that the results were highly disturbing and that she had never seen anything like this in her 15 years of blood microscopy analysis. She stresses several times in the interview that she is not an expert however she has been looking at blood and samples under microscopes for a decade and a half.

Blood of COVID vaccinated patient under the microscope, showing deformed red blood cells and mysterious dark substance. Image credit: Dr. Zandre Botha / Stew Peters

When she analyzed the blood of her vaxxed patients, she saw horrible examples of rouleau (the stacking and clumping of red blood cells together in columns). Dr. Young talked about rouleau (and the corona effect) way back in 2020 at the start of this scamdemic. She also discovered a weird black substance/structure among the red blood cells. Notably, Dr. Botha found this in every single vaxxed patient with symptoms!

What she found in the vials was even more disturbing. First of all, she found the exact same aforementioned black structure in the vial as in blood. She also found dark or black symmetrical circles that could be metallic, held together by connectors (see the featured image of this article). It looked engineered and was self-assembling! On another slide, she shows that black lines had started to form. Dr. Botha states that she had seen air bubbles before in blood analysis, and that these substances were not air bubbles. She also conducted a dark-field analysis, and found that particles were reflective.

Check out Botha’s interview with Peters to see more images.

She has been working both with patients recovering from COVID and recovering from the COVID vaccine. Check out her website for her alternative treatment protocols in both cases.

COVID Vax Contents: Analysis by Dr. John B

A “scientist, lecturer, father and whistleblower” with 30,000+ Twitter followers has analyzed the newest incarnation of the Pfizer BioNTech mRNA vaccine called Comirnaty. I have not been able to verify how he obtained Comirnaty, since my understanding of the recent FDA approval was the Comirnaty got approval but BNT162b2 didn’t, and that Comirnaty was not yet available on the market. However, Dr. John B. published his results on his Twitter page, with the first photograph showing a gloved hand holding a vial marked Comirnaty. I will include some but not all of his images. As always, please read on, do your own research and come to your own conclusions. He specifies many measurements in his images, so for reference, 1 meter (m) = 1,000 millimeters (mm) = 1,000,000 micrometer (µm) = 1,000,000,000 (nm). This means there are 1 thousand nanometers in 1 micrometer. He starts off by showing how he is zooming in one 1 drop:

“Zooming in, the larger particles were found to have a diameter of about 1 µm. For comparsion: Diameter of a human hair: 70-90 µm (See this), human red blood cell: 8 µm (See this), SARS-CoV-2: 90-100 nm (See this)”

“Some particle aggregations were also visible in the liquid”

Fiber-like structures can also be seen. Their diameter is in the nm-range. (Remember, a human hair has a diameter of about 70-90 µm). Some of them look like a continuous fiber (a, c), some have branches (b, d).

“Ring-like structure also seen.”

“A futher class of particles: comparatively large and with unique light refraction properties. They come in different shapes (e.g rod-like, squares)“

The last 3 images contain very strange-shaped objects, some of which look like shards of glass and some of which are clearly iridescent, luminescent or fluorescent. Again, to state the obvious, what are these substances and what the hell are they doing in a solution designed to be injected into the human bloodstream?

Common Themes

By now, with more and more independent doctors and scientists conducting their own analysis of the COVID vaccine vials, we can form a picture of what is really in them. The common themes of the COVID vax contents include:

• weird shaped objects like shards of glass
• threads (some of which have branches growing from them) (see also COVID masks and Madej’s evidence)
• bright luminescent or fluorescent colors (see Madej’s evidence and John B.’s evidence), suggesting luciferase and/or a computing system
• synthetic/engineered substances (look symmetrical, e.g. ring-like structures making a perfect circle, or the black circular grid int eh featured image)
• self-assembling

Final Thoughts

The NWO controllers must have known people would eventually analyze the contents of the vax under microscopy and discover what was in them. At the start of the scamdemic, it seemed that access to the vials was tightly controlled, but now, many independent doctors are getting their hands on them. Did they really think they would get away with hiding the contents from the public forever? Or do they think their plan is too far advanced for this exposure to matter? Or are they glad for it to come out now, so as to induce a sense of learned helplessness in the masses? The evidence discovered by these doctors and presented here (and in previous articles) could easily be used in a court of law in countless cases relating to the fake COVID pandemic and emergency. Humanity is literally being injected with synthetic substances, some of which self-assemble and may even be self-aware.

Transhumanism is not coming; it’s here.

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Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles, author of the book Cancer: The Lies, the Truth and the Solutions and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com. Makia is on Odysee/LBRY and Steemit.

Sources

https://thefreedomarticles.com/covid-vax-ingredients-exposed-graphene-nano-metals-parasites/

https://thefreedomarticles.com/covid-vax-creatures-live-self-aware-critters-found-microscope/

https://odysee.com/@BannedYouTubeVideos:4/Blood-Doctor-Reveals-HORRIFIC-Findings-After-Examining-Vials:b

https://thefreedomarticles.com/doctor-reveals-corona-effect-blood-coagulation/

https://www.drzandrebotha.com/copy-of-post-covid-injection-protocol

https://mobile.twitter.com/i/web/status/1444639912880443396

https://thefreedomarticles.com/strange-alive-worm-like-mask-fibers-found-in-covid-face-masks/

All images in this article are from TFA unless otherwise stated

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The European Gas Crisis keeps hitting new high after new high as gas prices around the world go ballistic.  While this isn’t just a European problem, if you read the MSM, that’s all they seem to care about.

You know, it snows in Japan as well folks, and China.

Prices keep skyrocketing in Europe because there is no shortage of idiocy at the top of the European power structure. The confluence of the pressurizing of Nordstream 2 with the release of the “Pandora Papers” and the beginnings of German coalition talks just after the beginning of Q4 should have everyone’s Spidey-Sense shutting down like your adrenals do after a long period of self-inflicted stress.

And honestly, whose adrenals aren’t on the verge of collapse after eighteen months of ‘flatten the curve,’ ‘follow the science,’ and ‘just roll over to the Communism, already, you disgusting plebe!’ that we’ve been going through.

I guess that’s yet another thing we have to try and factor into our analysis of what collapse is the most imminent?

Because when you put this gas crisis in Europe into its proper context it should be clear where the battle lines are being drawn as the extreme pressure cooker of today’s geopolitical landscape forces everyone off the sidelines and into the fray.

On the one hand we have natural gas prices in Europe approaching coffin corner. On the other we have Russia browning out gas deliveries to Europe. China is experiencing major energy shortages and the entirety of the coal delivery network around the world is buckling.

These are facts. There are more I could list but let’s stay focused here.

The thing that makes no sense, seemingly, is that no one has an answer why these facts exist in the first place.

Because all anyone official ever wants to do is blame the sneaky Russians to avoid their own responsibility for this.

Finally, after a couple of weeks of this howling, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the issue from their side.

I suggest strongly you read his remarks carefully. Because in there you’ll find a couple of ‘facts’ which make this entire crisis in Europe seem like yet another staged ‘false flag’ for political gain. Ready?

The two middle points are the ones the no one want to report on but are the key to the understanding of this.

Europe is engaged in a game of idiotic brinksmanship with its people and the capital markets over gas supplies. They do this to construct a narrative and distort markets for political benefit.

When the reality is that this entire ‘crisis’ is a manufactured one because of their unwillingness to bow to the forces their policies have unleashed.

Gas prices in Europe are this way because of Europe’s own mistakes in trying to remake its economy (Putin Point #4).

Moreover, Putin also urged Gazprom, as a gesture of good faith despite his misgivings, to ship gas through Ukraine even though it would be better to turn on other capacity.

“Gazprom believes that it is economically more viable, it would even be more profitable to pay a fine to Ukraine, but to increase the volume of pumping through new systems precisely because of the circumstances that I mentioned – there is more pressure in the pipe, less CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. Everything is cheaper, around 3 billion a year. But I ask you not to do this,” the President said.

Does this sound like the mustache-twirling tyrant that’s portrayed in the odious British, US and German media?

Of course not. Now, I’m not accusing Putin of being an angel here or anything, he’s throwing scraps back to people who have put themselves in a position to starve and freeze to death, both literally and politically.

The goal here is to highlight just how moronic the EU’s stance on energy has become, to finally to break up the logjam.

He’s happy to see Gazprom (and possibly Rosneft if need be) sell all Europeans as much gas as it can supply and they demand, but only on terms that benefit everyone, supplier and demander. As I’ve talked about in previous blog posts, the EU thinks they have a monopsony on Russian gas and because of this can dictate terms to them.

This is patently untrue, and Gazprom shifting around supplies for a few days here and there proves that point dramatically. Like Jay Powell draining the world of eurodollars with just five basis points, Putin and Gazprom can expose the the extent of Eurocrat mendacity with just a few days of slowing gas exports.

That’s why this brinksmanship over gas supplies and electricity prices isn’t aimed at the Russians, who clearly have other customers for their gas, but with the people of Europe themselves and the capital markets all structured around one-sigma price volatility they are now extremely vulnerable even if things begin to return to normal.

The Russian Bogey Man is simply the cover story for what is a much deeper and, frankly, much more disturbing game.

So, while Zerohedge is correct about gas supply brown outs in Europe it’s only partly for reasons abundantly clear to even first-year geopolitical analysts:

Flows dropped as Gazprom has booked only about a third of the gas transit capacity it was offered for October via the Yamal-Europe pipeline and no extra transit capacity via Ukraine.

Gazprom declined to comment. It has repeatedly said it was supplying customers with gas in full compliance with existing contracts and said additional supplies could be provided once the newly built Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline was launched.

Ball. Court. Germany.

Yes, Germany needs Nordstream 2. Hell Europe needs Nordstream 3 if these Davos ninnies are wrong about Climate Change, which they are.

Germany is the country caught in the middle of this titanic battle for the future of the world and Davos is the group creating this false flag to force a shift in sentiment negatively towards Russia.

That’s what’s driving this current crisis, one that, I think, is now threatening the future of the European Union itself. If those are the stakes, then eventually someone will finally do the right thing. Putin just offered the smallest of olive branches. Now let’s see if the European Commission has three collective brain cells to rub together and figure out how to save face (and their backsides).

Beating up and demeaning your neighbor is not a winning strategy, nor is it a path to lower prices and stable markets. At some point they, the Russians, realize that the situation is exactly what it looks like from the outside, war. And, in this case the Russians under Putin are finally treating the EU commissars as enemy combatants because that’s who they are.

That’s why his comments were structured to put the onus of the crisis back on Europe’s leadership rather than blaming the people keeping the lights on in the first place.

Whenever things like this happen Capitalism is always blamed. But, it’s always Commie vandals like the EU Commission who created the problem, either deliberately with dumb things like the Third Gas Directive or malinvestment of capital which leaves the world vulnerable to a hot summer in Asia.

And this is the essential point no one wants to confront. The EU picked this fight purely for political purposes because they have an agenda — energy instability for political benefit — but it has come back to bite them in the ass.

Because, as I said, the markets are so tight it takes only a small shift in sentiment to see the prices of things with inelastic demand, like energy, rise dramatically with a marginal shift in either supply, demand or, in this case, both.

Russia doesn’t act this ‘by the book’ at this moment in time without a plan. Treating the EU like the enemies they are is the strategic play. Whining about it in the media only accentuates their weakness and lack of leverage.

My friends at Mittdolcino.com are positively despondent because they see this power play for how it affects Italy, which is that it will carve the country up into pieces over divergent needs for inflation and deflation between it and Germany since one of these two countries need to exit the Euro-zone.

There’s no way this massive ‘drop’ in Russian supplies to the EU occurs without a longer-term strategic plan by the Russians.  Putin has made it clear he is fully fed up with EU shenanigans and this is the time for him to put the most pressure imaginable on Brussels to break the EU into tiny pieces.

How?  It’s again, all about Germany.

When Nordstream 2 was announced and I was writing Gold Stock Advisor for Newsmax in 2013 I talked then about how the difference between how gold was accounted for between the ECB and the Fed.  That put Germany squarely in the middle between the U.S. on one side and Russia on the other.

Russia and China still hadn’t signed the big deal for the Power of Siberia pipeline at the time. They are now working on Power of Siberia 2, which will open up the massive mineral deposits in Mongolia.  So, even then, in my naïve way of seeing the world then as a first-year geopolitical analyst, I understood that Russia’s foreign policy had to be focused on getting Germany to side with them versus the U.S.

The political establishment in Germany was never going to let that happen because under Obama Davos was running the operation to cleave Ukraine from Russia.  To date, both have been partially successful.  Both Ukraine and Germany are being torn apart from within as domestic leadership bows to internationals forces forcing them to pursue policies which go completely against their countries’ wishes and best interests.

So, now, fast forward to today.  The day after the German elections brings a mess but with a highly likely outcome that the SPD will ally with the Greens and the FDP. With Christian Lidner (FDP) as Finance Minister (at least temporarily) we have a German government at war with itself.

As Alex Mercouris brought up after I left the chat with Crypto Rich last week, the Greens are fracturing over the Russia issue.  Part of them want a restoration of good Russian relations, the other are neocon/Davos infiltrators trying to constantly move the goalposts on both Climate Change and geopolitics.

The SPD are pure Davos scum at this point so expect nothing good from them.  This is why I think Putin ‘shut off the taps’ the day after the election.  Like everyone else, he can see what Davos is doing and doesn’t like it.  So, in order for him to make his point he does exactly what he should, stop trading with those who have unofficially declared war on Russia and push the political scene in Germany to a breaking point.

Because here’s where this goes.  Germany needs to either control the purse strings of the EU or it needs to leave the euro-zone and be independent of the sinking ship.  Putin realizes that the best way to achieve this is to pour gasoline on a raging firestorm in the energy markets (oh, the humanity of the puns!) and remind German voters just who is truly responsible for their €2000/month electricity bills.

It’s not Putin.  It’s Berlin.  So, Berlin needs to sign off on Nordstream 2 and then ram it down the EU Commission’s throat.  And they better do it soon because Winter is Coming, after all.

And they just voted for more of this while Merkel, who has been the biggest obstacle to AfD’s inclusion in any government, is leaving the scene.  The CDU leadership got whacked across the board.  Most of the big names will not be in the Bundestag this time around, so the party will be doing a lot of self-reflection.

Inflation of the type Putin is ‘forcing’ on Europeans today is the type a country only recovers from with a political inversion.  This is why today we’re seeing surprise rate hikes from Poland, for example. It’s why Serbia is begging Russia to increase gas supplies there and Hungary signed a 15-year deal to secure its energy future.

While there is no appetite for a political inversion in Germany today after last week’s vote, there will be in about 3 months if coalition talks stall. Because the ECB under Christine Lagarde cannot raise rates but is powerless to stop them rising ultimately if the market senses that there is no political leadership capable of reining it in.

That ship sailed a few months ago after the Fed called Lagarde’s hawkish bluff and actively drained more than $1 trillion from overseas dollar markets and just increased the capacity to drain even more, without tapering QE.

Now let’s go back to the Fed and Wall St.  If there is a real backlash within some areas of the U.S. ‘big money’ against Davos which is showing up as Fed monetary policy, per my consistent analysis of the situation and events playing out to support it, then they are tacitly coordinating with Putin to give Germany what it wants, an excuse to leave the euro and conduct independent trade and energy policy.

Think about it.  On the one hand the Fed is drying up dollars.  On the other Putin is spiking energy prices making it impossible for Germany to fight inflation within the EU.  On the third hand, China is cracking down on property speculation domestically, kicking out the foreign NGOs and reminding foreign investors that the rules in China are not the same as they are in the West.

You can and will lose all your money if you invest behind the Great Wall, as so many Evergrande bondholders just found out.

Now let’s square the entire circle. If Europe’s energy crisis is a constructed false flag event to spook capital, encourage speculators and effect political change, then can’t you make the same arguments for the concurrent fight on Capitol Hill regarding the Democrats, the debt ceiling and the spending bills?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been adamant that the Democrats do not need any help in passing a debt ceiling resolution. They can do it any time they want to. But, the Democrats won’t do this? Why? They are manufacturing a narrative that there is crisis on the horizon — default on U.S. bond payments.

This is the one outcome no investor wants to contemplate. So, the Democrats, like the Europeans, are arguing against themselves in order to blackmail the world into giving them their cookie or they will hold their breath until they collapse global markets.

Let me repeat. There is no debt ceiling crisis. There is no U.S. default crisis. There is only a bunch of Mafiosi on Capitol Hill doing what they’ve been told to do while purposefully scaring everyone into believing there is a crisis when none exists.

Do I have to invoke a classic Who song to make my point?

What’s the goal? Chaos and the continued undermining of faith in politics, capital markets, energy production and seizing supply chains as we approach the winter in the Northern Hemisphere where susceptibility to pesky things like the flu, the latest iteration of COVID-9/11 and blatant political bullshit swells like a boil on the back of a government bureaucrat blocking a permit for some basic, but eminently important thing.

That Putin came out and told the world he’s ready to work with Europe to do his part alleviating the energy supply problems in Europe I’ve not heard one encouraging word from those that would benefit from this the most.

Their silence is deafening.

And that brings me back to Germany where, unless this gets resolved quickly, the most likely downstream outcome is Germany leaving the euro, reinstitute the Deutsche Mark, watch it fall vs. the dollar in the near term but outcompete the euro.

With the euro in freefall after a disastrous Q3 close and German Bunds getting prepared for their next big sell-off, perhaps, maybe, for the first time in a long time, the markets are beginning to wake up from their central bank induced SOMA injections and get real with the possibilities that forces are now aligned to do the unthinkable, break up the EU.

But that only happens with a political inversion where the CDU/CSU ally with AfD and the FDP to form a real government after the current parties can’t form a coalition or any three-way coalition formed fails as inflation crushes the German middle class.

If the AfD were smart now they would be blaming all of this on Merkel’s moronic energy policy.  Now we’re seeing calls for delaying shutting down Germany’s nuclear reactors.  They can’t import enough coal to feed the plants.  BASF has shut down ammonia production, so food production is threatened.

There is no Agenda 2030 on the horizon if Germans freeze to death in their homes or get decimated by COVID-9/11 because they can’t afford to heat their homes.

This will crush France and Macron, overthrow Davos at the mid-terms here in the states and break the European Union in the process.

Germany is the lynchpin to the entire Davos edifice.  Without a compliant and beaten Germany there is no further Great Reset.  A Germany that breaks from the euro becomes a Germany that realigns with Russia and Eastern Europe. It’s a Germany no longer hell bent on internal European mercantilism and the establishment of the Fourth Reich through the EUSSR.

The German people keep asking for that policy to end but aren’t given the options by their leadership to make that happen.  Then again, they keep giving their leadership just enough power to forestall their having to make a real decision. That decision is coming at them, fast.

As it is everyone across the West in various guises.

So, as as Powell with five little basis points is under extreme pressure to go full MMT retard but so far has held his water and Putin with a few million BTUs of gas, these men are forcing open fault lines in the aristocracy that thinks it deserves to run the world and can bring down the whole rotten edifice.

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The former Monsanto Co., now owned by Bayer AG, notched its first win in the mass tort U.S. Roundup litigation on Tuesday, defeating at trial a mother who alleged her use of Roundup exposed her child to the pesticide and caused him to develop cancer.

Ezra Clark was born in May 2011 and diagnosed in 2016 with Burkitt’s lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) that has a high tendency to spread to the central nervous system, and can also involve the liver, spleen and bone marrow, according to the court filings. Ezra’s mother, Destiny Clark, is the plaintiff in the case, which was heard in Los Angeles County Superior Court. A different Roundup trial is underway in San Bernardino County Superior Court.

Ezra Clark was “directly exposed” to Roundup many times as he accompanied his mother while she sprayed Roundup to kill weeds around the property where the family lived, according to court documents. Ezra has autism and his mother said it calmed him to play outdoors while she worked in the yard, which meant he often played in areas freshly sprayed with Roundup, according to the court filings.

Fletch Trammell, lead attorney for Clark, said his case was subject to a bifurcation order that organized the case into two phases. In the first phase he was limited to presenting evidence that focused on the child’s personal exposure to Roundup and whether or not it could have been enough to have contributed to his disease. The case would have proceeded to a second phase had the plaintiff won the first phase, but the loss in the first phases ends the trial.

“This was nothing like any of the other three trials,” Trammell said.

The jury was asked to address one key question in the first phase: Whether or not the child’s exposure to  Roundup was a “substantial factor” in his development of Burkitt’s lymphoma.

In a 9 to 3 decision, the jury found that it was not.

Trammell said the jury decision was because the jury doubted the child’s exposure to Roundup could have been enough to cause cancer. The decision did not address the larger question of the alleged carcinogenicity of Roundup overall, he said.

But Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018 as the first Roundup trial was getting underway, said the jury’s decision was in line with scientific research showing glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, is safe and does not cause cancer.

“The jury carefully considered the science applicable to this case and determined that Roundup was not the cause of his illness,” the company said in a statement.

80 hours

During the trial, Trammel presented evidence indicating Ezra was exposed to Roundup for about 80 cumulative hours over the years his mother sprayed with him at her side. He paired that with research showing there could ben an increased risk of NHL associated with repeated spraying of glyphosate herbicides, such as Roundup. And he noted language on Roundup labels in Canada that advise users to wear protective gloves and avoid getting the chemical on bare skin.

“The studies… they show that Roundup does three different things when it gets to your lymphocyte cells…   It can kill cells, which is bad enough; but it also causes the exact DNA damage that results in Burkitt’s lymphoma; it also, in a variety of ways, devastates your body’s ability to repair DNA damage,” Trammell told jurors in his closing argument.

Trammell also sought to counter problems with deposition testimony given by Destiny Clark. Trammell said the mother also has suffered from cancer, a cervical cancer that metastasized to her brain. The illness and treatments she has undergone made it difficult for her to recall details and she “made a lot of mistakes” in the deposition she gave to Monsanto’s attorneys, Trammell told jurors. But she was very clear, he told jurors, on recalling her use of Roundup nearly “every weekend” when Ezra was young.

Monsanto attorney  Brian Stekloff told jurors that Ezra’s exposure was in doubt. He told jurors that while they might have sympathy for the family, they could not ignore inconsistencies in Destiny Clark’s testimony about how often her son was exposed, and could not ignore statements by other family members that they did not see her spraying around Ezra.

“And there is an old adage or old saying, and it goes like this: The truth is simple because there’s nothing to remember,” Stekloff told jurors. “When you tell the truth, you don’t mix up the facts. It’s when it didn’t happen that you can’t remember what you said the first time and the next time, and the next time, and the next time. And the inconsistencies start piling up and piling up, and the explanations start coming and piling up and piling up. And that’s what you have seen here in this trial.”

Stekloff told jurors the evidence did not support a finding that exposure to Roundup was a substantial factor in causing his cancer.

“This is not a popularity contest. This is not a referendum on Monsanto. It’s not even a referendum on Roundup,” he said in his closing argument. “Roundup did not cause Ezra Clark’s Burkitt’s lymphoma.”

Clark is one of tens of thousands of plaintiffs who filed U.S. lawsuits against Monsanto after the World Health Organization’s cancer experts in 2015 classified glyphosate – the active ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicides – as a probable human carcinogen with an association to NHL.

Monsanto lost each of the three previous trials, after lawyers for the plaintiffs presented jurors with multiple scientific studies finding potential health risks with glyphosate and Roundup  The plaintiffs lawyers also used internal Monsanto documents as evidence, arguing the so-called “Monsanto Papers” showed intentional efforts by the company to manipulate regulators and control scientific research.

The jury in the last trial ordered $2 billion in damages though the award was later shaved to $87 million.

Bayer has maintained that there is no cancer risk with the glyphosate herbicides it inherited from Monsanto, but it has agreed to pay close to $14 billion to try to settle the litigation and said it will remove glyphosate products from the U.S. consumer market by 2023. The company will continue to sell the herbicides to farmers and other commercial users.

Mike Miller, who heads the Virginia law firm that won two of the three previously held Roundup trials, i but who was not involved in the Clark case, said the verdict does not change anything about the litigation, nor Bayer’s liability.

“Nothing about that verdict change the fact: Roundup causes cancer,” he said.

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Featured image: Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, is the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in history. (Photo: Mike Mozart/Flickr/cc)

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It’s been over a year-and-a-half since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic and the battle over wearing masks is still going on. Who would have thought.

Cities and school boards in some states like Florida are defying governors who got rid of mask mandates claiming that they have the authority to impose them.

Other school districts like some in York County Pennsylvania are refusing so-called CDC guidelines, which aren’t laws, and won’t impose mask mandates. President Joe Biden is being sued multiple times for imposing his latest mask mandates. And let’s not ignore the fact that nowhere in the U.S. Constitution does it say a president can mandate anything. He has absolutely no right to tell anyone what to do except for government employees and even then there are limits.

It both angers and saddens me that so many of my fellow Homo sapiens are utterly clueless. I’m truly fed up with all of the nitwits I see walking around in masks. What is it going to take to wake them up? I see frail sickly old people hobbling along in masks. These people need all the oxygen they can get. The last thing they need is a diaper on their face. I just recently saw a guy at the gym I go to wearing a mask while exercising with heavy weights who almost passed out. He was literally gasping for air. But he wouldn’t take off his trusty mask. The first time I ever saw him, I politely pointed out that the WHO explicitly states not to wear a mask while exercising. He assured me that he knew what he’s doing because he’s a doctor. Somebody, anybody, God, space aliens, beings from another dimension, please rescue us. We need HELP!

Fauci Fatigue

Back in early March 2020, three days before the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Anthony Fauci was interviewed on 60 Minutes. He emphatically stated that “people should not be walking around with masks…there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” He then later retracted that statement as reported in the Washington Post in July 2020, explaining that he was concerned about a shortage of masks or personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers, and that “We didn’t realize the extent of asymptomatic spread.”

Yet, at a press conference back in January 2020, Fauci clearly stated that “in all the history of respiratory borne viruses of any type asymptomatic transmission has ever been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person.”

All the way back in May 2019, months before anyone even heard of COVID-19, Fauci was interviewed on the David Rubenstein Show. The entire interview can be watched here. It was all softball questions. But at the end of the interview Rubenstein asked Fauci if he was his doctor what would be the best way for him to prevent getting an infectious disease, “wearing a mask?” Fauci ridiculed the idea, referring to it as “paranoia” and told him a “low tech” approach was the best way to go, as in eat right, exercise regularly, don’t smoke or consume alcohol, and get plenty of sleep. Here is the excerpt.

Fauci in 2019: "You don't need masks." pic.twitter.com/eTpEIJQw4d

— Sebastian Gorka DrG (@SebGorka) September 17, 2021

What’s going on? Is Fauci, lying, insane, senile, or a combination of all three? For the Fauci apologists who still think he is all knowing, all wise, and that some new scientific evidence must have come out that contradicts what he previously said about masks, read this March 31, 2020 NBC news report. This was three days before Fauci started telling everyone to wear masks on April 3. It says:

“While the science behind whether masks can prevent a person from catching the coronavirus hasn’t changed (a mask does not help a healthy person avoid infection), public guidance may be shifting.”

The article further declares:

“There is no scientific evidence that wearing face coverings would have a measurable impact on flattening the coronavirus curve.”

Is it any wonder that a recent Rasmussen poll shows that “Fauci fatigue” has set in. Less than half the country has a favorable view of Fauci. I’ve got them all beat. I’ve been fed up with Fauci since the AIDS fiasco back in the 1980s. In my case, it’s Fauci exhaustion.

Hypocrites and liars all

Once COVID-19 was declared a pandemic government officials all over the world at every level turned into petty tyrants. But it also rapidly became abundantly clear that these little Hitlers and Mussolinis didn’t think that their stupid rules should apply to them. They have flagrantly violated their own mask and social distancing rules with impunity.

Here are but a few examples:

Tucker Carlson reported that at a $30,000. per plate Democratic fund raising event in Napa Valley California last August, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave a speech. In spite of Pelosi being a mask zealot who imposed a mandatory mask rule on the House of Representatives back in July 2020, neither she nor any of the people attending wore masks. As pictured here, they all sat at long tables huddled together—no masks, no social distancing. But the peons serving them had to wear masks.

Source: Duty to America News

Back in September 2020, NBC News reported that Pelosi who chided then President Donald Trump and other Republicans for not following coronavirus safety protocols, got her hair done at a San Francisco beauty salon that was closed to the public due to the lockdowns which violated the city’s COVID-19 rules. Security camera footage showed Pelosi with wet hair and no mask.

Here is a YouTube video of Anthony Fauci, the poster boy for mask virtue, quickly removing his mask when he thinks the cameras aren’t rolling. A July 2020 WUSA9 article also caught Fauci with his mask pulled down at a baseball game. He claims he was dehydrated and that he pulled it down to drink some water. The cell phone in his hand doesn’t look like a water bottle. In another photo he’s sitting with his mask pulled down and doesn’t have anything in either hand.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, another raging petty tyrant, also played hippity-hop to the beauty shop to get her hair done back in April 2020 despite the fact that such businesses were shut down due to the state’s stay-at-home order. Lightfoot shamelessly defended her haircut by saying she’s the face of the city and out in the public eye. This is the same Lightfoot who vowed to vigorously prosecute anyone who violated stay-at-home orders. And last May she was caught partying maskless at a restaurant after declaring she will continue to wear masks in public and urged everyone else to do the same.

Check out more acts of blatant hypocrisy by government officials in this and other countries here.

And let us not forget back in September 2020 when Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf and state legislator Wendy Ulman didn’t realize that the podium mic at a press conference was turned on and laughed about masks being “political theater.”

Connect the dots folks. How come we weren’t told to wear masks in previous flu seasons or pandemics? How about because during the 1918 Spanish flu mask mandates were passed in some cites and studies from that time showed that they didn’t work. How about the numerous quality studies that have been done long after that time and in modern times that also show masks don’t work? So, why did public policy on masks shift when there is no scientific evidence that wearing them does any good? The fact that government officials violate the COVID restrictions they are imposing on us should tell you that they know all of this is a gigantic fraud. Wise up people: you’re being played.

Real science vs junk science

Ah, but hold on a second. Last September the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) cited three new studies showing that masks work. In reality, these were observational and modeling studies which prove nothing. Here is why.

There are two main types of medical research: observational and experimental along with a murky third type called computer modeling.

Observational studies deal with statistical correlations or epidemiology and the study of human behavior and emotions without any kind of intervention. Cohort studies, case control studies, asking people how they feel while doing something or after they did something, cultural observation, such as anthropologists living among primitive peoples to learn how they think and behave—the proverbial “fly on the wall.” Such studies are usually cheap, can be conducted over a long period of time, and sometimes they are all that can be done in regard to what is being studied.

The worst kind of scientific research to rely on is computer modeling. It is used to create simulations and representations of real world events as well as make predictions or explain what might happen in certain situations or areas. In other words, it explores the great WHAT IF. But computer models aren’t reality and can’t know all of the variables. To quote Science Learning Hub: “Models have always been important in science and continue to be used to test hypotheses and predict information. Often they are not accurate because the scientists may not have all the data.”

Example: computer models used to flesh-out and determine the size of the prehistoric mackerel shark otodus megalodon which swam in our oceans for almost 20 million years before going extinct about 2.6 million years ago. It was the largest fish that ever lived and had a bite force more powerful than Tyrannosaurus Rex. Turns out the original models were wrong and instead of 50 feet long it was more like 65 ft. long. The size uncertainty is because shark skeletons are mainly cartilage which doesn’t fossilize so all paleontologists have to work with are its teeth and jaws—the only parts that were bone. But the new estimate could just as easily be wrong and so what.

If computer models are wrong about how fleshed-out dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals looked and behaved it’s no fuzz of my peach. No harm done. But if inaccurate computer models are used to determine public health policies then it matters a whole lot.

Case in point: epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, also known as “Professor Lockdown” of London’s Imperial College. This is the fool who did a flawed computer model showing that there would be 510,000 COVID-19 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million deaths in this country unless, as reported in Business Insider on April 25 2020, “herd immunity” was scrapped in favor of a “suppression strategy” or “weeks of lockdown.”

Herd immunity means that people go about their normal lives, the virus runs its course, and the surviving population, which is just about everyone, develops antibodies and is immune. This is the nonintervention strategy governments should have followed instead of listening to an idiot like Ferguson who’s computer models suck. Read MSN’s 9-18-2021 report on Ferguson’s reign of error.

The third type of scientific research are experimental studies which involve testing, measuring and examining an actual something. This kind of scientific research is the realm of controlled experiments which are a lot more expensive to do, but are the best way to determine the truth. The gold standard of controlled experiments are randomized controlled trials with verified outcomes (RCTS) along with meta analysis (combining different studies) and systematic reviews of RCTs. When testing a drug or a vitamin supplement RCTs are referred to as double-blind, placebo-controlled studies.

All observational mask studies can do is claim that there is a correlation between wearing masks and COVID-19 cases and death numbers. Such studies are contradictory. There are plenty of observational studies that show masks don’t work. They are also heavily subject to bias because there are too many variables in the real world. There is no way to know who wore masks consistently, if they wore them properly, and it’s easy to cherry-pick data. As the old saying goes: “correlation doesn’t prove causation.” In other words, when it comes to masks, you have to verify observational studies with RCTs because they eliminate bias and speculation by testing the masks directly to see if they actually work. Get it folks? You don’t need to rely on weak observational and computer studies when you’re dealing with an actual something like a mask.

The Journal of the American Medial Association (JAMA), one of the world’s top ten medical journals, warned about relying on observational studies to guide policies on COVID-19 in a July 2020 article because they might “reduce the likelihood of a properly designed trial being performed, thereby delaying the discovery of reliable truth…if leaders, commentators, academics, and clinicians cannot restrain the rush to judgment in the absence of reliable evidence, the proliferation of observational treatment comparisons will hinder the goal of finding effective treatments for COVID-19—and a great many other diseases.”

The WHO’s “Interim Guidance” on page 6 states that there is no high quality direct scientific evidence that supports the use of masks by the general public. Instead, they admit that it is “a growing compendium of observational evidence,” the kind of evidence that JAMA warned against relying on, that indicates their possible effectiveness.

Every properly conducted RCT on masks ever done over the past 80 years has shown that masks regardless of what kind, cloth, surgical, N95, are worthless against viral diseases. There has never been an exception which includes the Danish study, the first RCT conducted to determine if masks are effective against the COVID-19 virus, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine last November. It found the benefits of wearing masks “was not statistically significant.” Read the results of some of the other rigorous RCT mask studies here, here, and here.

Notice that I said every properly conducted RCT. This excludes the recent Bangladesh mask study. it was the only RCT that showed some benefit to wearing surgical masks. But there were all sorts of problems with it and proper protocols weren’t followed. In spite of this, the study also found what all the properly conducted RCTs found: cloth masks are utterly useless. N95 masks, also known as respirators, weren’t included in the study. For a thorough debunking of this flawed RCT read Dr. Denis Rancourt’s article and Dr. Scott Atlas’s interview on Fox News here.

Bottom line: masks don’t work—even a lot of the packages they come in say that they won’t protect you from SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses. For example, a study from the University of Waterloo, Canada found that blue surgical masks were only 10% effective in stopping COVID-19 infection. This is because all masks, regardless of what kind, have a network of microscopic pores which are larger than the viruses they are supposed to keep out. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to breathe in them at all. Viruses go right through masks as Fauci pointed out in a February 2020 email.

This is demonstrated in mechanistic studies which test masks to determine the quantity of viral particles and droplets they block. The studies, such as this one, always show that plenty of viral particles will go through and around the sides of any mask. This is especially true in the case of men who have beards. The FDA admits some of this here. But saying that masks are 75%, 80%, 95% or even 99% effective is saying that they are 0% effective. This is why N95 masks, which means they filter out at least 95% of pathogens, fare no better than other types of masks in RCT studies. If you want to use an anthology, don’t think of a raincoat and umbrella preventing most parts of you from getting wet in a torrential rain storm. Instead, think of a screen door on a submarine because that’s how useless masks are.

Wearing a mask isn’t a small thing to ask

A common mantra uttered by some members of the brainwashed public along with politicians and bureaucrats who’s mental processes have atrophied from non use is that wearing a mask is small thing to ask—no big deal—a minor inconvenience. Oh, really? I think not.

As explained in some of my previous articles, numerous studies in the scientific literature demonstrate that masks are extremely damaging to the health of adults and children in numerous ways. A huge comprehensive review of those studies was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health last April. It included numerous systematic reviews and meta-analysis of experimental and observational studies.

The study documents that by obstructing the nose and mouth, oxygen deprivation increases CO2 levels in the blood causing: hypoxia,hypercapnia, facial lesions, damage to teeth and gums such as gingivitis that along with less oxygen increases the risk of heart attack and stroke, cancer due to lower oxygen levels and toxic substances in the masks, psychological deterioration, physical and mental exhaustion, headaches, and confusion which the authors of the study call MIES (Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome). Masks are even more harmful to children.

Masks create a warm moist environment on the face which is a veritable petri dish for all sorts of pathogenic microbes that “can cause clinically relevant fungal, bacterial or viral infections.” In addition, mask wearers exhale more fine microscopic aerosol particles than non mask wearers which can remain suspended in the fluid air for hours and are the primary mode of viral transmission, not droplets. This is why plastic shields at store counters are worthless. The viral aerosols are everywhere and everyone is breathing the same air.

The study further explains: “The mask-induced adverse changes are relatively minor at first glance, but repeated exposure over longer periods in accordance with the above-mentioned pathogenic principle is relevant…According to the scientific results and findings, masks have measurably harmful effects not only on healthy people, but also on sick people…”

No, folks, wearing a mask isn’t a small thing to ask—it is far too much to ask.

Additional facts to consider

When you hear some doctor or scientist extolling the benefits of wearing a face diaper, keep in mind that there is no such thing as a PhD in masks. Medical doctors can specialize in many areas, but none are specialists in masks. No such zebra exists. Like everyone else, MDs and PhDs have to educate themselves on this topic or they won’t know jack. It doesn’t matter how many diplomas are hanging on their wall.

A doctor may learn how to use masks and respirators in medical school. For example, surgeons are taught to use masks in operating rooms to prevent droplets from their nose and mouth from going into a patient’s open wound. But this doesn’t mean that they know if masks actually work. Doctors aren’t taught to question the procedures they learned in medical school who’s curriculum is heavily influenced by Big Pharma.

 

And let us not forget that a lot of doctors and scientists are paid whores. For centuries science was dominated by wealthy aristocrats and innovative thinkers who did science for the pure joy of it. But as Dr. Peter Duesberg, PhD explained in his 1996 book “Inventing The AIDS Virus,”the lone pioneer, the Isaac Newton, the Albert Einstein, intrepidly exploring the mysteries of the universe in his laboratory has been kicked out of mainstream science. In his place is a huge bureaucracy that controls teams of scientists who are dependent on huge government grants.

To get along in science today you have to follow whatever the corporate agenda is or you won’t get funded. If doctors don’t play along they can lose their medical license. This creates a herd mentality that ostracizes doctors and scientists who dare to speak out. As Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) put it: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Some people will argue that they are educated and informed on a topic because they watch a lot of news or read the paper. Dead wrong! They aren’t educating themselves—they are brainwashing and indoctrinating themselves because they aren’t verifying if what they’re being told is true. And this doesn’t mean verifying what Wolf Blitzer is saying on CNN by listening to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC because they are all reading from the same corporate script as demonstrated here. Some good reporting creeps in here and there, but for the most part you’re in an echo chamber getting spoon-fed propaganda by a bunch of corporate lackeys who are there to please their advertisers. Bringing the public reliable news isn’t a priority. For example, look at all the pharmaceutical ads on TV. That’s billions of dollars in network revenue—most are not going to upset the Big Pharma applecart.

Also consider that if COVID-19 is so deadly, why aren’t there any biohazard bins for discarded masks? How come we can just throw them in the garbage and litter our streets with them?

Masks along with all other irrational COVID rules are about maintaining the illusion of a pandemic. Masks create the illusion that there’s something to be afraid of. They also divide us. Unmasked people and those actively opposing this global tyranny threaten the fearful brainwashed masses because they make a lot of them think that if there isn’t a scary icky microbe to be afraid of maybe they should get off their asses and fight for their rights. They resent this because they need to believe they’re being righteous and patriotic by following the rules rather than realize that all they are doing is contributing to their own oppression.

People wearing masks because Anthony Fauci and other authority figures told them to is a classic example of groupthink. Another name for groupthink is mass stupidity.

Masks are about virtue signaling. The exhaustive study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health that I cited earlier documents Fauci, the WHO, the New England Journal of Medicine, etc. admitting this.

Virtue signaling to promote lies isn’t new. With AIDS it was condoms. With COVID-19 it’s masks. At least condoms usually worked when it came to preventing unwanted pregnancies and venereal diseases. They didn’t work when it came to preventing AIDS because there was never any virus to transmit. And if condoms aren’t your thing because for a lot of people they ruin the sex act, there are other ways to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But masks are utterly useless. There is no reason for anyone to be wearing them.

Wake the hell up

Get it through your heads once and for all folks. Masks are not about controlling the spread of COVID-19—they are about controlling the spread of freedom. Masks are about controlling you. I beg you, I implore you, wake the hell up. All you’re going to get by obeying authoritarian orders are more authoritarian orders. The longer you comply with this nonsense the longer it will go on.

Even if you aren’t bothered by wearing a mask you are still being oppressed because there is no reason to wear a mask. By continuing to wear a mask you are advertising your submission to the tyrannical world order that they are trying to impose on us. Masks make it easier to identify who the sheep are. So stop complying. There are lots of ways to get out of wearing masks.

In areas where there are no mask rules it’s easy. Just take off the masks. Stop wearing them. It’s that simple. If you’re in an area that has mask mandates and ordinances and confrontation isn’t your style you don’t have to die on that hill. Read the masks mandates and rules for your area and you will find that they very likely allow exemptions for medical, religious, and in some cases even psychological reasons. Just politely tell a business that requires masks that you have an exemption and that will usually be enough. Read the CDC and WHO mask guidelines as well. Get a medical mask exemption letter from your doctor. If your doctor won’t give you one try other doctors. Keep at it.

See if your employer will recognize mask and vaccine exemptions. If not, look for another job that will. There are plenty of jobs available now which in some cases is due to a lot of people being afraid to work because they believe the fear narrative. But the main reason could very well be because a lot of people have died and been seriously injured by the COVID vaccines. Just keep in mind that masks, like the tests and the vaccines (except for the Comirnaty vaccine), are under an EUA (Emergency Use Authorization). Under Federal Law you have the right to refuse to wear them as explained here and here. Additional websites to resist mask rules: Peggy Hall, Peggy Hall interview, Jason Hommel.

And to all businesses who are tired of this mask nonsense listen up.

My physical therapist who I’m seeing for a shoulder injury is an example of what not to do. She had stopped wearing a mask for quite a while once the mask mandates in our state were repealed. She’s a wonderful person who I like a whole lot. She has read my articles. She knows the science. She knows that masks are worthless. But she told me that a couple of masked customers complained and now the mask is back on her face and she won’t take it off even if no one else in the place has a mask on.

I implore all business people who think like my physical therapist: take off those stupid, ridiculous, useless masks and throw them in the garbage. Losing some customers isn’t worth losing your freedom. It isn’t worth the destruction of our world as we know it. It isn’t worth the dystopian world order you will be leaving to your children and to future generations. Don’t help the Bill Gates and Klaus Schwabs of this world bring about your demise. Don’t allow other people’s fear to control you. Start educating brainwashed mask wearing people. Get them out of this cult. Because that’s what mask wearing is: a cult ritual. Refuse to go along with it any longer.

Grow a spine and throw those masks away.

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Michael J. Talmo has been a professional writer for over 40 years and is strongly committed to the protection of civil liberties. He also did three music videos on COVID-19. The Masker Mash, COVID Vaccine Man, and The Corona Globalists. He can be reached at [email protected]

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In the new episode of the program “National Security Council,” Tetiana Popova discussed with General Ben Hodges, the former Commanding General of United States Army Europe, an agreement between Ukraine and the United States on strategic defense cooperation.

POPOVA: What do you think about Zelensky’s trip to the United States? How successful was it?

HODGES: …It highlights the need for a strategy for the greater Black Sea region where Ukraine fits inside an American strategy for the Black Sea region….It’s also important to remember that the United States, including the support of the Congress, continues to provide military support for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

HODGES: …the United States will continue to provide military equipment that Ukraine requests for land forces, for maritime forces…..I would anticipate we’re going to see increased cooperation on the defense industry side so that the American-Ukrainian industry is working together. It should include some intelligence-sharing agreements….There is this idea of air and missile defense, supported by the Congress, to provide this system called Iron Dome. I don’t know that that’s going to happen. I’m not sure it is….

POPOVA: Do you have a similar agreement with the United States in Georgia, or is Ukraine more advanced here? Because there were some agreements between Lockheed Martin and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. But I’m not sure that Israel’s protection is the same as that of Lockheed Martin.

HODGES: Of course, it is really a system that the United States has recently purchased and we’re not even sure that this is exactly what the United States needs. Either the whole concept of integrated air and missile defense is more than just the rockets of the interceptors. It’s about exercises, it’s about command-and-control, it’s about the radar sensors that have to be out there. That’s why I have been reluctant to advocate too strongly for a particular system for Ukraine. Because you have to have the entire package, not just the launcher. And I think that Ukraine has the technology actually to move much of this already, but there must be ways how the United States can help in a key moment. The key moment for air and missile defense is exercising, testing the ground system, sensor on the Black Sea, sensor in the air. And practically integrating them is the only way sure if you can identify the gaps that you need to address.

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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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Before last month, when he fled in disgrace as his country fell to the Taliban, Afghanistan’s former president, Ashraf Ghani, was unusual among American-backed despots. He appealed to Washington’s foreign-policy elite, with his technocrat pedigree and a doctorate from Columbia University.

Unlike Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or Iraq’s former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Ghani was an intellectual and social peer. He made a good dinner party guest. Between TED Talks and think-tank forums, Ghani had written a book on fixing failed states. His favorite utensil, presumably, wasn’t a bone saw.

Ghani, a former U.S. citizen, had American sensibilities that charmed his benefactors. “​​He knew the right words to say,” wrote The Atlantic. After his election in 2014, the august magazine reported approvingly on how, unlike his predecessor, Ghani had never confronted any American politicians with inconvenient pictures of Afghan children cowering in fear during Pentagon night raids. Afghanistan was America’s “good war,” and Ghani was America’s good warlord. He was also good at covering his tracks.

Even now, outside of his decision to abandon his country when there was still a chance to negotiate a political settlement with the Taliban, Ghani has largely been eulogized as a flawed but incorruptible visionary. This is a facade. Attributing Ghani’s failures to his professorial management style and personal cowardice allows American elites to avoid confronting the truth behind the Taliban victory. Military occupations fail because they are corrupt and brutal, and the Ghani regime, enabled by the Pentagon and its backers in Washington, was as corrupt and brutal as any.

From the moment he came to power in 2014, Ghani’s rule was tainted. Leaked tapes revealed election officials stuffing ballot boxes in Ghani’s favor. “[G]iven the apparent closeness of the election and the involvement of the chief electoral officer in fraud, it is almost impossible that we will ever know who won,” said a leaked State Department memo, obtained by The New Yorker. Ghani officially became president after the United States brokered a power-sharing agreement with his closest rival. Then–Secretary of State John Kerry called the undemocratic deal a “triumph of statesmanship.” But during Ghani’s 2019 re-election campaign, which was plagued by similar allegations of ballot-stuffing, Afghans, who did not trust the legitimacy of the election, voted in record-low numbers.

Ghani’s reign was maintained by violence, warlordism, and terror. His first running mate was Uzbek war criminal Abdul Rashid Dostum, a mass-murdering rapist and longtime ally of the CIA and American Special Forces. Dostum is accused of countless crimes against humanity, including suffocating and baking thousands of prisoners in shipping crates, driving tanks over others, directing the ethnic cleansing, including rape, extortion, and execution, of captured civilian populations, and personally overseeing the rape of a kidnapped political opponent with an assault rifle. While human rights activists viewed Dostum’s appointment with horror, foreign-policy experts saw it as a sign of political maturity. “Ghani was showing that he, too, could play politics the old, dirty way,” wrote The New Yorker about the deal with Dostum. And beyond Dostum, the Ghani government was also filled with other notorious war criminals.

Apologists might justify making deals with warlords as a political necessity, but war crimes were also carried out by forces directly under Ghani’s command. The country’s intelligence agency, the feared National Directorate of Security, assassinated Ghani’s political opponents. They also coordinated with the CIA and U.S. Special Forces on feared night raids known for extrajudicial killings of civilians in rural villages. The regular Afghan military wasn’t much better. A recent New Yorker article accused a powerful general, Sami Sadat, of ordering mass killings of civilians as collective punishment after their villages were captured by the Taliban. “We knew they were civilians,” one Afghan helicopter pilot reportedly said after gunning down civilians in a market.

These atrocities helped push rural Afghans into the arms of the Taliban. But for his American backers, with the occupation costing trillions of dollars, at least Ghani wasn’t that dirty.

Except he was. Ghani, during his nearly seven years in power, found ways to enrich his brother, his brother-in-law, and other members of his inner circle. This April, I co-authored a two-year-long investigation, published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, that revealed the Afghan president’s office had approved unique extralegal rights for the subsidiary of an American military contractor to purchase, process, and sell the metal chromite from local Afghan mines. Normally, buying from these types of mines was prohibited because it risked funding groups like the Taliban and the Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate. But this subsidiary was special.

Secret documents obtained from the United Arab Emirates, where Ghani fled after being deposed, show that his brother, Hashmat Ghani, owned 20 percent of the military contractor’s subsidiary that had won these rights.

A few years earlier, Afghanistan’s Pajhwok News uncovered another crooked contract. A Beirut based company, Khatib & Alami, obtained $16 million in sole-source contracts from the Afghan government, without going through a public bid process or receiving a valid work permit from the government. Later, Afghan government officials acknowledged the contract had been brokered by Riad Saada, the brother of Afghanistan’s first lady, Rula Ghani.

Ghani was personally in attendance as the Afghan National Procurement Authority signed off on a different questionable deal in 2019. The government granted an $11 million telecommunications and fee collection contract to the owner of a small defunct airline company, the Bustos Group, which had no prior telecommunications experience. Leaked messages from the company’s CEO, Josh Bustos, explained that Afghan officials had guaranteed him the contract prior to its being awarded. “No bribes no under the table issues up front,” he wrote. “Back end I am sure I will be hiring some specific Afghans to management roles.”

Despite these deals, the narrative around Ghani’s incorruptibility has remained. To the Washington foreign-policy elite, Ghani represented the belief that if you put an educated technocrat in charge, you can maintain an occupation of drone strikes and commando raids forever. But it’s clear, now that the Taliban have taken Kabul, that this was a fantasy. An educated technocrat is also corruptible.

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Zack Kopplin is an investigator at the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection organization.

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The U.S. could not vanquish the Taliban, failed to defeat Al-Qaeda, and were unsuccessful in leaving behind a pluralistic, tolerant and economically-sustainable Afghan state. Washington failed to induce good governance in Afghanistan and to stop Pakistan’s multifaceted support for the Taliban. After twenty years of war with the U.S., the Taliban now confronts the hard challenge of governing and managing the economy.

Formal legal incomes make up a small portion of Afghanistan’s revenues as it is dependent on foreign aid and illicit economies. In July 2020, former President Ashraf Ghani said that 90% of Afghans live below the government-determined poverty line of $2 a day and 30% are acutely food insecure. For an economy suffering the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the withdrawal of U.S. forces has the effect of spurring a drastic economic decline as Afghanistan becomes more globally isolated.

Pakistan has been engaging with key international and regional stakeholders with a message that Afghanistan should not be left alone and that the incoming government, likely to be led by the Taliban, should be given a chance. Recently, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan sought the world’s support for the Taliban. During the high-level ministerial meeting on the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan convened by the UN, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi linked the observance of human rights by the new Taliban government to the financial aid Afghanistan receives. Khan’s key cabinet members, like Federal Minister for Planning and Development Asad Umar, regularly calls for the Taliban government to receive international financial assistance.

Currently, the Taliban faces the loss of billions of dollars that had been allocated to Afghanistan. The U.S. immediately froze $9.5 billion worth of central bank assets. The International Monetary Fund blocked access to $460 million, and the EU has suspended aid. International donors had been providing 75% of the government’s operating budget, and the U.S. and NATO paid around $4 billion each year to fund the Afghan military. Iran, although struggling economically because of U.S. sanctions, is seeking good relations with the Taliban but cannot offer generous economic aid. Only China and the monarchies of the Gulf have deep pockets, but the question is if they will. Although Pakistan has been providing military and intelligence aid, its own economy is stagnating and wholly reliant on China.

The Taliban has no experience in delivering or maintaining existing state services, such as electricity or water, let alone tackling complex issues like setting macroeconomic policies. The immediate effects of the financial squeeze saw cash liquidity in Afghanistan drop, driving up inflation – including food prices, resulting in immense hardship to the population.

If the Taliban continues to engage in purges of non-Sunnis and implement regressive Sharia laws like public hangings and mutilation, educated Afghans will continue to flee the country, thus provoking a new brain drain. International actors will maintain sanctions on the Taliban and perhaps even intensify them. The new government will also struggle to find jobs for the many now-unemployed soldiers of the Afghan security forces.

The illegal poppy cultivation can only offset a part of those losses. However, the Taliban has promised to make Afghanistan drug free, and it is recalled that at its first press conference on August 19, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid promised that the new government would not turn what is already the world’s leading opium producer into a fully-fledged narco-state.

None-the-less, undeniably heroin production has helped fund the Taliban, and despite proclamations that they will struggle to wean themselves off the profitable trade, it is likely that economic pressures will force them to continue cultivation for some time as banning it would be socially immiserating for Afghanistan’s poorest.

Now that the Taliban are in power, they will find it difficult to maintain cohesiveness across its many different factions that have varied ideological intensity and material interests. The Taliban will also need to ensure that its key commanders and soldiers are paid enough to not be tempted to split off, like many did when Islamic State established itself in the country in 2015. A key element of the Taliban’s blitzkrieg this summer was bargaining with regional militias and promising them access to local economic rents, such as mining and logging.

The Taliban needs Chinese money, but persisting violence and corruption could deter economic investments. Beijing opposes any support for Uighur militants based in Afghanistan, including the Taliban’s Uighur units. Russia, Iran and the Central Asian states also want to ensure that the spread of the Islamic State into their territories does not occur.

Taxing the transport system in the country has long been a Taliban strategy for revenue raising. Whether the Taliban manages to keep the lucrative transport trade will depend on whether it sufficiently satisfies the counterterrorism interests of China, Iran, Russia and Central Asia. If the Taliban continues to support terrorist groups like they did in the 1990’s, this could see Afghanistan have only Pakistan as a trading partner and become wholly reliant on it for survival.

The Taliban understands how to deliver a brutal order, suppress crime and provide swift dispute resolution. Despite this, it does not have the capacity to build hospitals and deliver medical care, build modern water, electricity, and infrastructure systems, and provide high quality education. Afghanistan’s economic outlook remains uncertain and blanket sanctions and global isolation will worsen the suffering in the country. In this way, although the Taliban won the war against the U.S., it still has a long and difficult task of delivering not only security to the Afghan people, but also economic stability and opportunity.

*

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from OffGuardian

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***

 

The achievement heralded in the headline of this article was accomplished, coincidentally, on the 20th anniversary of that fateful day the world calls “9/11.” Such an important milestone is worthy of a closer look.

Let’s think about what it means to be a verified signatory to the petition of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth — to stand on the front lines of such a monumental mission.

The more than 3,500 architects and engineers who have signed AE911Truth’s petition exhibit the highest order of honor and courage. They have placed allegiance to their professional disciplines above personal gain. In a society whose leadership still seeks to marginalize and slander them, casting them aside as pariahs, they have made the choice to stand proudly for what they know to be right. They have shown the utmost integrity and commitment to their oath to protect the public welfare. They are not just professionals; they are truly champions.

Each architect and engineer who signs our petition must prove their credentials in order to be validated and displayed on our petition as an “AE.” We require each professional signatory to have a four-year degree or higher in their engineering or architectural discipline — or substantially equivalent professional licensing.

At AE911Truth, it is our duty to rigorously verify our petition signers. Over the years, an additional 2,000 people beyond the actual 3,500 AEs tried to sign our petition, claiming to be architects or engineers. Most of them probably are, but for one reason or another they either did not complete our verification process or did not fully meet the requirements. Or perhaps they didn’t receive our requests for further information. Whatever the case, the 3,500 verified mark we reached last month reflects a figure and process that 9/11 Truth activists the world over can count on.

As an aside, it’s no secret that algorithms can be devised to throttle the spread of information, channel communications to spam folders, or even now relegate phone calls to “suspicious caller” categories. So, if you’re an engineer or architect who signed our petition, whether ten days ago or ten years ago, please visit this and ensure that you are properly displayed. If you are not, then kindly follow through and contact AE911Truth to complete the process. Your signature and support matter!

Xander Arena verifies AE911Truth petition signers with the help of his conure, Aurora.

Verifying our thousands of supporters is a labor-intensive task, performed by generous and service-oriented volunteers who make great sacrifices to help “Team Truth.” And though our loved ones likely lament the lost time — the hours we put into verifying AEs instead of hanging out with family and friends — the intrinsic reward of helping to amplify the call for a new 9/11 investigation is a satisfaction that is without equal. As a volunteer verifier, I consider it a great honor every time I send the following message to our confirmed AE signatories: “We thank you so much for your courage and support. You are indeed on the right side of history!”

Once one understands the importance of what AE911Truth does, it is hard to sit on the sidelines. Signing our petition is itself an act of service — one I, too, chose to make some time ago. As a member of our “general public” category, I am proud to find my name amongst physicists and physicians, mathematicians and musicians, pilots and flight attendants, social workers and construction workers, psychologists, attorneys, veterans, firefighters, nurses, law enforcement professionals, homemakers, school teachers, restaurant owners, grocery clerks, and tens of thousands of other admirable thinkers and doers.

Our “general public” category, replete with concerned and capable citizens who have taken the brave stand of speaking out and being heard, now has more than 30,000 signatories. Many of them hold jobs that are termed “professional.” I point this out to emphasize that codes of conduct and ethical standards exist not only in the building profession — compelling engineers and architects to take a stand for truth — but also in all professional disciplines, demanding that their constituents not be silent in the face of criminality.

If you peruse the AE and the general public categories, you will see that some signatories make interesting statements expressing their ethical concerns, explaining their expertise, and offering their support, while many others simply add their name to the ranks. Both actions are equally important.

Undoubtedly, many people fear the implications of publicly expressing a desire for “a truly independent investigation with subpoena power, which seeks inquiry into the possible use of explosives that might have caused the destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers and Building 7.” Yet the very pillars of truth we stand upon protect our signatories. Indeed, those who fairly and thoroughly examine AE911Truth’s evidence and claims come away understanding that we are on the right side of the argument. The light of 9/11 Truth eviscerates even the darkest of shadows.

Acknowledging we have not yet received an honest and impartial investigation into the worst crime in American history, whose consequences have harmed the entire world, is a psychological turning point in many peoples’ lives. Grappling with a betrayal of that magnitude may even be scary, but to not speak out only perpetuates additional abuses. Individuals and societies have been able to overcome harrowing histories of violence and walk forward into the future. Such fortitude creates strength, trust, and respect.

The world deserves the truth. We deserve governance by truthful leaders and institutions. We deserve an open and honest accounting of what transpired before our very eyes and cost us all so dearly.

If you have not yet signed the petition calling for a real investigation, or if you are an architect or engineer who has not completed the verification process, I urge you to please do so expeditiously. Our collective future depends on it.

*

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A New York Times Sunday edition article on September 26 devoted an entire page, excluding an ad for luxurious furniture, to an examination of various efforts in the United States to initiate measures aimed at addressing historic discrimination and institutional racism.

Reparations, the demand for material and monetary compensation for the exploitation and national oppression of African Americans from the periods of colonial and antebellum enslavement right through the enactment of legalized segregation (Jim Crow) to the contemporary unequal social status and police misconduct, has gained considerable attention over the last five decades.

The New York Times begins its report with a focus on Detroit where during the post-World War II years, thousands of African American families were forcibly removed from the lower east side in the areas known as Black Bottom, Paradise Valley and others. In the mid-1950s, utilizing eminent domain, the white administration ordered people to leave certain areas of the city with almost no provisions for relocation or restitution.

Later, by the early 1960s, people living, working, worshipping, and conducting business along Hasting Street and neighboring areas were told to leave so that the Chrysler and Fisher Freeways could be constructed. These highways were designed in part to transport whites from their places of employment in the city out to the suburbs where homes and business complexes were being built. The Times article says that over 43,000 people were dislocated from the eastside within a decade.

Detroit Rebellion erupts on 12th and Clairmount, July 23, 1967 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

In 1956, the Federal Aid Highway Act, also known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, was passed and signed into law by the then administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It should be noted that the defense component of the legislation was enacted under Eisenhower who was Commander of the European Theater during World War II for the U.S.

A group of lawyers and political activists within the Detroit Democratic Party apparatus have placed a proposal on the upcoming November 2 ballot which would establish a taskforce to examine what reparations would look like in the city. The language on the proposal is quite vague and there has been no real discussion on how issues such as the displacement of Black communities, by not only the existing municipal administrations at the time, but more importantly, acknowledging that these policies stemmed from the profit motives of real estate firms, banks, the automotive industry and the federal government.

Since the 1950s, the population of the city of Detroit has declined every single census period to the present. From its peak at 1.8 million people in 1950, some 70 years later the number of people estimated to be living in Detroit is 637, 601. With the encouraged abandonment and forced removals of approximately 1.2 million residents over seven decades, any task force looking at reparations would demand a program for repopulation of the city with a principal focus on African Americans and other nationally oppressed groups dislocated by the combination of private and governmental forces.

Yet the current economic trajectory of the corporate interests and their imposed-Mayor Mike Duggan does not include the reconstruction of Black communities in Detroit as part of their agenda. Even though the existing administration may not directly oppose the proposal on the November ballot, the question remains as to what type of approach will the taskforce take in recommendations to ameliorate the present situation stemming from a historical legacy of policies which negatively impacted African Americans.

After being forced from Black Bottom and Paradise Valley many within the African American population relocated to the westside area of Virginia Park. It was in this very neighborhood that the 1967 rebellion erupted on July 23rd of that year. This uprising was the largest of its kind initiated by African Americans up until that time. The Rebellion ushered in a period of resistance within the auto industry, schools and colleges, neighborhoods and unrepresentative political structures.

The election of the Detroit’s first African American Mayor Coleman A. Young was a direct result of the struggles emanating from housing discrimination, dislocation, super-exploitation within industry, corporate media distortions, the fight against police brutality and policy neglect from the successive municipal and federal administrations. Since the period of 1974-1993 when Young was in office, the consistent erosion of any semblance of political power in Detroit among African Americans is an apparent social reality.

Other Local Efforts for Reparations

An announcement by the City of Evanston, Illinois, located north of Chicago, that it would enact a reparations program by providing housing assistance grants to African Americans. The city leaders say they are recognizing the discrimination in housing which has existed for decades in major urban areas and their suburbs.

These efforts have drawn criticism from both whites as well as people within the African American community. The conservative whites are claiming that any project to assist Blacks represents “preferential treatment” and “reverse discrimination.  On the other hand, many African Americans contend that the realization of any genuine form of reparations extends far beyond the role of local governments and must hold the federal government and the multinational corporations accountable for their role in the oppression and exploitation of African Americans.

The New York Times article from September 26 reports that:

“’There are a number of detours away from what I would call true reparations, and one of those are these alleged local programs,’ said William A. Darity, Jr., an economics professor at Duke University who has studied reparations for decades. Mr. Darity argues that an adequate reparations program, totaling about $11.2 trillion for an estimated 45 million Americans — more than 13 percent of the U.S. population — who would qualify for it, can only exist on the federal level. Where cities plan to get these funds to support a local reparations program remains to be seen. Some of these local officials are looking for answers that don’t automatically equate to a huge cash payout.”

In Tulsa, Oklahoma where the centenary of the 1921 race massacre was recently commemorated, the demand for reparations is rising from the community. Over 300 African Americans were killed on May 31-June 1 when white racist mobs including police, elected officials and national guard troops destroyed churches, homes, small businesses and social organizations which dislocated thousands.

For years the City of Tulsa and the State of Oklahoma deliberately withheld information about the race massacre and instead described it as a “riot.” Three survivors of the 1921 murderous spree in Tulsa are demanding reparations for their suffering and loss of generational wealth.

The Oklahoman newspaper wrote on this question in May emphasizing:

“Across the United States, renewed calls for reparations to help right decades-old racial injustices have been part of a racial reckoning that seemed to gain momentum in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.

As the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is commemorated and survivors of the tragedy are honored, a demand for justice in the form of reparations will continue to be part of the conversation. Damario Solomon-Simmons, lead attorney for a landmark reparations lawsuit against the city of Tulsa and other entities, said the case for reparations has successfully been made in other situations across the country, and reparations for massacre survivors and their descendants are long overdue.”

Reparations and the Existing Power Structure in the 21st Century

Many scholars have documented the causal relationship between the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and the advent of industrial capitalism. Writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, among many others, have long ago made the case for the rejection of the false narratives enunciated by the beneficiaries of exploitation and national oppression.

The growth and prosperity of capitalism and imperialism in Western Europe and North America is not due to the superiority or ingenuity of the white ruling class. The profits accrued from African enslaved labor and colonial exploitation provided the economic basis for every major industry which emerged during the 19th and 20th centuries. Today, in the 21st century, a reckoning on the part of the oppressed is mounting.

With specific reference to Detroit, the African American community has played a leading role in the development of the reparations demand. The Nation of Islam (NOI), which was founded in Detroit in the early 1930s, later during the 1960s called for the allocation of substantial portions of land within or outside the U.S. where African Americans would form their own nation. The NOI believed that the descendants of slave masters owed a debt to the former enslaved mandating that this independent Black state be subsidized by the federal government for 20-25 years.

Later in Detroit during March 1968, over 500 delegates to the inaugural conference of the Republic of New Africa (RNA) demanded the granting of five southern states to Blacks in the U.S. to form their own territorial nation. The following year, in April 1969, the National Black Economic Development Conference was held at Wayne State University in Detroit. A Black Manifesto was drafted by former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Executive Secretary and International Affairs Coordinator, Dr. James R. Forman, and adopted by the gathering of several hundred people.

Forman’s Black Manifesto began with a resounding call for Black Liberation and Socialism in the U.S. The document demands the payment of $500 million to $3 billion in reparations which would be utilized to build educational institutions, media and publishing outlets, cooperative housing and agricultural programs. Forman became an executive board member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) and the International Black Workers Congress (IBWC) which grew out of the post-Rebellion work of the Black proletariat within the auto plants, service sectors, communities and schools of Detroit.

In 1989, African American Congressman John Conyers, Jr. of Detroit submitted House Resolution (H.R.) 40 which would set up a research committee to study the payment of reparations to descendants of enslaved Africans. The bill was reintroduced every year until his departure from Congress. As a result of the mass demonstrations and rebellions of 2020, the bill has gained new life after being voted recently out of committee for the first time in 2021.

These actual historic examples of the demands for reparations must be studied in order to place the contemporary emphasis on localized efforts in their proper perspective. The call for reparations cannot be divorced from the continuing struggles against national oppression, capitalism, imperialism and the need for socialist construction.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: James Forman and Lucius Walker issue the Black Manifesto in May 1969

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Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

***

 

An English friend recently learned about the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plan to either kidnap or kill journalist Julian Assange and quipped “I’ll bet he’s happy to be safe and sound in Belmarsh Prison if he has a chance to read about that!” I replied that his time in Belmarsh has been made as demeaning as possible by an English judge and the British are just as capable of executing a Jeffrey Epstein suicide or “accident” if called upon to do so by their American “cousins.” He agreed, reluctantly. Indeed, the roles of American allies Britain and Australia in what is turning out to be one of the world’s longest-playing judicial dramas has been reprehensible.

For those readers who have missed some of the fun of the Assange saga, a recap is in order. Julian Assange, an Australian citizen who was living in London, was the Editor in Chief and driving force behind Wikileaks, which debuted in 2006 and was one of the alternative news sites that have sprung up over the past twenty years. WikiLeaks was somewhat unique in that it often did not write up its own stories but rather was passed documentary material by sources in government and elsewhere that it then reprinted without any editing.

Assange attracted the ire of the ruling class when he obtained in 2010 a classified video from an unidentified source that showed an unprovoked 2007 shooting incident involving U.S. Army helicopters in Baghdad in which a dozen completely innocent people were killed. The government’s anger at WikiLeaks intensified when, in 2013, Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, fled to Hong Kong with classified material that demonstrated that the U.S. government was illegally spying on Americans. WikiLeaks also reportedly helped to arrange Snowden’s subsequent escape to Russia from Hong Kong.

The bipartisan animus directed against WikiLeaks intensified still further in the summer of 2016 when the group’s website began to release emails from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The immediate conclusion propagated by Team Hillary but unsupported by facts was that Russian intelligence had hacked the emails and given them to WikiLeaks.

It was perhaps inevitable that Assange’s reporting, which has never been found to be factually inaccurate, was in some circles claimed to be based on information provided to him by Russian hackers. Even though he repeatedly denied that that was the case and there are technical reasons why that was unlikely or even impossible, this led to a sharp Russophobic response from a number of intelligence and law enforcement services close to the United States. Assange was charged in Britain in November 2010 on an international warrant demanding that he be extradited to Sweden over claims that he had committed rape in that country, an accusation which later turned out to be false. He posted bail but lost a legal battle to annul the warrant and then skipped a preliminary hearing in London in June 2012 to accept asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy, which has diplomatic immunity. He stayed in the Embassy for eighty-two months, at which point a new government in Quito made clear that his asylum would be revoked and he would be expelled from the building. He was preparing to leave voluntarily in April 2019 when police arrived and he was arrested on a charge of his failure to appear in court seven years before which was regarded as “bail jumping.” He was sent immediately to Belmarsh high security prison, where Britain’s terrorist prisoners are confined.

After his arrest, Assange continued to be incarcerated due to a U.S. Justice Department extradition request based on the Espionage Act of 1918, apparently derived from possible interaction with the Chelsea Manning whistleblower case. Assange has now been in Belmarsh for 29 months in spite of increasing international pressure asserting that he is a journalist and should be released. The British have hesitated to extradite him on the basis of the evidence produced by the U.S. government, which included the claim that Assange aided the former U.S. Army analyst Manning break into a classified computer network in order to obtain and eventually publish classified material, but they have likewise failed to release him. The British judge denied extradition in January, suggesting that if he were to be returned forcibly to the U.S. he would likely commit suicide, but she also denied Assange bail as he was considered to be a flight risk. The U.S. appealed that verdict and the next hearing is scheduled for the end of October. It should be noted that no evidence produced by the Justice Department has plausibly linked Assange to the Russian intelligence services.

Which brings us to the Yahoo news revelation regarding the CIA plot to shoot, poison or kidnap Assange while he was sheltering in the Ecuadorian Embassy. It goes something like this: in 2017, Assange’s fifth year in the Embassy, the CIA debated going after him to end the alleged threat posed to government secrets by him and his organization, which was still operating and presumed to be in contact with him. WikiLeaks had at that time been publishing extremely sensitive CIA hacking tools, referred to as “Vault 7,” which constituted “the largest data loss in CIA history.”

In an April 2017 speech, Donald Trump’s new CIA Director Mike Pompeo said “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” It was a declaration of war. The label “non-state hostile intelligence service” is a legal designation which more-or-less opened the door to non-conventional responses to eliminate the threat. CIA Stations where WikiLeaks associates were known to be present were directed to increase surveillance on them and also attempt to interdict any communications they might seek to have with Assange himself in the embassy. A staff of analysts referred to as the “WikiLeaks Team” worked full time to target the organization and its leaders.

At the top level of the Agency debate over more extreme options prevailed, though there were legitimate concerns about the legality of what was being contemplated. In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over possible kidnapping and/or assassination, the Agency picked up alarming though unsubstantiated reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing plans to help Assange escape from the United Kingdom and fly him to Moscow.

CIA responded by preparing to foil Assange’s possible Russian-assisted departure to include potential gun battles with Moscow’s spies on the streets of London or crashing a car into any Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange to seize him. One scenario even included either blocking the runway or shooting out the tires of any Russian plane believed to be carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. Pompeo himself reportedly favored what is referred to as a “rendition,” which would consist of breaking into the Ecuadorian Embassy, kidnapping Assange, and flying him clandestinely to the U.S. for trial. Others in the national security team favored killing Assange rather than going through the complexity of kidnapping and removing him. Fortunately, saner views prevailed, particularly when the British refused to cooperate in any way with activity they regarded as clearly illegal.

So Assange is still in prison and what does it all mean? The only possible charge that would convincingly demonstrate that Assange was spy paid by Russia would be related to his possibly helping Chelsea Manning to circumvent security to steal classified material, but there is no real evidence that Assange actually did that or that he is under Russian control. So that makes him a journalist. That he has embarrassed the United States, most often when it misbehaves, is what good journalists do. But beyond that the disgraceful CIA plans to kill or abduct Assange as an option to get rid of him reveal yet again the dark side of what the United States of America has become since 9/11.

More to the point, getting rid of Assange will accomplish nothing. He worked with a number of like-minded colleagues who have been more than able to pick up where he left off. He has been largely incommunicado since he has been languishing in Belmarsh Prison and it is his associates who have continued to solicit information and publish it on their site. Mike Pompeo’s unapologetic response to this assassination or kidnapping story was “They were engaged in active efforts to steal secrets themselves, and pay others to do the same …” Of course, if all that were true Mike and the government lawyers have had an opportunity to demonstrate just that in a British court. They couldn’t do so and instead promoted the easier option of just killing someone for publishing something true. And assassination is a blunt instrument that rarely accomplishes anything. One recalls that in January 2020 Pompeo certainly participated in the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Militia Leader Muhandis in Baghdad. What did that accomplish apart from turning a nominally friendly Iraq hostile to the U.S. presence?

Or, as Assange’s lawyer put it more to the point, “As an American citizen, I find it absolutely outrageous that our government would be contemplating kidnapping or assassinating somebody without any judicial process simply because he had published truthful information.” Unfortunately, that is not all that the Assange case is about. It is not just a question of truth or fiction and journalistic ethics, but rather an issue of the abuses enabled by powerful men who believe that their power is unlimited. That is the real abyss that the United States has fallen into and the only way out is to finally hold such people, starting with Pompeo, accountable for what they have done.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.orgaddress is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Dear Readers,

For much of this year, independent media – including Global Research – has felt the sting of increased online censorship”, in the form of a “crackdown on news that challenges official government narratives”.

September 2021 marks our 20th Anniversary. We started publishing in early September 2001, a few days before the 9/11 attacks.

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Project Veritas released the fifth video in its COVID vaccine investigative series today featuring a sit-down interview with Pfizer insider, Melissa Strickler. She leaked internal emails that show corporate executives telling staff to be secretive about the use of human fetal tissue in laboratory testing of the COVID vaccine.

Watch the video here.

Pfizer’s Chief Scientific Officer, Philip Dormitzer, admits aborted fetus tissue is used in the company’s vaccine program, but that employees should just stick with Pfizer’s polished narrative omitting any mention of aborted fetal tissue to avoid any issues with the public.

“HEK293T cells, used for the IVE assay, are ultimately derived from an aborted fetus,” Dormitzer said. “On the other hand, the Vatican doctrinal committee has confirmed that they consider it acceptable for Pro-Life believers to be immunized. Pfizer’s official statement couches the answer well and is what should be provided in response to an outside inquiry.”

Vanessa Gelman, who serves as Pfizer’s Senior Director of Worldwide Research, encouraged staff to be careful when talking about human fetal cells in the company’s vaccine program.

“From the perspective of corporate affairs, we want to avoid having the information on fetal cells floating out there,” Gelman said.

“The risk of communicating this right now outweighs any potential benefit we could see, particularly with general members of the public who may take this information and use it in ways we may not want out there. We have not received any questions from policy makers or media on this issue in the last few weeks, so we want to avoid raising this if possible,” she said.

In another email thread, Gelman doubled down on being secretive about this information.

We have been trying as much as possible to not mention the fetal cell lines…One or more cell lines with an origin that can be traced back to human fetal tissue has been used in laboratory tests associated with the vaccine program,” she said.

The whistleblower who shared these emails with Project Veritas, Pfizer manufacturing quality auditor Melissa Strickler, said she was not sure whether aborted fetal tissue made it to the final COVID vaccine product.

“They’re being so deceptive in their emails, it’s almost like it is in the final vaccine. It just made me not trust it,” she said.

Strickler said that Project Veritas was the only place she could go to tell her story.

“I have no one else to turn to when my own company won’t be honest with me. What I was told to do was to trust Project Veritas and to go with you guys by lawmakers, by lawyers,” she said.

The whistleblower has created a GiveSendGo crowdfunding campaign for herself now that she has gone public. People can support her directly by donating at the following web address: www.GiveSendGo.com/PfizerWhistleblower

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Sweden and Denmark on Wednesday said they will pause the use of Moderna’s COVID vaccine for younger age groups after reports of possible rare side effects, including myocarditis.

The Swedish health agency said it would pause the vaccine for people born in 1991 and later, as data pointed to an increase of myocarditis and pericarditis among youths and young adults who had been vaccinated, Reuters reported.

“The connection is especially clear when it comes to Moderna’s vaccine, ‘Spikevax,’ especially after the second dose,” the health agency said in a statement.

The health agency said it now recommends Pfizer/BioNTech’s Comirnaty vaccine instead. People born 1991 or later who received a first Moderna dose — approximately 81,000 people — will not get a second Moderna jab.

Earlier this week, the Swedish health agency said 12- to 15-year-olds would only get Pfizer’s COVID vaccine.

Denmark said that, while it was already using the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine as the main option for 12- to 17-year-olds, it had decided to pause the Moderna vaccine for people under 18 as a “precautionary principle.”

“In the preliminary data … there is a suspicion of an increased risk of heart inflammation, when vaccinated with Moderna,” the Danish Health Authority said in a statement.

The agency referred to data from a yet unpublished Nordic study, which will be sent to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for further assessment once the data is finalized, the agency added.

Norway, which already recommends the Comirnaty vaccine for minors, reiterated Wednesday rare side effects could happen, particularly in boys and young men, and mainly after receiving a second dose.

The EMA approved the use of Comirnaty in May, while Spikevax was approved for use in children over 12 in July, U.S. News reported.

Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle that can lead to cardiac arrhythmia and death. According to the National Organization for Rare Disorders, myocarditis can result from infections, but “more commonly the myocarditis is a result of the body’s immune reaction to the initial heart damage.”

Pericarditis is inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart that can cause sharp chest pain and other symptoms.

According to the the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, there have been 6,561 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis reported following COVID vaccines, with 5,874 cases attributed to Pfizer, 1,515 cases to Moderna and 161 cases to Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccine between Dec. 14, 2020 and Sept. 24, 2021.

Among 12- to 17-year-olds, there have been 617 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis, with 603 cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.

VAERS is the U.S. government-run system for reporting vaccine adverse events, but some of the reports sent to the system come from outside the U.S.

Another sad story! Mom so proud that her 14-year-old son could get the COVID vaccine… but now doctors confirm her son meets the criteria for having post-vaccine myocarditis.

SUBSCRIBE #TheDefender: https://t.co/zL66Edfiw5https://t.co/CmRUHc8QMr

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 11, 2021

On June 25, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added a warning to patient and provider fact sheets for both Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines suggesting an increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis — particularly following the second dose and with onset of symptoms within a few days after vaccination.

The FDA’s update followed a June 23 meeting which included a review of information and discussion by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — a committee within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that provides advice and guidance on effective control of vaccine-preventable diseases.

During the meeting, the committee acknowledged 1,200 cases of heart inflammation in 16- to 24-year-olds, and said mRNA COVID vaccines should carry a warning statement.

Health officials said the benefits of receiving a COVID vaccine still outweigh any risks. But physicians and other public commenters during the June 23 meeting accused the CDC of exaggerating the risk of COVID to young people, and minimizing the risk of the vaccines.

The FDA approved Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for emergency use in the 12 to 15 age group in May, and approved a biologics license application for the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine Aug. 23 — leaving the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine under Emergency Use Authorization.

A third booster dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine was approved for the immunocompromised and those in “high risk” professions in September — in what was deemed a controversial move by the CDC and FDA, both of which overruled the recommended guidance issued by their vaccine advisory committees.

In June, Moderna asked the FDA to expand emergency use of its COVID vaccine in adolescents aged 12 to 17. A decision has yet to be made.

Both Moderna and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) have asked the FDA to approve booster doses of their COVID vaccines for emergency use. The FDA will convene its advisory panel next week to review booster data from both J&J and Moderna.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

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On June 2, the Australian government conceded for the first time that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) supported CIA covert operations in Chile in the early 1970s. These operations created the climate for a coup against the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity government. The National Security Archive (NSA) recently published some of the ASIS’ station reports in Santiago, and the story has drawn attention in the Australian media.

The subject of ASIS and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) activities in Chile have been the subject of inquiry by journalists, politicians, and researchers for decades. But the Australian government has long worked to cover its paper trail in Chile. Even though the declassification of these documents for the first time is a significant development, few details are revealed by the heavily redacted documents beyond the admission that Australia had an ASIS station in Santiago and collaborated to some degree with the CIA.

Clinton Fernandes, a professor of politics at the University of New South Wales began the process to declassify the ASIS’ station reports in Chile in 2017 with barrister Ian Latham and solicitor Hugh Macken. According to Fernandes, when he started searching for the archives on ASIS records in Chile, the Australian “government’s response was that we can’t even confirm or deny the existence of records.”

On May 26, Fernandes and his legal team filed a 16-page set of arguments for the declassification of ASIS records on Chile and in early June, Fernandes was finally given files on ASIS activities in Chile.

Decades of Secrecy

Fernandes was not the first to look into ASIS’ activities in Chile in the early 1970s. Journalist Ian Frykberg published an article in October 1974 in the Sydney Morning Herald citing two former intelligence agents who claimed it was likely that the Australian mission in Chile was working with the CIA by “acting as the conduct for money passing from the CIA to newspapers and individuals leaking propaganda information to newspapers and other influential people.”

On December 2, 1974, Clyde Cameron, the Labor and Immigration Minister wrote to the Attorney General Senator Lionel Murphy about ASIO agents in Chile.

“I am particularly disturbed to learn that ASIO agents have been posing as migration officers in South America,” Cameron wrote, “and I am now convinced—though firm denials are to be expected—that the reports of ASIO collaboration with the CIA in bringing about the overthrow of the Allende Government is very close to the mark.”

In 1977, a Royal Commission into Australia’s Intelligence and Security (popularly known as the Hope Royal Commission) was tabled before the Australian Parliament. At the commission, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam stated:

“It has been written—and I cannot deny it—that when my Government took office, Australian intelligence personnel were working as proxies of the CIA in destabilising the government of Chile.”

In 1983, Seymour Hersh published a biography on ex-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger entitled The Price of Power. In that book, the New York Times investigative journalist claimed that since the CIA was aware that its agents were under close surveillance by the new Allende administration, Washington turned to its allies— in this case, Australia. By 1971, Hersh argues that the CIA station in Santiago “was collecting the kind of information that would be essential for a military dictatorship in the days following a coup–lists of civilians to be arrested, those to be provided with protection, and government installations to be occupied immediately.” A year later, Australia “agreed to monitor and control three agents on behalf of the CIA and relay their information to Washington.”

Australia’s involvement in the events following the coup continued for decades. In 1989, journalists Brian Toohey and William Pinwill published a book on ASIS entitled Oyster: The Story of The Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Another Labor administration in Canberra took the authors to court to prevent them from publishing any material on ASIS that had not been vetted by the government. Toohey and Pinwill’s final manuscript was negotiated with officials from ASIS and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. It reported that, while the November 1970 CIA proposal for ASIS to become involved in Chile was accepted by the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, ASIS itself “noted there was no vital Australian political or economic interests in Chile at that time.”

In recent years, Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) journalist Florencia Melgar broke the international story that notorious Pinochet secret police agent and alleged torturer Adriana Rivas (at the time on the run from Chilean authorities) was living in Sydney. For the story, Melgar said she submitted a formal request to the Australian government to investigate ASIS activities in Chile, but her request was turned down, and she was “warned” that she “risked legal prosecution” if some of the material she obtained  through Chile’s Foreign Affairs official records went to print.

Thus what Fernandes and his legal team achieved is no small feat. Australia, as an article in the New York Times accurately noted recently, may be the world’s most secretive democracy.

The Contents of the ASIS Station Reports

Although this was the first time reports officially recognized that the Australian government had an ASIS station in Santiago, Chile from 1971 to July 1973, the information published at the NSA is mainly technical. According to the NSA itself, the “documents turned over to Fernandes contain few revelations of actual covert operations, intelligence gathering or liaison relations with the CIA in Chile; those sections of the records are completely censored.”

Most of the communications relate to the difficulties that Australians faced carrying out their tasks in Chile. Reports include comments on everyday events like communication delays, station vehicle deliveries, agent lodgings, and observations like “[a] fluent knowledge of Spanish in SANTIAGO is a necessity.” According to Fernandes, another document notes the difficulty ASIS had in getting a safe while “there are several mentions about how beautiful Chilean women are.”

Despite these seemingly insignificant reports, an April 1973 memorandum states that if Australia’s role in Chile at the request of the CIA became public, Prime Minister Whitlam “would find himself in an extremely difficult political situation as, quite clearly, it would be impossible for him to present the MO9 [ASIS] presence in Santiago as being in the direct Australian national interest.”

The importance of the April 1973 memorandum cannot be understated. Domestically, Whitlam came to power with the support of a large movement against the war in Vietnam. Once in office, his was the most progressive administration Canberra had seen in decades, promoting a wide range of social policies. If Australia’s activities in Chile had been discovered during Whitlam’s term in office, a section of his own Labor base could have become hostile.

By July 1973, the ASIS station was allegedly disbanded, although NSA documents indicate that  “one ASIS agent reportedly stayed in Santiago until after the September 11, 1973, military coup.”

During the time that this final Australian ASIS agent was allegedly in Chile, leftists were being violently tortured and executed by the Chilean military. Peter Kornbluh, Director of Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects at the NSA would not speculate on that agent’s activities.

“That information” said Kornbluh “is contained in still-classified documents that the Australian government should release for the verdict of history.”

Australia and the Pinochet Connection Today

In November, former Pinochet secret police agent Rivas will return to the Federal Court in Sydney to continue fighting her extradition. She is wanted by the judicial system in Chile for the alleged kidnapping and disappearance of seven members of the Chilean Communist Party. Rivas, a former member of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (Directorate of National Intelligence, DINA) and personal secretary to Manuel Contreras, the head of Chilean intelligence (1973-1977), has already lost two appeals. The eventual conclusion of her case could set a precedent.

According to Chilean-Australian journalist Juan Miranda, there is “real proof that other members of Pinochet’s secret service” could be “living in Australia.” Miranda claims these possible members of the regime are being investigated, and at some point their presence will be raised with authorities in Australia.

Diego Andrés Peñaloza Pinto is a 28-year-old law graduate from the University of West Sydney whose family emigrated to Australia from Chile in order to escape political persecution. Several of his family members were disappeared or killed by the Chilean secret police.

“It is concerning and disappointing to know that the Australian taxpayer was duped into funding Australia’s involvement in the toppling of a democratically elected government,” said Peñaloza after ASIS’ activities in Chile were confirmed.

Peñaloza’s mother, Sandra del Carmen Pinto, added that it saddens her “that the country that gave me so much helped people that took so much from me.”

Together with 70 Chilean-Australians, Pinto has added her name to an open letter sent to Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) demanding that the Australian government apologise for its participation in the overthrow of the Allende government. The open letter also requests that “the government of Australia declassify all necessary files regarding ASIS activities in Chile in the 1970s.”

Although his work led to the Australian government admitting ASIS role in the overthrow of Allende, Fernandes has few hopes that he will ever see the full declassification of Canberra’s reports on Chile or countries like East Timor and Cambodia. If those reports were published, Fernandes is sure that they would show Australia’s intelligence agencies’ “total immersion in the CIA’s activities.”

The Australian government signed the new strategic defence alliance AUKUS with the U.K. and United States last month to build a series of nuclear-powered submarines and deepen cyber and artificial intelligence cooperation. In light of a recent series of Australian journalists and whistle blowers being threatened with legal actions or even arrested for their attempts to expose abuses by the Australian government, Fernandes’ comments should come as no surprise. Australia’s secretive nature, and who its key international allies are, has largely remained unchanged since September 11, 1973 when president Allende was violently removed from office in Chile.

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Rodrigo Acuña is an independent journalist on Latin American politics and host of Alborada’s Indestructible Podcast. He holds a PhD from Macquarie University. You can follow him on Twitter at @rodrigoac7.

Featured image: President Salvador Allende in Rancagua, Chile in 1971. (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional Chile, Wikimedia Commons)

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Iran has closed its airspace to Azerbaijan’s air force, which supplies military equipment to the Nakhijevan Autonomous Republic, Haqqin.az reported Tuesday, October 5. According to Azeri media publications, the country’s defense department has already been notified of the change.

“Baku regarded this decision as another betrayal against Azerbaijan, which is instigated by the Armenian government,” the Defense Ministry reportedly said. [sic]

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From Press TV: Iran concerned by Israel presence in Caucasus, will not accept any geopolitical change in region: FM

Iran wants Russia to be wary of “potential changes in region’s borders”

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian wants Russia’s “to be sensitive about any potential changes in borders across the region.”

Amirabdollahian made the remarks on Tuesday, October 5 in Moscow, ahead of his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. The Iranian foreign policy chief said Iran “certainly will not tolerate geopolitical change and map change in the Caucasus”, Al Jazeera reports.

Amirabdollahian said Iran expects Russia “to be sensitive about any potential changes in borders across the region, and be sensitive about the presence of terrorists and the movements of the Zionist regime that threatens regional peace and stability”.

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Tension has been high between Iran and Azerbaijan, which share a 700km (430 mile) border, since mid-September. Iran’s army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have recently mobilised forces and held military drills close to its northwestern borders with Azerbaijan amid lingering tensions following Azerbaijan’s 44-day war with Armenia last year. Azerbaijan and Turkey, in response, launched a joint military drill starting on Wednesday.

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Azerbaijan shuts office, mosque linked to Iranian Supreme Leader

Azerbaijan has closed a mosque and an office linked to Iran’s supreme leader in Baku just days after Tehran held military maneuvers close to the two countries’ common border, RFE/RL reports.

“The [Husseiniyya] mosque and the office of Seyyed Ali Akbar Ojaghnejad, representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Baku, were sealed and closed today by order of the authorities of the Republic of Azerbaijan,” Iran’s Tasnim agency said on October 5.

Azerbaijan’s Interior Ministry said in a statement that the cause for the closure, which also affected other indoor spaces, was a surge in coronavirus infections.

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Ojaghnejad has been Khamenei’s representative in Azerbaijan since 1996, according to the website of his office, which is located on the premises of the mosque.

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Iran’s embassy in Baku said in a statement on the evening of October 5 that it had followed up on the matter through diplomatic channels, adding that there had been no advance warning of the move.

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Tensions have been high recently between the two neighbors, who share a 700-kilometer border. Iranian ground forces began maneuvers near the frontier on October 1, a move criticized by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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It’s now been more than eighteen months since governments began the new social experiment now known as “lockdowns.” Prior to 2020, forced “social distancing” was generally considered to be too costly in societal terms to justify such a risky experiment.

Yet in 2020, led by health technocrats at the World Health Organization, nearly all national governments in the world suddenly and without precedent embraced the idea of lockdowns.

On the other hand, the Swedish regime rejected the idea.

For this act of iconoclasm, the Swedish government was pilloried by media organizations and non-Swedish government officials worldwide. The predictions of doom and of a widespread Swedish bloodbath were ubiquitous. Months later, even when it became clear Sweden was not the death-addled outlier many assumed it would be, it was common to see articles declaring Swedish covid policy to be a “disaster.”

Even eighteen months later, as the Sweden-is-doomed narrative broke down even more, critics of Sweden contort themselves to create an anti-Swedish narrative. Consider this August 2021 article at Business Insider, for example, which carefully slices and dices the data to make Sweden’s outcomes look bad. The author slyly writes:

Since the start of the pandemic, roughly 11 out of every 100 people in Sweden have been diagnosed with COVID-19, compared with 9.4 out of every 100 in the UK and 7.4 per 100 in Italy. Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway.

Note the sleight of hand used here. In one sentence, the comparison focuses on diagnoses compared to the UK and Italy. This is surely because actual deaths from covid are fewer per million in Sweden than in either of the UK or Italy. Indeed, the author with this comparison only succeeds in showing us that covid is less fatal in Sweden where there are more cases but fewer deaths. The author then quickly changes the subject to comparisons in deaths so as to make sure Sweden compares unfavorably to Denmark, Finland, and Norway.

These claims are becoming increasingly desperate, since in terms of excess deaths Sweden is better off than most of Europe overall, and also better off than most other northern European countries. (And much better than southern European countries.) Moreover, “excess mortality” is a better measure of deaths in a given country since it provides a broader view of the actual effects of both covid and covid policy.

Certainly, one can find some European regimes that had fewer deaths proportionally. Norway, Denmark, and Finland have remarkably low numbers of covid deaths compared to all of Europe.

But this fails to explain why Sweden’s nonbloodbath compares favorably to most EU member states, including France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and others.

For example, as of late August, excess mortality in Sweden was approximately 785 per million people. In France, the total is 988 per million, and in Spain, it is 1,917 per million. In EU nonmember the United Kingdom, the total is 1,657 per million.

This trend was already becoming apparent months ago, and in March Reuters reported,

Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively…. Twenty-one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality than Sweden.

Other data, also according to Reuters, “which included an adjustment to account for differences in both the age structures and seasonal mortality patterns of countries analysed,” Placed Sweden at eighteenth out of twenty-six in terms of mortality. The “highest” ranked—that is, the worst ranked—were Poland, Spain, and Belgium.

Another way of comparing Sweden to the rest of Europe is to look at excess mortality in 2020 and 2021 compared to “average monthly deaths” from 2016 to 2019.

In the time since February 2020, total deaths (measured as a percentage of the 2016–19 average) were lower in Sweden than in the “EU 27” in fourteen out of eighteen months.

Granting that Denmark, Norway, and Finland all compare favorably against Sweden, most other European countries can’t boast of such things.

Compared to France, Sweden’s excess monthly deaths were lower in thirteen out of eighteen months in that period. Comparisons were similar when looking at the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy. Indeed, among Europe’s large nations, only Germany fares better than Sweden.

So, yes, if we insist on cherry-picking exactly three countries to which to compare Sweden—i.e., Finland, Denmark, and Norway—Sweden looks like some kind of outlier. But with most other countries in Europe, plus the UK, Sweden compares well. Moreover, even if Sweden were only “about the same” as other European countries, this would still contradict the prophecies of doom handed down by the public health technocrats.

None of this “proves” of course that Sweden adopted the ideal response to the spread of disease. But at the very least, the Sweden experience betrays the solemn predictions of so many health “experts” who predicted total disaster for Sweden. Moreover, even if Sweden did have worse outcomes than most of Europe, that would not justify the widespread destruction of human rights necessary to force people into lockdowns, unemployment, and social isolation. The utilitarian approach is a road to untrammeled state power. But even the utilitarian approach doesn’t work for the lockdown advocates who fail even by their own metrics.

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Instead of successfully pressuring India into abandoning its special and privileged strategic partners in Russia, the US’ threatened sanctions might backfire by sabotaging the Quad.

The US has consistently threatened to sanction India under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) for its planned purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defense systems that it expects to begin receiving in November. Senior parliamentarian Subramanian Swamy said in late September that he heard from unnamed sources that the US does indeed plan to make good on these threats instead of extending a sanctions waiver like some in India hope. Nevertheless, he believes that US-Indian relations won’t be too adversely affected. This comes shortly after the Quad held its first-ever in-person summit in the US last week.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying criticized that gathering due to its members’ intent to sow discord between her country and its regional partners. The Quad is comprised of Australia, India, Japan, and the US, all of whom are suspected of attempting to “contain” China through a variety of hybrid means, including conventional military provocations, so-called supply chain “decoupling”, and information warfare, among others. India is regarded as one of this emerging US-led military bloc’s main members because of the vanguard role that it could play in these destabilization efforts due to its neighboring proximity to China.

Alas, even India’s potentially leading role in the US’ grand strategic campaign to “contain” China isn’t enough to spare it from its “ally’s” weaponization of economic-financial instruments through sanctions. America is still caught up in its Trump-era Russophobic craze and will stop at nothing to sabotage Moscow’s historical military relations with New Delhi for zero-sum aims. Ironically, the zero-sum outcome that ultimately transpires might not be the one that the US’ decision makers expect. Instead of successfully pressuring India into abandoning its special and privileged strategic partner, the US’ threatened sanctions might backfire by sabotaging the Quad.

To explain, India has reaffirmed on numerous occasions that it has no intent of reneging on its S-400 deal with Russia, the latter of which has full faith in its partner’s sincerity. This means that no one should expect New Delhi to dump Moscow due to Washington’s sanctions pressure. It’s unclear exactly what form its CAATSA sanctions might take, but they’d nevertheless represent the US imposing punitive economic-financial costs against one of its top Quad partners. It would be a humiliation for the proud nation of India to retain the same level of military cooperation with the US after that happens, which is why relations might actually worsen.

Not only that, but the US might not even want to cooperate as closely with India as before due to America’s concerns that its partner’s acquisition of Russia’s S-400s could somehow or another enable Moscow to tap into their military communication networks. These fears are factually unfounded and are only being used as the pretext for pressuring India into dropping its special and privileged strategic partner so that the US can replace its leading role in that country’s military-industrial complex, but they’d nevertheless also compel the US to limit its military cooperation with India if it wants to uphold the so-called “credibility” of its false claims.

In the possible scenario of India and the US limiting their presently expanding military cooperation with one another, let alone scaling it back through either India’s voluntary withdrawal from some Quad exercises or the US’ exclusion of it from the same, the CAATSA sanctions might actually be a blessing in disguise for Eurasia. The South Asian state already saw how the US abandoned its Afghan allies in August then backstabbed its oldest ally France the month after by poaching its AUS$90 billion submarine deal with Australia from it through AUKUS. It’s about time that India wakes up and realizes that it cannot rely on US support to “contain” China.

The sooner that this happens, whether out of its own will by proudly taking a step back from the Quad in the event that it’s sanctioned or due to the US piling further pressure upon it after imposing those threatened punitive economic-financial costs on India, the better that it’ll be for Eurasian stability. India would learn the long-overdue lesson about America’s unreliability as an “ally” with comparatively less costs than if it was misled into provoking another kinetic conflict with China only to be abandoned by America like many expect would inevitably happen. For that reason, it might not be all that bad if the US sanctions India later this year.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Chatter of an incoming large-scale ground operation in Greater Idlib have ramped up following the apparent failure to negotiate any solution between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

As the days were leading up to Erdogan and Putin’s meeting the situation seemed rather calm, and that remained for a few days.

Following that, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the other terrorist factions in Greater Idlib renewed their frequent ceasefire violations.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) responded, and Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) airstrikes also continued their near-daily occurrence.

On October 5^th, the SAA sent a large convoy of reinforcements to the Idlib frontlines, as seen in several videos.

Turkey is also making its own deployments to Syria, sending reinforcements so as not to be caught unprepared in case of an operation starting.

The Saraya Ansar Abu Bakr al-Siddiq faction announced that it had used an IED to attack a convoy of the Turkish Armed Forces on the Nakhlai-Erich highway in the Syrian province of Idlib.

The group is one of the terrorist factions in the region, and is presumably protected by Turkey, but still targets it.

There are two versions of why that is happening:

The first is the attack is a sort of revenge for all the Syrians who were killed by Turkish soldiers along the border. The second version is that the group was allegedly “planted” by Damascus to sabotage the Greater Idlib terrorists and Turkey army from behind enemy lines.

Still, on October 5^th, full fire exchange returned in Greater Idlib.

SAA shelling targeted the towns of al-Bara and Kansafra, and the villages of al-Fatira, Fleifel, Sfuhun and al-Ruwaiha in Zawiya Mountain, south of Idlib, with rockets and heavy artillery.

Additionally, bombing targeted the villages and towns of Tuqad, Kafr Nuran and Mekalbis, west of Aleppo, and the Ghab Plain, west of Hama.

The Turkistan Islamic Party targeted government forces’ positions in the village of Tanjara, west of Hama.

The mutual shelling coincided with an intense flight of Russian drones over the targeted areas.

For months, the northwestern regions of Syria have been witnessing mutual bombardment between the two sides of the conflict in different areas.

There is certainly a limit to how long this constant exchange can continue before the SAA and Russia’s VKS are forced to go on the offensive and move in. After all, the Idlib factions have little interest to push outwards as they are protected by Turkey’s observation posts, to a point.

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President Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 election is held hostage by two corporate Democratic Senators, fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema.

But the very week before the Dems’ $350 billion-per-year domestic package hit this wall of corporate money-bags, all but 38 House Democrats voted to hand over more than double that amount to the Pentagon. Senator Manchin has hypocritically described the domestic spending bill as “fiscal insanity,” but he has voted for a much larger Pentagon budget every year since 2016.

Real fiscal insanity is what Congress does year after year, taking most of its discretionary spending off the table and handing it over to the Pentagon before even considering the country’s urgent domestic needs. Maintaining this pattern, Congress just splashed out $12 billion for 85 more F-35 warplanes, 6 more than Trump bought last year, without debating the relative merits of buying more F-35s vs. investing $12 billion in education, healthcare, clean energy or fighting poverty.

The 2022 military spending bill (NDAA or National Defense Authorization Act) that passed the House on September 23 would hand a whopping $740 billion to the Pentagon and $38 billion to other departments (mainly the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons), for a total of $778 billion in military spending, a $37 billion increase over this year’s military budget. The Senate will soon debate its version of this bill—but don’t expect too much of a debate there either, as most senators are “yes men” when it comes to feeding the war machine.

Two House amendments to make modest cuts both failed: one by Rep. Sara Jacobs to strip $24 billion that was added to Biden’s budget request by the House Armed Services Committee; and another by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for an across-the-board 10% cut (with exceptions for military pay and healthcare).

After adjusting for inflation, this enormous budget is comparable to the peak of Trump’s arms build-up in 2020, and is only 10% below the post-WWII record set by Bush II in 2008 under cover of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would give Joe Biden the dubious distinction of being the fourth post-Cold War U.S. president to militarily outspend every Cold War president, from Truman to Bush I.

In effect, Biden and Congress are locking in the $100 billion per year arms build-up that Trump justified with his absurd claims that Obama’s record military spending had somehow depleted the military.

As with Biden’s failure to quickly rejoin the JCPOA with Iran, the time to act on cutting the military budget and reinvesting in domestic priorities was in the first weeks and months of his administration. His inaction on these issues, like his deportation of thousands of desperate asylum seekers, suggests that he is happier to continue Trump’s ultra-hawkish policies than he will publicly admit.

In 2019, the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland conducted a study in which it briefed ordinary Americans on the federal budget deficit and asked them how they would address it. The average respondent favored cutting the deficit by $376 billion, mainly by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, but also by cutting an average of $51 billion from the military budget.

Even Republicans favored cutting $14 billion, while Democrats supported a much larger $100 billion cut. That would be more than the 10% cut in the failed Ocasio-Cortez Amendment, which garnered support from only 86 Democratic Reps and was opposed by 126 Dems and every Republican.

Most of the Democrats who voted for amendments to reduce spending still voted to pass the bloated final bill. Only 38 Democrats were willing to vote against a $778 billion military spending bill that, once Veterans Affairs and other related expenses are included, would continue to consume over 60% of discretionary spending.

“How’re you going to pay for it?” clearly applies only to “money for people,” never to “money for war.” Rational policy making would require exactly the opposite approach. Money invested in education, healthcare and green energy is an investment in the future, while money for war offers little or no return on investment except to weapons makers and Pentagon contractors, as was the case with the $2.26 trillion the United States wasted on death and destruction in Afghanistan.

A study by the Political Economy Research Center at the University of Massachusetts found that military spending creates fewer jobs than almost any other form of government spending. It found that $1 billion invested in the military yields an average of 11,200 jobs, while the same amount invested in other areas yields: 26,700 jobs when invested in education; 17,200 in healthcare; 16,800 in the green economy; or 15,100 jobs in cash stimulus or welfare payments.

It is tragic that the only form of Keynesian stimulus that is uncontested in Washington is the least productive for Americans, as well as the most destructive for the other countries where the weapons are used. These irrational priorities seem to make no political sense for Democratic Members of Congress, whose grassroots voters would cut military spending by an average of $100 billion per year based on the Maryland poll.

So why is Congress so out of touch with the foreign policy desires of their constituents? It is well-documented that Members of Congress have more close contact with well-heeled campaign contributors and corporate lobbyists than with the working people who elect them, and that the “unwarranted influence” of Eisenhower’s infamous Military-Industrial Complex has become more entrenched and more insidious than ever, just as he feared.

The Military-Industrial Complex exploits flaws in what is at best a weak, quasi-democratic political system to defy the will of the public and spend more public money on weapons and armed forces than the world’s next 13 military powers. This is especially tragic at a time when the wars of mass destruction that have served as a pretext for wasting these resources for 20 years may finally, thankfully, be coming to an end.

The five largest U.S. arms manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics) account for 40% of the arms industry’s federal campaign contributions, and they have collectively received $2.2 trillion in Pentagon contracts since 2001 in return for those contributions. Altogether, 54% of military spending ends up in the accounts of corporate military contractors, earning them $8 trillion since 2001.

The House and Senate Armed Services Committees sit at the very center of the Military-Industrial Complex, and their senior members are the largest recipients of arms industry cash in Congress. So it is a dereliction of duty for their colleagues to rubber-stamp military spending bills on their say-so without serious, independent scrutiny.

The corporate consolidation, dumbing down and corruption of U.S. media and the isolation of the Washington “bubble” from the real world also play a role in Congress’s foreign policy disconnect.

There is another, little-discussed reason for the disconnect between what the public wants and how Congress votes, and that can be found in a fascinating 2004 study by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations titled “The Hall of Mirrors: Perceptions and Misperceptions in the Congressional Foreign Policy Process.”

The “Hall of Mirrors” study surprisingly found a broad consensus between the foreign policy views of lawmakers and the public, but that “in many cases Congress has voted in ways that are inconsistent with these consensus positions.”

The authors made a counter-intuitive discovery about the views of congressional staffers. “Curiously, staffers whose views were at odds with the majority of their constituents showed a strong bias toward assuming, incorrectly, that their constituents agreed with them,” the study found, “while staffers whose views were actually in accord with their constituents more often than not assumed this was not the case.”

This was particularly striking in the case of Democratic staffers, who were often convinced that their own liberal views placed them in a minority of the public when, in fact, most of their constituents shared the same views. Since congressional staffers are the primary advisors to members of Congress on legislative matters, these misperceptions play a unique role in Congress’s anti-democratic foreign policy.

Overall, on nine important foreign policy issues, an average of only 38% of congressional staffers could correctly identify whether a majority of the public supported or opposed a range of different policies they were asked about.

On the other side of the equation, the study found that “Americans’ assumptions about how their own member votes appear to be frequently incorrect … [I]n the absence of information, it appears that Americans tend to assume, often incorrectly, that their member is voting in ways that are consistent with how they would like their member to vote.”

It is not always easy for a member of the public to find out whether their Representative votes as they would like or not. News reports rarely discuss or link to actual roll-call votes, even though the Internet and the Congressional Clerk’s office make it easier than ever to do so.

Civil society and activist groups publish more detailed voting records. Govtrack.us lets constituents sign up for emailed notifications of every single roll-call vote in Congress. Progressive Punch tracks votes and rates Reps on how often they vote for “progressive” positions, while issues-related activist groups track and report on bills they support, as CODEPINK does at CODEPINK Congress. Open Secrets enables the public to track money in politics and see how beholden their Representatives are to different corporate sectors and interest groups.

When Members of Congress come to Washington with little or no foreign policy experience, as many do, they must take the trouble to study hard from a wide range of sources, to seek foreign policy advice from outside the corrupt Military-Industrial Complex, which has brought us only endless war, and to listen to their constituents.

The Hall of Mirrors study should be required reading for congressional staffers, and they should reflect on how they are personally and collectively prone to the misperceptions it revealed.

Members of the public should beware of assuming that their Representatives vote the way they want them to, and instead make serious efforts to find out how they really vote. They should contact their offices regularly to make their voices heard, and work with issues-related civil society groups to hold them accountable for their votes on issues they care about.

Looking forward to next year’s and future military budget fights, we must build a strong popular movement that rejects the flagrantly anti-democratic decision to transition from a brutal and bloody, self-perpetuating “war on terror” to an equally unnecessary and wasteful but even more dangerous arms race with Russia and China.

As some in Congress continue to ask how we can afford to take care of our children or ensure future life on this planet, progressives in Congress must not only call for taxing the rich but cutting the Pentagon–and not just in tweets or rhetorical flourishes, but in real policy.

While it may be too late to reverse course this year, they must stake out a line in the sand for next year’s military budget that reflects what the public desires and the world so desperately needs: to roll back the destructive, gargantuan war machine and to invest in healthcare and a livable climate, not bombs and F-35s.

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Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Featured image is from Rise Up Times

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On the Steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery on October 1st, celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Code, Dr. Nagase gave this powerful speech.

Dr. Daniel Nagase has been a doctor for over 15 years, he graduated from Dalhousie Medical School in 2004.

He has been an emergency doctor for 10 years and has been working in rural underserviced communities throughout Alberta since 2015.

He has a story he’d like to share with you about what happened after he gave Covid patients Ivermectin in a small hospital west of Red Deer.

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Dr. Maximilian C. Forte gets to the heart of the matter. We must face honestly that unscrupulous bankers, corporate hucksters, media hacks, and corrupt politicians have succeeded in pushing bogus science on the mostly compliant leadership of our universities. This exercise of power over a weak and servile academia is pretty much the death knell for what once could be credibly described as institutions of higher learning.

Now we have institutions of compliance with lethal and injurious emergency measures. These measures have been imposed on us without imposing on the ascendant authorities any real requirement to prove with credible evidence that a genuine emergency actually exists. Courts have failed, the media has failed, the medical profession has failed and now the universities have failed on a gargantuan scale to provide reasonable checks that might balance against the utter failure of our so-called parliamentary democracy to provide honest and conscientious governance.

Prof. Forte points to the absurdity of  “a university that effectively bans free speech?” If only that was the problem. Unfortunately it goes much deeper. Why have there been so few faculty voices speaking with the clarity of Prof. Byram Bridle and Prof. Denis Rancourt to identify the mounting travesties that have been obvious from the inception of the manufactured COVID crisis?

Mostly our faculty associations have been compliant right up to this advanced stage of the crisis when all constitutional protections for our inalienable rights and freedoms are being bulldozed under in ways that might become permanent and irreversible.

As for protecting the principles of academic freedom, I accuse our own Canadian Association of University Teachers of playing fast and loose on that score. Our association of faculty associations has not lived up to the heavy responsibilities it bears to defend academic freedom. Instead, CAUT is well in line with the betrayal of social democracy by the trade union movement and the NDP. As I see it, CAUT is more than willing to host the woke perspectives whose proponents seem to want more masking, more lockdowns, and more submission to cradle-to-grave regimes of mandatory vaccines no matter how unsafe nor how ineffective.

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From Dr. Maximilian C. Forte

Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Concordia University
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
Montreal, QC, Canada, H3G-1M8

October 5

It is because of situations such as these, that I wonder why some colleagues–who are opposed to the mandates, the restrictions, and all the propaganda that goes with them–are fighting so hard to get exemptions. Who would want to preserve their place in such an institution? A university, that effectively bans free speech? It defeats the purpose of wanting to be an academic, and certainly wanting to remain. One might want to keep their job in a university…but when there is no university any longer as such, all you are keeping is “a job”. Sorry, but I would rather maintain the right to say what I think, and be folding sheets at the local Days Inn.

Imagine the inversion we have achieved here: a professor has to live in fear of what students might say.

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The only surprise was that it did not come sooner.  Big Tech whistleblowers are not exactly running out of the offices of Silicon Valley, so it was with some excitement that Facebook could produce a person willing enough to show us the laundry, with the dirt still caking the content.

And the laundry in question proved to be bountiful, with internal company documents running into the thousands showing a fruit salad range of mendacity, deception and approaches to combating hate, violence and misinformation on its platform.  The Wall Street Journal capitalised.

Before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Production, Product Safety, and Data Security, Frances Haugen, who revealed her identity on October 3, elaborated.  Lawmakers were certainly more pleased with Haugen’s frankness, a far cry from the testimony of Facebook global head of Safety, Antigone Davis, who gave little away the week prior.

As an algorithm specialist, Haugen spent time at Facebook dealing with civic misinformation, counterespionage and democracy.  She also had previous stints at Google, Pinterest and Yelp. “Having worked on four different types of social networks, I understand how complex and nuanced these problems are,” she claimed in her opening statement.  “However, the choices being made inside Facebook are disastrous – for our children, for our public safety, for our privacy and for our democracy – and that is why we must demand Facebook make changes.”

Where there were conflicts between profits and safety, these were resolved in favour of the former. “The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats, and more combat.”  Online discussions (Haugen calls it “dangerous online talk”) had, in some cases, “led to violence that harms and even kills people.”

The hearing itself spent much time on Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm, which emphasises interactions (likes and comments) from those the company deems the use closest to.  While not in of itself pernicious, data scientists, Haugen’s documents reveal, were concerned that this focus was having a skewed effect.

Another concern for Haugen is the company’s use of engagement-based ranking.  Content receiving more reactions from users are given ranking in terms of priority, meaning that violence and misinformation receive prominence.  In “basically damning 10 years of my own work”, Haugen suggested that a chronological ranking system would be preferable.

Facebook’s relationship with information – and misinformation – is deeply problematic.  Safeguards were implemented in the leadup to the 2020 US presidential election, only to be removed.  After the Capitol riot of January 6, they were reintroduced.  This, Haugen suggests, demonstrates a false logic at play: that using its current algorithms is necessary for profits while stressing safety would diminish them.  Not so, claims the whistleblower: having oversight governed by researchers, academics, and government bodies could actually aid growth.  “With appropriate oversight and some of these constraints, it’s possible that Facebook could actually be a much more profitable company five or ten years down the road, because it wasn’t as toxic, and not as many people quit it.”

These suggestions are not free of their own problems.  Government oversight is hardly a guarantee on the veracity and verity of information and having an example of it set in the United States is bound to see it replicated in other countries.  Nor is it a guarantee against censorship, ever the prerogative of moralising lawmakers keen to use the message of safety to block material.

Haugen also wishes to see reforms to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which protects the social media platforms from legal liability.  Should the algorithms in question be shown to cause harm, then the company should be made liable.  “Facebook should not be given a free pass on choices it makes to prioritize growth and reactiveness over public safety.”

Zuckerberg’s response to the Haugen show was predictably filled with denial.  “We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health.”  He found it “difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives.”  The examples he adduced were themselves suggestive of how deep the mire has become: the creation of “an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues”; the employment of “so many people” in “fighting harmful content”.  But what really irked Zuckerberg was the suggestion that “we prioritize profit over safety and well-being.”

The company chief can hardly be too bothered: he is vacationing.  It fell to the demons of Facebook PR to go to work.  “Today,” Director of Policy Communications Lena Pietsch fired in statement, “a Senate Commerce subcommittee held a hearing with a former product manager at Facebook who worked for the company for less than two years, had no direct reports, never attended a decision-point meeting with C-level executives – and testified more than six times to not working on the subject matter in question.”

The statement had it all: demeaning the whistleblower’s testimony as irrelevant, ill-informed and unimportant, largely because she was unimportant to begin with, lacked access to the relevant channels and could not possibly have formed a valid opinion about the company.  That said, Facebook did agree that it was “time to begin to create standard rules for the internet.”  This involved an over to you message to Congress.  “It’s been 25 years since the rules of the internet have been updated and instead of expecting the industry to make societal decisions that belong to legislators, it is time for Congress to act.”

Beyond these disclosures, Facebook will be fighting with committed savagery to convince those on the Hill that change, were it to happen, should be minimal.  From the company’s perspective, it has to be, given the central tenets of surveillance capitalism that underpin its success.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.  Email: [email protected]

Video: “How Many People Are We Going to Kill if We Keep Following this Narrative”, Asks Ontario Emergency Physician

By Dr. Rochagné Kilian and Strong and Free Canada, October 06, 2021

Dr. Rochagné Kilian, an ER doctor in Owen Sound, Ontario, resigned in protest of mandatory vaccines and the corruption of our health services. Dr. Kilian came to public attention when the recording of the Grey Bruce hospital board was released.

Video Emerges Where Fauci and Others Planned for a “Universal mRNA Flu Vaccine” Which Became the “COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine” Because People Were Not Afraid Enough of the Flu Virus

By Brian Shilhavy, October 06, 2021

Last night Alex Jones of Infowars.com did a special broadcast regarding an October, 2019 video that they had just become aware of that was a panel discussion hosted by the Milken Institute discussing the need for a Universal Flu Vaccine.

Pure Insanity: Now Anyone with Any Disease in Alberta Can be Counted as a “COVID” Case

By Ethan Huff, October 05, 2021

In an announcement, Alberta Chief Health Officer Deena Hinshaw explained that people who test “negative” for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19), as well as people who never get tested at all but who show respiratory symptoms of any kind, will be automatically added to the official case count that the government relays to the media.

People are Dying Worldwide: “Foreign Aid” to Finance 1.8 Billion Vaccine Doses. Western Governments, Billionaires and Big Pharma Come to the “Rescue of the Poor Countries”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 07, 2021

The mRNA “experimental” vaccine was launched in mid to late December 2020. In many countries, there was a significant and immediate shift in mortality following the introduction of the Covid-19 vaccine.

The Covid “Killing Spree” – And the “Robotization” of the Survivors. We Need A Nuremberg 2.0

By Peter Koenig, October 06, 2021

During Hitler’s Nazi Reich, doctors and nurses were obliged to kill disabled or handicapped children – for the good of society, for obtaining a clean Arian State. And for economics. Most of them complied. They killed innocent children, adults, and old-age people as well, for the same purpose. The elderly and infirm were injected with a poison, so they wouldn’t cost money to the state.

Why Is the UN Dictating Canada’s Provincial Health Policies?

By Prof. Scott Masson, October 06, 2021

There can be no rationale for trashing the Nuremberg Code that does not destroy the ethical legitimacy of health care, no appeal to the public good when conscience has been denied any validity, and no claim to defend a health-care system that dismisses thousands of health professionals that does not simultaneously destroy it.

Lessons for Ethically-compromised Physicians in 2021 from the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg (1946 – 1947)

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls, October 06, 2021

The Medical Case, U.S.A. vs. Karl Brandt, et al. (also known as the Doctors’ Trial), was prosecuted in 1946-47 against twenty-three doctors and administrators accused of organizing and participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the form of medical experiments and medical procedures inflicted on prisoners and civilians.

Video: Dr. Kary B. Mullis. “No Infection or Illness Can be Accurately Diagnosed with the PCR Test”

By Kary B. Mullis and Dr. Gary Null, October 06, 2021

In 1996, Dr. Gary Null interviewed the late Nobel Laureate Dr. Kary B. Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test. He stated that no infection or illness can be accurately diagnosed with PCR. He also discussed his thoughts regarding Dr. Fauci and the scientific and medical establishments.

J’Accuse! The Gene-based “Vaccines” Are Killing People. Governments Worldwide Are Lying to You the People, to the Populations They Purportedly Serve

By Doctors for COVID Ethics, October 06, 2021

The signal of harm is now indisputably overwhelming, and, in line with universally accepted ethical standards for clinical trials, Doctors for Covid Ethics demands that the COVID-19 “vaccination” programme be halted immediately worldwide.

“The Harmful Behaviour of Facebook”: Social Media Destabilizes Democracy and Harm Users’ Mental Health

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, October 06, 2021

Controversies involving the role of social networks in the contemporary world are on the rise. Far beyond the blackout on October 4, large technology companies have recently been criticized for acting in a socially destructive way, harming the mental health of their users and fostering the polarization of society.

The Police State’s Reign of Terror Continues … With Help from the Supreme Court

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, October 06, 2021

This is what one would call a slow death by a thousand cuts, only it’s the Constitution being inexorably bled to death by the very institution (the judicial branch of government) that is supposed to be protecting it (and us) from government abuse.

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Under the aegis of the newly established Nigeria-Russia Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Russians are now gearing up to revamp the Ajaokuta Iron and Steel Complex that was abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, and further take up energy, oil and gas projects in Nigeria, as well as facilitate trade between Nigeria and Russia.

After Soviet’s collapse, Russia has been struggling to find ways of regaining part of its Soviet-era economic influence throughout Africa, and Nigeria has been high on Russia’s agenda for reviving multifaceted business ties, at least to share the market and take up opportunities similar to external players such as the United States, Europe and China.

President Olusegun Obasanjo visited Russia in 2001. Since then, there had been a number of deals and business proposals, these previously and in theory featured in Russia-Nigerian relations. As far back in June 2009, Dmitry Medvedev as president visited Nigeria for the first time, held topmost state level talks on possible nuclear energy, oil exploration and military cooperation. There were talks also focusing on the establishment of petrochemical plant in Nigeria. Alongside there was also a declaration on principles of friendly relations and partnership between Nigeria and the Russian Federation.

Nowhere, among the four nation-tour, was it more obvious than in oil-rich Nigeria when Medvedev expressed regret saying Russia was “almost too late in engaging with Africa. In fact, work with our African partners should have been started earlier.” How serious is Russia’s engagement with Africa, even after the four-nation tour – Egypt, Nigeria, Angola and Namibia? Medvedev’s statement still has some relevance, and a lot more implications and interpretations.

Russia has been prospecting for its nuclear-power ambitions down the years. According to Russia’s Rosatom, the protocol signed at that time on nuclear offered the possibility of bilateral cooperation for the development of nuclear infrastructure and the joint exploration and exploitation of uranium deposits. The aim, two nuclear plants estimated cost at US$20 billion – the bulk of it by Russia, is to boost Nigeria’s electricity supply.

Russia’s second-largest oil company, and privately controlled Lukoil, has gone forth and back these several years with plans to expand its operations in Nigeria, and in a number of West African countries. There has been a long-dead silence after Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, signed an agreement with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) on the exploration and exploitation of gas reserves with a new joint venture company known as NiGaz Energy Company.

Nigeria needs Russian technology to boost industrialization just as Russia needs Nigeria as a market for its industrial products and military equipment. There is weak indication that the two countries have sufficient and adequate perception of each other. This, in part, is responsible for the lack of the political will to implement the existing bilateral agreements.

There are many other aspects of the bilateral relations. With high interest, Russians are pushing for military-technical cooperation. The supply of Russian military equipment could play a high value addition to the fight against notorious Boko Haram. In most of the economic deals, the Nigerian political elites are under strong influence of Beijing, London and Washington. The interest is to distance Moscow from African countries.

Nigeria is an economic powerhouse in West African region. As well known, Nigeria is one of the Africa’s fastest growing economies and it boosts the largest population. Russia and Nigeria have some sort of economic relations, but these are not consistent with the long-standing cordial relations between both countries.

In addition, Nigeria is a vast market with huge potentials for prospective foreign investors and so is Russia. Regrettably, investors from both sides appear to know little or nothing about these opportunities. This is, usually attributed to the apparent inadequate knowledge of the many investment opportunities in both countries.

Statistics are extremely hard to obtain. By the end of 2018, Russia’s trade with Nigeria was almost US$600 million, still seen as far below the full potential of trade and economic cooperation between the two countries. Stunningly, talking about bilateral economic footprints, both Russians and Nigerians are unprepared to give needed useful information about Russia’s investment in Nigeria.

The term – bilateral relations – seen as a two-way street, Nigeria’s presence in the Russian Federation is only the diplomatic representative office. Russians hardly encourage African presence in the Russian Federation, and on the other hand, Africans are simply undesirous or unenthusiastic about developing commercial links except a few countries. Despite criticisms, reports show that majority prefer traditional markets – the United States and Europe, and now Asian region. The African political elite and business people choose the United States and Europe for their holidays and as tourism destinations.

Undoubtedly, Africa is growing despite the tremendous challenges and several setbacks. There are still new windows opening especially with the start of African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the most ambitious integration initiative embedded in the Agenda 2063 of the African Union.

It stresses working in industrial hubs, localizing manufacturing and marketing goods in the borderless trading space throughout Africa. It simply increases the attractiveness of the African market and makes it more significant for external players. This, however, points vividly to the fact that Africa is on a transformative journey of industrialization and diversification, and utilizing its vast reserves of natural resources.

While, it explicitly seems, Russian companies do not have enough resources to engage in such investment expansion, it is necessary to demonstrate dynamism, consistency and commitment with whatever economic areas and countries that are identified, especially this time at the start of the landmarked AfCFTA. The market is potentially the largest, Africa – is the continent of the future.

Nigeria-Russia Chamber of Commerce and Industry, established and inaugurated late September 2021, now has as its primary task to raise bilateral economic relations between the two countries. It will help implement some of the significant issues that were discussed during the historic first Russia-Africa summit held October 2019 in Sochi, Russia.

President of Nigeria-Russia Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Dr Obiora Okonkwo told the visiting Russian delegation headed by Ambassador Oleg Ozerov, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation and Head of the Secretariat of Russia-Africa Partnership Forum (RAPF), that establishment of the NRCCI was the first step towards resuscitating and strengthening existing relations between Nigeria and Russia.

He said the official inauguration of the chamber shows the beginning of a new journey that will enable “Nigeria explore business relations with the Russian Federation, and will promote economic growth, technology transfer, development and foster better understanding between both countries.”

Reports indicated that Nigeria-Russia Chamber of Commerce and Industry (NRCCI) was created and incorporated under the Companies and Allied Matters Act 1990, and has established beneficial relationships and contacts with numerous economic development organizations in the Russian Federation.

The principal objectives of NRCCI is to promote commerce, industry, trade and ancillary services; foster, advance and protect commercial, industrial, trade and professional enterprises. “We are therefore seeking to establish an industrial development mechanism built on the principle of mutual beneficial relationships with their own business groups. The strategy is to establish and sustain business contacts with the existing numerous economic development organizations in Russia and Nigeria,” explained Okonkwo.

The Russian business delegation included Andrei Albeshchenko from the Association of Economic Cooperation with African States; Andrei Vladimirov, State Atomic Energy Corporation Overseas; Stepan Belanovich, Uralchem United Chemical Company JSC; Maksim Poltoradnev, Uralchem United Chemical Company JSC and Russian business executives from enterprises interested in Africa.

The September business visit to Abuja was organized by the Association of Economic Cooperation with African States (AECAS) with support from the Russian Foreign Ministry, assistance from the Russian Embassy in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Ozerov and his delegation paid an official courtesy call on Vice President Yemi Osinbajo at the Presidential Villa.

According to reports, Vice President Osinbajo has expressed keen interest in developing bilateral cooperation and the need to increase the presence of Russian companies in Nigeria. Vice President Osinbajo stressed the fact that the formal inauguration of a Nigeria-Russia Chamber of Commerce and Industry (NRCCI) will consolidate efforts to deepen the long-lasting relationship and invigorate business opportunities between Federal Republic of Nigeria and the Russian Federation.

“We are interested in developing relations with Nigeria. It is one of the largest and most promising economies where we see lot of opportunities. We were happy to hear that the Vice President supports the development of bilateral economic relations. Russia has a lot to offer, from new technologies to fertilizers, agriculture, energy and infrastructure projects. We must intensify cooperation to achieve tangible results prior to the second Russia-Africa summit,” Ambassador Oleg Ozerov, Head of the Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum, told journalists during the press conference following the meeting.

Within the framework of the joint declaration adopted at the first Russia-Africa Summit, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation established the Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum. The Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum also moved to create an Association of Economic Cooperation with African States (AECAS).

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Featured image is from TheCable

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Turkey and Azerbaijan are presenting a united front against a potential enemy in the face of Iran.

Ankara and Baku announced that they would hold a joint military exercise near the border with the Islamic Republic between October 5^th and October 8^th.

Titled “Unshakable Brotherhood,” the drills are organized to “develop friendship, cooperation and coordination between the Turkish and Azerbaijani Land Forces.”

Prior to these exercises in Nakhichevan, joint military exercises with Georgian, Azerbaijani and Turkish servicemen “Eternity-2021” were launched in Georgia on October 4^th.

These are all an attempt to show force before Iran, as it held large-scale military exercises along the border with Azerbaijan in the previous days.

Tehran meanwhile released a series of hype videos, mostly from its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) showcasing the capabilities it was deploying along the border.

Two days earlier, the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Defense Force (IRIADF) unveiled a new tactical radar and an air-defense simulator.

These improvements are significant, as Azerbaijan, as well as Turkey employ a large number of UAVs in their military operations. In the event of hostilities, they need to be countered in order to avoid a repeat of the Armenia-Azerbaijani war for Nagorno Karabakh. Tehran is deeply concerned of the strengthening of the Baku’s military cooperation with Tel Aviv, fearing the deployment of Israeli Harop UAVs in the border regions.

One of the videos demonstrates about 4,000 IRGC speed boats that were deployed in the port of Astara on the Caspian Sea that could quickly reach the Azerbaijani oil facilities in the Caspian Sea. Such a reinforcement could play a strategic role in case of a direct confrontation.

Tehran will likely not openly oppose Turkey and Azerbaijan’s attempt at “two states – one nation”, but it will evidently also not support it. This is an issue for Iran, as up to 30 million ethnic Azerbaijanis live in its north-western region, so-called Iranian Azerbaijan, compared to the entire population of its neighbor that sits at 10 million. A realization of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plan of a unified Turkic world directly threatens Iran’s livelihood.

Geographically, a big part of Ankara and Baku’s effort is to organize a direct transport corridor to the Caspian Sea and further to Central Asia.

Armenia’s Syunik region separates Azerbaijan’s mainland from the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic. In a recent visit of Armenia’s Foreign Minister to Tehran, it was underlined that Iran is against the removal of Armenian servicemen from the Syunik region and would be ready for a direct confrontation if it happens.

Iran is fortunate in this regard that it doesn’t need to fight, but simply show its forces and mark the red lines, as both Russia and China do not seem willing to allow “Great Turan” to turn into reality.

The developments are still in their early stages, but it is very apparent that both Ankara and Baku are making significant movements and are unwilling to stop their attempts. There are sure to be pushes towards shifts in a geopolitical landscape in the coming months and years.

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In June 2021, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson held a news conference with families who shared stories about the injuries they’d suffered as a result of taking the COVID jab

September 10, 2021, WXYZ-TV Channel 7 posted a request on Facebook, asking people who had lost an unvaccinated loved one to COVID-19 to contact them for a story. The post has received more than 241,000 comments and most are about someone who was injured or died from the COVID shot, or who got severe COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated

Jodi O’Malley, a registered nurse who works for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is blowing the whistle on COVID jab injuries. Suspected vaccine injuries are not being reported, even though it’s required. In fact, few health care workers are familiar with this requirement and they don’t know how and where to file such reports

Brandon Schadt, a Johnson & Johnson regional business lead, has been caught on tape saying children should not get the COVID jab, and media cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the shots

Justin Durrant, a Johnson & Johnson scientist, agrees babies and young children don’t need the COVID shot, and tells the undercover reporter to not get the Johnson & Johnson COVID “vaccine”

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At the end of June 2021, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson held a news conference with families who shared stories about the injuries they’d suffered as a result of taking the COVID jab. You can watch the hour-long meeting, which was widely censored and suppressed, above.

While Johnson is diplomatic, stating that most people have no problem after taking the jab, and that the shots have saved many lives, it seems clear that side effects from the COVID injections are FAR more common than anyone is willing to publicly admit.

Case in point: September 10, 2021, WXYZ-TV Channel 7 posted a request on Facebook,^1,2 asking people who had lost an unvaccinated loved one to COVID-19 to contact them for a story.

As of September 29, 2021, the post had more than 244,000 comments, and the vast majority are about someone who was injured or died from the COVID shot, or who got severe COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated. You can browse through the hundreds of thousands of comments here. Below are some examples of the comments posted on the site:

“My good friend’s grandpa just passed away due to receiving his booster vaccine.”

“How about doing a story about my uncle who was in fine shape until he got vaccinated. Or my boss’s uncle who was healthy and in his 50s, then died suddenly a week after getting vaccinated.”

“My sister-in-law’s father died of a stroke 48H after Moderna vax. He was active and healthy.”

“The shot murdered my friend three weeks after he got it.”

“I have a close friend that now has myocarditis after the shots. High Mortality within 5 years. Perfectly healthy prior to the shots.”

“I know 2 women who had strokes right after their shot.”

“We lost an uncle to heart inflammation 2 days after he received the vaccine.”

“Lost a very dear man after his second dose of the vaccine and he said he regretted getting it and he advised me not to get it. How about reporting on those? He died of a brain aneurysm, and was a very healthy man.”

“My beautiful mother passed away recently, 23 days after having the first AstraZeneca shot (that I didn’t know she was getting). ‘Immunization’ was the ‘cause of death’ on her death certificate.”

“I now know more people injured by the vaccine than people who even had covid.”

“No but I know of two people who died from Covid after being fully vaccinated.”

“My uncle passed away 3 months after his second shot. He was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, had surgery, was released to rehab and then died of a blood clot. Thanks Pfizer.”

“I know two women who had miscarriages within 2 days of taking it.”

These responses are what you would call a major CLUE. As noted by one commenter,

“Doesn’t sound like you’re getting the story you need judging by the vast majority of these comments about vaccine losses and side effects. Since there is such an overwhelming outpouring of vaccine reactions maybe do a story on that? There’s lots of people here to pool from it seems.”

We now also have medical insiders blowing the whistle, confirming COVID jab injuries are incredibly commonplace, and most are never reported. In an upcoming article, I will share businessman Steve Kirsch’s analysis that strongly suggests the reports in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) is underreported by a factor of 41. This means there may actually be more than 200,000 deaths and up to 5 million COVID jab injuries.

In a stunning Project Veritas report, Jodi O’Malley, a nurse working for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reveals health officials are ignoring and covering up COVID-19 vaccine injuries.

O’Malley says she’s seen “dozens of people come in with adverse reactions,” including myocarditis, congestive heart failure and deaths, yet the reactions are not being reported. This, despite the fact that both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention require any suspected injury from an emergency use vaccine to be reported.

“If everyone is supposed to gather this data and report it, but no one is reporting it, how will anyone know the vaccine is truly safe? They don’t,” O’Malley says.

One of the reasons O’Malley decided to come forward, knowing she will likely lose her job over it, is because one of her coworkers who was coerced into taking the shot died. “Nobody should have to decide between their livelihood or take the vaccine,” O’Malley says.

She also points out that while there are medications such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that have been shown to be safe and effective against the virus, the HHS will terminate anyone who uses these drugs. Were these drugs permitted, the COVID jab wouldn’t even qualify for emergency use. When O’Malley asks Gayle Lundberg, a DHHS pharmacist, if ivermectin can be given to a patient if the doctor is willing to prescribe it, Lundberg responds:

“I am stuck. I am told you are absolutely not to use [ivermectin] under any circumstances whatsoever for somebody with COVID, unless you don’t want to have a job. I’m not going to lose my job over this.”

“This is evil at the highest level,” O’Malley says. “You have the FDA, the CDC, that are both supposed to be protecting us, but they are under the government, and everything we’ve done so far is unscientific.”

Another whistleblower, Deborah Conrad, was recently featured in a Highwire exclusive. Conrad, a physician’s assistant, reveals there’s a complete disregard for the requirement to report COVID jab injuries at her hospital too. I will publish that interview this coming Friday, October 8, 2021.

Johnson & Johnson Officials Caught on Tape

In Part 3 of its COVID vaccine investigative series, Project Veritas exposes the true sentiments of two Johnson & Johnson officials: Brandon Schadt, a Johnson & Johnson regional business lead, and Justin Durrant, a Johnson & Johnson scientist.

Speaking to an undercover Project Veritas reporter over a meal, Schadt admits he does not agree with the push to vaccinate children.

“Kids shouldn’t get a f*cking [COVID] vaccine,” he says. “It’s terrible … It’s a kid, you just don’t do that, you know? Not something that’s so unknown in terms of repercussions down the road.”

When asked if we really have no idea what the long-term repercussions are, he replies, “I mean, how could you? Right? There’s nobody who’s 30 years in who said, ‘Hey, I had the vaccine and I don’t have a third eyeball.” When asked if we can trust the media when it comes to reporting on the COVID shots, Schadt states, “In no capacity should we ever trust anything that they say.”

Durrant also doesn’t think babies and young children need the jab, saying “It wouldn’t make that much of a difference” if children are unvaccinated for COVID. That said, he does seem to be onboard with the corporate policy to push the injection on adults, regardless of need or personal beliefs.

He admits that what they’re doing is making life so inconvenient for the unvaccinated that they just give up and get it. Despite that, Durrant tells the undercover reporter: “Don’t get the Johnson & Johnson [COVID vaccine]. I didn’t tell you [that] though.”

FDA Warnings Issued for Janssen, Pfizer and Moderna

In late April 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration added a warning label to the Janssen COVID shot about the risk for potentially serious blood clotting in the brain and other sites, including the abdomen and legs, in combination with thrombocytopenia (low platelet count), particularly among women.^3,4 In mid-July, Guillain-Barre syndrome and altered immunocompetence were added to the list of warnings.^5,6

In June 2021, Pfizer and Moderna both got warning labels added to their COVID shots as the FDA concluded there’s a “likely association” between the mRNA injections and heart inflammation in adolescents and young adults.⁷

June 24, 2021, Fierce Pharma reported that “heart inflammation has occurred at a rate of 12.6 per million among those aged 12 to 39, according to the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink.”⁸

Menstrual Problems Emerging as a Widespread Side Effect

One of the side effects that has yet to register on the FDA’s and CDC’s radar is menstrual irregularities among women. According to a September 16, 2021, editorial in The BMJ,⁹ more than 30,000 reports of menstrual irregularities and vaginal bleeding had been filed with the British Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA) Yellow Card Scheme, which collects and monitors adverse vaccine reactions, as of September 2, 2021.

The editorial was written by Victoria Male, a reproductive immunology specialist at the Imperial College of London. According to Male, the link between these bleeding irregularities and the COVID jabs, irrespective of brand, is a plausible one that warrants further investigation. She writes:¹⁰

“Menstrual changes have been reported after both mRNA and adenovirus vectored covid-19 vaccines, suggesting that, if there is a connection, it is likely to be a result of the immune response to vaccination rather than a specific vaccine component.

Vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV) has also been associated with menstrual changes. Indeed, the menstrual cycle can be affected by immune activation in response to various stimuli, including viral infection: in one study of menstruating women, around a quarter of those infected with SARS-CoV-2 experienced menstrual disruption.

Biologically plausible mechanisms linking immune stimulation with menstrual changes include immunological influences on the hormones driving the menstrual cycle or effects mediated by immune cells in the lining of the uterus, which are involved in the cyclical build-up and breakdown of this tissue.”

Assistant professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Kathryn Clancy, who is researching acute immune activation and menstrual repair mechanisms, told The Defender she’s “dismayed that the research design of [COVID] vaccine trials makes it impossible at this time to actually explore this relationship, and hope drug and vaccine manufacturers in the future take these considerations into account.”¹¹

US Reports of Menstrual Irregularities

In the U.S., the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) had logged a total of 9,589 reports of menstrual disorders following a COVID injection as of September 17, 2021.¹² Dr. Lawrence Palevsky, a pediatrician, also weighed in on The BMJ article, telling The Defender:¹³

“If we were to follow the scientific method, as it was taught in textbooks (knowing full well there is no longer any adherence to the scientific method), we would immediately see this observation of menstrual cycle changes in tens of thousands of women as a signal, for which necessary questions would need to be asked …

A true adherence to the scientific method would allow for answers to be reported without bias or prejudice for a desired outcome of the results … There is a long list of side effects that the manufacturers of the injection sent to the FDA in the fall of 2020.

Many of the injuries people are reporting after receiving these injections, including bleeding, blood clots, autoimmunity, Guillain-Barré syndrome and many others, are well known to the manufacturers and the FDA but, the powers that be continue to ignore the reports of people presenting with these real-time adverse events, as if they have nothing to do with the injections, at all.

Essentially, they gathered the data in clinical trials but have kept them completely under wraps.”

Palevsky believes the menstrual irregularities reported by women who have gotten the COVID shot may be related to effects from the spike protein that their bodies are now producing.

NIH Funds Study to Investigate Menstrual Irregularities

In early September 2021, the Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Office of Research on Women’s Health, both of which are part of the National Institutes of Health, announced they will award $1.67 million in grants to five research institutions to investigate the link between menstrual irregularities and the COVID jabs.^14,15

Over the next year, researchers at Boston University, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University and Oregon Health and Science University, will try to determine whether the menstrual changes are directly linked to the COVID shots, how long the changes last, and what the underlying mechanism is.

The five studies are expected to enroll somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 participants, according to Dr. Diana Bianchi, director of the Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

There’s also an independent group that is collecting data from unvaccinated women who are experiencing abnormal bleeding patterns after coming into close contact with a COVID jabbed individual. Palevsky and Dr. Christiane Northrup are part of this research group, among others. You can find more information about this project on MyCycleStory.com.¹⁶

Mounting Data Tell a Horrifying Story

In closing, while authorities insist the COVID shots are “safe and effective,” mounting data tell a different story. Not only are the injections losing effectiveness within months, as demonstrated by Israeli data discussed in the video above, VAERS has also received more than 726,960 adverse events reports following the COVID shot, including 15,386 deaths and 66,642 hospitalizations, as of September 17, 2021.¹⁷

These numbers are so staggering, there’s really nothing that can compare. In nine months, these shots have caused more VAERS reports of injury and death in the United States than all available vaccines over the past 30 years. A similar situation can be seen in the U.K., where 30,305 people have died within 21 days of their COVID shot. And that was just within the first six months of the vaccine rollout.¹⁸

In August 2021, Japan’s health ministry suspended the use of 1.63 million doses of Moderna’s injection after finding foreign substances that looked like metal particles in some vials. Then, in mid-September, suspected contaminants were discovered in a particular lot of Pfizer’s injection as well.¹⁹ Still, we’re told to just roll up our sleeves and ask no questions. Why?

As noted by Schadt, the Johnson & Johnson employee caught on tape by Project Veritas, the mass vaccination campaign isn’t really about public health, it’s about politics and money. Beyond that, I believe it’s about building the control mechanism needed for the Great Reset. Vaccine passports will allow unelected technocrats to control and manipulate the whole world according to their own whims.

As expected, it doesn’t end with two doses. In Israel, a fourth Pfizer shot is already being rolled out, and the year isn’t even over yet. And all those who took the first two doses will now lose all of their freedoms all over again, until they catch up on the recommended boosters. This is precisely what we can expect to happen everywhere else in the world, where vaccine passports are rolled out.

Freedoms are being tied to being up-to-date on your vaccinations, and once COVID-19 disappears, if ever, they’ll just come out with something else that must be injected into you if you want to work, go to school, travel, shop or live a semi-normal life.

This is what the new biosecurity state is built around. The question is, is that any kind of life? Is that how we want to live? Is this the world we want for our children and grandchildren? If not, we must all do our part and resist mandates, vaccine passports and restrictions based on vaccine status. The good news is, together we can win, because there are far more of us than there are of them.

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Notes

¹ Facebook WXYZ-TV Channel 7 September 10, 2021

² World Tribune September 13, 2021

³ Yale Medicine April 21, 2021, updated August 4, 2021

⁴ FDA Press Release April 23, 2021

⁵ FDA.gov Janssen COVID Vaccine Package Insert

⁶ CNBC July 12, 2021

^7, 8 Fierce Pharma June 24, 2021

^9, 10 The BMJ 2021; 374:n2211

^11, 13 The Defender September 22, 2021

¹² NVIC MedAlerts VAERS data as of 9/17/21

¹⁴ NIH August 30, 2021

¹⁵ The Defender September 8, 2021

¹⁶ Mycyclestory.com

¹⁷ OpenVAERS

¹⁸ The Expose September 15, 2021

¹⁹ KyodoNews September 14, 2021

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Controversies involving the role of social networks in the contemporary world are on the rise. Far beyond the blackout on October 4, large technology companies have recently been criticized for acting in a socially destructive way, harming the mental health of their users and fostering the polarization of society. The dissemination of hate speech, fake news, and the omission of the companies’ officials in the face of crimes, offenses and disrespectful discussions that commonly occur on digital platforms have drawn the attention of many experts, activists and legislators to a problem that seems to have reached its limits: the threat that social networks pose to the stability of democracy.

Recently, the denunciations made by a former Facebook employee have strongly impacted public opinion regarding the real functioning of social networks. Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old American engineer who held the position of product manager at Facebook, has stood out for her criticisms about the company’s negative role in the mental health of child users. Beyond mere criticism, Haugen became active in defending the imposition of legal restrictions on Big Tech companies, participating in hearings in the US Senate, where she exposed information about the harmful behavior of Facebook, urging lawmakers to impose limits on companies of the technology sector.

Haugen’s main criticism is that Facebook maintains an internal policy that seeks to grow at any cost, prioritizing profits and the expansion of the platform to any ethical limits. According to her, Facebook purposely provides inappropriate content to children and young people in order to provoke extreme reactions because, in this way, despite the mental damage of users, the chances of virtual interaction increase through views, likes and shares, making the platform grow more and more. The same happens with other social networks belonging to the Facebook Group and chaired by Mark Zuckerberg, such as Whatsapp and Instagram.

These were some of her words:

“The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people (…) Yesterday we saw Facebook taken off the internet. I don’t know why it went down, but I know that for more than five hours, Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies”.

She added:

Facebook understands that if they want to continue to grow, they have to find new users. They have to make sure that the next generation is just as engaged with Instagram as the current one. And the way they will do that is by making sure that children establish habits before they have good self-regulation (…) It’s just like cigarettes, teenagers don’t have good self-regulation. They say, explicitly, ‘I feel bad when I use Instagram and yet I can’t stop’.”

The Senate reaction was quite favorable to Haugen. With very few exceptions, politicians applauded the former employee and complemented her statement with comments criticizing severely the working dynamics of social media. Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator from Minnesota, said:

“When they allowed 99% of violent content to remain unchecked on their platform including the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, what did they do? Now we know, Mark Zuckerberg was going sailing.”

On the other hand, in response, Mark Zuckerberg made a statement on his media accounts in response, denying all of Haugen’s words and criticizing her stance. Zuckerberg says it is “illogical” to think that his companies push inappropriate content to generate negative reactions. These were his words:

“The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don’t want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don’t know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed.”

In fact, the psychological impacts generated by the use of social media has become an increasingly discussed issue in recent years. There is clear evidence that the use of social networks without any kind of regulation – except that one self-imposed by the companies themselves – has caused irreversible damage to the mental health of young people, who constantly expose their thoughts and bodies in texts and photos that are available for the entire world, often resulting in negative repercussions.

Unable to control the reactions of those who consume the exposed content, young users try to seek more and more positive reactions – as this is a way to improve their social acceptance -, which results in more and more exposure. Social networks automatically boost the content that is being commented on, even if in a derogatory or disrespectful way, just so that more users maintain interaction expanding the platform. The same happens with criminal, violent or pornographic content posted on the networks.

Despite the self-imposed rules prohibiting this type of content, in practice, the companies tend to push them to be more and more consumed, generating reactions and expanding the network. Regardless of whether the reactions are positive or negative, the mere fact that virtual interaction is taking place generates profits for companies, motivating them to increasingly seek to promote all kinds of inappropriate content. It is difficult to measure the effects of this type of constant exposure to inappropriate content and disrespectful reactions in the virtual environment, but certainly many traumas can be developed from this.

The American legislation of the last decades has given a lot of power to social networks, allowing them to work in a system of self-regulation, which in practice means absolute freedom. These networks act as real states whose territory is a cybernetic environment. These “virtual states” are immune to the laws of the physical world and create their own rules – and if in the physical world laws are designed in order to preserve democracy, in these virtual environments they are designed to generate profits.

Now, Washington has a choice to do: either legislation changes completely and imposes severe limits on social networks, or the virtual world will generate more and more damage to the physical world, harming the mental health of young people and destabilizing the entire democratic social structure with unnecessary polarizations and the spread of hatred.

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Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

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Dr. Rochagné Kilian, an ER doctor in Owen Sound, Ontario, resigned in protest of mandatory vaccines and the corruption of our health services.

Dr. Kilian came to public attention when the recording of the Grey Bruce hospital board was released (watch below).

In that recording, board president Gary Simms cannot provide any evidence whatsoever of his dire predictions of a ‘tidal wave of pediatric Covid cases’ which he says are coming this fall, while threatening Dr. Kilian when she spoke up for the truth.

Dr. Kilian has spoken out before regarding the growing corruption of our health care services and has shown leadership and integrity by resigning from her position.

“At least 80% of the ER patients in the past three months were double-vaxxed”, says Dr. Kilian of her informal survey of patients entering the ER with serious medical issues. “How many people are we going to kill if we keep following this narrative?”

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A civil court has sided with a nurse who was suspended without pay after she refused the COVID-19 vaccine.

The ruling was given by the Tribunal of Milan on September 16, following the appeal of the Italian nurse, who was not named. She had been suspended without pay in February because she refused to receive the jab in defiance of a vaccine mandate imposed by her employer. The tribunal called the suspension “illegitimate” and ordered the employer to pay the nurse her full wages with interest and arrears. The decision overturns previous court rulings for similar cases.  

It is the first time in Italy that a court of law has ruled in favor of an employee in a case of a suspension or a dismissal for failure to vaccinate. 

The decision comes from one of Italy’s most authoritative courts and is considered particularly significant because it overturns precedents  and enshrines in law the illegitimacy of dismissing or suspending employees without pay for failing to vaccinate.  

“This was one of the first cases of suspension of a healthcare worker,” stated Mauro Sandri, the nurse’s lawyer, in an interview on YouTube.

Sandri compared the case to that of 5 nurses in a similar situation; they lost their appeal in May.

“Everyone [in Italy] will remember the ruling in Belluno, when 5 nurses who were suspended by their employer launched an appeal and lost it,” he said.  

“The mainstream [media] amplified the outcome of that ruling by going so far as to say that it was pointless to appeal to suspensions imposed by employers.”  

Sandri then recalled that the ruling in that case was “unfortunately emulated by other tribunals, including Modena and Verona” and that “a jurisprudence had been created, giving employers license to suspend their employees.” 

All of Sandri’s previous attempts to appeal such decisions had been unsuccessful. However, he sees that this new decision had overturned the trend.

“This decision was overwhelmingly positive, as it established the illegitimate nature of the suspension,” he said.  

The nurse in question had been suspended since February and had not received any salary since that time. The court therefore ordered the employer to pay her salary for the full period in which she had not been compensated, with added interest, as Sandri pointed out. 

“The appeal aimed at obtaining her reinstatement in the workplace (…) So we requested that, as well as a full payment of her wages, with arrears.” 

The Italian lawyer is convinced that the new ruling will serve as case law for similar cases in the future. 

“The court’s decision will certainly set a benchmark for future rulings,” Sandri said.

“It’s going to be a milestone (…). For me, it’s also going to be the basis for further cases that I have pending.”

The lawyer encouraged workers in similar situations after resisting pressure to take the vaccine to sue not only for lost wages but also for damages. Sandri described the scare-tactics and threats used by some employers who pressure their workers into getting vaccinated as a form of “bullying.”  

“The same principle can be applied in many other situations where there is a vaccine mandate,” he said.

“Anyone employed at a company who has been unduly pressured to get vaccinated and perhaps suspended for not doing so thus becomes a victim of bullying.”  

Sandri also sees the ruling as a hopeful development in the ongoing fight against the imposition of the “Green Pass” in Italy. 

“This ruling shows us how important it is to defend your rights in an efficient manner in order to obtain results,” he said.

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This sickness doth infect/ The very life-blood of our enterprise. — Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1

According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, “Autoimmune disease happens when the body’s natural defense system can’t tell the difference between your own cells and foreign cells, causing the body to mistakenly attack normal cells.”

Canada’s health bureaucracy is now acting like an autoimmune disease to the body politic.

How did many of health-care’s “front-line heroes” of the past 18 months suddenly find themselves out on the streets because they refused to comply with vaccine mandates?

It makes no sense to the health-care professionals. It also destroys the health care they provide to the public. Surely it is not accidental.

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“As prime minister of Japan at the time of the [Fukushima] disaster, I now believe that the time has come for Japan and the world to end its reliance on nuclear power,” Naoto Kan writes in the introduction of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2021 (WNISR).

“Around once a year, I still visit the remains of the Fukushima Daiichi site. Even though ten years have passed, progress in the decommissioning process remains frustratingly slow, driving home to me the importance of avoiding any repeat of such an event.

“The large quantities of radioactive debris that remain within the stricken reactors continue to release alarming levels of radiation. We already know from the example of Chernobyl that the timescale needed for this nuclear waste to drop to safe radioactivity levels will be measured in terms of centuries.”

Stagnation

This year’s WNISR is the work of 13 interdisciplinary experts from across the world. For nearly 30 years, these annual reports have provided important factual antidotes to industry promotion and obfuscation.

In broad terms, nuclear power has been stagnant for 30 years. WNISR notes that the world’s fleet of 415 power reactors is 23 fewer than the 2002 peak of 438, but nuclear capacity and generation have marginally increased due to uprating and larger reactors being built.

There is one big difference with the situation 30 years ago: the reactor fleet was young then, now it is old.

The ageing of the reactor fleet is a huge problem for the industry, as is the ageing of the nuclear workforce ‒ the silver tsunami. The average age of the world’s reactor fleet continues to rise, and by mid-2021 reached 30.9 years. The mean age of the 23 reactors shut down between 2016 and 2020 was 42.6 years.

The International Atomic Energy Agency anticipates the closure of around 10 reactors or 10 gigawatts (GW) per year over the next three decades. Reactor construction starts need to match closures just for the industry to maintain its 30-year pattern of stagnation.

Renewables

But construction starts have averaged only 4.8 per year over the past five years, and there’s no indication of looming growth. During the past decade, the average time between reactor construction start and grid connection has been 10 years.

From 2001-2020, there were 95 reactor startups and 98 closures around the world. There were 47 startups and no closures in China, while in the rest of the world there were 48 startups and 98 closures. As of mid-2021, 53 power reactors were under construction, 16 fewer than in 2013 and far fewer than the peak of 234 in 1979.

Nuclear power’s contribution to global electricity supply has fallen from a peak of 17.5 percent in 1996 to 10.1 percent in 2020 – a 4.3 percent share of global commercial primary energy consumption.

Renewables reached an estimated 29 percent share of global electricity generation in 2020, a record share. Non-hydro renewables at 10.7 percent in 2020 overtook nuclear in 2019 and the gap grew in 2020 with non-hydro renewables generating 16.5 percent more electricity than nuclear reactors.

Total investment in new renewable electricity exceeded US$300 billion in 2020, including US$142 billion investment in wind and US$149 billion in solar. Investment in renewables was 17 times greater than nuclear investment of around US$18 billion.

Solar

In 2020, a record 256 GW of renewable capacity were added to the world’s power grids, including 111 GW of wind and 127 GW of solar. There was a net gain of 0.4 GW of nuclear capacity in 2020.

Despite the marginal increase in nuclear capacity in 2020, nuclear generation fell by 3.9 percent. That compares to a 21 percent increase in solar generation, and 12 percent for wind power.

Since 2009, levelised cost estimates for utility-scale solar dropped by 90 percent, wind by 70 percent, while nuclear costs increased by 33 percent.

Despite the hype, China’s nuclear program is modest: 2 GW of new nuclear capacity added in 2020 compared to 72 GW of wind, 48 GW of solar PV and 13 GW of hydro. Solar and wind combined generated twice as much electricity as nuclear in China in 2020.

In India, wind and solar generation combined was more than three times greater than nuclear generation in 2020.

Vulnerabilities

In the European Union, renewable power generation at 38 percent overtook fossil fuels at 37 percent in 2020 while nuclear power accounted for 25 percent. Last year was the first year that non-hydro renewables generated more power than nuclear in the EU.

In the US, renewable generation in 2020 was 12 percent of the total compared to 20 percent for nuclear. The gap is closing fast due to the growth of renewables and the slow but steady closure of ageing reactors – the average age is over 40.

Last year, nuclear generation in the US declined by 3.6 percent to the lowest level since 2012 while wind increased by 14 percent and solar by 22 percent.

France’s nuclear generation fell by 12 percent in 2020, WNISR notes, to the lowest level in 27 years. With debt-laden utilities, huge liabilities for decommissioning and waste management, an ageing reactor fleet, and catastrophic cost increases for new reactors, the situation is bleak.

In addition to a vast amount of energy data, WNISR includes detailed analyses of the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters; the vulnerabilities of nuclear power to the impacts of climate change such as dwindling and warming water resources, storm impacts, sea-level rise and a chapter on nuclear decommissioning.

Crime

WNISR details the slow and unsteady progress of small modular reactors. The report notes that “so-called advanced reactors of various designs, including so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), make a lot of noise in the media but their promoters have provided little evidence for any implementation scheme before a decade at the very least.”

WNISR notes that previous reports have covered irregularities, fraud, counterfeiting, corruption, and other criminal activities in the nuclear sector. This year’s report dedicates a chapter to nuclear criminality and includes 14 case studies with serious implications – including safety and public governance – that came to trial in the period 2010-2020.

The report states:

 “A stunning number of revelations in recent years on irregularities, fraud, counterfeiting, bribery, corruption, sabotage, theft, and other criminal activities in the nuclear industry in various countries suggest that there is a systemic issue of ‘criminal energy’ in the sector. …

“Although not comprehensive, this analysis offers several noteworthy insights: Criminal activities in the nuclear sector are not new. Some major scandals date back decades or have been ongoing for decades.

“Organized crime organizations have been supplying workers to nuclear sites – e.g. the Yakuza in Japan – for over a decade.

Corruption

“Serious insider sabotage has hit major nuclear countries in recent years – like a Belgian nuclear power plant – without ever leading to arrests.

“There is no systematic, comprehensive, public database on the issue. In 2019, the IAEA released a report on cases of counterfeit or fraudulent items in at least seven countries since at least the 1990s.

“In Transparency International’s 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index about half of the 35 countries operating or constructing nuclear power plants on their territory rate under 50 out of 100.

“In the Bribery Payers Index (BPI, last published in 2011), seven out of the ten worst rated countries operate or are building nuclear power plants on their territory.”

The discussion about whether safe nuclear power can be generated in the right circumstances remains white hot. However, we clearly do not live under the right circumstances. The risks from nuclear – both energy and weapons – remains existential.

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Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and an organiser of a global NGO statement on nuclear power and climate change to be released ahead of COP26.

Featured image: IAEA experts depart Unit 4 of TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station on 17 April 2013 as part of a mission to review Japan’s plans to decommission the facility. (Source: Greg Webb / IAEA)

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Since the dawn of capitalism the logic of collective commons has been systematically challenged by the capitalist class through commodification and private appropriation of wealth. One of their earliest objectives, when factories started to appear in Europe just over several centuries ago, was to take away the common people’s resources and livelihoods by grabbing the lands they lived on and so force them to migrate to the cities and accept the miserable and miserably paid jobs in the factories. On farther continents under European domination their goal had been to grab the land and resources of local populations and force them into hard labour under the whip of imperialist exploiters.

From the 16^th to the 19^th century the various countries that one after the other fell under the yoke of capitalism all went through vast periods of destruction of collective commons, a process that has been well documented by such authors as Karl Marx (1818-1883) book 1 of Capital, [1] Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) in The Accumulation of Capital, [2] Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) The Great Transformation, [3] Silvia Federici (1942) Caliban and the Witch. [4] A great film by Raoul Peck about the young Karl Marx [5] visualizes examples of the destruction of collective commons with dramatic scenes of the brutal repression of poor people collecting wood for fuel in German Rhineland forests and Karl Marx’s stand in support of their centuries old legal and traditional right to do so that was running contrary to capitalistic logic. Daniel Bensaïd wrote Les Dépossédés : Karl Marx, les voleurs de bois et le droit des pauvres (in French) a concise description of the process of destroying collective commons. [6]

In Capital, Karl Marx describes certain forms of grabbing by the capitalist system in Europe:

“The spoliation of church properties, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries the necessary supply of a “free” and outlawed proletariat”. (Capital, Book I, eighth section. Chap. 27)

While capitalist production was being imposed on Europe it was also spreading all over the globe:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation”. (Capital, book I, part 8. Chap. 31)

Marx very succinctly describes the four centuries leading up to the generalization of the industrial revolution at the time Capital was written:

“The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17^th century, they arrive at a systematic combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition (Chap. 31).

Since then, capitalism has continued its offensive against collective commons for two reasons: 1. The commons have not yet entirely disappeared and therefore they limit the total domination of capital, which consequently seeks to appropriate them or reduce them to the bare minimum. 2. Important struggles have recreated commons during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. These commons are constantly being challenged.

During the 19^th and 20^th centuries there have been simultaneous destructions and creations of collective commons

During the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century, popular movements recreated social commons by developing systems of collective support: cooperatives, strike funds, solidarity funds. The victories of the Russian revolution also led to a short period of creation of common properties, until Stalinism degenerated into dictatorship and shamefully privileged a bureaucratic caste as described by Leon Trotsky in 1936 (Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed. [7]).

In many capitalist countries (in varied degrees of development) the governments realized that to maintain social peace and even to avoid a resurgence of revolutionary movements some scraps had to be thrown to the populations. This resulted in the development of welfare states.

After WW2, from the second half of the 1940s to the end of the 1970s the wave of decolonizations mainly in Africa, Asia and the Middle-East, and the victorious revolutions in China (1949) and Cuba (1959) led to the redeployment of some collective commons notably through the nationalizations of strategic infrastructures (Suez canal in 1956 by the Nasser regime) and commodities such as copper by Allende in the early 1970s and petroleum resources (Algeria, Libya, Iraq, Iran…).

This period of reaffirming collective commons is expressed in several United Nations documents from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the 1986 Declaration on the Right of Development which in article 1 paragraph 2 affirms: “The human right to development also implies the full realization of the right of peoples to self-determination, which includes,(…) the exercise of their inalienable right to full sovereignty over all their natural wealth and resources.” [8] This inalienable right of peoples to full sovereignty over their resources is constantly challenged by the IMF, the World Bank and the majority of governments in the interests of big private corporations.

Concerning collective commons

In this article we will not establish a stricto sensodefinition of what are ‘collective commons’. The term will be used in a wide generic sense. This will include the collective ownership of lands which under different forms has marked the history of Humanity right up to the most recent concepts of ‘collective commons’; public services which are 20^th century social conquests won through social struggles and financed through taxation. ‘Collective commons’ also includes workers’ own solidarity structures that grew with early capitalism such as solidarity and strike funds, cooperatives, mutual loans, not forgetting more recent developments such as labour laws and welfare state structures won by the working classes during the 20^th century and analyzed in an original manner by Bernard Friot. [9] In a collective commons environment mercantile relations are either excluded or reduced to minimal proportions.

An extract of Jean-Marie Harribey’s book, La richesse, la valeur et l’inestimable suggests that the ever worsening ecological crises would stimulate renewed interest in the ’notion of the commons [arising] from the awareness of the existence of a common heritage of humanity and therefore of the need to preserve certain material resources (water, air, soil, forests, raw materials) and also immaterial resources (climate, knowledge, culture, health, financial stability, peace, etc.)”. [10]

The activity of social reproduction has also come to the forefront of concerns about the commons through the work of feminist movements. As Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser write in their manifesto Feminism for the 99%, [11] “Finally, capitalist society harbors a social-reproductive contradiction: a tendency to commandeer for capital’s benefit as much ’free’reproductive labor as possible, without any concern for its replenishment. As a result, it periodically gives rise to ’crises of care,’ which exhaust women, ravage families, and stretch social energies to the breaking point (page 65). The authors’ define social reproduction as follows “It encompasses activities that sustain human beings as embodied social beings who must not only eat and sleep but also raise their children, care for their families, and maintain their communities, all while pursuing their hopes for the future. These people-making activities occur in one form or another in every society. In capitalist societies, however, they must also serve another master, namely, capital, which requires that social-reproductive work produce and replenish ‘labor power’” (page 68).

What the authors add later on brings us closer to the situation highlighted by the current multidimensional crisis of capitalism and the coronavirus pandemic: ’[Capitalism assumes]that there will always be sufficient energies to produce the laborers and sustain the social connections on which economic production, and society more generally, depend. In fact, social-reproductive capacities are not infinite, and they can be stretched to the breaking point. When a society simultaneously withdraws public support for social reproduction and conscripts its chief providers into long and grueling hours of low-paid work, it depletes the very social capacities on which it relies. (page 73)

What is denounced in this passage allows us to better understand the fragility of capitalist society in the face of epidemics, the inability of governments to do what is necessary in time to best defend the population, the pressure put on workers in the essential and vital sectors to come to the aid of the population while, at the same time, as a result of the decisions of these same governments, they are underpaid, devalued and in insufficient numbers. The same can be said about the causes of the failure of governments to address the consequences of climate change and the under-equipment and lack of civil protection personnel in the face of increasingly frequent ’natural disasters’.

Public debt has been and still is systematically used as a means of grabbing commons

Since the 1970s public debt has systematically been used as a means of grabbing commons, as much in the North as in the South. The CADTM, along with other social movements, has not ceased to denounce this since the 1980s. We have devoted a dozen books [12] and several hundred articles to this issue. It is very satisfying to see that more and more writers are now highlighting the issue of debt as a weapon against public property. [13]

We cite once again Feminism for the 99%:

’Far from empowering states to stabilize social reproduction through public provision, it authorizes finance capital to discipline states and publics in the immediate interests of private investors. Its weapon of choice is debt. Finance capital lives off of sovereign debt, which it uses to outlaw even the mildest forms of social-democratic provision, coercing states to liberalize their economies, open their markets, and impose ’austerity’ on defenseless populations. (page 77)

All through the neoliberal offensive that has been the dominating ideological tendency since the 1980s, governments and different international institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF have insisted on the “duty” to repay external debt in order to generalize a tidal wave of privatizations of many countries’ strategic economic sectors, public services and natural resources, whether in developed countries or not. As a consequence, the previously existing tendency towards reinforcing collectivism has been reversed.

The list of assaults on public properties based on public debt is long. Some have accelerated the ecological crisis and the development of zoonoses: rapid deforestation, intensive animal farming and monocrops to gain foreign currencies in order to pay foreign debt, all of this in the framework of structural adjustmentpolicies induced by the, already ill mentioned World Bank and IMF.

Some of the political policies imposed through debt repayment obligations have seriously hindered the capacity of states and populations to deal with public health crises including the coronavirus pandemic: stagnation or reduction of public health budgets, imposing compliance to medical patents, renouncing the use of generic drugs, giving up producing medical equipment domestically, preferring private sector medical treatment and medicine distribution, suppressing free access to medical care in many countries, reducing the quality of working conditions in the medical sector and introducing the private sector into numerous essential public health services.

Already, over a century and a half ago Marx put it in a nutshell: “Public debt: the alienation of the state – whether despotic, constitutional or republican – marked with its stamp the capitalistic era”. [14] Once we have become aware of the way repayment of public debt is instrumentalised to impose mortal neoliberal capitalist policies, we know we must fight for the cancellation of illegitimate debt.

Coming next part 2: Knowledge appropriation and Big Pharma profits during the pandemic

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Translated by Mike Krolikowski and Christine Pagnoulle

This article was originally published on CADTM.

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. He is the author of Debt System (Haymarket books, Chicago, 2019), Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc. See his bibliography. He co-authored World debt figures 2015 with Pierre Gottiniaux, Daniel Munevar and Antonio Sanabria (2015); and with Damien Millet Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, Monthly Review Books, New York, 2010. He was the scientific coordinator of the Greek Truth Commission on Public Debt from April 2015 to November 2015.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

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Sides are forming around the Iran vs Azerbaijan squabble. But this fight is not about ethnicity, religion or tribe – it is mainly about who gets to forge the region’s new transportation routes.

The last thing the complex, work-in-progress drive towards Eurasian integration needs at this stage is this messy affair between Iran and Azerbaijan in the South Caucasus.

Let’s start with the Conquerors of Khaybar – the largest Iranian military exercise in two decades held on its northwestern border with Azerbaijan.

Among the deployed Iranian military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) units there are some serious players, such as the 21st Tabriz Infantry Division, the IRGC Ashura 31 battalion, the 65th Airborne Special Forces Brigade and an array of missile systems, including the Fateh-313 and Zulfiqar ballistic missiles with ranges of up to 700 kilometers.

The official explanation is that the drills are a warning to enemies plotting anything against the Islamic Republic.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei pointedly tweeted that “those who are under the illusion of relying on others, think that they can provide their own security, should know that they will soon take a slap, they will regret this.”

The message was unmistakable: this was about Azerbaijan relying on Turkey and especially Israel for its security, and about Tel Aviv instrumentalizing Baku for an intel drive leading to interference in northern Iran.

Further elaboration by Iranian experts went as far as Israel eventually using military bases in Azerbaijan to strike at Iranian nuclear installations.

The reaction to the Iranian military exercise so far is a predictable Turkey–Azerbaijani response: they are conducting a joint drill in Nakhchivan throughout this week.

But were Iran’s concerns off the mark? A close security collaboration between Baku and Tel Aviv has been developing for years now. Azerbaijan today possesses Israeli drones and is cozy with both the CIA and the Turkish military. Throw in the recent trilateral military drills involving Azerbaijan, Turkey and Pakistan – these are developments bound to raise alarm bells in Tehran.

Baku, of course, spins it in a different manner: Our partnerships are not aimed at third countries.

So, essentially, while Tehran accuses Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev of making life easy for Takfiri terrorists and Zionists, Baku accuses Tehran of blindly supporting Armenia. Yes, the ghosts of the recent Karabakh war are all over the place.

As a matter of national security, Tehran simply cannot tolerate Israeli companies involved in the reconstruction of regions won in the war near the Iranian border: Fuzuli, Jabrayil, and Zangilan.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdullahian has tried to play it diplomatically:

“Geopolitical issues around our borders are important for us. Azerbaijan is a dear neighbor to Iran and that’s why we don’t want it to be trapped between foreign terrorists who are turning their soil into a hotbed.”

As if this was not complicated enough, the heart of the matter – as with all things in Eurasia – actually revolves around economic connectivity.

An interconnected mess

Baku’s geoeconomic dreams are hefty: the capital city aims to position itself at the key crossroads of two of the most important Eurasian corridors: North-South and East-West.

And that’s where the Zangezur Corridor comes in – arguably essential for Baku to predominate over Iran’s East-West connectivity routes.

The corridor is intended to connect western Azerbaijan to the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic via Armenia, with roads and railways passing though the Zangezur region.

Zangezur is also essential for Iran to connect itself with Armenia, Russia, and further on down the road, to Europe.

China and India will also rely on Zangezur for trade, as the corridor provides a significant shortcut in distance. Considering large Asian cargo ships cannot sail the Caspian Sea, they usually waste precious weeks just to reach Russia.

An extra problem is that Baku has recently started harassing Iranian truckers in transit through these new annexed regions on their way to Armenia.

It didn’t have to be this way. This detailed essay shows how Azerbaijan and Iran are linked by “deep historical, cultural, religious, and ethno-linguistic ties,” and how the four northwestern Iranian provinces – Gilan, Ardabil, East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan – have “common geographical borders with both the main part of Azerbaijan and its exclave, the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic; they also have deep and close commonalities based on Islam and Shiism, as well as sharing the Azerbaijani culture and language. All this has provided the ground for closeness between the citizens of the regions on both sides of the border.”

During the Rouhani years, relations with Aliyev were actually quite good, including the Iran‑Azerbaijan‑Russia and Iran‑Azerbaijan‑Turkey trilateral cooperation.

A key connectivity at play ahead is the project of linking the Qazvin‑Rasht‑Astara railway in Iran to Azerbaijan: that’s part of the all-important International North‑South Transport Corridor (INSTC).

Geoeconomically, Azerbaijan is essential for the main railway that will eventually run from India to Russia. No only that; the Iran‑Azerbaijan‑Russia trilateral cooperation opens a direct road for Iran to fully connect with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).

In an optimal scenario, Baku can even help Iranian ports in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman to connect to Georgian ports in the Black Sea.

The West is oblivious to the fact that virtually all sections of the INSTC are already working. Take, for instance, the exquisitely named Astara‑Astara railway connecting Iranian and Azerbaijani cities that share the same name. Or the Rasht‑Qazvin railway.

But then one important 130km stretch from Astara to Rasht, which is on the southern shore of the Caspian and is close to the Iranian–Azeri border, has not been built. The reason? Trump-era sanctions. That’s a graphic example of how much, in real-life practical terms, rides on a successful conclusion of the JCPOA talks in Vienna.

Who owns Zangezur?

Iran is positioned in a somewhat tricky patch along the southern periphery of the South Caucasus. The three major players in that hood are of course Iran, Russia, and Turkey. Iran borders the former Armenian – now Azeri – regions adjacent to Karabakh, including Zangilan, Jabrayil and Fuzuli.

Source: The Cradle

It was clear that Iran’s flexibility on its northern border would be tied to the outcome of the Second Karabakh War. The northwestern border was a source of major concern, affecting the provinces of Ardabil and eastern Azerbaijan – which makes Tehran’s official position of supporting Azerbaijani over Armenian claims all the more confusing.

It is essential to remember that even in the Karabakh crisis in the early 1990s, Tehran recognized Nagorno‑Karabakh and the regions surrounding it as integral parts of Azerbaijan.

While both the CIA and Mossad appear oblivious to this recent regional history, it will never deter them from jumping into the fray to play Baku and Tehran against each other.

An extra complicating factor is that Zangezur is also mouth-watering from Ankara’s vantage point.

Arguably, Turkey’s neo-Ottoman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who never shies away from an opportunity to expand his Turkic-Muslim strategic depth, is looking to use the Azeri connection in Zangezur to reach the Caspian, then Turkmenistan, all the way to Xinjiang, the Uyghur Muslim populated western territory of China. This, in theory, could become a sort of Turkish Silk Road bypassing Iran – with the ominous possibility of also being used as a rat line to export Takfiris from Idlib all the way to Afghanistan.

Tehran, meanwhile, is totally INSTC-driven, focusing on two railway lines to be rehabilitated and upgraded from the Soviet era. One is South-North, from Jolfa connecting to Nakhchivan and then onwards to Yerevan and Tblisi. The other is West-East, again from Jolfa to Nakhchivan, crossing southern Armenia, mainland Azerbaijan, all the way to Baku and then onward to Russia.

And there’s the rub. The Azeris interpret the tripartite document resolving the Karabakh war as giving them the right to establish the Zangezur corridor. The Armenians for their part dispute exactly which ‘corridor’ applies to each particular region. Before they clear up these ambiguities, all those elaborate Iranian and Tukish connectivity plans are effectively suspended.

The fact, though, remains that Azerbaijan is geoeconomically bound to become a key crossroads of trans-regional connectivity as soon as Armenia unblocks the construction of these transport corridors.

So which ‘win-win’ is it?

Will diplomacy win in the South Caucasus? It must. The problem is both Baku and Tehran frame it in terms of exercising their sovereignty – and don’t seem particularly predisposed to offer concessions.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects are having a ball exploiting those differences. War, though, is out of the question, either between Azerbaijan and Armenia or between Azerbaijan and Iran. Tehran is more than aware that in this case both Ankara and Tel Aviv would support Baku. It is easy to see who would profit from it.

As recently as April, in a conference in Baku, Aliyev stressed that

“Azerbaijan, Turkey, Russia and Iran share the same approach to regional cooperation. The main area of concentration now is transportation, because it’s a situation which is called ‘win‑win.’ Everybody wins from that.”

And that brings us to the fact that if the current stalemate persists, the top victim will be the INSTC. In fact, everyone loses in terms of Eurasian integration, including India and Russia.

The Pakistan angle, floated by a few in hush-hush mode, is completely far-fetched. There’s no evidence Tehran would be supporting an anti-Taliban drive in Afghanistan just to undermine Pakistan’s ties with Azerbaijan and Turkey.

The Russia–China strategic partnership looks at the current South Caucasus juncture as unnecessary trouble, especially after the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit. This badly hurts their complementary Eurasian integration strategies – the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Greater Eurasian Partnership.

INSTC could, of course, go the trans-Caspian way and cut off Azerbaijan altogether. This is not likely though. China’s reaction, once again, will be the deciding factor. There could be more emphasis on the Persian corridor – from Xinjiang, via Pakistan and Afghanistan, to Iran. Or Beijing could equally bet on both East-West corridors, that is, bet on both Azerbaijan and Iran.

The bottom line is that neither Moscow nor Beijing wants this to fester. There will be serious diplomatic moves ahead, as they both know the only ones to profit will be the usual NATO-centric suspects, and the losers will be all the players who are seriously invested in Eurasian integration.

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This article was originally published on The Cradle.

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Summary

The Medical Case, U.S.A. vs. Karl Brandt, et al. (also known as the Doctors’ Trial), was prosecuted in 1946-47 against twenty-three doctors and administrators accused of organizing and participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the form of medical experiments and medical procedures inflicted on prisoners and civilians.

Physician and surgeon Karl Brandt, the lead defendant, was the senior medical official of the German government during World War II; other defendants included senior doctors and administrators in the armed forces and SS. Brandt had been appointed by Adolf Hitler to head the Euthanasia Program, Aktion T4. The defendants were indicted on four counts:

1. Conspiracy to Commit War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity;

2. War Crimes (I.E., Crimes Against Persons Protected by the Laws of War, Such as Prisoners of War);

3. Crimes Against Humanity (Including Persons Not Protected By The Laws Of War); and

4. Membership in a Criminal Organization (the SS).

Karl Brandt, the lead defendant, was the senior medical official of the German government during World War II; other defendants included senior doctors and administrators in the armed forces and SS.  See Harvard Documents

 

 

The specific crimes charged included more than twelve series of medical experiments concerning the effects of and treatments for high altitude conditions, freezing, malaria, poison gas, sulfanilamide, bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration, bone transplantation, saltwater consumption, epidemic jaundice, sterilization, typhus, poisons, and incendiary bombs.

These experiments were conducted on concentration camp inmates. Other crimes involved the killing of Jews for anatomical research, the killing of tubercular Poles, and the euthanasia of sick and disabled civilians in Germany and occupied territories. The defendants were charged with ordering, supervising, or coordinating criminal activities, as well as participating in them directly. The fourth count concerned membership in the SS (Schuttzstaffeln) of the Nazi regime.

Brandt on trial, 20 August 1947 (Public Domain)

Karl Brandt and six other defendants were convicted, sentenced to death, and executed; nine defendants were convicted and sentenced to terms in prison; and seven defendants were acquitted.

The material presented in this project includes case file documents (the briefs and document books created and used in the course of the trial), evidence file documents (the evidentiary documents from which the prosecution, and occasionally the defendants, derived their exhibits), and the trial transcript.

The trial documents and evidence file documents related to Case 1 amount to approximately 2800 documents and 13,000 pages of material.

Indictments – (25 Oct. 1946)

Four Counts:

1. Conspiracy to commit war crimes against humanity: The ordering, planning, and organization of the war crimes and crimes against humanity charged in counts two and three. Charged against all of the defendants. The tribunal decided not to convict on this charge.
2. War crimes: Charged against all defendants. 15 guilty, 8 acquitted.
3. Crimes against humanity: Charged against all defendants. 15 guilty, 8 acquitted.
4. Membership in a criminal organization:  Membership in the SS. Charged against K. Brandt, Genzken, Gebhardt, R. Brandt, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Sievers, Brack, Hoven, and Fischer. All found guilty.

Human Experiments and Other “Medical” Crimes (itemized in counts 2 and 3):

1. High-altitude experiments. March – August 1942. Conducted for the German air force to investigate the effect of high-altitude flying; experiments were conducted at the Dachau camp using a low-pressure chamber. Charged against Becker-Freyseng, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Romberg, Ruff, Schroeder, Sievers, and Weltz. Charges against K. Brandt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, and Poppendick were withdrawn. R. Brandt and Sievers were convicted.
2. Freezing experiments. August 1942 – May 1943. Conducted primarily for the German air force to investigate treatments for persons who had been severely chilled, using prisoners at the Dachau camp. Charged against Becker-Freyseng, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Schroeder, Sievers, and Weltz. Becker-Freyseng, K. Brandt, Gebhardt, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, and Weltz were acquitted; R. Brandt, Handloser, Schroeder, and Sievers were convicted.
3. Malaria experiments. February 1942 – April 1945. Conducted to test immunization for and treatment of malaria; experiments were conducted on more than 1000 prisoners at Dachau. Charged against Blome, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Rostock, and Sievers. (Evidence was also presented against Rose, but no judgment was reached.) No judgment was made concerning Mrugowsky. Blome, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Poppendick, and Rostock were acquitted; Sievers was convicted.
4. Mustard (“lost”) gas experiments. September 1939 – April 1945. Conducted for the benefit of the German armed forces to investigate treatment of injuries caused by Lost (mustard) gas; experiments were conducted at Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, and other camps. Charged against Blome, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Rostock, and Sievers. Blome, Gebhardt, Handloser, and Rostock were acquitted; K. Brandt, R. Brandt, and Sievers were convicted.
5. Sulfanilamide experiments. July 1942 – September 1943. Conducted for the benefit of the German armed forces to test the effectiveness of sulfanilamide and other drugs as treatments for infected wounds; experiments were conducted at Ravensbrueck. Charged against Becker-Freyseng, Blome, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Fischer, Gebhardt, Genzken, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Oberheuser, Poppendick, Rostock, and Schroeder. Charges against Becker-Freyseng, Blome, and Schroeder were withdrawn. No judgment was reached concerning R. Brandt. Genzken, Poppendick, and Rostock were acquitted; K. Brandt, Fischer, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, and Oberheuser were convicted.
6. Bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration, and bone transplant experiments. September 1942 – December 1943. Conducted for benefit of German armed forces, using Polish inmates at the Ravensbrueck camp. Charged against K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Fischer, Gebhardt, Handloser, Oberheuser, and Rostock. Charge against R. Brandt withdrawn. K. Brandt, Handloser, and Rostock were acquitted; Fischer, Gebhardt, and Oberheuser were convicted.
7. Seawater experiments. July – September 1944. Conducted for the German air force and navy to test methods of making seawater drinkable; experiments were conducted at Dachau. Charged against Becker-Freyseng, Beiglboeck, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Rostock, Schaefer, Schroeder, and Sievers. The charge against Mrugowsky was withdrawn. K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Handloser, Poppendick, Rostock, and Schaefer were acquitted; Becker-Freyseng, Beiglboeck, Gebhardt, Schroeder, and Sievers were convicted.
8. Epidemic jaundice experiments. June 1943 – January 1945. Conducted for the benefit of the German armed forcesto investigate causes of and inoculations against epidemic jaundice; experiments were conducted on Polish prisoners at Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler camps. Charged against Becker-Freyseng, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Rose, Rostock, Schroeder, and Sievers. Charges against Becker-Freyseng, Rose, and Sievers were withdrawn. R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Handloser, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Rostock, and Schroeder were acquitted; K. Brandt was convicted.
9. Typhus (“spotted fever”) and other vaccine experiments. December 1941 – February 1945. Conducted for the benefit of the German armed forces to test the effectiveness of vaccines against typhus, smallpox, cholera, and other diseases; experiments were conducted at Buchenwald and Natzweiler. Charged against Becker-Freyseng, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Genzken, Handloser, Hoven, Mrugowsky, Poppendick, Rose, Rostock, Schroeder, and Sievers. Becker-Freyseng, K. Brandt, Gebhardt, Poppendick, and Rostock were acquitted; R. Brandt, Genzken, Handloser, Hoven, Mrugowsky, Rose, Schroeder, and Sievers were convicted.
10. Poison experiments. December 1943 and September – October 1944. Conducted to investigate the effect of various poisons, including poison in food and poisoned bullets; experiments were conducted at Buchenwald (food) and Sachsenhausen (bullets). Charged against Gebhardt, Genzken, Mrugowsky, and Poppendick. Gebhardt, Genzken, and Poppendick were acquitted; Mrugowsky was convicted.
11. Incendiary bomb experiments. November 1943 – January 1944. Conducted to test pharmaceutical treatments for phosphorus burns; experiments were conducted at Buchenwald, involving the infliction of burns by materials from incendiary bombs. Charged against Gebhardt, Genzken, Mrugowsky, and Poppendick. All were acquitted.
12. Sterilization experiments. March 1941 – January 1945. Conducted to develop methods of rapid, large scale sterilization in order to ensure the eventual elimination of “enemy” populations while keeping captive workers as a labor force during the war. Experiments were planned and/or conducted at Auschwitz, Ravensbrueck, and elsewhere employing drugs, x-rays, and surgery. Charged against Brack, K. Brandt, R. Brandt, Gebhardt, Mrugowsky, Oberheuser, Pokorny, and Poppendick. The charges against Mrugowsky and Oberheuser were withdrawn. K. Brandt, Pokorny, and Poppendick were acquitted; Brack, R. Brandt, and Gebhardt were convicted.
13. Skeleton collection. June 1943 – September 1944. Conducted to complete a skeleton collection for an anatomical research project at the Reich University of Strasbourg; one hundred twelve Jews at Auschwitz were killed for the purpose. Charged against R. Brandt and Sievers; both were convicted.
14. Tubercular Polish nationals. May 1942 – January 1944. Polish nationals alleged to have incurable tuberculosis were imprisoned or killed on the pretext of protecting the health of Germans in Poland. Charged against Blome and R. Brandt; both were acquitted.
15. Euthanasia. September 1939 – April 1945. Involved the secret killing of the aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed children, and others, beginning at asylums in Germany and later in the camps and occupied territories. Charged against Blome, Brack, K. Brandt, and Hoven. Blome was acquitted; Brack, K. Brandt, and Hoven were convicted.

Other charges:

16. Phenol (gas oedema) experiments. 1942 – 1944. Conducted to investigate whether levels of phenol in gas oedema serum caused fatalities among wounded soldiers; experiments were conducted on prisoners at Buchenwald. Charged against Handloser, Hoven, and Mrugowsky. Handloser was acquitted; Hoven and Mrugowsky were convicted.
17. Phlegmon experiments. 1942. Conducted to test treatments for sepsis and related diseases, in coordination with sulfanilamide experiments at Ravensbrueck; experiments were conducted at Dachau and Auschwitz. Charged against Fischer, Oberheuser, and Poppendick; all were acquitted.
18. Polygal experiments. 1943 – 1944. Conducted to test the effectiveness of polygal, a blood coagulant, for the treatment of wounds. Charged against Blome, Handloser, Poppendick, and Sievers. Blome, Handloser, and Poppendick were acquitted; Sievers was convicted.
19. Planning, organization, and administration (of 1-15 above)
20. Conspiracy: Count 1.
21. Membership: Count 4.

The Nuremberg Code (1947)

Permissible Medical Experiments

See this.

The great weight of the evidence before us to effect that certain types of medical experiments on human beings, when kept within reasonably well-defined bounds, conform to the ethics of the medical profession generally. The protagonists of the practice of human experimentation justify their views on the basis that such experiments yield results for the good of society that are unprocurable by other methods or means of study. All agree, however, that certain basic principles must be observed in order to satisfy moral, ethical and legal concepts:

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.

The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs, or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.

3. The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results justify the performance of the experiment.

4. The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.

5. No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.

6. The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.

7. Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.

8. The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.

9. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.

10. During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him, that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

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Dr Gary G. Kohls is a retired American family physician who practiced holistic (non-drug) mental health care during the last decade of his professional career. His patients came to see him asking for help in getting off the psychotropic drugs to which they were addicted and which they knew had sickened them and disabled their brains and bodies.

Dr Kohls lives in Duluth, MN, USA and writes articles that deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s psychiatric drugging and over-vaccination agendas, and other movements that threaten the environment, prosperity, democracy, civility and the health and longevity of the planet and the populace.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Dr Kohls’ Duty to Warn columns have been archived at a number of websites around the world, including the following:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls;

http://freepress.org/geographic-scope/national;

https://www.lewrockwell.com/author/gary-g-kohls/?ptype=article; and

https://www.transcend.org/tms/author/?a=Gary%20G.%20Kohls,%20MD

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/

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For weeks, Iran has been concentrating troops and heavy vehicles on its border with Azerbaijan as tensions continue to mount. Participating in military exercises on the Azerbaijani border include several infantry, special forces and armored units, as well as several fighter jets, helicopters and missile systems.

The “Conquerors of Khaybar”, the name given to the military exercise, is a reference to a battle fought by Muhammed, the founder of Islam, against the Jews in 628 CE. This is an obvious reference to the close relationship Azerbaijan has with Israel. Not only does Azerbaijan acquire Israeli weapons, many of which were used against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, but Mossad has a legal right to operate in the Caucasian country as part of their spying and espionage acts against Iran.

In response, the Azeris announced joint military exercises with Turkey between October 5 and 8, dubbed “Indestructible Brotherhood 2021.” Officially, the maneuvers are to improve cooperation and coordination between the land forces of Turkey and Azerbaijan, but it’s also a supposed message towards Iran that Azerbaijan is not alone. In fact, Azerbaijan is so confident that a lawmaker even quipped that Pakistan’s army would invade Tehran if it made any hostile move against Baku, while another lawmaker threatened to cut Iran’s tail.

Tensions between Iran and Azerbaijan have been building for months now, with no signs that relations are improving or stabilizing. On October 5, Azerbaijan closed down the office of the Iranian spiritual leader in Baku, a significant move when remembering that only Iran, Azerbaijan, Iraq and Bahrain are Shi’te-majority countries out of the 50 Muslim-majority countries across the world.

Closing down of the Iranian spiritual leader’s office in Baku was in response to Iran closing its airspace to the Azerbaijani Air Force. This is a major move as flying over Iranian airspace was the most direct route to carry military reinforcements and supplies to the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic from Azerbaijan proper. Both Azerbaijani territories are separated by Armenia’s Syunik Province, hence why the Iranian flight route was needed. However, for Azerbaijan to reach its detached autonomous region, it now must take an extended bypassed route over Georgia and Turkey. The move by Iran now adds extended travel time, something that would be catastrophic if a war broke out.

Moreover, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, tweeted on Sunday: “Those who, under the illusion of relying on others, think that they can provide security, know that they will be slapped soon.” The tweet also comes as news emerged that Azerbaijan will soon acquire a batch of Israeli-made Arrow 3 anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense missiles.

After rhetorically supporting last year’s joint Azerbaijani-Turkish invasion of Nagorno-Karabakh in a gross miscalculation on the intentions and purposes of the war, Tehran is now exerting pressure on the ongoing attempts to close the trade corridor between Iran and Armenia. Azerbaijani authorities recently announced that Iranian trucks heading to the Armenian capital of Yerevan, in addition to paying a transit fee of $300, will not be able to travel at night, but only during the day. Following the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, Azerbaijan captured a part of the road that links Iran to Yerevan, hence why Iranian Deputy Transportation Minister Kheirollah Khademi visited Armenia on Monday to express Tehran’s financial and technical support for a 400-kilometer transit road linking the Iranian border crossing at Nordooz to Yerevan, bypassing Azerbaijani-held territories.

From the Iranian perspective, assisting Armenia now is also a part of their conflict with Israel, a country that Yerevan has never had good relations with, unlike Baku. According to Tehran, Israel has four bases in Azerbaijan. Even though Israel denies having its own bases there, the Jewish state actually considers Azerbaijan as a part of its peripheral strategy – establishing alliances with countries close to enemy states.

This flurry of exchanges between Iran and Armenia, despite the former strongly backing Azerbaijan rhetorically during last year’s war, is undoubtedly due to the complex dynamics created by Turkey’s pursuit of an ideologically syncretic neo-Ottoman and pan-Turkic foreign policy. The Turks, along with cultural and linguistic affinities, are also motivated to strengthen their relations with Azerbaijan so they can collaborate in the energy field and establish trade corridors with Central Asia.

The confrontation between Iran and Azerbaijan can easily involve not only the Turks, but also the Israelis in a more meaningful way beyond weapon sales and intelligence exchanges. Tehran is taking a huge risk by threatening war with Azerbaijan as it could reignite the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and draw in Armenia, Turkey and perhaps even Pakistan.

At the same time, despite all of Azerbaijan’s bravado and confidence after defeating a weak Armenian military with the assistance of Turkey and Syrian mercenaries, it is unlikely that Ankara will allow a war to occur as they recognize and understand Iran’s military might. While Baku is full of arrogance after last year’s victory, Turkey is struggling to keep its economy afloat while maintaining its various military operations across the region. For this reason, it is unlikely that a war between Iran and Azerbaijan will breakout as Turkey, which has de facto control over large parts of the Azerbaijani military, will not allow its ally to provoke a war in the same way they did with Armenia. Unlike Baku, Ankara understands that Iranian power is incomparable to Armenia’s.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image: Iran’s national army began exercises near its border with Azerbaijan, October 1, 2021. (Credit Image: © Iranian Army Office via ZUMA)

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While India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar is doing a masterly job to canvass support for the Biden Administration’s project to delay any constructive engagement with the Taliban Government in Kabul by the international community until Washington gets its act together, on a parallel track, the Anglo-American axis has been working systematically to re-engage the Taliban. read more 

In this connection, the overnight trip by the UK Minister for the Armed Forces, James Heappey to Uzbekistan on September 21-22 was actually a working visit to put in place the logistics for a sustainable engagement with the Taliban Government. The US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman swiftly followed it up this week in Tashkent. read more 

Heappey made a ‘field trip’ to Termez where a massive Soviet era air base is located (from where the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was staged in 1980.) The intention seems to have been to assess the possible use of Termez to open a ‘humanitarian corridor’ towards Afghanistan. 

There is a huge groundswell of opinion in the world community, repeatedly highlighted by the UN agencies and Secretary-General António Guterres in the recent weeks, that a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in real time in Afghanistan. For the Biden Administration, which is already badly wounded by the clumsy evacuation at Kabul Airport, this looming humanitarian crisis has the explosive potential to damage its reputation further. 

Suffice to say, the US and the UK are positioning themselves to spearhead a humanitarian aid programme that in political terms would also inevitably open the pathway to their engagement with the Taliban Government. The idea is to ‘normalise’ the relations with the Taliban at a working level and build mutual trust to a point from where formal diplomatic recognition of the government in Kabul can follow as a logical step sooner rather than later. 

Interestingly, there are some indications already that the Biden Administration is distancing itself from the previous Afghan ambassador in Washington Adela Raz who was appointed by the Ashraf Ghani government.  

Fundamentally, Washington and London have decided that it is possible to do business with the Taliban Government. At the root of this is their strategic assessment that there is no better way to address the security threat emanating from from the ISIS and other terrorist groups present in Afghanistan than by co-opting the Taliban Government, given the fact that Taliban and ISIS are mortal enemies of each other. read more

In the weekend, in fact, Taliban destroyed a major hideout of the ISIS in Charikar town to the north of Kabul. Second, any independent counter-terrorist operations by the US or the UK on Afghan soil will be firmly opposed by the Taliban as an attack on their country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. That is to say, the US and the UK would risk getting entangled in a confrontation with the Taliban, which is not only futile but can be counterproductive as it could destabilise Afghanistan and create conducive ground for the ISIS to exploit. 

Third, the fact of the matter is that the Taliban is a known entity for the Western intelligence agencies over the past many years, and rhetoric apart, western capitals have a positive impression about the Taliban’s pragmatic outlook and their eagerness to integrate into the western world. 

Of course, Western experts do not share the one-dimensional view of the Taliban that the Indian establishment propagates, namely, that they are a mere Pakistani proxy without an Afghan identity of their own. 

Fourth, the Western assessment is that it is unwise to let the Taliban become utterly dependent on the regional states surrounding Afghanistan — Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan — in the prevailing international climate of big power rivalry in new cold war conditions. 

Fifth, while the esoteric of ‘Afghan resistance’ is intoxicating to the uninformed mind, the cold professional assessment in knowledgable quarters is that the Taliban rule in Afghanistan is a compelling reality that cannot be ignored and the regime is consolidating in that country. Other thanks the maverick leadership in Tajikistan, no one thinks that The Taliban government is in any danger of being overthrown. read more

That is to say, realistically speaking, there is no alternative to doing business with the Taliban government, and the earlier the contacts in such a direction are initiated, the more productive it will be for both sides. The spectre of refugee flow from Afghanistan is indeed haunting the Western world. 

All these multiple considerations have prompted the visit by the UK Prime Minister’s special representative on Afghanistan Sir Simon Gass (concurrently the chairman of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and formerly British ambassador to Iran) to Kabul earlier today to make the first direct contact with the Taliban government. 

Sir Simon was accompanied by Martin Longden, the C’dA in the British Embassy in Kabul (which is now relocated to Doha). The two British diplomats were received by the Taliban Foreign Khan Amir Khan Muttaqi.

The British side later tweeted that Sir Simon had “serious and substantial discussions with Muttaqi. A wide range of issues covered — including the humanitarian crisis, terrorism, the importance of safe passage for UK & Afghan nationals, and rights of women and girls.” A UK readout subsequently  said the British envoys also met the two deputy prime ministers of The Taliban government Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar Akhund and Mawlawi Abdul-Salam Hanafi.

It added, “Sir Simon and Dr Longden discussed how the UK could help Afghanistan to address the humanitarian crisis, the importance of preventing the country from becoming an incubator for terrorism, and the need for continued safe passage for those who want to leave the country. They also raised the treatment of minorities and the rights of women and girls. The government continues to do all it can to ensure safe passage for those who wish to leave, and is committed to supporting the people of Afghanistan.” Conceivably, a reopening of the UK embassy in a near future — or some form of British presence in Kabul — cannot be ruled out. 

The Allies Sculpture: Life sized bronze statues of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill sitting on a bench in New Bond Street, London, reminding the world of the shared history of the two great powers.

There is no gainsaying the fact that as often in modern history, the US and the UK are moving in tandem. Presidents and prime ministers come and go but the ‘special relationship’ is alive and thriving! read more

Without doubt, Sir Simon’s mission had the full backing of the Biden Administration.. With Sir Simon flying into Kabul, the first move in the new great game begins in Afghanistan as a template of the so-called ‘strategic competition’ — to borrow the expression from the Biden Administration — involving the US, Russia and China.

This audacious British move cutting through the shibboleths of vitriolic rhetoric over the DNA of the Afghan Taliban would have taken Moscow and Beijing by surprise. Who’s afraid of recognising the Taliban government, after all?

It is a stark warning that the war in Afghanistan has mutated into a newer form of the 19th century great game. Only yesterday, there were rumours swirling in the Kremlin media that Chinese planes had landed in Bagram air base.

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Featured image: Sir Simon Gass, British Prime Minister’s representative on Afghanistan, seated second from left, with Taliban Foreign Minister Mullah Amir Khan Muttaqi, Kabul, October 5, 2021. (Source: Indian Punchline)

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Last night Alex Jones of Infowars.com did a special broadcast regarding an October, 2019 video that they had just become aware of that was a panel discussion hosted by the Milken Institute discussing the need for a Universal Flu Vaccine.

The video clip that they played of this event was a 1 minute and 51 second dialogue between the moderator, Michael Specter, a journalist who is a New Yorker staff writer and also an adjunct professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Rick Bright, the director of HHS Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).

In this short clip, which was extracted from the hour-long panel discussion, Anthony Fauci explains that bringing a new, untested kind of vaccine like an mRNA vaccine, would take at least a decade (“if everything goes perfectly”) to go through proper trials and be approved by the FDA.

He would know, because he had been trying to do it for about a decade already by then (October, 2019), trying to develop an mRNA based vaccine for HIV.

But now they were discussing something much bigger than just a vaccine for AIDS patients. They are talking about a “Universal Flu Vaccine” that everyone would have to take – a huge market for Big Pharma!

Rick Bright, the director of HHS Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), then speaks and states that what could happen is that “an entity of excitement that is completely disruptive and is not beholden to bureaucratic strings and processes” could change that.

Here is the short clip which I put on our Bitchute and Rumble channels last night:

Alex Jones spent over 50 minutes covering this on his show last night, and it looks like he covered it on his show today as well.

I have not had a chance to watch these yet, as I went and found the original 1 hour panel discussion video, and spent the day listening to and analyzing that, so that I could supply this report to our readers.

Joining Fauci, Rick Bright, and Michael Specter at this event were:

• Margaret Hamburg, Foreign Secretary, National Academy of Medicine
• Bruce Gellin, President, Global Immunization, Sabin Vaccine Institute
• Casey Wright, CEO, FluLab

In short, this panel discussion focused on what they perceived as the need for a universal flu vaccine, but they admitted that the old way of producing vaccines was not sufficient for their purposes, and that they needed some kind of global event where many people were dying to be able to roll out a new mRNA vaccine to be tested on the public.

They all agreed that the annual flu virus was not scary enough to create an event that would convince people to get a universal vaccine.

And as we now know today, about 2 years after this event, that “terrifying virus” that was introduced was the COVID-19 Sars virus.

And so now we know why the flu just “disappeared” in the 2020-21 flu season. It was simply replaced by COVID-19, in a worldwide cleverly planned “pandemic” to roll out the world’s first universal mRNA vaccines.

This was always the goal, and previous efforts through various influenzas, AIDS, Ebola, and other “viruses” were all unsuccessful in leading to the development of a universal vaccine to inject into the entire world’s population.

Margaret Hamburg stated regarding getting a “Universal Vaccine” into the market:

“It’s time to stop talking, and it’s time to act.”

“I think it is also because we haven’t had a sense of urgency.”

Michael Specter asks:

“Do we need lots of people to die for that sense of urgency to occur?”

Hamburg replies that: “There are already lots of people dying” from the flu each year.

Bruce Gellin states that basically people just are not afraid enough of the term “the flu.”

There are so many things that are revealed about how Big Pharma and government health authorities think in this panel discussion. For example, they bemoan the fact that if they do too good of a job in public health, then they lose funding to develop products that fight viruses.

Michael Specter states: “It seems to me that one of the curses of the public health world is, if you guys do your job well, everyone goes along well and healthy.”

Hamburg: “And they cut your funding.”

Rick Bright complains that the yearly distribution of flu vaccines is inefficient in terms of collecting data, and in the process actually admits that some vaccines just don’t work well:

“We distribute 150 million doses of the seasonal (flu) vaccines every year, we don’t even know how many people are being vaccinated from the doses that are delivered to the people, which doses they got, and what the real outcome was, so that we can learn from that knowledge base on how to optimize or improve our vaccine. So there are opportunities that we have today…

I think if we uncloaked the poorest performing vaccines in the market place today, it might be very revealing to tell us which of the technologies we have, and allow us to go deeper into those technologies to determine why they are more effective. There are vaccines licenses today that are more effective. I think that we’re just afraid to admit the truth.”

So much for the public mantra that is espoused by Big Pharma and government that the “science” of vaccines is “settled,” and that they are completely “safe and effective.”

Casey Wright repeats the mantra that was publicized every year, before COVID, about just how deadly the flu virus was: “650,000 people die every year from the flu.”

As we have documented many times over the past decade here at Health Impact News, this is simply not true. This is an estimate because actual laboratory confirmed cases of influenza each year are very small, probably less than 1000 in the U.S.

Most flu-like symptoms are never tested in a lab to determine what is causing the symptoms. They were always just classified as “flu” to inflate the numbers to justify the very profitable flu shot each year. Some of our previous coverage of this issue: CDC Inflates Flu Death Stats to Sell More Flu Vaccines, Did 80,000 People Really Die from the Flu Last Year? Inflating Flu Death Estimates to Sell Flu Shots

So as they have inflated the COVID-19 cases since last year, they are simply continuing their policy of inflating flu numbers each year in order to sell their vaccines. They obviously could not have done both last year, as the public would have quickly seen that the math doesn’t work.

And yet, so many in the public bought the lie that the COVID-19 measures got rid of the flu, but not COVID-19.

Ultimately, this panel discussion can be boiled down to: Nobody wants to fund research for a universal flu vaccine. So how do we change that? Create a pandemic of fear over the flu (but they couldn’t call it the “flu” because people are no longer afraid of influenza, and the fear over “AIDS” had also subsided).

Fauci then addressed this “perception problem.”

There’s this perception (about the flu), if it’s so serious, how come people get the flu each year and it isn’t a catastrophe?

When you’re dealing with a disease like HIV, if you get HIV, it’s serious. Whether you’re young, whether you’re middle aged, or whether you’re old. If you get cancer, that’s bad. Whether you’re young, whether it’s intermediate… whereas if it’s influenza, some people, they go throughout life and it doesn’t impact them at all.

There isn’t anyone who is afraid of influenza. You go into a focus group and you say: Are you afraid of getting HIV if you’re at risk? Oh, absolutely.

Are you afraid of getting cancer? Absolutely. Are you afraid of the flu? Don’t bother me.

That’s the reality of how people perceive flu.

And it is going to be very difficult to change that, unless you do it from within and say, I don’t care what your perception is, we’re going to address the problem, in a disruptive way….

Specter then asks:

In the long run, over time, if the 2009 pandemic had been much more deadly, would that have ended up being a better thing for humanity?

Everyone is silent as they obviously were thinking about how to answer that, and Specter says: “Come on gang.”

Fauci ultimately answers and says “No” because there were other years that were worse than 2009 and it didn’t change a thing in terms of creating a universal vaccine.

Hamburg then states:

The sad truth is that when there is a major crisis, it focuses attention and usually resources and some significant mobilization follows.

We need, #1, this time to be different, and we also need to really organize ourselves in a way where there will be accountability for sustained action, and not just response.

Specter states:

Craig Venter, who is a controversial person, but interesting to me, has written that he thinks we ought to have a vaccine, such that, if you take off in a plane from Hong Kong, and are infected, by the time your plane lands in New York, there ought to be a vaccine assembled and deliverable to you.

How crazy is that? How far are we from that? Are we ever going to get there?

Bright replies:

I’m not going to say how far away, but I don’t think that’s too crazy.

I think that if we move towards the era of synthetic-based vaccines, I think we remove the dependencies of thinking the vaccine has to be grown into something else, an egg, a cell, or insect cell – any type of dependency embryo.

If we can move into more synthetic, the nucleic acid based, messenger RNA based, those sequences can be rapidly shared around the world.

He then goes on to talk about using a 3D printer to print out a “vaccine patch” that people use to administer the “vaccine.”

We also learn in this panel discussion why Anthony Fauci is so opposed to natural immunity, because natural immunity for influenza, according to his view, translates to an immune response against other strains of a particular influenza virus, which will interfere with what they are trying to do with the vaccines.

That is why he wants to inject infants as young as 6 months old with a universal vaccine, as he states here, to prevent that “confused” natural immunity from happening before the child grows older.

So the big question that this panel was tackling, was how do they implement their strategies, and what is holding them back?

Certainly the government/regulatory issue is a big one, and now two years later we can see exactly how they did that, by controlling the FDA and the CDC to promote the “killer virus pandemic” narrative as long as possible to justify taking emergency measures that short-cut the normal procedures for bringing novel, new drugs to the market.

It also clearly explains the vicious opposition to existing, cheap therapeutics that very easily treated what is really just the seasonal flu “virus,” which stood in their way of rolling out a universal vaccine.

Casey Wright then made a rather remarkable comment about “philanthropy” and its role in this effort:

There’s a potential role for philanthropy to play there… we are in a position to take on a little more risk (she smiles eerily as she says this), to be open to a little bit more experimentation and methods in how we do things. That’s what I think is unique about FluLab, and is unique about other philanthropies.

I think they can play a really important role there, and fund a set of bolder, maybe earlier promising concepts.

Bingo! Think Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other “philanthropies” that are “unburdened” by regulatory issues as they spend their money pretty much unchecked, with no accountability, all in the name of “science” and the “greater good.”

We have seen most certainly how the Gates Foundation has done this in India by luring poor people into highly questionable ethical experimentations on vaccines, such as the Gardasil vaccine which we have covered so often over the years here at Health Impact News.

Bruce Gellin then talks about a report published by his organization that called for an “entity” that would make these decisions and bring everyone together to collaborate to create this universal vaccine, and eliminate those who oppose.

The report was published in 2019, and here is the press release.

He states:

They called for this “entity” which is the collaboration we talked about. They called for the need to infuse innovation, to find some of these people who we don’t know might be part of the problem to come into this. And to try to think about how we talk about this differently so that your stomach flu doesn’t keep us from making progress. (everyone laughs…)

I assume that this “entity” is Gellin’s group, The Sabin-Aspen Vaccine Science & Policy Group.

Today, this is the main group fighting “vaccine hesitancy” and trying to silence any dissenting voices that get in their way of rolling out this universal vaccine, which of course we now know is the COVID-19 vaccine.

Online Misinformation about Vaccines

Watch the entire panel discussion to learn just how arrogant these people are. This is on our Bitchute and Rumble channels.

Your Life Only has Value as a Lab Rat to These Satanic Tyrants

This is one of the most explosive videos I have ever watched that takes us into the mindset of the Globalist Tyrants and their greedy desire to control the human race by means of vaccines.

As you watch this, you need to ask yourself: Who appointed these people as caretakers of humanity to decide what is good for the entire human race?

At the very core of this problem of medical tyranny is a fundamental difference of how one views life.

This panel represents the Luciferian, Satanic worldview that completely excludes God as the Creator of Life.

When they talk about the “deficiencies” of natural immunity, this is a direct Satanic attack on the human race, created in God’s image, and this has always been the case behind the “science” of vaccines.

This worldview represented by this panel believes that they are a higher form of life that can dictate to the masses how to live their lives, because these people honestly believe that they are tasked with saving humanity, and saving the planet, and that everyone else is too ignorant to make these decisions.

They are psychopaths driven by greed and the desire to control. We only see their public side, but they are human beings just like everyone else, and if we could see how they live outside of their public life, they would probably never be able to maintain their positions of power, because it would be plain to see just how evil they are.

Look at Anthony Fauci, for example. Does he look like an 80-year-old man? What does he do to stay looking so young?

We know that the rich and famous are addicted to pursuing youth and maintaining their power, and that many do so by consuming “young blood,” the blood taken from young people, including what is reportedly the very addictive drug “adrenochrome” harvested from babies just before they are executed. See: “Young Blood” – The Emerging Market for Products Made from the Blood of Children

They think nothing of people dying in mass for the sake of “science” and developing their universal vaccines. This universal vaccine is something they have worked on for decades now, and their dreams are finally coming to fruition through COVID-19.

I have been covering this issue for over a decade now, and nothing in this panel discussion surprised me at all.

The only way to control the global population for their own agendas is to control their health, and they have learned after decades of failure that it is nearly impossible to develop a biological weapon capable of infecting and spreading through the entire population.

The reason for this is because God’s natural immune system is just too strong, as it adapts and overcomes these diseases, as a built-in safe guard for the human race.

I would suspect that pretty much ALL of the past historical “pandemics” have been failed biological weapon programs that they have tried to develop. In the end, they have learned that the only way to infect everyone on the face of the earth, is to inject them with a poison via vaccines.

This has ALWAYS been the goal of the vaccine movement, even if most in the movement were not aware of it, and were foolish enough to believe that vaccines actually conferred health upon people.

REAL health is not something that can be purchased from “health authorities.” It is a free gift given to us by our Creator, and the most healthy people on the planet today are those very few individuals who recognize this truth, and stay as far away from pharmaceutical products as they can knowing they are poisons, and make every effort to eat clean, whole foods as God created them, and breathe fresh air, something that is getting more and more difficult to do as they pollute the atmosphere with their chemicals in geoengineering.

There are “natural medicines” that God has supplied us to use when our immune system is not balanced properly, and they are found in nature and generally available to all, because they cannot be patented, since they are God-made, and not man-made.

We must resist these Satanic tyrants! Your health is the most important thing God has given to you. Without your health, you are at their mercy and enslaved by their medical system.

Without your health you cannot love your spouse, you cannot produce children, you cannot live your life to its fullest and accomplish the purpose that God placed you on this earth to accomplish.

The mark of the beast prophesied in the Bible that is necessary to take in order to participate in the economy is here, and it is the COVID-19 vaccine, and this video is just further proof to this fact.

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For years now, and in response to similar projects at central banks in Europe and – more importantly – China with the PBOC, the Fed has been hemming and hawing about whether to take the possibility of creating a “FedCoin” more seriously.

Senior officials have been pretty tetchy about carefully weighing the “pros and cons” of a system that  would, in theory, enable the Fed to deposit money directly into the ‘digital wallets’ of regular Americans, a power that could ultimately render the entire private banking system obsolete.

And so, as we wait for the Fed to take the next tenuous steps toward developing a CBDC, WSJ has offered yet another leak confirming that the Fed is finally ready to release its official ‘report’ on CBDCs, which will serve as the start of a long-promised “review” of the pros and cons of CBDCs that’s supposed to allow for public feedback. The report could drop “as early as this week”.

Some more compassionate proponents of a FedCoin argue it could create a kind of “parallel” system where the Fed would be able to directly and easily dispense FedCoins to the public (the ideal of “helicopter money”, finally achieved), without relying on banks or the IRS as intermediaries, which could make delivering this type of aid faster and cheaper. It could also offer a more “efficient” avenue for distributing welfare or financial aid (that is, unless the Fed chose to distribute FedCoin through financial intermediaries instead of sending them directly from the Fed to the American people.

It could also be the greatest weapon in the war to make cash obsolete.

But within the Fed, the drive to create a “FedCoin” is primarily rooted in the fear that not having a central bank digital currency could potentially threaten the dollar’s dominance in the global financial system. In that respect, it’s like any other technological arms race.

Here’s more on that from Fed Governor Lael Brainard:

“It’s just very hard for me to imagine that the US, given the status of the dollar as a dominant currency in international payments, wouldn’t come to the table in that circumstance with a similar kind of an offering,” she said.

Chairman Powell has done his best to push for caution, arguing that it’s more important to “get it right” than be “first to market”. Put another way: who cares if the PBOC roles out the “e-RMB” first? The dollar’s role in the global financial system is much greater, which means the US is obligated to proceed with more trepidation.

Powell and others have said repeatedly that the Fed’s research so far has been early and exploratory. Powell has also pointed to the fact that many Americans still use and prefer cash. Most importantly, Powell has addressed concerns that a CBDC would effectively allow the Fed to monitor the finances of every American.

“It’s our obligation to do the work both on technology and on public policy to form a basis for making an informed decision,” he said last month.

Others on the Fed, including Randy Quarles, the Fed’s financial regulation guy, has slammed CBDCs as a fad, noting that the US dollar is already “highly digitized”. A report from the Philly Fed recently warned that a CBDC could also destabilize the financial system if everybody were to pull their digital dollars from markets, mutual funds and banks.

But enough of what senior Fed officials are saying: pretty soon, it will be the “public’s” turn, as the Fed has promised to solicit public comment during its review.

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During Hitler’s Nazi Reich, doctors and nurses were obliged to kill disabled or handicapped children – for the good of society, for obtaining a clean Arian State. And for economics.

Most of them complied. They killed innocent children, adults, and old-age people as well, for the same purpose. The elderly and infirm were injected with a poison, so they wouldn’t cost money to the state.

Did they have scruples? Maybe some of them did. But not following the orders of the tyrants, would have cost them their jobs – and livelihoods. And probably more. Punishment was not excluded.

At the end of the war, the criminals were judged.

The Nuremberg trials lasted about a year, from 20 November 1945 – 1 October 1946 and condemned the surviving criminals, those who could be apprehended in Germany or elsewhere in the world.

Many fled and went into hiding, many of them in South America, into states with military governments and who were “quietly” sympathetic to the Nazis. See this.

 

Today, the Situation is much Worse. In fact, there is No Comparison.

All 193 UN member countries are involved. They are subscribed to the same evil agenda. They are under the same diabolical blackmail spell, even the entire UN system doesn’t dare to oppose its tyrannical system. The UN and members of the UN family, in particular WHO, they actually help drive the agenda forward.

The people around the world have to be made aware of what’s behind this sinister plan – this outright killing spree.

The people have to know what is in the injections that go as “vaccines”, because most people haven’t a clue.

The mainstream media and their governments, in many cases governments elected and paid by the very people, who are now being betrayed, miserably betrayed and killed by their governments, still believe in their governments.

Simply because they cannot imagine the unimaginable. Yes, it is very difficult. But they should listen – and observe and research for themselves in those alternative media that the big and powerful mainstream hasn’t censured or shot-down altogether. The one publishing this article is one of them.

We Need Urgently a Nuremberg 2.0

We cannot wait until humanity has been extinct – and extinct it will be, if we do not react NOW to this madness, to this crime of biblical proportion, a crime of dimensions humanity has never experienced before in known history.

There is this phenomenon called cognitive dissonance, meaning they, those who bend over to the tyranny, believe in the devil’s narrative for comfort, but in their heart they now its false, it’s a lie. That happens when it’s easier to believe in a lie that accommodates their immediate life, rather than dealing with the often hard and devastating truth – which, if not attended to, will catch up sooner or later.

The Spanish Fifth Column Research Team, when they first examined a vaccine vial, they discovered that these vials are filled largely with a fluid called Graphene oxide, which has electromagnetic properties, thereby transforming your body into an electromagnetic field. See this.

Video: Interview with Ricardo Delgado 

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The Spanish Fifth Column Research Team also discovered that babies born to parents who were inoculated between December 2020 and January 2021, were born with black eyes. These babies are also known as Pandemic Babies or, more recently, Black-Eyed Babies. See this. Is this a coincidence? What will be other consequences? We may find out, as time goes on.

What’s In the Vaccine Vials

As if these occurrences weren’t disconcerting enough, Dr. Carrie Madej gave a shocking interview on the Stew Peters show on 29 September 2021. What she had discovered after examining different vials from different batches of both Modern and J&J injections, called “vaccines”, is hair-rising. She appeared obviously shocked by what she had seen after examining the “vaxx” vials. It is absolutely devastating.

You should take the time to watch and listen to the entire video. But, starting about minute 11 (of a 15 min. video), she mentions the Bill Gates experiments in West Africa, where vaxxed adults were literally robotized with credit cards, which were their only means of payment, no cash – and that in a part of the world were talking digital money is like a foreign language. See this or watch the video below.

The West African experiment had started in August 2020. Bill Gates then openly spoke about how humans would be digitized, so that all their personal data, including their money accounts would be “built-in” an electromagnet system in their body.

He even used the term Operating System, that we will be living with a built-in Operating System. It was too strange to believe.

Now it’s happening. A trial, for what will come to us, if we do not stop it.

It is in our power. We have to become a unit of people in solidarity around the world, because We, the People, around the globe – those of us who survive the “killing spree” – are destined to live the same horror towards the new future, towards The Great Reset.

Of course, belonging to this “dark cult”, he had to tell the world, they have to tell us ever so often what they are up to. That’s part of their cult’s rule. And they obey it by the letter, as we can see when we go back in history. But they present these atrocities in such ways that we, who are conveniently blind-folded – don’t see it, or do NOT WANT to see it. And they, every time, are moving a step closer to their end goal of total control of a drastically reduced population.

The WEF Officially Announces “The Great Reset”

Almost in parallel, in mid-2020, Klaus Schwab, WEF, brought us The Great Reset. Its contents are also difficult to believe – with the ending, “You will own nothing and be happy”.

This infers that the human is no longer human, but has been transposed to become a “transhuman” through artificial intelligence, robots – and other digital gimmicks which control his life – if one may still call this a life.

“The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future” — Klaus Schwab, WEF (June 2020)

What is envisaged under “the Great Reset” is a scenario whereby the global creditors will have appropriated by 2030 the World’s wealth, while impoverishing large sectors of the World Population.

In 2030 “You’ll own nothing, And you’ll be happy.” (see video below)

“Transhumans”

Of course, such algorithms may also be used to turn off lives that are not worth having roaming-authority around Mother Earth, because somehow, they have found ways to oppose the system, or otherwise do not contribute.

Killing a “transhuman”, a half-robot, may not even be considered murder – since it is for the good of society.

Video: Towards Digital Tyranny with Peter Koenig

Click here to link to bitchute version

People! That’s the world we are living in, and have been living in for almost 20 months. That’s the situation we are moving towards, if We, the People, just let it happen. For this new world, “new normal”, as many like to call it, we need the dangerous ultra-shortwaves of 5G and soon 6G. They will transmit the algorithm-calculated signals, with which Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots control us all, our behavior, our money, and, of course, our” wellbeing”.

This may happen, if We, The People, just keep slumbering in our cognitive dissonance dreams – that all will be the same as before, we just have to sit it out. Wrong, so wrong.

“Sustainable Development”: A Nightmare

The next ten years are crucial. It’s not by accident that they are called, UN Agenda 2030 – or “The Sustainable Development Goals”. These SDGs are a deviation bait for the developing countries and for all those in the UN system who work for them.

The 17 so-called SDGs are not achievable, because they would require several trillions of dollars, or dollars equivalents, of investments, money that is not available; money that is being spent for producing and selling injections, so-called “covid-vaccines”, the satellites and earthly antennas, millions, it takes to beam and receive on earth the 5G and soon 6G ultra-short vaves down to earth; and for paying Big Pharma to come up with ever new vaxxes, with new boosters every six months or so, all with the same or similar contents, to make sure your body becomes an electromagnetic field if, and this is a Big IF, you survive, as not all people react the same to these injections.

Never forget, the more you are “vaccinated” with these poison jabs and, in addition of deadly graphene, spike proteins are injected into your body, the more you jeopardize your own immune system. That’s what they want, of course. So, you become vulnerable to every little disease, including the common flu and covid.

Do not – ever – believe that these vaxxes are for the benefit of your health. They are for killing or dominating you, for controlling you, for stealing your assets and savings and transferring them upwards – to the ultra-rich – you know who they are, no need to mention them by name.

And even if the money was available for the 17 SDGs in some 130 developing countries, in the so-called Global South, these countries would lack the absorptive capacity to implement their largely foreign imposed ambitious dream-plans. Western money is simply stamped out of thin air, and as soon as it is transferred to a Global South country, it becomes debt. And as we know, debt is a rope around the neck. In other words, enslavement.

Back to where we are today. Thinking about Dr. Carrie Madej’s most recent video – see above – portraying the most recent knowledge on what these deadly injections are supposed to do, there is only one key warning – be aware, stay away from it. Stay away from the electromagnetic poison jab.

Why do you think they push so hard that every soul on earth – except them, of course, those in government, in their science, in their medical world, who play along with their narrative – is being inoculated with this deadly poison?

Today, the Government blackmails people, corporations, schools, universities, airlines, railway companies, hospitals, and of course, their own administration is the master example to request that all employees be “vaccinated” – if not they lose their job. Can you imagine? This means either you inject your body with a deadly poison, or you lose your livelihood. Not even Nazi Germany exerted such horrifying blackmail upon her citizens.

This concerns two to three generations today, who have to struggle to make a living – if they don’t give in to the vax coercion.

Many of them have to support families, pay rent – let alone food – and many will starve, because they do not have a support system that would share their income or housing with them. We are talking about hundreds of millions of people in the Global North, who are threatened and potentially lose their work.

We are only in 2021. This masterfully thought-out plan, The Great Reset, is supposed to finish its work and reach its targets in ten years, by 2030.

What may come next?

The unvaxxed are not allowed into super markets, and are not allowed to order food online.

Friendly vaxxed neighbors, a friend or even family member may then soon also not be allowed to shop for the unvaxxed – surveillance will be everywhere, is already everywhere.

We are moving towards a world for which the term tyranny is way too soft, a new word needs to be invented. It was shocking to hear all EU governments declare in lockstep: No jobs of the unvaxxed. George Orwell’s imagination in 1984, of how the future may look like, was way too benign.

“We are at the Gate to Hell”. So says Dr. Mike Yeadon – and he may be closer to the truth than you can ever imagine. See this.

Listen to Dr. Michael Yeadon, former Vice President and Chief Science Officer of Pfizer, talking about the pandemic and the COVID vaccine.

 

Watch the video below.

We Should Stand United

Why do the vaxxed and unvaxxed not unite in solidarity to fight their common enemy?

How many have been force-vaxxed and already died from the vaxx-injuries? The mainstream media will not tell: Cancers of the ovaries, prostate, breast, they affect often the reproductive systems – blood clots that move to the lungs, impairing breathing, oxygen intake, or move to the heart, causing heart embolies, or the brain, resulting in brain strokes, and so on. It will be difficult, as Dr. Yeadon, former VP and Chief Scientist of Pfizer, says, to link the cause of death to the covid injection – as the injuries can be very diverse, and autopsies are in most cases not allowed, exactly, to keep a veil over the cause of death.

They, the vaxxed, injured and death, leave families behind. Imagine what it means for so many children, for no reason, and no fault of theirs, they cannot go to school, or have to wear the oxygen-starving, totally useless masks, and / or losing one or both of their parents because they had to be poison-injected in order to continue earning a living!

We are so far gone, that all those who have submitted to the deadly potion have no idea whether they will live or die, and if they live how they will be ‘robotized’ or ‘trans-humanized’, by the all controlling “elite”, the dark, sinister side of non-humanity among us, still roaming Mother Earth.

How do these people at heads of governments, heads of the UN system and its multiple agencies, the bought – or coerced – scientists, lawyers, teachers, doctors – and so on – sleep at night? And live a seemingly normal life? The answer is, they are not humans. They are not even trans-humans. They are — a new term has to be invented for this abhorrent species of living beings.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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A paper published Sept. 30, in Eurosurveillance showed COVID spread rapidly by a fully vaccinated patient to fully vaccinated staff, patients and family members — despite a 96% vaccination rate and use of full personal protective equipment. Five patients died and nine had severe cases.

A paper published Sept. 30 in Eurosurveillance raises questions about the legitimacy of “vaccine-generated herd immunity.”

The study cites a COVID outbreak which spread rapidly among hospital staff at an Israeli Medical Center — despite a 96% vaccination rate, use of N-95 surgical masks by patients and full personal protective equipment worn by providers.

The calculated rate of infection among all exposed patients and staff was 10.6% (16/151) for staff and 23.7% (23/97) for patients, in a population with a 96.2% vaccination rate (238 vaccinated/248 exposed individuals).

The paper noted several transmissions likely occurred between two individuals both wearing surgical masks, and in one instance using full PPE, including N-95 mask, face shield, gown and gloves.

Of the 42 cases diagnosed in the outbreak, 38 were fully vaccinated with two doses of Pfizer and BioNTech’s Comirnaty vaccine, one had received only one vaccination and three were unvaccinated.

Of the infected, 23 were patients and 19 were staff members. The staff all recovered quickly. However, eight vaccinated patients became severely ill, six became critically ill and five of the critically ill died. The two unvaccinated patients tracked had mild COVID cases.

The authors concluded:

“This communication … challenges the assumption that high universal vaccination rates will lead to herd immunity and prevent COVID-19 outbreaks … In the outbreak described here, 96.2% of the exposed population was vaccinated. Infection advanced rapidly (many cases became symptomatic within 2 days of exposure), and viral load was high.”

According to the paper, the outbreak originated from a fully vaccinated haemodialysis patient in his/her 70s who was admitted with fever and cough and placed in a room with three other patients.

The patient had not been tested for SARS-CoV-2 on admission day, because his/her symptoms were mistaken for a possible bloodstream infection exacerbating congestive heart failure.

To determine the source of the outbreak, researchers conducted phylogenetic analysis on the whole-genome SARS-CoV-2 sequences that were available for 12 cases in the outbreak, including staff and patients from Wards A, B and C and dialysis departments.

All were infected with the Delta variant and epidemiologically and phylogenetically connected to the same outbreak, except for one case. That case and three staff members were not considered part of the outbreak.

“This is a very interesting paper and it is scientifically very sound,” said Dr. Brian Hooker, Ph.D., P.E., Children’s Health Defense chief scientific officer and professor of biology at Simpson University.

“The breakthrough rate of 96.2% of the vaccinated population shows that in this instance, the vaccine was virtually useless in preventing transmission,” Hooker said. “It should also be noted the two reported cases among unvaccinated patients were mild, whereas six of the vaccinated patients died.”

BioNTech CEO says new COVID vaccine will be needed in 2022

The head of BioNTech — the German company that co-developed a COVID vaccine with Pfizer — said a new formula will likely be needed by mid-2022 to protect against future mutations of the virus.

According to Bloomberg, Ugur Sahin, co-founder and CEO of BioNtech, told the Financial Times that while current COVID vaiants, such as the contagious Delta strain, were not different enough to undermine current vaccinations, new strains will emerge that can evade booster shots and the body’s immune defenses.

“This year [a different vaccine] is completely un-needed, but by mid-next year, it could be a different situation,” Sahin said. “This is a continuous evolution, and that evolution has just started.”

According to a new pre-print study submitted for peer review, Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine antibodies disappear in many by seven months.

Six months after receiving the second dose of Pfizer’s two-shot vaccine, many recipients no longer have vaccine-induced antibodies that can immediately neutralize worrisome SARS-CoV-2 variants, Reuters reported.

Researchers analyzed blood samples from 46 healthy, mostly young or middle-aged adults after receipt of the two doses and again six months after the second dose.

“Our study shows vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine induces high levels of neutralizing antibodies against the original vaccine strain, but these levels drop by nearly 10-fold by seven months” after the initial dose, Bali Pulendran of Stanford University and Mehul Suthar of Emory University said in an email to Reuters.

In roughly half (47%) of all subjects, neutralizing antibodies that can block infection against COVID variants, such as Delta, Beta and Mu, were undetectable at six months after the second dose, the study showed.

Neutralizing antibodies are not the immune system’s only defense against the virus. Still, they “are critically important in protecting against SARS-CoV-2 infection,” said Pulendran and Suthar.

Researchers said the findings warrant administering a booster dose around six to seven months to enhance protection against SARS-CoV-2 and its variants.

Fauci says three shots of a COVID vaccine is ‘optimal regimen’

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Tuesday he believes the “optimal regimen” of vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 virus will include a booster shot.

Fauci’s comments come a week after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authorized boosters for millions of Americans, including those whose professions make them “high risk.”

Nearly 1 million Americans have already scheduled appointments to receive a third dose of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, according to the White House.

Pfizer and BioNTech on Sept. 30 submitted initial data from their vaccine trial on children between 5 and 11 years old to the FDA.

The FDA’s independent vaccine advisory committee will hold three meetings in October to discuss COVID booster shots, mix-and-match boosters and vaccines for children 5 to 11 years old, the agency announced Friday.

The first two meetings, on Oct. 14 and 15, will cover booster doses of Moderna and Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccines — both of which are authorized for use in adults.

During the second meeting, the committee also will discuss data from the National Institutes of Health on the safety and efficacy of getting initial doses of one COVID vaccine and, later, a booster dose of another manufacturer’s shot, Politico reported.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

Featured image is from CHD

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A new vaccine “tailored” to target next-generation Covid-19 will likely be needed by the middle of 2022, according to the head of BioNTech, the biotechnology company that developed the Pfizer shot.

The German firm’s CEO, Uğur Şahin, told the Financial Times that Covid-19 variants such as the Delta strain were more contagious but could be tackled by booster shots of current vaccines.

However, he added that mutations would emerge that could slip past the body’s vaccine-acquired immune defenses.

“This year, [a different vaccine] is completely unneeded. But by mid next year, it could be a different situation,” Sahin said, adding that “tailored” versions of current vaccines would be needed to specifically target the new strains that emerge.

“This virus will stay, and the virus will further adapt,” he said.

“We have no reason to assume that the next-generation virus will be easier to handle for the immune system than the existing generation. This is a continuous evolution, and that evolution has just started.”

Vaccination programs will feature two main streams by next year, Sahin predicted, with booster shots for those already inoculated and a continued campaign to get the vaccines to those who have had minimal access to them thus far.

A number of vaccine developers, including BioNTech and US pharma major Pfizer – which helped bring the company’s mRNA vaccine to the market – have been under pressure to share patents and technology to allow wider production of vaccines.

While Sahin claimed patent-sharing posed no risks to quality control, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has repeatedly argued that waiving intellectual property rights would disincentivize innovation. However, critics such as former US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head Tom Frieden have accused pharma companies of “war-profiteering.”

Sahin declined to forecast how the Pfizer vaccine would be priced in the future, but told the newspaper that it would still be needed in the coming years.

According to the co-founder of BioNTech Dr Ugur Sahin, the COVID-19 vaccine he designed for Pfizer was designed in just few hours in a single day on January 25, 2020.

No other vaccine in history has been created and manufactured so quickly. Previously, the fastest vaccine ever developed took more than four years.

Meanwhile, new research from Trinity College Dublin and University of Edinburgh found more evidence that vitamin D protects against severe COVID-19 disease and death.

According to a whistleblower nearly 50000 patients died soon in 14 days after getting COVID vaccine shot. ‘They are lying. There is no question they are lying,’ said Attorney Renz. ‘The mantra of ‘safe and effective’ must stop after today’s information.’

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The COVID-19 “Vaccine” and the Nuremberg Code. Crimes Against Humanity, Genocide

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 05, 2021

The mRNA vaccine is “experimental’ and unapproved. Since December 2020, it has resulted in a worldwide upward trend in deaths and injuries. Numerous scientific studies confirm the nature of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine which is being imposed on all humanity.

Pure Insanity: Now Anyone with Any Disease in Alberta Can be Counted as a “COVID” Case

By Ethan Huff, October 05, 2021

In order to keep the “case” count high and the plandemic moving right along, government officials in Alberta, Canada, are now counting all illnesses as “covid” in order to justify all the tyranny.

Spanish Government Says that the SARS-CoV-2 Virus Has Not Been Isolated

By Free West Media, October 05, 2021

The Spanish Ministry of Health does not have SARS-CoV-2 cultures for testing and does not have a list of laboratories with samples of this virus. The government confirmed this to critical lawyers and organizations.

The Monday October 4th Facebook Blackout Reveals Real Power of Big Tech Companies

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, October 05, 2021

The problem has hit the Facebook group companies, causing damage not only to social media, but also to various websites and apps that are somehow linked to Mark Zuckerberg‘s businesses – including banking and financial transaction apps.

Potentially Millions of First Responders, Police, Teachers, Healthcare Workers Will Soon be Out of a Job over COVID Vaccine Mandates

By J. D. Heyes, October 05, 2021

An increasing number of governments, including the federal government, are mandating that their employees get a COVID-19 vaccine or else lose their jobs.

Huge Uptick in Ivermectin Use Is Causing Profit-driven Big Pharma to Sell Patented Copycat Pills

By Joel S. Hirschhorn, October 05, 2021

I am confident in predicting that as more and more bad news about the ineffectiveness and dangerous side effects of COVID vaccines become increasingly known to more of the public, the big drug companies will increasingly switch from vaccines to prescription antiviral medicines.

Forever Wars, Recaptured in Real Time

By Pepe Escobar, October 05, 2021

The 21^st century, geopolitically, so far has been shaped by the U.S.- engineered Forever Wars. Forever Wars: Afghanistan-Iraq, part 2, ranging from 2004 to 2021, is the fourth in a series of e-books recovering the Pepe Escobar archives on Asia Times.

Trump, Twitter and the Digital Town Hall

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, October 05, 2021

The merits are hard to stomach for partisans long jaundiced by presumption and dislike, but the cheer at the deplatforming of Donald Trump by a range of social media platforms said as much about the nature of any sentiment about democracy as it did about those claiming to defend it.

The Brutality of Denying Water to Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills

By Daphne Banai, October 05, 2021

Abu Hani and his family live only two kilometers from the Israeli settlement outpost of Avigayil in the occupied South Hebron Hills. But unlike Avigayil’s residents, who are connected to Israel’s national water grid, Abu Hani and his children are barred from doing so.

Pfizer Scientists Caught Undercover Admitting Pfizer Is Evil and that Natural Immunity Is Better than the COVID-19 Vaccine

By Brian Shilhavy, October 05, 2021

Project Veritas released their fourth video in its COVID-19 vaccine investigative series today which exposed three Pfizer scientists saying that antibodies lead to equal, if not better, protection against the virus compared to the vaccine.

What Biden Told the Indians

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, October 05, 2021

It has been a sobering two years. India’s economy crashed and it cannot be the magnet anymore for investors in Silicon Valley. ‘Make in India’ withered away. The current pitch for a spot in the global supply chain is unconvincing.    

Are US War Plans with China Taking Shape?

By Brian Berletic, October 05, 2021

The US and its allies continue beating the drums of war in regards to China, but how serious is this? Will it really lead to war, or is it merely posturing meant to give the US the most favorable position on the other side of a fully ascendant China?

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges.”—George Carlin

You think you’ve got rights? Think again.

All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.

This is the grim reality of life in the American police state.

In fact, in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs, our so-called rights have been reduced to mere technicalities, privileges that can be granted and taken away, all with the general blessing of the courts.

This is what one would call a slow death by a thousand cuts, only it’s the Constitution being inexorably bled to death by the very institution (the judicial branch of government) that is supposed to be protecting it (and us) from government abuse.

Court pundits, fixated on a handful of politically charged cases before the U.S. Supreme Court this term dealing with abortion, gun rights and COVID-19 mandates, have failed to recognize that the Supreme Court—and the courts in general—sold us out long ago.

With each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear that Americans can no longer rely on the courts to “take the government off the backs of the people,” in the words of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. When presented with an opportunity to loosen the government’s noose that keeps getting cinched tighter and tighter around the necks of the American people, what does our current Supreme Court usually do?

It ducks. Prevaricates. Remains silent. Speaks to the narrowest possible concern.

More often than not, it gives the government and its corporate sponsors the benefit of the doubt, seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government interests than with upholding the rights of the people enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

Rarely do the concerns of the populace prevail.

Every so often, the justices toss a bone to those who fear they have abdicated their allegiance to the Constitution. Too often, however, the Supreme Court tends to march in lockstep with the police state.

As a result, the police and other government agents have been generally empowered to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance.

In recent years, for example, the Court has ruled that police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits; police officers can stop cars based only on “anonymous” tips; Secret Service agents are not accountable for their actions, as long as they’re done in the name of “security”; citizens only have a right to remain silent if they assert it; police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes,” justifying any and all police searches of vehicles stopped on the roadside; police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime; police can stop, search, question and profile citizens and non-citizens alike; police can subject Americans to virtual strip searches, no matter the “offense”; police can break into homes without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home; and it’s a crime to not identify yourself when a policeman asks your name.

Moreover, it was a unanimous Supreme Court which determined that police officers may use drug-sniffing dogs to conduct warrantless searches of cars during routine traffic stops. That same Court gave police the green light to taser defenseless motorists, strip search non-violent suspects arrested for minor incidents, and break down people’s front doors without evidence that they have done anything wrong.

The cases the Supreme Court refuses to hear, allowing lower court judgments to stand, are almost as critical as the ones they rule on. Some of these cases have delivered devastating blows to the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

By remaining silent, the Court has affirmed that: legally owning a firearm is enough to justify a no-knock raid by police; the military can arrest and detain American citizens; students can be subjected to random lockdowns and mass searches at school; police officers who don’t know their actions violate the law aren’t guilty of breaking the law; trouble understanding police orders constitutes resistance that justifies the use of excessive force; and the areas immediately adjacent to one’s apartment can be subjected to warrantless police surveillance and arrests.

Make no mistake about it: when such instances of abuse are continually validated by a judicial system that kowtows to every police demand, no matter how unjust, no matter how in opposition to the Constitution, one can only conclude that the system is rigged.

By refusing to accept any of the eight or so qualified immunity cases before it last year that strove to hold police accountable for official misconduct, the Supreme Court delivered a chilling reminder that in the American police state, “we the people” are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”

This is how qualified immunity keeps the police state in power.

Lawyers tend to offer a lot of complicated, convoluted explanations for the doctrine of qualified immunity, which was intended to insulate government officials from frivolous lawsuits, but the real purpose of qualified immunity is to rig the system, ensuring that abusive agents of the government almost always win and the victims of government abuse almost always lose.

How else do you explain a doctrine that requires victims of police violence to prove that their abusers knew their behavior was illegal because it had been deemed so in a nearly identical case at some prior time?

It’s a setup for failure.

A review of critical court rulings over the past several decades, including rulings affirming qualified immunity protections for government agents by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order, protecting the ruling class, and insulating government agents from charges of wrongdoing than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

Indeed, as Reuters reports, qualified immunity “has become a nearly failsafe tool to let police brutality go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights.”

Worse, as Reuters concluded, “the Supreme Court has built qualified immunity into an often insurmountable police defense by intervening in cases mostly to favor the police.”

For those in need of a reminder of all the ways in which the Supreme Court has made us sitting ducks at the mercy of the American police state, let me offer the following.

As a result of court rulings in recent years, police can claim qualified immunity for warrantless searches. Police can claim qualified immunity for warrantless arrests based on mere suspicion. Police can claim qualified immunity for using excessive force against protesters. Police can claim qualified immunity for shooting a fleeing suspect in the back. Police can claim qualified immunity for shooting a mentally impaired person. Police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits. Police can stop, arrest and search citizens without reasonable suspicion or probable cause.  Police officers can stop cars based on “anonymous” tips or for “suspicious” behavior such as having a reclined car seat or driving too carefully. Police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime.  Police can use the “fear for my life” rationale as an excuse for shooting unarmed individuals. Police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes.” Not only are police largely protected by qualified immunity, but police dogs are also off the hook for wrongdoing.

Police can subject Americans to strip searches, no matter the “offense.” Police can break into homes without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home. Police can use knock-and-talk tactics as a means of sidestepping the Fourth Amendment. Police can carry out no-knock raids if they believe announcing themselves would be dangerous. Police can recklessly open fire on anyone that might be “armed.” Police can destroy a home during a SWAT raid, even if the owner gives their consent to enter and search it. Police can suffocate someone, deliberately or inadvertently, in the process of subduing them.

To sum it up, we are dealing with a nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence carried out with impunity against individuals posing little or no real threat.

So where does that leave us?

For those deluded enough to believe that they’re living the American dream—where the government represents the people, where the people are equal in the eyes of the law, where the courts are arbiters of justice, where the police are keepers of the peace, and where the law is applied equally as a means of protecting the rights of the people—it’s time to wake up.

We no longer have a representative government, a rule of law, or justice.

Liberty has fallen to legalism. Freedom has fallen to fascism.

Justice has become jaded, jaundiced and just plain unjust.

And for too many, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the American dream of freedom and justice for all has turned into a living nightmare.

Given the turbulence of our age, with its government overreach, military training drills on American soil, domestic surveillance, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, wrongful convictions, profit-driven prisons, corporate corruption, COVID mandates, and community-wide lockdowns, the need for a guardian of the people’s rights has never been greater.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Featured image is from The Crux

O Relógio do Clima, instalado por Roberto Cingolani na fachada do Ministério da Transição Ecológica, iniciou a contagem decrescente: faltam menos de 7 anos para a catástrofe climática causada pelo aquecimento global. O relógio está regulado calibrado de acordo com as previsões do instituto MCC, em Berlim, e não nas do IPCC (Comissão das Nações Unidas para as Alterações Climáticas). Calcula que a temperatura média global, que aumentou cerca de 1 °C desde o nível pré-industrial de 1750, poderá aumentar 1,5 °C em 2050 (ou seja, em três séculos), principalmente devido ao CO2 (dióxido de carbono) libertado na atmosfera pelas actividades humanas, o que causa uma intensificação do efeito de estufa. Segundo os cientistas da ONU, contribui secondariamente para o aquecimento global o aumento da actividade do Sol, enquanto, pelo contrário, para outros cientistas é a causa principal.

No Pré-Cop de Milão, do qual o Ministro Cingolani foi o principal organizador, o complexo quadro científico das alterações climáticas e das suas consequências ambientais foi espectacularizado utilizando técnicas de filmes sobre catástrofes. Confrontados com a previsão “científica” de que dentro de sete anos o planeta Terra será envolvido numa catástrofe climática, os 400 jovens de todo o mundo, reunidos por Cingolani em Milão, exigiram que a indústria de combustíveis fósseis fosse encerrada até 2030 e que os governos deixassem de financiá-la agora, substituindo-a por fontes verdes que não emitem CO2.

O Ministro Cingolani comprometeu-se em concretizar esse objectivo. Há de facto uma forma de o fazer, se a Itália tivesse um plano estratégico para criar um sistema energético integrado baseado na energia solar fotovoltaica e especialmente termodinâmica (com espelhos que concentram os raios solares), e em grandes parques eólicos, especialmente offshore (com turbinas eólicas instaladas em águas pouco profundas ou flutuantes). O projecto inovador solar termodinâmico desenvolvido pelo Prémio Nobel, Carlo Rubbia, que teria tornado possível produzir um terço das necessidades eléctricas italianas com algumas centrais solares de emissão zero, foi deliberadamente afundado e está agora a ser utilizado na China. A construção de parques eólicos offshore está dificultada, de tal forma que existe apenas um, em Taranto.

O Ministro Cingolani tem, contudo, uma “solução”: a energia nuclear (ver artigo do Director do Greenpeace Itália no il manifesto de 3 de Setembro). Cingolani declarou-o, de modo aberto e polémico, quando foi convidado por Renzi para a Escola de Educação Política ‘Italia Viva’. O Ministro patrocinou então uma conferência de apoiantes nucleares. Não é coincidência que, depois de conhecer John Kerry, o enviado especial do Presidente dos EUA para a gestão climática, se tenha convertido de oponente a apoiante da energia nuclear. Cingolani foi imediatamente acompanhado por Salvini, que disse: “Uma central nuclear na Lombardia? Qual é o problema?” Assim, o poderoso lobby nuclear também se radicou em Itália, que já obteve um primeiro resultado fundamental na União Europeia: o Centro Comum de Investigação, encomendado pela Comissão Europeia, incluiu a energia nuclear entre as “fontes de energia verde” apoiadas e financiadas pela União Europeia, para eliminar as emissões de CO2 até 2050.

Assim, a União Europeia está a relançar a indústria nuclear, numa altura em que esta se encontra em profunda crise devido ao aumento dos custos e a problemas técnicos. Embora as centrais de energia solar possam produzir mais electricidade do que as centrais nucleares, sem custos adicionais ou emissões perigosas, só para armazenar temporariamente a enorme quantidade de resíduos radioactivos produzidos pelas centrais nucleares da União Europeia, espera-se que o seu custo seja de 420-570 biliões de euros. Adiciona-se a enorme cifra necessária para o desmantelamento dessas mesmas centrais, que, na maior parte atingiram ou superaram a idade limite de 35 anos e estão a tornar-se cada vez mais caras e perigosas. Entretanto, a Agência Internacional para a Energia Atómica autorizou a descarga no mar de mais de um milhão de toneladas de água radioactiva, que se acumulou na central nuclear de Fukushima, após o acidente de 2011, com o  resultado de que aumentaram as mortes por cancro provocadas por esta “fonte de energia  verde”.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

La transizione “ecologica” al nucleareBy Manlio Dinucci, October 05, 2021

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos