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This article was first published in September 2020.
We are told that the virus is everywhere – in the air, in our breath, on fomites, trapped in masks – yet public health authorities seem not to be in possession of any cultivable clinical samples of the offending pathogen.
In March 2020, the World Health Organisation instructed authorities not to look for a virus but to rely instead on a genome test, the RT-PCR, which is not specific for SARS-CoV-2 (1) (2).
A Freedom of Information request to Public Health England about cultivable clinical samples or direct evidence of viral isolation has no information and refers to the proxy RT-PCR test, quoting Eurosurveillance (3).
Eurosurveillance states:
“Virus detection by reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) from respiratory samples is widely used to diagnose and monitor SARS-CoV-2 infection and, increasingly, to infer infectivity of an individual. However, RT-PCR does not distinguish between infectious and non-infectious virus. Propagating virus from clinical samples confirms the presence of infectious virus but is not widely available (and) requires biosafety level 3 facilities” (4).
The CDC admits that, “no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV are currently available”, and used a genetically modified human lung alveolar adenocarcinoma cell culture to, “mimic clinical specimen”(5).
It appears, therefore, that we have public health bodies without clinical samples, a test which is non-specific and does not distinguish between infectivity and non-infectivity, a requirement for biosafety level 3 facilities to even look for a virus, yet we are led to believe that it is up all our noses.
So, where is the virus?
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This interview with the Funeral Director, John O’Looney is a wake up call!
What he has witnessed since 2019 to present needs to be shared … all the deaths he is currently seeing have resulted from the ‘vaccine’ – the experimental unapproved gene therapy.
He tells it like it is … no government agency or politician, health authority or or media can cover up or fudge the TRUTH he is dealing with as a Funeral Director.
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“I have no doubt that the scientific and public health officials monitoring this crisis have the best intentions.” Erin O’Toole (1)
Canada’s Recovery Plan, (2) the Conservative’s go-to 2021 campaign doc, devotes ten pages to Covid. Under “Beating Covid-19 through vaccinations and testing” we learn:
“Canadians will likely need booster shots to protect against Covid-19. We need to be ready… Conservatives will implement a plan to ensure that Canada has faster and more consistent access to vaccines and that we have rapid access to booster shots to deal with future variants.”
Beating Covid through testing requires designated testing teams at all border-points and airports. Under the Conservatives, all prospective entrants to Canada, citizen or not, will submit to one or more Covid tests. O’Toole would: mass distribute home-testing kits; ramp-up testing inside elementary schools; and, fast-track testing technology approval.
The chapter, A Detailed Plan to Protect Canada from Future Pandemics,leads with:
“We know that we will face more Covid-19 variants in the years to come… Conservatives will ensure that our country is ready to face future pandemics…”
O’Toole’s mission: “bolster our infectious disease and pandemic infrastructure.”
O’Toole covets vaccine stockpiles. He wishes to overhaul federal infectious disease procedures with a view to improving early warning, and contract-tracing, capabilities. His Plan twice promises a national Covid/Vaccine data-base.
O’Toole commits to “making Canada one of the best jurisdictions globally for pharmaceutical research and development” by ending Liberal “hostility” toward the “global biomedical sector.”
Partnering with business will allow O’Toole to grow Canada’s biomaterials industries. Universities will also partner, thereby facilitating: “domestic vaccine (human) research testing.”
O’Toole wants: a) increased pharmaceutical R&D spending; b) increased production of vaccines, and other “infectious control products and biomaterials”; and c) increased PPE production. He shamelessly pitches tax-breaks, subsidies and tariffs for Big Pharma.
O’Toole schemed openly during several election-orientated Global, CBC and CTV news-pieces. (He protested no misquotes). Details in these articles and videos appear nowhere on the Party’s website.
O’Toole:
“I’ve been very clear – vaccines are the most critical tool in us fighting Covid-19. We encourage all Canadians to get vaccinated.” (3)
Prime Minister O’Toole would force Canada’s vaccination rate “beyond 90%” in two months. (4) He previously threatened “90%.” This upped the wager.
Fifteen to 20% of Canadians militantly oppose coercive vaccination. A third of this cohort will soon buckle, leaving a hardcore of at least 9% (3.3 million). By promising to press into 91-2% territory, O’Toole macho-signals, to key elites, a determination to combat hardcore resistance.
O’Toole proclaims ‘Beyond 90%’ achievable through: a) sick-leave for worker’s undergoing vaccination; b) free transportation too and from vaccination centres; and c) “appeals to patriotism.” Less overt are his primary stratagems; each designed to poke the bear.
O’Toole demands “accelerated authorization of vaccines for children under the age of 12” (5); i.e., vaccinating kids over the explicit protests of their parents.
O’Toole will implement a “national proof-of-vaccination system” (6); i.e., ensnaring the un-vaxxed with inter-provincial travel restrictions.
Early auditioning landed O’Toole the role of village scold. Erin breaks a sweat gossiping about the scandalous disregard of social distancing protocols at Justin’s soirees. Likewise, he denounces Covid Resistance protests at hospitals as “completelyunacceptable.” (7)
A glimpse at O’Toole’s authoritarian planet came during an attack on Bernier, wherein Erin opined:
“Let me be frank. The single worst thing I, or any other leader, could do is turn a question of public health into one of political division.” (8)
Doubting public health officials… – worst crime imaginable?
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Dr. Vladimir Zelenko and his team has successfully treated 6,000 patients and trained hundreds of physicians. He has attended to public officials from the US, Israel and Brazil.
Dr. Zelenko’s experience has given him a unique perspective in approaching COVID-19, basically to keep people out of hospitals.
Watch him share his experience below.
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There seems to be a glaring illogic to official arguments about the need to vaccinate British children against Covid that no one in the corporate media wishes to highlight.
Days ago the British government’s experts on vaccinations, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, withstood strong political pressure and decided not to recommend vaccinating children aged between 12 and 15. That was because the JCVI concluded that vaccination could not be justified in the case of children on health grounds.
The implication was that the known health risks associated with vaccination for children – primarily from heart inflammation – outweighed the health benefits. The JCVI also indicated that there might be unknown, longer-term health risks too, given the lack of follow-up among young people and children who have already been vaccinated.
But while the JCVI defied the government, they did not entirely ignore the political demands of them. They offered the government’s four chief medical officers a get-out clause that could be exploited to rationalise the approval of child vaccinations: they conceded that vaccinations might offer other, non-health benefits.
Research suggesting that boys are four times more likely to get serious side-effects from the vaccine than from Covid itself throws another wrench in the highly politicised 'follow the science' narrative, as I explain in my recent post https://t.co/ykAvaZhTCY
Predictably, this utilitarian justification for child vaccinations has been seized on by the British government. Here is the Guardian uncritically regurgitating the official position:
“There have also been concerns about the indirect effects of the virus on children. The biggest has been the disruption to schools, which had a severe impact on their mental and physical health, as well as their education.
“That, essentially, is why the four CMOs have said children aged between 12 and 15 should be eligible for the jab.
“They believe that being vaccinated will reduce the risk of disruption to school and extracurricular activities and the effect of this on their mental health and wellbeing.”
Let’s unpack that argument.
Covid poses no serious threat to the overwhelming majority of children, the JCVI and the chief medical officers are agreed. (Those few children who are at risk can be vaccinated under existing rules.)
But, according to the government, Covid has inflicted physical, mental and educational suffering on children because classrooms had to be shut for prolonged periods to protect vulnerable adults in the period before the adult population could be vaccinated.
Now most adults, and almost all vulnerable adults, are vaccinated against Covid, offering them a significant degree of protection.
But still children need to be injected with a vaccine that may, on balance, do more harm to their health than good.
If this is the official argument, we should all be asking: Why?
Two scenarios
There are two potential scenarios for assessing this argument.
The first:
The vaccine works against transmission and severe illness in adults. Schools therefore no longer need to be shut down to protect the adult population. Adults are now largely safe – unless they have decided not to get vaccinated. And that, in turn, means that “indirect” harm to children’s mental and physical wellbeing caused by school closures should no longer be a consideration.
If this is the case, then there are no grounds – either health ones or indirect, non-health ones – to justify vaccinating children.
The second:
The vaccine doesn’t stop transmission and severe illness, but it reduces some transmission and mitigates the worst effects of Covid. This is what the evidence increasingly suggests.
If this is the case, then vaccinating children will not only fail to stop a proportion of them catching and transmitting Covid but it will also fail in its stated purpose: preventing the future closure of schools and the associated, indirect harms to children.
Worse, at the same time vaccination may increase children’s risk of damage to their health from the vaccine itself, as the JCVI’s original conclusion implies.
Speculative benefits
Neither scenario offers persuasive medical, or even non-medical, grounds for vaccinating children. A speculative, marginal benefit to the adult population is being prioritised over the rights of children to enjoy bodily autonomy and to avoid being subjected to medical experiments that may have either short-term or long-term effects on their health.
Keep this quote. It'll soon be inconvenient and get forgotten. JCVI prof says: 'The MHRA actually allow you to use a vaccine, and we say, well, do we need to? And the answer is no, not for healthy 12 to 15-year-olds, on health grounds' https://t.co/2kgdEwRllupic.twitter.com/VCGzJ7SdNN
Just to be clear, as the “follow the science” crowd prepare yet again to be outraged, these are not my arguments. They are implicit in the official reasoning of the experts assessing whether to vaccinate children. They have been ignored on political grounds, because the government would prefer to look like it is actively getting us “back to normal”, and because it has chosen to put all its eggs in the easy (and profitable) vaccine basket.
If vaccines are all that is needed to solve the pandemic, then there is no need to look at other things, such as the gradual dismantling of the National Health Service by successive governments, very much including the current one; our over-consumption economies; nutrient-poor diets promoted by the farming and food industries; and much else besides.
Unadulterated racism
There are, in fact, much more obvious, unequivocal reasons to oppose vaccinating children – aside from the matter that vaccination subordinates children’s health to the adult population’s wellbeing on the flimsiest of pretexts.
First, vaccination doses wasted on British children could be put to far better use vaccinating vulnerable populations in the Global South. There are good self-interested reasons for us to back this position, especially given the fact that the fight is against a global pandemic in a modern world that is highly interconnected.
But more altruistic – and ethical – concerns should also be at the forefront of discussions too. Our lives aren’t more important than those of Africans or Asians. To think otherwise – to imagine that we deserve a third or fourth booster shot or need to vaccinate children to reduce the risk of Covid deaths in the west to near-zero – is pure, unadulterated racism.
And second, a growing body of medical reseach indicates that natural immunity confers stronger, longer-lasting protection against Covid.
Given that the virus poses little medical threat to children, the evidence so far suggests they would be better off catching Covid, as apparently half of them already have.
That is both because it serves their own interests by developing in them better immunity against future, nastier variants; and because it serves the interests of the adults around them – assuming (and admittedly it’s a big assumption) that the goal here is not to have adults dependent on endless booster shots to prevent waning immunity and enrich Pfizer.
Worst of both worlds
By contrast, the approach the British government is pursuing – and most of the corporate media is cheerleading – is the worst of both worlds.
British officials want to treat Covid as a continuing menace to public health, one that apparently can never be eradicated. A state of permanent emergency means the government can accrue to itself ever increasing powers, including for surveillance, on the pretext that we are in an endless war against the virus.
But at the same time the government’s implicit “zero tolerance” approach to Covid – in this case, a futile ambition to prevent any hospitalisations or deaths from the virus in the UK – means that the interests of British children, and populations in foreign countries we helped to impoverish through our colonial history, can be sacrificed for the good of adults in rich western countries.
Covid offers ideal conditions to set us at each other's throats. First it was over masks and lockdowns. Then over vaccination status and passports. Now it's children against parents. My latest explains why we're on a slippery slope https://t.co/VzH5w96XYV
The combined effect of these two approaches is to foster a political climate in which western governments and the corporate media are better placed to replicate the colonial policy priorities they have traditionally pursued abroad but this time apply them to the home front.
The supposed war against the virus – a war that children apparently must be recruited to fight on our behalf – rather neatly echoes the earlier, now discredited and unravelling “war on terror”.
Both can be presented as threats to our civilisation. Both require the state to redirect vast resources to corporate elites (the “defence” industries and now Big Pharma). Both have led to widespread fear among the populace, making it more compliant. Both require a permanent state of emergency and the sacrifice of our liberties. Both have been promoted in terms of a bogus humanitarianism. And neither war can be won.
Dog eat dog
Recognising these parallels is not the same as denial, though the government and media have every interest to cultivate this as an assumption. There were and are terrorists, even if the term readily gets mangled to serve political agendas. And there is a dangerous virus that vulnerable populations need protection from.
But just as the “terror” threat arose in response to – and to mask – our arrogant, colonial control over, and plundering of, other people’s resources, so this pandemic threat appears to have arisen, in large part, from our arrogant invasion of every last habitat on the planet, and our ever less healthy, consumption-driven lifestyles.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote an article that went viral called “A lesson coronavirus is about to teach the world“. In it, I argued that our capitalist societies, with their dog-eat-dog ideologies, were the least suited to deal with a health crisis that required solidarity, both local and global.
My latest: The response of leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson to the coronavirus crisis has shed a troubling light on the twisted priorities long cultivated in our societies https://t.co/YNDYawpBbY
I noted that Donald Tump, then the US president, was trying to secure an early, exclusive deal for a “silver bullet” – a vaccine – whose first doses he planned to reserve for Americans as a vote-winner at home and then use as leverage over other states to reward those who complied with his, or possibly US, interests. The planet could be divided into friends and foes – those who received the vaccine and those who were denied it.
It was a typically Trumpian vanity project that he did not realise. But in many ways, it has come to pass in a different fashion and in ways that have the potential to be more dangerous than I could foresee.
Divide and rule
The vaccine has indeed been sold as a silver bullet, a panacea that lifts from our shoulders not just the burden of lockdowns and masks but the need for any reflection on what “normal life” means and whether we should want to return to it.
And just as Trump wanted to use vaccine distribution as a tool of divide-and-rule, the vaccination process itself has come to serve a similar end. With the quick roll-out of vaccines, our societies have almost immediately divided between those who demand vaccine passports and mandates as the price for inclusion and those who demand the protection of basic liberties and cultivation of social solidarity without conditions.
In popular discourse, of course, this is being spun as a fight between responsible vaxxers and irresponsible anti-vaxxers. That is more divide-and-rule nonsense. Those in favour of vaccination, and those who have been vaccinated, can be just as concerned about the direction we are heading in as the “anti-vaxxers”.
Fear has driven our division: between those who primarily fear the virus and those who primarily fear western elites whose authoritarian instincts are coming to the fore as they confront imminent economic and environmental crises they have no answers for.
Increasingly, where we stand on issues surrounding the pandemic has little to do with “the science” and relates chiefly to where each of us stands on that spectrum of fear.
Hoarding impulse
The vaccination of children highlights this most especially, which is why I have chosen to focus on it. We want children vaccinated not because the research suggests they need it or society benefits from it but because knowing they are vaccinated will still our fear of the virus a little more.
Similarly, we want foreigners denied the vaccine – and that is the choice we make when we prioritise our children being vaccinated and demand booster shots for ourselves – because that too will allay our fears.
We hoard the vaccinations, just as we once did toilet paper. We try to fortify our borders against the virus, just as we do against “immigrants”, even though the rational part of our brain knows that the virus will lap up on our shores, in new variants, unless poorer nations are in a position to vaccinate their populations too.
Our fears, the politicians’ power complexes and the corporations’ profit motives combine to fuel this madness. And in the process we intensify the dog-eat-dog ideology we call western civilisation.
We turn on each other, we prioritise ourselves over the foreigner, we set parent against child, we pit the vaccinated against the unvaccinated – all in the name of a bogus humanitarianism and solidarity.
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Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
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).
During the 1900’s, Germany was one of the main European powers that controlled several colonies in Africa turning the people into test subjects. Germany’s colonies included ‘German South-West Africa’ which is Namibia today, there was also Kamerun, which is now called Cameroon, there was also ‘German East Africa’ which is now made up of Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. Africans can recall what happened during those times of German colonization especially with the Herero women of Namibia.
Historically, German doctors experimented on the Herero women with “sterilization tests” in order to ban mixed-race marriages. Fast forward to 1996, Big Pharma giant Pfizer conducted a clinical trial with a drug called trovafloxacin (Trovan) at the height of meningococcal meningitis outbreak in Kano, Nigeria. The chosen guinea pigs were 200 Nigerian children, 100 of the children were given Trovan while the remaining 100 children received what they considered the “gold-standard anti-meningitis treatment, ceftriaxone” which is described as a “cephalosporin antibiotic.” What was cynical about the clinical trials is that Pfizer gave a reduced dose of ceftriaxone so that their drug Trovan, would prove to be more effective. In 2007, the BBC published an article ‘Nigeria sues drugs giant Pfizer’ said that “Nigeria has filed charges against the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, accusing it of carrying out improper trials for an anti-meningitis drug.” However, in a corporate fascist manner, Pfizer denied “any wrongdoing”:
The government is seeking $7bn (£3.5bn) in damages for the families of children who allegedly died or suffered side-effects after being given Trovan. Kano state government has filed separate charges against Pfizer. The firm denies any wrongdoing, saying the trials were conducted according to Nigerian and international law
The results of the 200 Nigerian children were not good, in fact Kano officials said that the trials resulted in more than 50 deaths with others suffered from severe side effects including physical deformities:
Pfizer – the world’s largest pharmaceutical company – tested the experimental antibiotic Trovan in Kano during an outbreak of meningitis which had affected thousands in 1996. Some 200 children were tested. Pfizer say 11 of them died of meningitis, but Kano officials say about 50 died whilst others developed mental and physical deformities.
The government says the deaths and deformities were caused by Trovan and that the children were injected with the drug without approval from Nigerian regulatory agencies. The government says the deaths and deformities were caused by Trovan and that the children were injected with the drug without approval from Nigerian regulatory agencies
Byrant Haskins, a Pfizer spokesperson at the time said “These allegations against Pfizer, which are not new, are highly inflammatory and not based on all the facts,” he told the Reuters news agency. Haskins also said the trials “had helped save lives.” The BBC had mentioned one fact that is surely undeniable:
The BBC’s Alex Last in Nigeria says the case has added to suspicion of western medicine and drug trials in northern Nigeria and that has had a damaging effect on attempts to get the whole population to accept polio immunisation
In an interesting note on the whole clinical trial ordeal, Pfizer had said that they received “verbal consent” from the parents but apparently Pfizer “neglected to informed consent from the parents of the patients, who were, anyway, too stressed to make rational decisions” according to a 2020 Al-Jazeera report.
One last experiment on the African people I would like to mention happened in 1994 in Zimbabwe during the AZT human trials that was funded by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). AZT (Azidothymidine) was developed in the 1960’s as a way to fight cancer by allowing the compound in the drug to insert into the DNA of the cancer cell in order to stop it from reproducing itself but tests on mice proved that AZT had been a failure. With that said, American physicians in collaboration with the University of Zimbabwe proceeded with the AZT trials basically without informed consent that included the testing 17,000 women who basically did not understand the dangers of the tests to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV/AIDS. The result was that more than 1000 babies had contracted HIV due to the experiments.
Many Africans remember the history of these events involving Big Pharma and that’s why they oppose vaccines and most drugs that come from the West. I came across an interesting article published by a World Bank sponsored blog titled ‘What is driving COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Sub-Saharan Africa?’ that basically says that the African people are skeptical of the Covid-19 experimental injections for various reasons, “as African countries accelerate the deployment of COVID-19 (coronavirus) vaccines, the issue of vaccine hesitancy looms.” The authors of this article Neia Prata Menezes, Muloongo Simuzingili, Zelalem Yilma Debebe, Fedja Pivodic and Ernest Massiah say that vaccine hesitancy is due to the shortage of Covid-19 experimental injections but at the same time they also admit that it’s not the only explanation of low vaccination rate on the continent, “In Africa, hesitancy must be viewed in the context of significant vaccine shortage; hesitancy does not explain fully the low vaccination rates in Africa. The slow vaccine rollout on the continent is due to supply constraints, structural issues, and logistical barriers.” However the safety of the experimental injections with its side effects are the main drivers of vaccine hesitancy in several countries according to the authors:
In a recent five-country Afrobarometer survey six out of 10 citizens in Benin, Liberia, Niger, Senegal and Togo were hesitant to get vaccinated. In Africa, there are multiple drivers of vaccine hesitancy. Concerns about safety, side effects, and effectiveness are widespread—and observed among health workers in Zimbabwe, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Sudan and Ethiopia.
The Africa CDC survey noted that respondents viewed COVID-19 vaccines as less safe and effective than other vaccines, similar findings have been observed in Uganda, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Cameroon and South Africa
AstraZeneca’s experimental injections were also mentioned as it was suspended in European countries and South Africa’s data proved its ineffectiveness led to the rejection of the AstraZeneca vaccines by several African countries. News that the Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine that was suspended in the US due to blood clots also created vaccine hesitancy throughout Africa.
What is not surprising about the World Bank article is that it blames vaccine hesitancy on “conspiracy theories” as a contributing factor:
Access to social media has facilitated the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories. In the Africa CDC study, people with high levels of hesitancy were more likely to use social media and be exposed to disinformation. Half of those surveyed in South Africa believed the virus was linked to 5G technology. In another South African study, approximately a third of those who would refuse the vaccine trusted social media as a primary source of information. A small study in Addis Ababa showed that hesitancy was 3.6 times higher among those who received their information from social media compared to those who relied on television and radio
Many also do not trust their corrupted governments officials since historically they are susceptible to bribes from western governments and multinational corporations:
Trust in one’s government influences vaccination uptake. In West Africa, Afrobarometer reported high levels of mistrust in governments’ ability to provide a safe vaccine. Those who did not trust their government were five to 10 times less likely to want to be vaccinated. In Ghana, 40% of those who are unwilling to be vaccinated cited mistrust of the government while in South Africa, those who believed the president was doing a good job were more likely to be vaccinated
Many in Africa especially in Niger and Liberia believe that praying to God was more effective than the experimental injections, “Religious beliefs also inform vaccine acceptance. Close to 90% of individuals surveyed in Niger and Liberia said that prayer was more effective than the vaccine.” A recent poll showed “six African countries showed religious beliefs as key determinants of hesitancy.” And who can blame them? The African people understand Western vaccines are extremely dangerous, so for them, praying to God is a lot more safer than taking an experimental injection.
The authors also pointed out that many believe that they are being used as guinea pigs for what the authors call “Western medical practices” and are targeted for depopulation:
Mistrust of vaccines developed in Western countries is not new in Africa. It is rooted in the history of unethical Western medical practices on the continent where early efforts to address disease diminished trust in Western medicine and led to underutilization of health services.
Approximately 43% of those surveyed by the Africa CDC 15-country study believed that Africans were being used as guinea pigs in vaccine trials. Similar findings were noted in DRC; and, a 2021 survey in Addis Ababa hesitancy was associated with the belief that the vaccine was a biological weapon from developed countries to control population growth
So what is their solution to convince Africans that Western vaccines are safe and effective? You guessed it! They believe that more propaganda is needed to convince the African people to take the experimental injections:
As vaccine supply increases and communication campaigns expand, changes in hesitancy are being observed. This needs to be constantly monitored to develop consistent and effective communication strategies that address the challenges posed by new variants and more divergent views on COVID-19 and vaccines continue to flood social media
“now evidence arises from Japanese researchers that in countries in Africa where Onchocerciasis or River Blindness is endemic, Ivermectin is distributed to the population to prevent or cure infection. In these countries, there is practically no Covid.”
Source: Johns Hopkins CSSE via SCN
The African people are one of the most awaken people on earth when it comes to any form of medicine that basically comes from the west.
They understand what are dangers behind Big Pharma’s long-term agenda because that continent has experienced life through centuries of European colonization.
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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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This article was first posted on Global Research on March 21, 2021
1. It’s not a vaccine. A vaccine by definition provides immunity to a disease. This does not provide immunity to anything. In a best-case scenario, it merely reduces the chance of getting a severe case of a virus if one catches it. Hence, it is a medical treatment, not a vaccine. I do not want to take a medical treatment for an illness I do not have.
2. The drug companies, politicians, medical establishment, and media have joined forces to universally refer to this as a vaccine when it is not one, with the intention of manipulating people into feeling safer about undergoing a medical treatment. Because they are being deceitful, I do not trust them, and want nothing to do with their medical treatment.
3. The presumed benefits of this medical treatment are minimal and would not last long in any case. The establishment acknowledges this, and is already talking about additional shots and ever-increasing numbers of new “vaccines” that would be required on a regular basis. I refuse to turn myself into a chronic patient who receives injections of new pharmaceutical products on a regular basis simply to reduce my chances of getting a severe case of a virus that these injections do not even prevent.
4. I can reduce my chances of getting a severe case of a virus by strengthening my immune system naturally. In the event I catch a virus, there are vitamins and well-established drugs that have had wonderful results in warding off the illness, without the risks and unknowns of this medical treatment.
5. The establishment insists that this medical treatment is safe. They cannot possibly know this because the long-term effects are entirely unknown, and will not be known for many years. They may speculate that it is safe, but it is disingenuous for them to make such a claim that cannot possibly be known. Because they are being disingenuous, I do not trust them, and I want no part of their treatment.
6. The drug companies have zero liability if anything goes wrong, and cannot be sued. Same for the politicians who are pushing this treatment. I will not inject myself with a new, experimental medical device when the people behind it accept no liability or responsibility if something goes wrong. I will not risk my health and my life when they refuse to risk anything.
7. Israel’s Prime Minister has openly admitted that the Israeli people are the world’s laboratory for this experimental treatment. I am not interested in being a guinea pig or donating my body to science.
8. Israel agreed to share medical data of its citizens with a foreign drug company as a fundamental part of their agreement to receive this treatment.I never consented for my personal medical data to be shared with any such entity, nor was I even asked. I will not contribute to this sleazy enterprise.
9. The executives and board members at Pfizer are on record that they have not taken their own treatment, despite all the fanfare and assurances. They are claiming that they would consider it unfair to “cut the line”. This is a preposterous excuse, and it takes an unbelievable amount of chutzpah to even say such a thing. Such a “line” is a figment of their own imagination; if they hogged a couple of injections for themselves no one would cry foul. In addition, billionaires with private jets and private islands are not known for waiting in line until hundreds of millions of peasants all over the world go first to receive anything these billionaires want for themselves.
10. The establishment media have accepted this preposterous excuse without question or concern. Moreover, they laud Pfizer’s executives for their supposed self-sacrifice in not taking their own experimental treatment until we go first. Since they consider us such fools, I do not trust them, and do not want their new treatment. They can have my place in line. I’ll go to the very back of the line.
11. Three facts that must be put together:
Bill Gates is touting these vaccines as essential to the survival of the human race.
Bill Gates believes the world has too many people and needs to be “depopulated”.
Bill Gates, perhaps the richest man in the world, has also not been injected. No rush.
Uh, no. I’ll pass on any medical treatments he wants me to take.
12. The establishment has been entirely one-sided in celebrating this treatment.The politicians and media are urging people to take it as both a moral and civic duty. The benefits of the treatment are being greatly exaggerated, the risks are being ignored, and the unknowns are being brushed aside. Because they are being deceitful and manipulative, I will not gamble my personal wellbeing on their integrity.
13. There is an intense propaganda campaign for people to take this treatment.Politicians and celebrities are taking selfies of themselves getting injected (perhaps in some cases pretending to get injected), the media is hyping this as the coolest, smartest, most happy and fun thing to do. It is the most widespread marketing campaign in history. This is not at all appropriate for any medical treatment, let alone a brand new one, and it makes me recoil.
14. The masses are following in tow, posting pictures of themselves getting injected with a drug, feeding the mass peer pressure to do the same. There is something very alarming and sick about this, and I want no part of it. I never took drugs just because “everyone’s doing it” and it’s cool. I’m certainly not going to start now.
15. Those who raise concerns about this medical treatment are being bullied, slandered, mocked, censored, ostracized, threatened, and fired from their jobs. This includes medical professionals who have science-based concerns about the drug and caregivers who have witnessed people under their charge suffering horrible reactions and death shortly after being injected. When the establishment is purging good people who risk everything simply to raise concerns about a new medical treatment — even if they don’t outright oppose it — I will trust these brave people over the establishment every time. I cannot think of a single similar case in history when truth and morality turned out to be on the side of the establishment.
16. This is the greatest medical experiment in the history of the human race.
17. It is purposely not being portrayed as the greatest medical experiment in the history of the human race, and the fact that it is a medical experiment at all is being severely downplayed.
18. Were they up front with the masses, very few would agree to participate in such an experiment. Manipulating the masses to participate in a medical experiment under false pretenses violates the foundations of medical ethics and democratic law. I will not allow unethical people who engage in such conduct to inject me with anything.
19. The medical establishment is not informing people about any of this. They have become marketing agents for an experimental drug, serving huge companies and politicians who have made deals with them. This is a direct conflict with their mandate to concern themselves exclusively with the wellbeing of the people under their care. Since the medical establishment has become corrupted, and has become nothing more than a corporate and political tool, I do not trust the experimental drug they want so badly to inject me with.
20. We are being pressured in various ways to get injected, which violates medical ethics and the foundations of democratic society. The best way to get me not to do something is to pressure me to do it.
21. The government has sealed their protocol related to the virus and treatments for THIRTY YEARS. This is information that the public has a right to know, and the government has a responsibility to share. What are they covering up? Do they really expect me to believe that everything is kosher about all this, and that they are concerned first and foremost with my health? The last time they did this was with the Yemenite Children Affair. If you’re not familiar with it, look it up. Now they’re pulling the same shtick. They didn’t fool me the first time, and they’re definitely not fooling me now.
22. The government can share our personal medical data with foreign corporations, but they won’t share their own protocol on the matter with us? I’m out.
23. The establishment has recruited doctors, rabbis, the media, and the masses to harangue people who don’t want to get injected with a new drug. We are being called the worst sort of names. We are being told that we believe in crazy conspiracies, that we are against science, that we are selfish, that we are murderers, that we don’t care about the elderly, that it’s our fault that the government continues to impose draconian restrictions on the public. It’s all because we don’t want to get injected with an experimental treatment, no questions asked. We are even being told that we have a religious obligation to do this, and that we are grave sinners if we do not. They say that if we do not agree to get injected, we should be forced to stay inside our homes forever and be ostracized from public life.
This is horrific, disgusting, a perversion of common sense, morality, and the Torah. It makes me recoil, and only further cements my distrust of these people and my opposition to taking their experimental drug. How dare they?
24. I know of many people who got injected, but none of them studied the science in depth, carefully weighed the potential benefits against the risks, compared this option to other alternatives, was truly informed, and decided this medical treatment was the best option for them. On the contrary, they got injected because of the hype, the propaganda, the pressure, the fear, blind trust in what “the majority of experts” supposedly believed (assuming THEY all studied everything in depth and were completely objective, which is highly dubious), blind trust in what certain influential rabbis urged them to do (ditto the above), or hysterical fear that the only option was getting injected or getting seriously ill from the virus. When I see mass hysteria and cult-like behavior surrounding a medical treatment, I will be extremely suspicious and avoid it.
25. The drug companies have a long and glorious history of causing mass carnage with wonder drugs they thrust on unsuspecting populations, even after serious problems had already become known. Instead of pressing the pause button and halting the marketing of these drugs until these issues could be properly investigated, the drug companies did everything in their power to suppress the information and keep pushing their products. When companies and people have demonstrated such gross lack of concern for human life, I will not trust them when they hype a new wonder drug. This isn’t our first rodeo.
26. Indeed, the horror stories are already coming in at warp speed, but the politicians are not the least bit concerned, the medical establishment is brushing them aside as unrelated or negligible, the media is ignoring it, the drug companies are steaming ahead at full speed, and those who raise a red flag continue to be bullied, censored, and punished. Clearly my life and my wellbeing are not their primary concern. I will not be their next guinea pig in their laboratory. I will not risk being the next “coincidence”.
27. Although many people have died shortly after getting injected — including perfectly healthy young people — we are not allowed to imply that the injection had anything to do with it. Somehow this is anti-science and will cause more people to die. I believe that denying any possible link, abusing people who speculate that there might be a link, and demonstrating not the slightest curiosity to even explore if there might be a link is what is anti-science and could very well cause more people to die. These same people believe I am obligated to get injected as well. No freaking thanks.
28. I am repulsed by the religious, cult-like worship of a pharmaceutical product, and will not participate in this ritual.
29. My “healthcare” provider keeps badgering me to get injected, yet they have provided me no information on this treatment or any possible alternatives.Everything I know I learned from others outside the establishment. Informed consent has become conformed consent. I decline.
30. I see all the lies, corruption, propaganda, manipulation, censorship, bullying, violation of medical ethics, lack of integrity in the scientific process, suppression of inconvenient adverse reactions, dismissal of legitimate concerns, hysteria, cult-like behavior, ignorance, closed-mindedness, fear, medical and political tyranny, concealment of protocols, lack of true concern for human life, lack of respect for basic human rights and freedoms, perversion of the Torah and common sense, demonization of good people, the greatest medical experiment of all time being conducted by greedy, untrustworthy, godless people, the lack of liability for those who demand I risk everything… I see all this and I have decided they can all have my place in line. I will put my trust in God. I will use the mind He blessed me with and trust my natural instincts.
Which leads to the final reason which sums up why I will not get “vaccinated.”
31. The Whole thing Stinks.
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“When missionaries came to Africa, we had the land, they had the bible. We closed our eyes to pray. When we opened them, we had the bible and they had the land.” (Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu(1))
The usual portrayal of Africa is of a continent whose people are backwards, unable to move beyond a series of ethnic rivalries and ruled by war-mongering dictators.
The mainstream media rarely ask “What role did rich nations play in getting those leaders into power and keeping them there?” Analysis of almost any African country highlights the worst aspects of the international system, whether it is providing weapons to help dictators get into power, or economic conditions, imposed by the IMF, which make it difficult for well-meaning leaders to reduce poverty. It provides excellent examples of how the combination of war and economic exploitation work together to allow rich nations to achieve their aims.(2) At the same time this causes devastating consequences for people in African countries, with violence, rape, extreme poverty and the spread of diseases all feeding on each other.(3) Throughout Africa, the main players are the US, Britain and France, with China gradually increasing its influence.
The Richest Continent On Earth
The importance of Africa’s natural resources was recognised hundreds of years ago. Rich countries have pursued them ever since. There are many valuable minerals that powerful people are prepared to fight wars over. People in war zones often refer to the term, war GODs, meaning Gold, Oil and Diamonds. Wars have occurred repeatedly in Angola, the Congo, Ghana and Sierra Leone as there is so much profit to be made from controlling the diamond trade.(4) Cobalt and Niobium are used to make equipment that has to work in extreme conditions and are therefore used in space, weaponry, nuclear reactors, submarines, chemical refineries, blast furnaces and oil tankers.
Coltan is used in mobile phones, computers and video games and is therefore in great demand by corporations from advanced nations. Central Africa holds 80% of the world’s coltan reserves and 60% of the world’s cobalt.(5) It is estimated that the resources of a single country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), are worth $24 trillion, but little of this wealth is used to benefit the poor. For overseas companies, dictators and warlords, it can be profitable to exploit these resources during both peacetime and war. A proper government expects to be properly paid. In war zones, corrupt governments who assist big corporations can get away, literally, with murder. Rich countries support repressive regimes so their corporations can continue extracting these resources.
Colonial Exploitation
Throughout history we find evidence that white people have regarded black people as inferior. Examples of these attitudes can be found in the speeches of many famous people. Field Marshall Montgomery once said of Africa’s resources “The African is a complete savage, incapable of developing these resources himself”.(6) This attitude has been used by US, British and European politicians to justify appalling treatment of many people in Africa, whilst stealing their resources.
Until just after the second world war, Africa was divided up into European colonies, mostly British and French. Many people in Britain have been brainwashed into believing that colonialism was mostly about rich countries ‘taking civilization to the natives’. The evidence strongly contradicts this. It was mostly about rich countries plundering resources for their own benefit. Large quantities of crops and raw materials were brought to Britain from its colonies at prices well below the going rate.(7) This involved huge amounts of violence against the local populations, including widespread murder, torture and rape.
As a by-product of the colonial system, some countries gained a railway system, but this was primarily to transport resources to coastal ports, and to move soldiers inland quickly. Some of the population received education, and some countries gained a civil service, but this was just a small minority who effectively administered the system on behalf of their British rulers. The British governor in Sudan once said “We have been able to limit education to the sons of chiefs and native administrative personnel.”(8) Data for Tanzania suggests that when Tanzania gained independence in 1961, only one person in six could read.(9) The country only had 2 engineers and 12 doctors. After three decades of development after independence, almost everyone could read and the country had trained thousands of doctors, engineers and teachers. Most other African countries had been similarly under-developed by their European colonisers.(10)
Neo-colonialism: The Myth Of Independence
After World War 2 it became clear that European countries were no longer able to continue controlling their colonies. Britain and France did not give up their empires easily. There was widespread violence as people fought for their independence. Winston Churchill is remembered for being a successful war leader but he was also a ‘stubborn imperialist’. Colonies were eventually granted independence, but often on terms that were acceptable to Britain, France and other colonial powers. The term independence is an excellent example of government propaganda. A 1947 report stated that we (the British government) must “convert formal into informal empire”. Colonialism did not really end. It merely continued in a different form, which has been called neo-colonialism. Rich nations tried to ensure that the new governments of their former colonies would continue to allow European companies to control mineral and other resources. A Foreign Office memo stated “Britain must ensure that any major obligations it gives up are taken over by its friends.”(11)
The political systems in these countries changed, but in some cases the economic systems did not. After independence, some countries continued with their colonial role of providing a small number of crops or minerals, and this still continues today. In Kenya there were, and still are, large numbers of highly profitable mines and estates. In the 1950s British rulers in Kenya slaughtered, tortured and locked up hundreds of thousands of Kenyans who objected to the way they were exploited. Kenya eventually gained its independence in 1963 but before that, land was redistributed in a way that created a small class of landowners and a large class of people without land.(12) The landowners effectively became the new ruling class. They do not represent their poorest people and they have followed policies that benefitted themselves and foreign elites.
Some African leaders realised that these arrangements were too generous to colonial powers. They wanted to use the resources of their country for the benefit of their people. When they tried to re-negotiate contracts for oil, uranium or other minerals, they found themselves being overthrown by new leaders backed by rich countries. This system of rich countries trying to continue exploiting the region using corrupt leaders is the root cause of many of the problems in Africa. Of the 107 African leaders replaced between 1960 and 2003, two thirds were murdered, jailed or slung into exile. Up until 1979, 59 African leaders were toppled or assassinated. Only three retired peacefully and not one was voted out of office. No African ruler ever lost an election until 1982.(13) Rich nations have been active behind the scenes during many of these problems.
Uganda is a good example. Uganda gained its independence in 1961. The leader there, Milton Obote, had a mixed record, but in his early years he tried to create policies that were designed to help many of his people, including some of the poorest. Representatives at the British Foreign Office recognised that these policies were in the best interests of the people, but not in the interests of British corporations. The British Government objected to these policies, worried that it would set a precedent that other countries would follow. (Sudan nationalised many foreign-owned businesses shortly afterwards.) Idi Amin was a soldier in the Ugandan army and he took power in a violent coup. Despite knowing that he was a mass murderer, Britain supplied him with weapons, believing that his government would be better for British interests. It is estimated that over 300,000 people died during his rule. Britain only stopped supporting him when other countries realised how extreme he was, and his connection to Britain became an embarrassment.(14)
The French Still Exploit Africa Too
These problems also occur in those countries that were French colonies. For nearly 40 years (until 2005), a brutal dictator called Eyadema Gnassingbe governed the small West African country of Togo(15) but was rarely mentioned in the Western press. You may not be familiar with him because, on the whole, he followed policies that were acceptable to French elites, and was therefore rarely criticised by leaders from rich countries. In another former French colony, the Ivory Coast, French companies own almost half the land and they still control the water and electricity, ports, railways, tobacco, rubber, construction, public works, telecoms, banking and insurance.(16)
The US are now the dominant power in Africa
With the US’s rise to power after World War 2, it has gradually become the major player in Africa. In 1960, the CIA and the Belgian government helped to overthrow and then assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the leader of Zaire (now called the DRC), in order to replace him with the dictator, Mobutu.(17) He ruled until 1997, stealing at least $4 billion during that time. He was a murderous tyrant who tortured and executed political opponents. The US supplied him with large quantities of weapons, which he used to repress his own people. The US has exploited the region ever since by helping other repressive regimes in neighbouring countries.
Rwanda and Uganda have become the power-centre for US control of central Africa. They help the US exploit minerals in the region.(18) In the 1990s, the mainstream media talked about ‘the Rwandan genocide’ where millions of people were murdered. However, the media failed to explain that the violence was by both sides at different times, and that one group was backed by the US and Britain, and the other side was backed by France.(19) The US-backed leaders now control the region, and French is being replaced by English as the main language in some areas. The violence began years earlier and continues today. Rape, murder, child trafficking and sexual slavery are commonplace.(20) The huge death toll is mostly due to famine, malnutrition and disease.(21) America has supplied weapons to many of the groups involved in the fighting, and British weapons exports to the region are at record levels.(22)
Control By The IMF
Some African countries are run by leaders who would genuinely like to help their poorest people, but they are heavily constrained by international organizations, such as the IMF and the WTO (Discussed in earlier posts.) In one analysis of IMF policies in Africa, the conclusion was that these policies had failed in 31 out of 34 countries. Millions of people are still dying from malnutrition and disease, having applied IMF policies for decades. Some of these countries, such as Nigeria, were once classed as middle-income countries, after making significant progress before the IMF became involved, but are now listed among the poorest countries in the world, with as much as 70% of the population living in poverty.(23) Foreign companies can make huge profits because there is little to stop them exploiting the locals, who have virtually no rights. The privatisation of healthcare and the corporate control of basic resources in Africa has been a disaster for many, particularly the poorest.
A country like Zambia provides a good example of how the current economic system virtually guarantees that some countries will remain in poverty. Zambia was doing quite well after independence. By the early 1970’s it had become one of Africa’s richest nations by following sensible policies, such as lots of government spending on healthcare and education. But almost all of its export earnings came from copper. The price of copper plummeted because there was too much being produced in other countries, such as Chile. At the same time, the price of imported oil rocketed. The prices of both oil and copper were manipulated by organisations from other countries, beyond the control of the Zambian government. It needed to borrow money from the IMF, but the IMF imposed the conditions outlined in earlier posts. Zambia has been extremely poor ever since.(24)
What about China?
The mainstream media repeatedly carry stories about China exploiting Africa. However, the arrangements that China has with African countries have so far been much less exploitative than the arrangements that the US and the former European colonial powers have had.(25)
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Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda, and explaining war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media.
9) The Heart of Africa: Interview with Julius Nyerere on Anti-Colonialism, New Internationalist Magazine, issue 309, Jan-Feb 1999, at www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/30/049.html
10) Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1972
11) Cohen-Caine Report, cited in Mark Curtis, Ambiguities of Power, p.16
The British intelligence agency, MI6, might also have been involved in the assassination of Lumumba, see Gordon Corera, ‘MI6 and the death of Patrice Lumumba’, BBC News, 2 April 2013, at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-22006446
18) ‘Report of The Panel of Experts On The Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of The Democratic Republic of The Congo’, at www.un.org/News/dh/latest/drcongo.htm
19) Michael Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty, pp.103-122
Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, p.478
25) David Haroz, ‘China in Africa: Symbiosis or Exploitation’, The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Vol.35, No.2, Summer 2011, at https://www.jstor.org/stable/45289533
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).
Is a bluetooth vaccine the next phase of weirdness associated with the rollout of the experimental COVID non-vaccines? Is bluetooth connectivity or compatability another effect of the vaccine? It’s been a string of bizarre events, and the high strangeness shows no signs of ending. First, we discovered the COVID vaxxed were affecting the unvaccinated just by being in their vicinity, probably via frequency transmission.
Next, we discovered that magnets stuck to the injection site of some of the COVID vaxxed, usually on the upper arm, with theories being that the COVID non-vaccine contained metallic nanoparticles or magnetic hydrogel. Now, we have early evidence of a brand new phenomenon (which still needs to be verified): a possible bluetooth vaccine. A recent video posted here on Brighteon shows a man who says he was vaccinated, explaining that he feels fine, except that everywhere he goes, devices in the vicinity try to connect … with him. Yes, I wrote correctly; devices try to connect with him.
Does the Injected COVID Non-Vaccine Try to Connect with Electronic Devices?
At this stage we are only asking questions and not making claims, however the video provides very interesting evidence. The man states that devices such as his car and his home computer are trying to connect with him via bluetooth. The man shows a notification on his phone of a bluetooth pairing request with a device called “AstraZeneca_ChAdOx1-S.” He even walks over to a TV hanging on the wall in the restaurant in which he’s sitting; when he gets close, the TV picks up the same AstraZeneca signal! AstraZeneca, as many know by now, is 1 of 4 Big Pharma companies (the others being Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson) who have brought a COVID non-vaccine to market. The man says:
“The only problem is that everywhere I go, everywhere I go, everything is trying to connect with me man, like Bluetooth connect to me. I get in the car, my car is trying to connect to me. I go home, my computer’s trying to connect. Like, my phone is trying to connect … the connectivity’s still there. I don’t know how to turn it off. Everywhere I get the same message.”
As you would expect, the mainstream fact-checkers (run by the same people who own the MSM) are coming out with their debunking articles. I’m not going to link to them to give them traffic, but you can easily look it up for yourself. Reuters writes in its ‘fact-checking’ article that “any mobile phone’s name could be edited to show “AstraZeneca_ChAdOx1-S” and request to pair with another device” implying that this whole thing is a hoax. Time will tell, however there’s no denying the overall pattern here.
Those who understand the background to this discovery – including Transhumanism and the Operation Coronavirus-nanotech connection – will perceive that this is another clue that the COVID non-vaccines are injecting some kind of biosensor into people, to begin the process of turning people into nodes on the Smart Grid.
Weird COVID Vax Phenomena is Actually Expected if You Understand the Transhumanism Agenda
From the viewpoint of the transhumanism agenda, none of these phenomena are actually strange at all. They are make complete sense and are in total alignment with the agenda to turn man into machine. In fact, this is only the beginning. It doesn’t take a genius to predict that there will be many more such phenomena that will surface in the weeks, months and years to come. It could be that someone will discover they suddenly have a synthetic or metallic body part inside of them they never knew existed. It could be that someone feels something moving under their skin. It could be that someone suddenly sees some kind of semi-alive fiber protruding out of their body (we already know there are weird fibers reminiscent of Morgellons in some COVID masks). It could be that people start to feel sensations, information or messages beamed at them to the biosensor receiver embedded in their bodies.
The New World Order (NWO) manipulators weren’t joking when they talked years ago of the Internet of Things (IoT) to work in conjunction with 5G; Bond-villain Klaus Schwab wasn’t joking when his World Economic Forum (WEF) talked recently of the Internet of Bodies (IoB). These Orwellian things are coming very rapidly into our reality, and we better pay attention. The Transhumanistic desire to turn all of us into Human 2.0 is happening right before our eyes and it’s high time to wake up to the agenda before it’s too late.
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“That to me contextualizes what 9/11 was about, which was the institution of this new form of governance, the “Security State” which enabled all sorts of legislation and other things that gave more, centralized more power in the hands of the executive. Well now we’re seeing the complete take-over with regards to the Biosecurity State and literally the limitation and control of each individual and their participation in society.”
The latest doc series from acclaimed film director Spike Lee might well have marked the most explosive upset of common and entrenched narratives around the September 11 attacks that we have seen in a long time – if ever.
NYC Epicenters 9/11 2021 1/2 is a 4 part documentary driven by interviews on camera which details New York’s resilience in the face of both the COVID crisis of the last year and a half, and of 9/11 from twenty years ago. The final half hour of the series presented honest interviews with 9/11 victims and with the group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth which put forward the claim that the World Trade Center towers did not collapse due to fires but were deliberately demolished. [1]
The film was pre-screened on August 22nd. The backlash by the press reporters was apparently so intense that even Spike Lee, an acclaimed film maker with an impressive record of courting controversy was forced to back down and re-edit this most extravagant production so that all references to AE911 truth and alternative views were to be scrapped from the final product!
Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth wrote their own take on the incident. Read it here.
Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth can boast of their accomplishments, their detailed work, and even putting together an expensive report by Dr Leroy Hulsey, now a Professor of Structural University of Structural Engineering Emeritus at Alaska Fairbanks, detailing his thorough and detailed paper on the inability of fires to bring down World Trade Center 7. And yet, in the mainstream media, their tireless efforts are described in less reverent descriptions such as the following:
“…Lee spends about 30 minutes on Gage and the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, whose theories — like that the Twin Towers were brought down by a controlled demolition — have been widely debunked.”[2]
Doesn’t exactly seem like independent researchers have the official storytellers backs against the wall, does it?
The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 was expected to see the biggest splash of not only solemn remembrance, but also an intense period of skeptical inquiry to reveal more details to a wider audience. But like every year so far, while gains are made among the general populace, successes in converting influential figures seem to be drying up.
This week, as an epilogue to last week’s show, the Global Research News Hour focuses again on the attacks of September 11, 2001 but with a focus on where this work as gotten us in the past, and what the prospects may be for life changing truths to wash up on the tide of an ocean of massive relays of facts, disinformation and the ever present creature of ‘conspiracy.’
In the first half hour, we speak with Roland Angle of AE911 Truth about his views surrounding the latest developments in the group’s efforts, and hopes for tidal wave of change one day bursting through the official story. In our second half hour, podcaster and 9/11 truther James Corbett pops by to mention the ‘good and bad’ of traditional 9/11 research, and it’s implications for COVID truth and other plots of the deep state seeping into all of our lives.
Roland Angle is the acting CEO and President of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. He served in the U.S. Army Special Forces, where he was trained in the use of explosives, and worked for 50 years as a licensed civil engineer in California. He has trained over 30 civil and structural engineers who give presentations around the country examining how the official engineering reports on the World Trade Center collapses are false.
James Corbett started The Corbett Report website in 2007 as an outlet for independent critical analysis of politics, society, history, and economics. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has lectured on geopolitics at the University of Groningen’s Studium Generale, and delivered presentations on open source journalism at The French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation’s fOSSa conference, at TedXGroningen and at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto.
Transcript – Interview with James Corbett, September 14 2021
Global Research: Your interest in 9/11 Truth started a few years ago after the event. Might I ask what specifically about this event left you convinced that the official story was flawed?
James Corbett: In order to understand the effect of discovering the fraud of the event, I have to go to return to the day itself and the events and the way they played out. And, like I imagine much of the public on that day, I rather unquestioningly accepted a lot of what was being told and what was being shown to us with growing sense of unease about the ways that 9/11 was clearly being used as a political bludgeon on the geopolitical stage in order to enact a war agenda that obviously started to rankle, but any suggestion that there was anything untoward with the events themselves seemed to me outlandish conspiracy theory.
Which is interesting, because of course I, growing up I had been willing to question all sorts of things, I did not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone nut, or those sorts of things. But in this particular event, perhaps because of the trauma of the events themselves, and the way they were presented, I found it difficult to go there.
It wasn’t until the fifth anniversary of 9/11 that I started to encounter information online that at least got me questioning. And I wish I could identify the single Silver Bullet as it were that got me there , but, I think it was more of a series of assertions that I was encountering in online documentaries about, for example, Osama Bin Laden meeting – suggestions that Osama Bin Laden was meeting with American intelligence in a hospital in Rawalpindi before 9/11 and things like this, which sounded outlandish to me, outlandish enough that I decided to look up, well is that true? And then I could determine for myself. Oh that was reported by French intelligence in the summer of 2001, or I heard about Operation Northwoods, a Joint Chiefs of Staff authorized plan to commit Terror attacks in the United States with casualties in order to blame that on Cuba. In order to justify an invasion of Cuba. I thought that sounded absolutely, staggeringly outlandish until I looked it up and saw the declassified documents for myself.
It was really that process of starting to not just encounter assertions of the information but actually looking up the documents underlying that information that got me interested in independent media generally. I mean, I wouldn’t be here doing this today if it wasn’t for that experience that I had around the fifth anniversary of 9/11.
GR: Myself as well. I know that the 9/11 Commission report, which contains a lot of information that’s in doubt, based on what you know about that report, what should the average listener think about as one of the most damning aspects of the official statement?
JC: I think, for me, one of the statements that has always stuck out for me was the statement on terrorist financing, where, ultimately, they conclude that, whatever the source is of the money trail here, it’s not that important. Something to that effect. I’ve quoted the actual line from the commission report, which I have sitting behind me, many times because it’s just so staggeringly, on its face ridiculous. The idea of a criminal investigation basically not interested in the money trail is a gigantic sign that they were not interested in investigating this at all. They have been many explorations of the staggering failures of the 9/11 Commission even from a mainstream perspective. You had Philip Sheen and then others who had written about the 911 Commission report and its many shortcomings.
One of the facts that I think spells it out most clearly is the fact that Philip Zelikow, who I think was appointed to be the executive director of the commission and essentially was running the commission, the chairmen were more figurehead positions. The executive director was the person who was dealing with it, hiring the commission staff, directing them, telling them what to write about, and then ultimately organizing the final report, not only did all of that work, but as Phillip Shenon reported in his I think 2008 book on the 9/11 Commission, Zelikow and one of his partners had, at the very beginning of the entire investigation, before the commission staff had even met a single time, written the entire complete outline of the final report of the 9/11 Commission. Not only including chapter titles, not only including headings, not only including subheadings, but sub-subheadings. Every single part of the 9/11 Commission final report, which is the official story of 9/11, was already baked into the cake before the 9/11 Commission even began meeting.
So that should tell you what you really need to know about the reliability of that report. There are many many many other points to be made besides there, but I think that gives you the flavour of just how reliable that investigation really was.
GR: A lot of the information came out of…torture was a way of getting information from …
JC: Another extremely important point. I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it was over four hundred of the footnotes, a full one third or one quarter of the footnotes in the 9/11 Commission report sources back to CIA extracted torture testimony from a few key eyewitnesses or key participants or at least alleged participants.
The testimony which would not be admitted in any court, and in fact that’s exactly what the continued, ongoing, never-ending circus trial that isn’t taking place in Guantanamo right now with regards to KSM, the so-called mastermind of 9/11 and his alleged co-conspirators, that’s the reason why in the 15, 16, 17 years they’ve been trying to bring that case, they still haven’t even been able to do that, even in a military kangaroo court, because the testimony was extracted via torture. And when that was discovered and the evidence of those torture testimony sessions, the waterboardings and others, the video evidence that existed, was ordered, ordered by a court judge to be preserved. The CIA went and erased it anyway. So, that again, gives you a flavour of where this actual final word on what happened on 9/11 really comes from.
GR: You know, the state of 9/11 Truth today, it seems to be almost completely absorbed in the explanation of the collapsing towers, particularly World Trade Center 7, but there used to be numerous other warnings outlined by Daniel Hopsicker, Kevin Fenton, Paul Thompson, and of course Michel Chossudovsky, but that stuff is treated like icing. The proof of controlled demolition of the towers is the cake, okay? Some of the older and wiser people in organizing have tended to reject that kind of argument base because it’s essentially speculative at its core. They prefer evidence about suppressed warnings and use of the CIA in deliberately telling the FBI about its activities, as the physical evidence arguments tend to dominate discussion, the financing, the numbers of activists. Some of the 9/11 Truth crowd have essentially thrown up their hands and walked away from the movement. But what are your thoughts about that, James? I mean, do you really think that stressing physical evidence from the site will get you anywhere in the courts?
JC: That’s actually been a particular bugbear of mine almost since the beginning of my exploration into the 9/11 Truth. I noticed, even at that time, in 2006, 2007, the very early days, whenever I would bring up the topic or even try to explore the topic with other people in real life, the thing they would say is, yeah, I saw that video on YouTube of the different explosions in the towers. Something along those lines. It would always boil down to the towers, at best, or maybe the Pentagon, or some other aspects of the explosive fireworks of that day. And I do not dismiss for one second the importance of investigating that. I think it is an important piece of what happened. But if we reduce 9/11 Truth down to the explosive events that happened on that day, and that’s all we talk about, that’s all we investigate, that’s all we look at, then for me it’s just a firework show. It’s just a pyrotechnic event. It has no meaning and no consequence. If we reduce 9/11 Truth down to that.
Because at base for me, 9/11 Truth is not about the day of Tuesday September 11th 2001 from 8:55 a.m. to 11 a.m. or whatever time frame we set there, no, this was a, at the very least , as one at 9/11 Commissioners himself admitted to, I believe, We Are Change LA, over a decade ago, this was the result of a 20-year conspiracy, which one would assume he’s talking about the origins of what eventually became al-Qaeda in the Soviet Afghan war and things along those lines. And if it was at least a 20-year conspiracy to bring those events about, it has since played out over 20 years in various permutations for various political agendas. And if we reduce all of that, all of that history, all of those extremely important points down to, it was some explosions that happened in a building, then we miss the absolute core of what 9/11 really signified, and the way that it’s being used, and then, we miss the actual importance of those events for the events that we are living through now with regards to the current crisis, when we’re looking at the COVID crisis. We cannot understand this unless we understand the greater paradigm that was operative, not just on the day of 9/11, but that was opened up by recourse to the events of 9/11.
GR: For sure. I definitely agree with you. I mean I think that the evidence is pretty strong about the controlled demolition. But I mean you only have a sliver of thought encapsulating this basically grand spectrum of activities.
In his 2006 essay lamenting the misdirection of 9/11 activism on the 5th anniversary, Emmanuel Sferios states the following:
“The basic idea is to control both sides of the debate, and frame it in a way that makes the opposing side ineffective (not necessarily unbelievable). In the end it doesn’t matter whether even a majority of the people believe the US government was complicit in 9/11 (this is already the case). What matters is only that the perpetrators can never successfully be prosecuted. Thus they pollute the body of evidence with red herrings and false lines of inquiry.”
That bring us forward to 20 years after 9/11. Spike lee was forced to excise the meat of his production, which featured architects and engineers and 9/11 family members challenging the official story. Regardless, do you see any promise of a 9/11 breakthrough 20 years later or has success been driven even further into the mud of confusion?
JC: If the proof of the pudding is in the eating then I would just ask anyone out there in the crowd to taste the fruits of the 9/11 Truth tree! And what as it actually provided? Certainly no prosecutions! Certainly nothing tangential in that way. Not even really the derailing of any of the key political agendas that have played out. And now it is at the point where 9/11 is not even a touchstone that the politicians will bring out anymore in order to justify their agendas. That really does seem like yesterday’s news. So, the idea that 9/11 Truth is going to have some sort of breakthrough at this point seems highly unlikely.
I would never, ever dissuade anyone from pursuing whatever line of investigation and truth-seeking that they’re interested in. And certainly if you go into that go into it with the intention of making a difference and making a breakthrough. Yes. One hundred percent. But I am not holding my breath waiting for that.
I think, for me, the one real victory that I can identify with regards to the 9/11 Truth movement over the last twenty years was the introduction into public discourse of the idea of false flag terrorism. And I can attest to this from my own perspective being someone who, if you had confronted me with that idea twenty years ago, I would have responded as I think most of the public has responded, for the past couple of decades. “But why would the government attack itself?” It’s such a bizarre notion to the average person. They can’t even process what the political dynamics would be! Why would this happen? That doesn’t make any sense!
I have matured in my thinking over the past couple of decades. And I do think that the general public is now much more aware of the idea of false flag terrorism. Why it would be perpetrated, for what purpose and the idea that it could happen. Obviously, there’s still a large degree of debate and skepticism among the public that it does happen, or that it was implemented on 9/11 itself.
But even having that idea in the public consciousness is actually valuable because I’ve often likened it to a magic trick. If the crowd doesn’t know that there’s the rabbit up the sleeve, then it seems amazing when it happens and they just tend to believe it. But if you know that there is a rabbit up the sleeve, you’ll be looking for that rabbit. You will be less likely to believe when suddenly the rabbit appears from the hat. “Oh! How did that happen?” I can’t imagine.
Well, once you have that in your mind, you can at least start to process it. And I think that is an important step forward for truth-seeking generally and also for the derailing of the political agendas that are brought about through false flag events. The sort of wisening of the public to the idea that that exists is a significant victory.
GR: Most people, I think, might want to apply these lessons of 9/11 Truth to the pandemic or the “scamdemic” or the “COVID Conspiracy” whatever you want to call it. I mean, first of all there are similarities – I mean they’re both “conspiracy theories” right? They call you a conspiracy theory either way. A conspiracy theorist. Can I get you to talk about other similarities and talk about the differences between 9/11 Truth and COVID Truth?
JC: I think the similarities for anyone who is already familiar with 9/11 Truth, I think the similarities tended to jump out. And I have catalogued and talked about that quite specifically. I released something on the 19th anniversary of 9/11 last year called “COVID 9/11: From Homeland Security to Biosecurity” where I attempted to detail those connections and the similarities and what makes these events comparable. And – not even comparable but actually part of a continuous fabric.
And within that I pointed – for example, I mean we can talk about it in generalities of Homeland Security and Biosecurity and that sort of thing – but we can look at very specific examples. Like the case of CLEAR which was a company that as Caryn Seidman-Becker who was an executive at CLEAR who was interviewed in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic on CNN talking about “Oh, what can we do now? Let’s start implementing all sorts of new security procedures,” the CEO of this company company called CLEAR was brought on to talk about their work with regards to COVID. And she started by saying CLEAR was born out of 9/11, and it was about a public-private partnership leveraging innovation to enhance Homeland Security and delight customers.
Imagine saying that with a straight face! Anyway, and then she says “and that was really the beginning of screening 1.0.” And just like screening was forever changed post-9/11, in a post-COVID environment you’re going to see screening and public safety significantly shift, and that’s when she goes into her spiel, touting CLEAR HEALTHPASS, which is now being adopted by more and more – I mean, the Phoenix Coyotes in the U.S. and other places are starting to adopt this. It is an APP that can be downloaded that can have your various details and your vaccination record, etc.
It is screening 2.0, to use Caryn Seidman-Becker’s analogy there. And if 1.0 was the terrorism-homeland security version that was at the airports specifically for international travel, 2.0 is becoming more invasive and now it’s in order to attend a public event, in order to eventually leave your home – although that idea would have sounded outlandish a little while ago – it isn’t at this point.
So I think there’s a direct continuity, identifiable documentable continuity, between the two agendas. But the person who has articulated that the most clearly in my mind is Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher who has written and talked extensively about this crisis and where it’s coming from. And I have cited him often for giving me that word: Biosecurity.
He wrote an excellent, very concise little piece called Biosecurity and Politics towards the beginning of this entire crisis that really well articulated that concept. But in this book, of his that was recently released called Where are We Now he really brings this out in a way that I think is extremely important to understand.
He says, “We are experiencing the end of an era in the political history of the West. The era of bourgeois democracy founded on constitutions, on rights, on parliaments, and on the divisions of power. This model was already facing a crisis. Constitutional principles were increasingly being ignored. And the executive power had almost entirely replaced the legislative by operating, as it now does, exclusively through legislative decrees.
“With the so-called pandemic, things went further. What American political analysts called the “Security State” which was established in response to terrorism, has now given way to a health-based paradigm of governance that we term “Biosecurity.”
“It is important to understand that Biosecurity, both in its efficacy and in its pervasiveness outdoes EVERY form of governance that we have hithertoo known. As we have been able to see in Italy, but not only here, as soon as a threat to health is declared, people unresistingly consent to limitations on their freedom that they would never have accepted in the past.
“We are facing a paradox – the end of all social relations and political activity is presented as the exemplary form of civic participation.”
Obviously referencing the social distancing paradigm and the incredible shut down of political dissent that we’ve seen in the COVID era, in every form and in every sense. And I think we really have to understand and internalize what Agamben is pointing out here. This is not at base some sort of public health emergency that’s taking place in some sort of decontextualized manner. What we are experiencing is a change-over in the paradigm of governance on the planet. And what differentiates this change-over from a lot of others is it is truly global in nature, and instantaneous.
We can look at previous change-overs in governance from feudalism to mercantilism and other sorts of change-overs that have happened in the past that took place over a period of decades if not centuries and involved different, took different forms in different countries at different times. But we’re watching an almost simultaneous roll-out of a new governance paradigm throughout the world right now based on biosecurity.
And anyone who thinks that that is simply going to disappear when this pandemic is declared over truly does not understand what we’re living through right now. And I think that that to me contextualizes what 9/11 was about, which was the institution of this new form of governance, the “Security State” which enabled all sorts of legislation and other things that gave more, centralized more power in the hands of the executive. Well now we’re seeing the complete take-over with regards to the Biosecurity State and literally the limitation and control of each individual and their participation in society.
GR: Yeah. For certain. I mean I can’t imagine any other way that you can just, you know, shut down economies like that if we did it through, I don’t know, democratic processes.
After 20 years, you know since 9/11, the deep state or secret governments have learned how to adapt to 9/11 skeptical thinking. They expect the people to be more distrustful of government and media. When someone cooks another scheme hidden by media, the reaction is to label it a conspiracy theory and say they are getting information – they’re getting it from internet con-artists or something like that to the extreme of even developing conspiracy sites clandestinely. So that is the confusion of our time 20 years later.
QANON for example, I suspect, is most likely something cooked up by the State. ProporNot featured the release of the names of sites and groups that ask too many of the wrong questions. They’re Kremlin agents essentially.
The point is that this is part of the interpretation of the changing times. Don’t hide the conspiracy. Instead bury it in an avalanche of conspiracy theories. Would you agree to that?
JC: Yes! Not only would I agree to that, but I think even the WHO and other prestigious world bodies would agree to that!
For example, we saw the attempt at the beginning of this crisis to float the idea of an info-demic which was the term that was – I believe it actually was originated a couple of years before the crisis – but they really started trying to push this idea just as this was starting to take off internationally in the media. There is an info-demic of misinformation and disinformation that’s being perpetuated online. And that very quickly morphed into calls for censorship.
And I think what we’re experiencing is not new in the larger historical sense. I think one of the ways that power functions in society is powerful interests and groups wage information warfare on their subject populations. That’s been true throughout history. But to deny that that is taking place now, especially is lunacy, I would say. It’s becoming not just evident but explicit in, for example, the censorship that is now taking place online.
But there’s a second flank to that movement, as you indicate, which is yes, of course there’s the outright censorship and the draconian attempt to control the conversation, but the people who have spent decades if not centuries studying humans and their reactions know that there will be resistance, there will be skepticism, there will be a certain percentage of the public who is likely to, for example, question 9/11 and, for example, question COVID. And what can be done in response to that?
Well, there have been in the past there have been people who have talked quite explicitly about possible responses to that. Like Cass Sunstein who will be familiar to people who have been involved in 9/11 Truth research, as a Harvard Law Professor slash the person who became Obama’s regulatory czar in 2009. In 2008, he wrote a paper on “Conspiracy Theories” – he co-authored the paper – in which he actively advocated for the government to at least consider using undercover operatives to go into conspiracy communities in order to undermine their crippled epistemology and to introduce government talking points into those communities, and other such things.
As I pointed out in a recent editorial, although many people have pointed out time and time again, the horrific nature, the totalitarian mindset that that emerged from and that idea of putting out government propaganda through covert means as a way of trying to undermine the idea that government engages in covert operations against its citizens which is on its face a contradiction. But beyond that, as I pointed out in my editorial, actually its even more insidious than that, because by introducing this idea of “cognitive infiltrators” as he called them going into conspiracy community discussions undercover, he has then introduced into the debate, in conspiracy circles of, well, anyone who doesn’t agree with me is clearly a cognitive infiltrator, and you’re working for the government, and suddenly as we have I think demonstratively seen in the 9/11 Truth space it’s undeniable at this point, it has devolved into warring factions who have become marginalized and then further marginalized and further further marginalized themselves into smaller and smaller groups in which everyone who doesn’t agree with me is a cognitive infiltrator and that’s all that people are interested in talking about.
So unfortunately, I mean, at th-, we’ve seen how the warring commission skepticism was undermined by even the introduction of the phrase “conspiracy theory” through CIA memo 1035-960 I believe it is off the top of my head. And people can look into that history or the ways that for example the CIA were admittedly planting agents within district attorney, Jim Garrison’s investigation in order to feed him misinformation and report back to Langley about what was going on in that investigation. So these types of operations have been underway for a very long time – how to undermine skeptics and people who are trying to inquire, and potentially going to bring prosecution against the actual perpetrators of these events.
Unfortunately, that means they’ve had half a decade to fine-tune – half a century – to fine-tune these various techniques and unfortunately, I think we already seen signs that it’s working quite well in the – even in the conspiracy space as people start again to further and further marginalize themselves, retreat into certain dogmatic positions about what they believe is happening right now. And then, not willing to work with or in any way engage with people who don’t agree every single point about what I think is happening right now. And people are starting to limit themselves into these little boxes.
And then there’s, on top of that, the absolute flood of information and info-demic. That is demonstrably taking place every single day. There’s a thousand new stories that are pertinent to what’s happening right now that no one person could possibly keep on top of all by themselves, and that is absolutely overwhelming.
And put on top of that, not only the health concerns that people have at this time but the mental health concerns about isolation, and lockdowns and all of these things the way they’re affecting people. I won’t say that we’ve never seen such outright levels of total all encompassing warfare on the population through every vector before, but you’d be hard pressed to find one in which it has been so relentless and so long-lasting as this one has already been. And we’re only a year and a half into this.
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Oregon State Senators Kim Thatcher and Dennis Linthicum jointly filed a formal petition for a federal grand jury investigation into both the CDC and FDA on August 16th in the city of Medford, Oregon, Jackson County. The official letter included eight exhibits and 20 references for evidentiary materials showing a clear need to formally investigate the agencies for willful misconduct.
In March 2020, according to a paper published in the journal Science, Public Health Policy, and The Law, the CDC abruptly changed how death certificates were recorded for only one type of death—COVID-19—and circumvented multiple federal laws to do so. This hyperinflation of death certificate reporting kicked off an avalanche of data degradation and destructive public health policies.
Now, two Oregon Senators have broken their silence in an exclusive briefing about their letter and the petition calling for a thorough investigation. The project has been a months-in-the-making combined effort between scientific, legal and public policy experts.
The letter, submitted exactly one month prior to public release to protect those involved, was addressed to the Honorable Scott E. Asphaug, U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, which stated:
“What we have learned is worthy of independent State and/or Special Federal Grand Jury Investigation from our vantage point as elected state policy makers. Pursuant to 18 U.S. Code § 3332 – Powers and Duties and the case law cited within the Formal Grand Jury Petition, we respectfully request that the petition and preliminary supportive documentation be presented to the members of the grand jury we are petitioning for immediate deliberation. Public trust in elected officials, the Oregon Health Authority, and our ability to lead the resilient people of Oregon through this crisis has been eroded to an all-time low. The peoples’ trust in their ability to participate in their own governance and be heard by their elected officials is perhaps the most essential element for a thriving free and healthy society. As elected officials it is our sworn duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution of Oregon, the tenets of Informed Consent, and honor our legal obligation to comply with 18 U.S. Code § 4 – Misprision of felony. We are fulfilling our duty by calling for a Special Federal Grand Jury Investigation, or at the very least an independent state district-led grand jury investigation convened by a judge, into the issues and evidentiary materials presented.”
During this press briefing, Leah Wilson, J.D., Executive Director and Co-Founder of Stand for Health Freedom, which hosted the national public signature gathering, asked revealing questions that should have been asked long ago by mainstream media networks that vacated their duty to impartially investigate and objectively inform the public. To date more than 62,200 signatures have been gathered, including thousands across Oregon where the two senators reside.
Also included on the briefing panel was Dr. Henry Ealy, the lead researcher from a team who authored the peer reviewed papers titled “COVID-19 Data Collection, Comorbidity & Federal Law: A Historical Retrospective” and “COVID-19: Restoring Public Trust During A Global Health Crisis.” His work verified significant findings of federal law violations by the CDC and acts of willful misconduct by the FDA that were thoroughly vetted through nine attorneys and one judge as well as stringent peer-review prior to being released publicly. The papers are also in use across several active court cases, including one filed at the federal level against HHS and the CDC.
In February 2021, Stand for Health Freedom launched a public petition to gather signatures to ask US Attorneys to convene a Grand Jury investigation into the CDC and FDA responses toward COVID-19 following astounding revelations concerning federal law violations and data inaccuracy. We are 20 months after “two weeks to flatten the curve.” Americans deserve to know the integrity of the data relied upon by agencies pushing national health policy and reshaping the fabric of American life. The CDC and FDA are issuing guidance asserted with the authority of federal law that is influencing officials at all levels of government to mandate something created by an industry that holds no liability for risk in selling its experimental and novel vaccine products. Americans are being told that these products are the only viable pathway back to a free and open society.
Senators Thatcher and Linthicum call upon Americans to pursue the federal grand jury process in their respective states to demand greater accountability.
Stand for Health Freedom released this pre-recorded press briefing as an exclusive interview to avoid the same drastic censorship faced following a cyber attack during a national online event covering this topic earlier this year.
Included in this Press Briefing:
How the CDC violated federal laws to unlawfully change death certificate recording beginning March of 2020 for COVID-19
Why the public should be highly concerned about the CDC’s clear willful misconduct of COVID data corruption
Why accuracy, integrity and transparency are so important, especially during a public health crisis
How the CDC set the stage for widespread collateral damage—physical, psychological and economic
Why this formal petition filing for a Grand Jury Investigation should be filed by others across all states
Official Statements:
“Federal agencies like the CDC have committed atrocities in the name of ‘public health,’ resulting in extensive collateral damage that transformed society in ways that we are still grappling to understand. The CDC’s unlawful and questionable changes to death certificates related to COVID, the use of false-positive PCR tests and their callous indifference to individual rights—or science, for that matter—led to fraudulent data that was used to justify sweeping policy changes, not only in Oregon, but across the country. I refuse to stand by and watch as our constitutional rights and liberties are endangered by oppressive agencies, which is why I have chosen to take part in this effort to bring forth a petition for a grand jury investigation. Equal protection under the Constitution is still the right of every American.” — Kim Thatcher – Oregon State Senator
“Plain and simple: the CDC acted illegally in March of 2020, which has led to these current ‘medical’ mandates stemming from the original lynchpin of corrupted data for COVID death certificates. Our health and the health of our children is our responsibility, not the government’s, yet the CDC, through pure data manipulation, has promulgated government overreach through incredulous policies in unimaginable ways through this wrongful slight-of-hand, creating a falsified reality that has no place in a free society.” — Dennis Linthicum – Oregon State Senator
“Our COVID Research Team has dedicated more than 20,000 hours into investigating all aspects of COVID-19 and feel that it is imperative to produce high-integrity research to empower elected officials, attorneys, professional organizations, independent media and the public to take action on behalf of good people throughout the world. Why am I doing this? I ask myself this question often, and then I think about Simone Scott, the 19-year old Northwestern student who died horrifically after receiving experimental inoculations. I think about Hayden Hunstable, the 12-year old who took his own life during the despair of being isolated from friends during ineffective lockdowns. And I think about how the CDC has violated multiple federal laws in order to hyperinflate COVID deaths and promote rampant acts of willful misconduct. What’s happened since 2-weeks to flatten the curve is wrong and while we can’t bring back the departed, we can make sure they are remembered as the inspirations for us making things right.” — Dr. Henry L. Ealy – Researcher, Founder of the Energetic Health Institute
“Grand jury petitions are a way for any elected officials or individual to help drive forward an investigation into the widespread willful misconduct surrounding the response to COVID-19. The work that Oregon Senators Dennis Linthicum and Kim Thatcher have done provides a viable template for others to use in their own state to say ‘we have had enough’ and demand real answers, with real discovery, to end the harmful policies destroying the U.S.” — Leah Wilson, J.D. – Executive Director and Co-Founder, Stand for Health Freedom
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Mounting evidence shows natural immunity to COVID trumps vaccine immunity, but experts say the CDC is ignoring the long-standing science of natural immunity and manipulating data to support “what they’ve already decided.”
There is now a growing body of literature showing natural immunity not only confers robust, durable and high-level protection against COVID, but also provides better protection than vaccine-induced immunity.
Yet, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is ignoring the long-standing science of natural immunity when it comes to COVID — while acknowledging the benefits of natural immunity for other diseases — according to an expert who accused the agency of providing contradictory, ‘illogical’ COVID messaging.
Dr. Marty Makary, professor of surgery and health policy at John Hopkins University, on Tuesday accused the CDC of “cherry-picking” data and manipulating public health guidance surrounding vaccines and natural immunity to support a political narrative.
Makary joined the “Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show” to discuss the clinical impact of natural immunity as it compares to the vaccine.
During the show, Travis pointed out the CDC’s guidance on COVID is inconsistent with its vaccine recommendations for other contagious viruses, like chickenpox.
The CDC’s current guidance for chickenpox, for example, does not encourage those who have contracted it to vaccinate themselves against the virus. The CDC only recommends two doses of chickenpox vaccine for children, adolescents and adults who have never had chickenpox.
“So why doesn’t the CDC say the same thing about those of us who already had COVID?” Travis asked.
Makary called the conflicting guidance “absolutely illogical,” and accused the agency of “ignoring natural immunity.”
“It doesn’t make sense with what they’re putting out on chickenpox,” Makary said. It’s like they have adopted the immune system for one virus, but not for another virus, he said, and “cherry-picking the data to support whatever they’ve already decided.”
“They salami slice it — something we call fishing in statistical techniques,” Makary said. “That is when you look for a tiny sliver of data that supports what you already believe.”
According to a Sept. 13 article in The BMJ, when the COVID vaccine rollout began in mid-December 2020, more than a quarter of Americans — 91 million — had been infected with SARS-CoV-2, according to CDC estimates.
CDC estimates SARS-CoV-2 has infected more than 100 million Americans, and evidence is mounting that natural immunity is at least as protective as vaccination. Yet public health leadership says everyone needs the vaccine.https://t.co/lAqZaGHq5A
As of this May, that proportion had risen to more than a third of the population, including 44% of adults between the ages of 18 and 59.
However, the CDC instructed everyone, regardless of previous infection, to get fully vaccinated as soon as they were eligible. On its website, the agency in January justified its guidance by stating natural immunity “varies from person to person” and “experts do not yet know how long someone is protected.”
Gupta cited recent data from Israel suggesting people who recovered from COVID had better protection and a lower risk of contracting the Delta variant, compared to those with Pfizer-BioNTech’s two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.
“I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that,” Fauci said. “That’s something we’re going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response.”
The research from Israel did not address the durability that natural immunity offers. Fauci said it is possible for a person to recover from COVID and develop natural immunity, but that protection might not last for nearly as long as the protection provided by the vaccine.
“I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously,” Fauci said.
Numerous studies, however, have shown people who recovered from COVID have robust, durable and long-lasting immunity.
Evidence of natural immunity
As early as November 2020, important studies showed memory B cells and memory T cells formed in response to natural infection — and memory cells respond by producing antibodies to variants at hand.
A study funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted by the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, found “durable immune responses” in 95% of the 200 participants up to eight months after infection.
One of the largest studies to date, published in Science in February 2021, found that although antibodies declined over eight months, memory B cells increased over time, and the half-life of memory CD8+ and CD4+ T cells suggests a steady presence.
In a study by New York University published May 3, the authors studied the contrast between vaccine immunity and immunity from prior infection as it relates to stimulating the innate T-cell immunity — which is more durable than adaptive immunity through antibodies alone.
The authors concluded:
“In COVID-19 patients, immune responses were characterized by a highly augmented interferon response which was largely absent in vaccine recipients. Increased interferon signaling likely contributed to the observed dramatic upregulation of cytotoxic genes in the peripheral T cells and innate-like lymphocytes in patients but not in immunized subjects.”
The study further noted:
“Analysis of B and T cell receptor repertoires revealed that while the majority of clonal B and T cells in COVID-19 patients were effector cells, in vaccine recipients, clonally expanded cells were primarily circulating memory cells.”
This means natural immunity conveys much more innate immunity, while the vaccine mainly stimulates adaptive immunity — as effector cells trigger an innate response that is quicker and more durable, whereas memory response requires an adaptive mode that is slower to respond.
According to a longitudinal analysis published July 14 in Cell Medicine, most recovered COVID patients produced durable antibodies, memory B cells and durable polyfunctional CD4 and CD8 T cells –– which target multiple parts of the virus.
“Taken together, these results suggest broad and effective immunity may persist long-term in recovered COVID-19 patients,” the authors said.
In a May 12 study conducted by the University of California, researchers found natural immunity conveyed stronger immunity than the vaccine.
The researchers wrote:
“In infection-naïve individuals, the second [vaccine] dose boosted the quantity but not quality of the T cell response, while in convalescents the second dose helped neither. Spike-specific T cells from convalescent vaccinees differed strikingly from those of infection-naïve vaccinees, with phenotypic features suggesting superior long-term persistence and ability to home to the respiratory tract including the nasopharynx.”
According to The BMJ, studies in Qatar, England, Israel and the U.S. have found infection rates at equally low levels among people who are fully vaccinated and those who have previously had COVID.
As The Defender reported in June, the Cleveland Clinic surveyed more than 50,000 employees to compare four groups based on history of SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination status.
New Cleveland Clinic study found people who had COVID were less likely to be reinfected than fully vaccinated individuals who never had virus—suggesting vaccine is of no benefit to people who already had COVID.#TheDefender: https://t.co/zL66EdwTnDhttps://t.co/zvQMuYwHaa
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 9, 2021
Not one of more than 1,300 unvaccinated employees who had been previously infected tested positive during the five months of the study. Researchers concluded the cohort “are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination.”
In the largest real-world observational study comparing natural immunity gained through previous SARS-CoV-2 infection to vaccine-induced immunity afforded by the Pfizer vaccine, researchers in Israel found people who recovered from COVID were much less likely than never-infected, vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms or be hospitalized.
“Our results question the need to vaccinate previously infected individuals,” they concluded.
Experts speak out on natural immunity
In a recent letter to the editor of The BMJ, Dr. Manish Joshi, a pulmonologist at UAMS Health; Dr. Thaddeus Bartter, a pulmonologist at UAMS Health; and Anita Joshi, BDS, MPH, said data demonstrate both adequate and long-lasting protection in those who have recovered from COVID, while the duration of vaccine-induced immunity is not fully known.
The authors of the letter said the “SIREN” study in the Lancet addressed the relationships between seropositivity in people with previous COVID infection and subsequent risk of severe acute respiratory syndrome due to SARS-CoV-2 infection over the subsequent seven to 12 months.
The study found prior infection decreased risk of symptomatic reinfection by 93%.
A large cohort study published in JAMA Internal Medicine which looked at 3.2 million U.S. patients, showed the risk of infection was significantly lower (0.3%) in seropositive patients compared to those who were seronegative (3%).
A recent study published in May in the journal Nature demonstrated the presence of long-lived memory immune cells in those who have recovered from COVID-19 suggesting durable and long-lasting immunity.
“This implies a prolonged (perhaps years) capacity to respond to new infection with new antibodies,” the authors wrote.
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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.
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).
More than 15 studies now show the natural immunity you get after recovering from COVID-19 is far superior and more long-lasting than what you get from the COVID shot
Lawsuits challenge vaccine requirements that fail to accept natural immunity as an alternative to the COVID injection
Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University in Virginia, sued over the school’s vaccine mandate, which did not recognize natural immunity. The school settled out of court, granting Zywicki a medical exemption. They did not, however, change their general policy to recognize other staff and students who have natural immunity
Some of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against Rutgers University in New Jersey also object to the vaccine mandate on the basis that they have natural immunity. This lawsuit is still pending
Since COVID shots do not prevent infection or spread of the virus, and COVID-jabbed individuals carry the same viral load when symptomatic as unvaccinated individuals, the argument that vaccine passports will identify and separate “public health threats” from those who are “safe” to be around simply falls apart
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While governments around the world are going full steam ahead with plans for vaccine passports, two key things have occurred that blow irreparable holes in the whole argument.
First, more than 15 studies now show the natural immunity you get after recovering from COVID-19 is far superior and longer-lasting than what you get from the COVID shot, and secondly, lawsuits have challenged vaccine requirements that fail to accept natural immunity as an alternative to the COVID injection. Other lawsuits highlighting the illegalities of vaccine mandates have also been filed.
The Zywicki Case
As reported by the New York Post,1 August 4, 2021, when George Mason University in Virginia decided to implement a vaccine mandate, law professor Todd Zywicki sued.2 Mason recovered from COVID-19 in 2020 and has natural immunity, as demonstrated by several antibody tests. One of his attorneys, Harriet Hageman, stated:
“Common sense and medical science should underpin GMU’s actions. Both have gone missing with this latest effort to force a distinguished professor to take a vaccine that he does not need — not for his own protection nor for anyone else’s safety at Scalia Law School.”
The lawsuit pointed out that people with natural immunity have an increased risk of adverse reactions to the COVID shot — according to one study3 up to 4.4 times the risk of clinically significant side effects — and that the requirement not only violates due process rights and the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment, but is not compliant with the Emergency Use Authorization.4
A Win for GMU Professor but No Legal Precedent
August 17, 2021, George Mason University caved before the case went to trial and granted Zywicki a medical exemption to the vaccine requirement.5 Unfortunately, and irrationally, the school did not revise its general policy. As reported by Citizens Journal:6
“The school’s acknowledgment of natural immunity is significant given the serial case of amnesia that seems to have overtaken the world on this basic point of biology.
However, the school still maintains the vaccination requirement for all other members of the GMU community, regardless of naturally acquired immunity. At the time of this writing, the same medical exemption has not been offered on a broader scale.
Furthermore, the lawsuit would have served as an interesting test case for vaccine mandate-related litigation, which will become more prevalent as time goes on. Regardless, the victory still serves as a sliver of hope that some universities will entertain reasonable arguments and that individuals can fight back with litigation …
With the GMU case resolved without trial, many critical legal arguments went untested. For example, does the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause apply to vaccine mandates, or does the state have the ability to suspend such rights when responding to a public health emergency?
How does the reliability of natural immunity affect the constitutionality of policies that fail to recognize it? Can the government simply cherry-pick whatever science it wants to justify its policies? According to the court filing,7
‘The Supreme Court has recognized that the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to privacy. A ‘forcible injection … into a nonconsenting person’s body represents a substantial interference with that person’s liberty[.]’ Washington v. Harper, 494 U.S. 210, 229 (1990).’
Given this precedent, as well as the state’s police powers to suspend individual rights under compelling circumstances, how will this apply to Covid-19 in a low-risk environment such as a college campus?
If the right still holds, how will it apply to city-wide vaccine passport programs, given that Covid-19 is a relatively mild disease? … The move is also mysterious, given the relevance of the matter. As a result, it did not create a binding legal precedent.”
In a statement, lead counsel Jenin Younes with the New Civil Liberties Alliance, said:8
“NCLA is pleased that GMU granted Professor Zywicki’s medical exemption, which we believe it only did because he filed this lawsuit. According to GMU, with the medical exemption, Prof. Zywicki may continue serving the GMU community, as he has for more than two decades, without receiving a medically unnecessary vaccine and without undue burden.
Nevertheless, NCLA remains dismayed by GMU’s refusal — along with many other public and private universities and other employers — to recognize that the science establishes beyond any doubt that natural immunity is as robust or more so than vaccine immunity.”
Other Lawsuits Challenging Schools’ Vaccine Mandates
While not specifically centered around the validity of natural immunity, a lawsuit filed by more than a dozen students and Children’s Health Defense against Rutgers University in New Jersey does include this aspect, as some of the plaintiffs object to the mandate on the basis that they have natural immunity. This lawsuit was filed in mid-August 20219 and is still pending.
Earlier this year, in April 2021, the Los Angeles Unified School District was sued over its vaccine requirement by California Educators for Medical Freedom and the Health Freedom Defense Fund.10July 27, a California court dismissed the lawsuit without prejudice, as it concluded the LAUSD had voluntarily abandoned its mandatory vaccine requirement. As reported by The Defender:11
“This is a BIG win — because of the lawsuit, LAUSD represented to the court on the record that it does not have a policy requiring vaccination with EUA products. Since the court has now confirmed the absence of any policy requiring vaccination at LAUSD, all teachers and staff are safe to return to work without vaccination or furnishing proof of vaccination in the fall.”
Time will tell if the Children’s Health Defense case against Rutgers University will bring the legal precedent needed to more effectively thwart this tyrannical trend. Still, even smaller wins like Zywicki’s are important and demonstrate there are ways we can fight back, if only we’re willing.
While vaccine passports are immoral and unconstitutional in and of themselves, medical science is also proving them useless and irrational. As reported by Daniel Horowitz in an August 25, 2021, article in The Blaze,12 there are at least 15 studies that show natural immunity from previous infection is more robust and longer-lasting than what you get from the COVID shot. He writes:
“The debate over forced vaccination with an ever-waning vaccine is cresting right around the time when the debate should be moot for a lot of people. Among the most fraudulent messages of the CDC’s campaign of deceit is to force the vaccine on those with prior infection, who have a greater degree of protection against all version of the virus than those with any of the vaccines.
It’s time to set the record straight once and for all that natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is broader, more durable, and longer-lasting than any of the shots on the market today. Our policies must reflect that reality.”
We now have data showing vaccine immunity rapidly wanes regardless of variants, but especially when a new variant becomes predominant. According to the Mayo Clinic, as of July 2021, Pfizer’s COVID injection was only 42% effective against infection,13 which doesn’t even meet the Food and Drug Administration’s requirement of 50% efficacy14 for COVID vaccines.
This matches Israeli data, which show Pfizer’s shot went from a 95% effectiveness at the outset, to 64% in early July 2021 and 39% by late July, when the Delta strain became predominant.15,16 Pfizer’s own trial data also demonstrate rapidly waning effectiveness. BMJ associate editor Peter Doshi discussed this in an August 23, 2021, blog.17
By the fifth month into the trial, efficacy had dropped from 96% to 84%, and this drop could not be due to the emergence of the Delta variant since 77% of trial participants were in the U.S., where the Delta variant didn’t emerge until months later. So, even without a predominance of a new variant, effectiveness drops off. In an August 20, 2021, report, BPR noted:18
“‘The data we will publish today and next week demonstrate the vaccine effectiveness against SARS COVID 2 infection is waning,’ the CDC director [Rochelle Walensky] began … She cited reports of international colleagues, including Israel ‘suggest increased risk of severe disease amongst those vaccinated early’ …
‘In the context of these concerns, we are planning for Americans to receive booster shots starting next month to maximize vaccine induced protection. Our plan is to protect the American people and to stay ahead of this virus,’ Walensky shared …
The CDC director appears to all but admit that the vaccine’s efficacy rate has a strict time limit, and its protections are limited in the ever-changing environment.”
You’re Far Safer Around a Naturally Immune Person
Add to this a) the fact that the COVID shots do not prevent infection or spread of the virus and b) the fact that COVID-jabbed individuals carry the same viral load when symptomatic as unvaccinated individuals,19,20 and the whole argument that vaccine passports will identify and separate “public health threats” from those who are “safe” to be around simply fails miserably.
As noted by Horowitz, anyone capable of rational thought understands that a person with natural immunity from a previous infection is “exponentially safer to be around than someone who had the vaccines but not prior infection.”21
As for the unvaccinated who do not have natural immunity from prior infection, well, their status poses no increased risk to anyone but themselves. Conversely, since the COVID shot cannot prevent infection or transmission, and only promises to reduce your risk of serious illness, the only one who can benefit from the shot is the one who got it. It protects no one else.
In fact, you may actually pose an increased risk to others, because if your symptoms are mild or nonexistent, but your viral load high, you’re more likely to walk around as usual. Rather than staying home because you suspect you’re infected and infectious, you’re out spreading the virus around to others, vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.
What Does the Research Say?
In his article, Horowitz reviews 15 studies that should, once and for all, settle the debate about whether people who have had COVID are now immune and whether that immunity is comparable to that of the COVID shots. Here’s a select handful of those studies. For the rest, please see the original Blaze article.22
Immunity May 202123— New York University researchers concluded that while both SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination elicit potent immune responses, the immunity you get when you’ve recovered from natural infection is more durable and quicker to respond.
The reason for this is because natural immunity conveys more innate immunity involving T cells and antibodies, whereas vaccine-induced immunity primarily stimulates adaptive immunity involving antibodies.
Nature May 202124— This research dispels fears that SARS-CoV-2 infection might not produce long-lasting immunity. Even in people with mild COVID-19 infection, whose anti-SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (S) antibodies levels might rapidly decline in the months’ post-recovery, persistent and long-lived bone marrow plasma cells start churning out new antibodies when the virus is encountered a second time.
According to the authors, “Consistently, circulating resting memory B cells directed against SARS-CoV-2 S were detected in the convalescent individuals. Overall, our results indicate that mild infection with SARS-CoV-2 induces robust antigen-specific, long-lived humoral immune memory in humans.”
Nature July 202025— The Nature findings above support findings from Singapore published in July 2020, which found patients who had recovered from SARS in 2002/2003 had robust immunity against SARS-CoV-2 17 years later.
Cell Medicine July 202126— Here, they found that most previously infected patients produced durable antibodies and memory B cells, along with durable polyfunctional CD4 and CD8 T cells that target multiple parts of the virus.
According to the authors: “Taken together, these results suggest that broad and effective immunity may persist long-term in recovered COVID-19 patients.” The same clearly cannot be said for vaccine-induced immunity.
BioRxiv July 202127— Echoing the Cell Medicine findings above, University of California researchers concluded that “Natural infection induced expansion of larger CD8 T cell clones occupied distinct clusters, likely due to the recognition of a broader set of viral epitopes presented by the virus not seen in the mRNA vaccine.”
We’re Creating a Pandemic of the Vaccinated
If natural immunity is better than vaccine-induced antibodies, you’d expect to see fewer reinfections among those who have already had COVID-19, compared to breakthrough infections occurring among those who got the COVID shot. And that’s precisely what we see.
In a preprint titled “Necessity of COVID-19 Vaccination in Previously Infected Individuals,”28 the researchers looked at reinfection rates among previously infected health care workers in the Cleveland Clinic system.
Of the 1,359 frontline workers with natural immunity from previous infection, not a single one was reinfected 10 months into the pandemic, despite heavy exposure to COVID-19-positive patients.
A second preprint,29 posted August 25, 2021, compared SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity by looking at reinfection and breakthrough rates. Four outcomes were evaluated: SARS-CoV-2 infection, symptomatic disease, COVID-19-related hospitalization and death.
Results showed that, compared to those with natural immunity, SARS-CoV-2-naïve individuals who had received a two-dose regimen of Pfizer’s COVID shot had:30
A 5.96-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection
A 7.13-fold increased risk for symptomatic disease
A 13.06-fold increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant
A higher risk for COVID-19-related-hospitalizations
After adjusting for comorbidities, SARS-CoV-2-naïve individuals who had received two Pfizer doses were 27.02 times more likely to experience symptomatic breakthrough infection than those with natural immunity.31 No deaths were reported in either of the groups. In closing the authors concluded:32
“This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity.”
Majority of Hospitalizations Are Actually in the Vaccinated
The oft-repeated refrain is that we’re in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” meaning those who have not received the COVID jab make up the bulk of those hospitalized and dying from the Delta variant. However, we’re already seeing a shift in hospitalization rates from the unvaccinated to those who have gotten one or two injections.
For example, in Israel, the fully “vaccinated” made up the bulk of serious cases and COVID-related deaths in July 2021, as illustrated in the graphs below.33 The red is unvaccinated, yellow refers to partially “vaccinated” and green fully “vaccinated” with two doses. By mid-August, 59% of serious cases were among those who had received two COVID injections.34
Data from the U.K. show a similar trend among those over the age of 50. In this age group, partially and fully “vaccinated” people account for 68% of hospitalizations and 70% of COVID deaths.35
Data36 from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also refute the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative. Between July 6,2021, and July 25, 2021, 469 COVID cases were identified in a Barnstable County, Massachusetts, outbreak.
Of those who tested positive, 74% had received two COVID injections and were considered “fully vaccinated.” Even despite using different diagnostic standards for non-jabbed and jabbed individuals, a whopping 80% of COVID-related hospitalizations were also in this group.37,38
COVID Shot May Harm Immunity in Those Previously Infected
While the authors of that August 25, 2021, preprint39 claim in their abstract that “Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant,” in the body of the article they admit they “could not demonstrate significance in our cohort.”
Unless significance is demonstrated, the finding is basically irrelevant, so I would not rely on this paper if I wanted to argue for vaccination of those with preexisting natural immunity. Besides, there’s research40 showing the COVID shots may actually harm the superior T cell immunity built up from prior infection, especially after the second dose. As reported by Horowitz in The Blaze:41
“Immunologists from Mount Sinai in New York and Hospital La Paz in Madrid have raised serious concerns. In a shocking discovery after monitoring a group of vaccinated people both with and without prior infection, they found ‘in individuals with a pre-existing immunity against SARS-CoV-2, the second vaccine dose not only fail to boost humoral immunity but determines a contraction of the spike-specific T cell response.’
They also note that other research has shown ‘the second vaccination dose appears to exert a detrimental effect in the overall magnitude of the spike-specific humoral response in COVID-19 recovered individuals.'”
Arguments for Vaccine Passports Are Null and Void
FEE.org reported the August 25 findings under the headline, “Harvard Epidemiologist Says the Case for COVID Vaccine Passports Was Just Demolished”:42
“Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff said research showing that natural immunity offers exponentially more protection than vaccines means vaccine passports are both unscientific and discriminatory, since they disproportionately affect working class individuals.
‘Prior COVID disease (many working class) provides better immunity than vaccines (many professionals), so vaccine mandates are not only scientific nonsense, they are also discriminatory and unethical,’ Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, observed on Twitter …
Vaccine passports would be immoral and a massive government overreach even in the absence of these findings. There is simply no historical parallel for governments attempting to restrict the movements of healthy people over a respiratory virus in this manner.
Yet the justification for vaccine passports becomes not just wrong but absurd in light of these new revelations. People who have had COVID already have significantly more protection from the virus than people who’ve been vaccinated.
Meanwhile, people who’ve not had COVID and choose to not get vaccinated may or may not be making an unwise decision. But if they are, they are principally putting only themselves at risk.”
Positive Signs
While we still have a long and likely hard fight ahead of us, there is reason to be optimistic. In a recent TikTok video,43 a young man named Ari Hasanaj who lives in New York City describes how he printed up posters that say:
“We do not discriminate against ANY customer based on sex, gender, race, creed, age, vaccinated or unvaccinated. All customers who wish to patronize are welcome in our establishment.”
He then went around the city, from one store to the next, asking each owner if they would agree to post the sign on their door to protest NYC’s vaccine passport requirement. A majority said yes. He is now asking others to join him in this effort.
In Denmark, vaccine passports will no longer be used to restrict movement as of September 10, 2021. The health minister, Magnus Heunicke, has stated, though, that the passport system may be reinstated if rising infection rates threaten important functions.
Denmark was among the first to announce the development of a digital vaccine passport, which came into effect in April 2021.44 For months, Danes repeatedly demonstrated against the COVID passes, and it seems the protests eventually had the desired effect. It just goes to show that if enough people resist, tyrannical overreach can be reined in.
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Western leftists, the real tyrants, have been waiting for an opportunity to assert full control over their respective countries, and they found that opportunity in a virus.
Left-wing governments throughout the Western world have used the COVID-19 pandemic to impose mandates, lockdowns, and even steal elections in the United States, all in a bid to gain complete control over their people.
Australia is turning into a giant COVID gulag. The Biden regime is using the pandemic to impose unheard of requirements on Americans, tens of millions of whom are now at risk of becoming second-class citizens in their own country. And in Europe, opposition to vaccine mandates is threatening to destabilize the healthcare industry, especially in France, where some 300,000 medical workers haven’t taken the jab and are resisting President Emanuel Macron’s mandate to do so.
The Epoch Times reports:
French people working in the medical sector are required to be vaccinated against the CCP virus or risk a suspension from their jobs without pay under President Emmanuel Macron’s new vaccine mandate that went into effect on Sept. 15.
Two months ago, Macron ordered hospital staff, ambulance technicians, nursing home workers, doctors, fire brigade members, and people caring for the elderly or infirm in their homes—some 2.6 million employees in total, to get a COVID-19 vaccine by Sept. 15, though hundreds of thousands haven’t yet complied with the new rule.
The country’s health authority said that 300,000 French medical field employees have not gotten the jab and so now, some hospitals are in fear they will suffer massive personnel shortages, according to The Associated Press.
“Vaccines are now compulsory for medical care, home care and emergency workers in France, and Wednesday is the deadline for such staff to have had at least one shot. Failing that, they face having pay suspended or not being able to work. But a top court has forbidden staff to be fired outright,” AP reported on the deadline date.
Meanwhile, healthcare workers who have only gotten a single dose of the vaccine will be required to take a COVID test every three days until they receive their second dose; Oct. 15 is the deadline for workers to have gotten both.
The French government noted that as of Sept. 7, about 84 percent of the country’s health care staffers were vaccinated, but that leaves a lot of workers who, potentially, won’t be able to work and fill shifts if they don’t comply by the deadlines.
And it’s very likely that the employers will comply; under Macron’s order, companies and hospitals who don’t will be fined $160 (130 euros) per violation but those can climb to $4,430 (3,750 euros) if they are fined three times in a month, French media reported.
Oh, and there is prison time involved as well; six months behind bars, potentially.
It’s insanity — all of this over a virus with a 99.7 percent recovery and survival rate.
“We feel like we’re living through a third wave, but this time it’s a human resources wave,” Emmanuel Chignon, who owns a nursing home in Western France, told The Epoch Times. Though he managed to remain open throughout the pandemic, now he and other healthcare providers face closure because of a large number of French healthcare workers who would rather quit their jobs than get the vaccine.
Vanessa Perotti, a health care worker at “Hopital Beaujon” in Clichy, a working-class suburb in Paris, said she’s angry.
“I’m disgusted. In any case, there’s nothing I can do. I just have to accept it,” she said after quitting her healthcare industry position for refusing to get the jab.
“I’m not going to force myself to get injected with something just to work,” said Perotti. “Maybe it’s harmful, maybe it’s not, but I don’t want anyone to impose it on me. It’s not ethical, we’re free to do what we want with our bodies.”
Not anymore — at least, not with the COVID-19 vaccine. Abortions, yes; this vaccine, no.
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Healthcare workers in New York have been given a reprieve from the state’s Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) mandate. This comes after a group of 17 healthcare professionals sued the state of New York to enjoin the enforcement of its unconstitutional vaccine mandate. The state issued its COVID-19 vaccine mandate on Aug. 28. This required all healthcare workers at hospitals and nursing homes to get at least one dose of the vaccine by Sept. 27.
This mandate does not recognize religious exemptions to vaccinations. The healthcare workers who sued the state believe the lack of an exemption is an attempt to nullify the protections for sincerely held religious beliefs granted under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “The same frontline healthcare workers hailed as heroes by the media for treating COVID patients before vaccines were available, including the plaintiffs herein, are now vilified by the same media as pariahs who must be excluded from society until they are vaccinated against their will,” reads the lawsuit. The lack of an exemption for people with deeply held religious beliefs against vaccinations also stands in stark contrast to an earlier mandate pushed by the state that did have those protections.
“What New York is attempting to do is slam shut an escape hatch from an unconstitutional mandate,” said Christopher Ferrara, a lawyer for the pro-religious liberty Thomas More Society. “And they are doing this while knowing that many people have sincere religious objections to vaccines that were tested, developed or produced with cell lines derived from aborted children.” Ferrara is also one of the attorneys representing the New York healthcare workers in their case against the vaccine mandate. In his case, Ferrara pointed out that New York has no right to nullify a federal law that protects people with sincerely held religious beliefs against discrimination. “This is a brazen power grab by people who think they can get away with anything,” he said. Along with citing violations to the Constitution, the lawsuit alleges that the lack of exemptions for people with sincerely held religious beliefs is also a violation of the New York State Human Rights Law and the New York City Human Rights Law.
Further legal battles over New York’s vaccine mandate expected
Judge David N. Hurd of the District Court for the Northern District of New York ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and issued an order temporarily blocking the state from enforcing its vaccine mandate. Hurd then gave the state until Sept. 22 to respond to the lawsuit in federal court. If the state opposes the request of the plaintiffs for a preliminary court order blocking the vaccine mandate, an oral hearing will be held on Sept. 28 to decide the matter.
The 17 plaintiffs are all Christians and they include practicing doctors, nurses, a nuclear medical technologist, a cognitive rehabilitation therapist and a physician’s liaison. The lawsuit made it clear that they all want to proceed with the case anonymously because they “run the risk of ostracization, threats of harm, immediate firing and other retaliatory consequences if their names become known.” “Without court intervention, these health professionals face loss of occupation, professional status and employability anywhere in the state of New York,” said Ferrara. All of them oppose the COVID-19 vaccines as a matter of religious conviction, and they do not want to cooperate in any medical procedure that relates to abortion or the use of matter from aborted children. In a statement, Ferrara made it clear that his clients are not against vaccines. “They are in fact in favor of voluntary vaccination with informed consent, but they oppose jack-booted coercion by the state to take a vaccine their religion forbids them to take. This is America, not Red China,” he said.
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Joe Biden issued a mandate for businesses with 100 or more employees to require all staff to either take a COVID-19 vaccine or be subjected to weekly testing, lest the company be fined $14,000 for each violation.
This, after Biden as ‘president-elect’ vowed he did not have the authority to issue any vaccine mandates on private businesses and individuals.
At the same time, King Biden said that all federal employees and federal contractors would also have to get the jab, but it turns out he lied about that, too, and at the same time gave every business he commanded a legal out, as if they needed one, given that Biden’s order is unconstitutional on its face.
Turns out that members of Congress and their staffs are exempt, along with about a quarter of the overall federal workforce, The Epoch Times reported:
…President Joe Biden unveiled two executive orders that could mandate vaccinations for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus for millions of working Americans in both the public and private spheres. But absent from these mandates are similar requirements for members of Congress, federal judges, or their staffers.
Biden’s executive orders would unilaterally require vaccination for federal employees, the military, and government contractors. The president also asked Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to require that firms with over 100 employees either mandate vaccination or weekly CCP virus tests. In total, these mandates could affect over 100 million American workers, making it one of the widest-reaching vaccine mandates in world history.
“It is the policy of my Administration to halt the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), including the B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant, by relying on the best available data and science-based public health measures,” Biden wrote in his order.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) within the Department of Health and Human Services has determined that the best way to slow the spread of COVID-19 and to prevent infection by the Delta variant or other variants is to be vaccinated,” the order continued.
When he addressed the nation, Biden indicated that in addition to private industry, federal employees would be mandated as well.
“I will sign an executive order that will now require all executive branch federal employees to be vaccinated — all. And I’ve signed another executive order that will require federal contractors to do the same,” Biden said. “If you want to work with the federal government and do business with us, get vaccinated. If you want to do business with the federal government, vaccinate your workforce.”
However, as The Epoch Times noted, “not included in the executive orders are mandates for members of federal employees in the legislative or judicial branches, including members of Congress, their staffers, as well as federal judges and other court employees.”
But reports last week said that U.S. Postal Service workers are going to be exempted. The Washington Post reported that the union representing the 644,000 USPS workers had carved out a deal where they would not be required to get the jab, though the New York Post says the White House has issued a “clarification” stating otherwise.
“The White House issued a clarification late Thursday after the Washington Post, citing an official, reported USPS workers were not required to get the shot and were only being ‘strongly encouraged’ to do so,” The Post reported.
“USPS is not included in the executive order requiring vaccination of Federal employees. USPS has a separate statutory scheme and is traditionally independent of federal personnel actions like this,” said an administration official.
The administration saying that the USPS is not actually exempt is meaningless; the Washington Post wouldn’t get something like this wrong about a Democrat regime. But beyond that, it makes perfect sense that our elites are ‘exempt’ from the mandate they impose on us.
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The announcement that the United States and the United Kingdom will help Australia build nuclear submarines, enhance U.S. troop presence, and jointly collaborate on cyber, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies has been generally hailed in Washington.
However, the new alliance (which the nations have named the awkward-sounding AUKUS), will only add to the dark clouds hovering over Asia. It catapults Australia into the ranks of “frontline states” in a U.S.-led strategy toward China that looks less like balancing and more like containment with every passing year, with attendant arms races and potential for military crises.
Make no mistake, AUKUS is only the latest in an ever-denser web of military interconnections Washington is helping weave around China. The Quad (U.S.-India- Australia-Japan), India-France-Australia, US-Japan-India, and India-Japan-Australia have supplemented the US-Japan-Australia Trilateral Strategic Dialogue that was inaugurated in 2001. The U.K.’s entry into these China-centric minilaterals has however come with a particularly potent edge — the nuclear dimension. This may be because the three Western powers perceive a special civilizational bond with each other, with accompanying anxieties about the rise of an Asian peer.
Except for India, all participants in the Washington-led minilaterals are U.S. treaty allies. The anomalous status of New Delhi is being made up through socialization and opinion-making among elites, along with arms sales and “foundational” defense agreements. Military interoperability and joint war-fightingexercises are at the core of most of these groupings. In fact, the best geometry describing these trilaterals and quadrilaterals is that of a sharp arrow, with its tip aimed straight at Beijing.
A repetitive stream of rhetoric has accompanied these initiatives. We are constantly told they stand for the “rule of law,” “freedom of navigation,”” inclusivity” and so forth. But the irony of the past 20 years of a U.S.-led expansive “war on terror” across the Middle East, with its 900,000 dead, $8 trillion largely wasted, many violations of international law, and severe erosion of America’s own cherished values of liberty and limited government, surely cannot be lost on any objective observer. The fact is that the United States and the United Kingdom are simply in no position to lecture China or anyone else on the norms and values question unless they demonstrate serious accountability and reparations for their destructive actions since 9/11.
In their joint remarks, President Biden and Prime Minister Morrison were at pains to dispel any impression that the submarine project involves nuclear weapons. But AUKUS was justified in terms of “rapidly evolving threats.” Couldn’t further such perceived “evolution” open the door to an Australian nuclear deterrent? The submarine designs in question could easily accommodate such a shift. Any security rival must take this possibility into account. China can logically be expected to take countermeasures.
But it is not just China that will perceive a threat from AUKUS. The Australian defense minister’s assertion of seeking “regional superiority” will alarm its Southeast Asian neighbors, especially Indonesia. Though Jakarta’s ties with Canberra have improved markedly in recent years, the two share a contentious past that could come alive again if a new cold war accelerates in Asia. In its single-minded taking up the cudgels against Beijing, Canberra may have bitten off more than it can chew.
Australia is a non-nuclear state with a historically hawkish stance toward non-proliferation. But as nuclear experts have pointed out, nuclear submarines of the sort that the US and UK will build for Australia are prone to proliferation with Highly Enriched Uranium as fuel. Naval reactors are mostly excluded from international nuclear safeguards. But we should not be surprised that proliferation concerns have taken a backseat to China-containment. In the 1980’s the nuclear ambitions of another “frontline state” — Pakistan — were willfully ignored as Washington embraced a dangerous strategy of arming and training Salafi militants in Afghanistan as a part of the Cold War containment strategy against the Soviet Union.
Such a non-state option is not seen as viable to counter China, which increases Washington’s emphasis on Cold War-style alliance building. But China is no Soviet Union. The two states are similar in terms of their penchant for domestic repression. But Moscow pushed a revolutionary project to remake the global economy and install Marxist-Leninist oriented regimes across the world. China’s excessive maritime claims and assertive actions in its backyard are clearly of concern. But these actions do not threaten the U.S. mainland, which is where most Americans live.
Also, Beijing’s territorial claims do not originate so much from the Chinese Communist Party as from the Chinese nation-state itself, ironically governed back then by the Kuomintang, which later founded the Taiwanese state. Which explains why Taiwan has similar claims and maintains militarized islands in the South China Sea. There is also no evidence that China presents a serious threat to freedom of commerce and travel in its maritime neighborhood, which makes the intent of U.S. FONOPs in Asia questionable at best, and downright provocative at worst.
China is indeed an existential threat to Taiwan and to border regions of India. But other regional powers have varying perceptions on Beijing, with Southeast Asia having a much more benign view. It is difficult to argue Beijing has the conquest of other states in mind, least of all the United States. The economic challenge that China presents cannot be countered with military alliances.
What provokes Washington’s anxieties is the very rise of China itself. The United States fears it will eventually have to give up its global armed dominance and share power in the international system with a non-Western actor, four times its population. But this declinist anxiety is no reason to enmesh the world in another dangerous bipolarity, that too by helping construct what looks like a global China-containing bloc. We barely survived the last time it happened.
It is also ironic that a climate action-hostile leader — Scott Morrison — is being bestowed with nuclear-capable gifts, when by President Biden’s own characterization, climate change is an “existential threat” faced by the world (which China isn’t). If this is true, shouldn’t the United States be forging a fundamentally different approach toward China?
Imagine if, instead of the escalatory step of a nuclear-tipped AUKUS alliance, President Biden had announced a specific security confidence-building step in the region (for example, announcing a time-bound suspension of FONOPs), and dared Beijing to respond in kind? Going even further, imagine if Washington had proposed an alliance, not in the hackneyed style of 20th century containment, but inclusive of Beijing and nonaligned regional powers in Southeast Asia to counter climate threats to fragile nation states and communities in Asia? Now that would have been real leadership worthy of a superpower.
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The collapse of the American project in Afghanistan may fade fast from the news here, but don’t be fooled. It couldn’t be more significant in ways few in this country can even begin to grasp.
“Remember, this is not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinkentold a television audience on August 15th, the day the Taliban swept into the Afghan capital, pausing to pose for photos in the grandly gilded presidential palace. He was dutifully echoing his boss, President Joe Biden, who had earlier rejected any comparison with the fall of the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, in 1975, insisting that “there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”
Both were right, but not in the ways they intended. Indeed, the collapse of Kabul was not comparable. It was worse, incomparably so. And its implications for the future of U.S. global power are far more serious than the loss of Saigon.
On the surface, similarities abound. In both South Vietnam and Afghanistan, Washington spent 20 years and countless billions of dollars building up massive, conventional armies, convinced that they could hold off the enemy for a decent interval after the U.S. departure. But presidents Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam and Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan both proved to be incompetent leaders who never had a chance of retaining power without continued fulsome American backing.
Amid a massive North Vietnamese offensive in the spring of 1975, President Thieu panicked and ordered his army to abandon the northern half of the country, a disastrous decision that precipitated Saigon’s fall just six weeks later. As the Taliban swept across the countryside this summer, President Ghani retreated into a fog of denial, insisting his troops defend every remote, rural district, allowing the Taliban to springboard from seizing provincial capitals to capturing Kabul in just 10 days.
With the enemy at the gates, President Thieu filled his suitcases with clinking gold bars for his flight into exile, while President Ghani (according to Russian reports) snuck off to the airport in a cavalcade of cars loaded with cash. As enemy forces entered Saigon and Kabul, helicopters ferried American officials from the U.S. embassy to safety, even as surrounding city streets swarmed with panicked local citizens desperate to board departing flights.
Critical Differences
So much for similarities. As it happens, the differences were deep and portentous. By every measure, the U.S. capacity for building and supporting allied armies has declined markedly in the 45 years between Saigon and Kabul. After President Thieu ordered that disastrous northern retreat, replete with dismal scenes of soldiers clubbing civilians to board evacuation flights bound for Saigon, South Vietnam’s generals ignored their incompetent commander-in-chief and actually began to fight.
On the road to Saigon at Xuan Loc, an ordinary South Vietnamese unit, the 18th Division, fought battle-hardened North Vietnamese regulars backed by tanks, trucks, and artillery to a standstill for two full weeks. Not only did those South Vietnamese soldiers take heavy casualties, with more than a third of their men killed or wounded, but they held their positions through those long days of “meat-grinder” combat until the enemy had to circle around them to reach the capital.
In those desperate hours as Saigon was falling, General Nguyen Khoa Nam, head of the only intact South Vietnamese command, faced an impossible choice between making a last stand in the Mekong Delta and capitulating to communist emissaries who promised him a peaceful surrender. “If I am unable to carry out my job of protecting the nation,” the general told a subordinate, “then I must die, along with my nation.” That night, seated at his desk, the general shot himself in the head. In South Vietnam’s last hours as a state, four of his fellow generals also committed suicide. At least 40 more lower-ranking officers and soldiers also chose death over dishonor.
On the road to Kabul, by contrast, there were no heroic last stands by regular Afghan army units, no protracted combat, no heavy casualties, and certainly no command suicides. In the nine days between the fall of Afghanistan’s first provincial capital on August 6th and the capture of Kabul on August 15th, all of the well-equipped, well-trained Afghan soldiers simply faded away before Taliban guerrillas equipped mainly with rifles and tennis sneakers.
After losing their salaries and rations to graft for the previous six to nine months, those hungry Afghan troops simply surrendered en masse, took Taliban cash payments, and handed over their weapons and other costly U.S. equipment. By the time the guerrillas reached Kabul, driving Humvees and wearing Kevlar helmets, night-vision goggles, and body armor, they looked like so many NATO soldiers. Instead of taking a bullet, Afghanistan’s commanders took the cash — both graft from padding their payrolls with “ghost soldiers” and bribes from the Taliban.
The difference between Saigon and Kabul has little to do with the fighting ability of the Afghan soldier. As the British and Soviet empires learned to their dismay when guerrillas slaughtered their soldiers in spectacular numbers, ordinary Afghan farmers are arguably the world’s finest fighters. So why wouldn’t they fight for Ashraf Ghani and his secular democratic state in far-off Kabul?
The key difference would seem to lie in the fading of America’s aura as the planet’s number one power and of its state-building capacities. At the peak of its global hegemony back in the 1960s, the United States, with its unequalled material resources and moral authority, could make a reasonably convincing case to the South Vietnamese that the political mix of electoral democracy and capitalist development it sponsored was the way forward for any nation. Today, with its reduced global clout and tarnished record in Iraq, Libya, and Syria (as well as in prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo), America’s capacity to infuse its nation-building projects with any real legitimacy — that elusive sine qua non for the survival of any state — has apparently dropped significantly.
The Impact on U.S. Global Power
In 1975, the fall of Saigon did indeed prove a setback to Washington’s world order. Still, America’s underlying strength, both economic and military, was robust enough then for a partial rebound.
Adding to the sense of crisis at the time, the loss of South Vietnam coincided with two more substantial blows to Washington’s international system and the clout that went with it. Just a few years before Saigon’s collapse, the German and Japanese export booms had so eroded America’s commanding global economic position that the Nixon administration had to end the automatic convertibility of the dollar to gold. That, in turn, effectively broke the Bretton Woods system that had been the foundation of U.S. economic strength since 1944.
Meanwhile, with Washington mired in its self-made Vietnam quagmire, that other Cold War power, the Soviet Union, continued to build hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles and so functionally forced Washington to recognize its military parity in 1972 by signing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Strategic Arms Limitation Protocol.
With the weakening of the economic and nuclear pillars on which so much of America’s paramount power rested, Washington was forced to retreat from its role as the great global hegemon and become a mere first among equals.
Washington’s Relations with Europe
Almost half a century later, the sudden, humiliating fall of Kabul threatens even that more limited leadership role. Although the U.S. occupied Afghanistan for 20 years with the full support of its NATO allies, when President Biden walked away from that shared “nation-building” mission, he did so without the slightest consultation with those very allies.
America lost 2,461 soldiers in Afghanistan, including 13 who died tragically during the airport evacuation. Its allies suffered 1,145 killed, including 62 German soldiers and 457 British troops. No wonder those partners held understandable grievances when Biden acted without the slightest notice to or discussion with them. “There is serious loss of trust,” observed Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to Washington. “But the real lesson… for Europe is this: Do we really want to be totally dependent on U.S. capabilities and decisions forever, or can Europe finally begin to be serious about becoming a credible strategic actor?”
For Europe’s more visionary leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron, the answer to that timely question was obvious: build a European defense force free from Washington’s whims and so avoid “the Chinese-American duopoly, the dislocation, the return of hostile regional powers.” In fact, right after the last American planes left Kabul, a summit of European Union officials made it clear that the time had come to stop “depending on American decisions.” They called for the creation of a European army that would give them “greater decision-making autonomy and greater capacity for action in the world.”In short, with America First populism now a major force in this country’s politics, assume that Europe will pursue a foreign policy increasingly freed from Washington’s influence.
Central Asia’s Geopolitics
And Europe may be the least of it. The stunning capture of Kabul highlighted an American loss of leadership that extended into Asia and Africa, with profound geopolitical implications for the future of U.S. global power. Above all, the Taliban’s victory will effectively force Washington out of Central Asia and so help to consolidate Beijing’s already ongoing control over parts of that strategic region. It, in turn, could prove to be the potential geopolitical pivot for China’s dominance over the vast Eurasian land mass, home to 70% of the globe’s population and productivity.
Speaking at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan in 2013 (though nobody in Washington was then listening), China’s President Xi Jinping announced his country’s strategy for winning the twenty-first-century version of the deadly “great game” that nineteenth-century empires once played for control of Central Asia. With gentle gestures that belied his imperious intent, Xi asked that academic audience to join him in building an “economic belt along the Silk Road” that would “expand development space in the Eurasian region” through infrastructure “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea.” In the process of establishing that “belt and road” structure, they would, he claimed, be building “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”
In the eight years since that speech, China has indeed been spending over a trillion dollars on its “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) to construct a transcontinental grid of railroads, oil pipelines, and industrial infrastructure in a bid to become the world’s premier economic power. More specifically, Beijing has used the BRI as a geopolitical pincers movement, a diplomatic squeeze play. By laying down infrastructure around the northern, eastern, and western borders of Afghanistan, it has prepared the way for that war-torn nation, freed of American influence and full of untapped mineral resources (estimated at a trillion dollars), to fall safely into Beijing’s grasp without a shot being fired.
To the north of Afghanistan, the China National Petroleum Corporation has collaborated with Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to launch the Central Asia–China gas pipeline, a system that will eventually extend more than 4,000 miles across the heart of Eurasia. Along Afghanistan’s eastern frontier, Beijing began spending $200 million in 2011 to transform a sleepy fishing village at Gwadar, Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea, into a moderncommercial port only 370 miles from the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Four years later, President Xi committed $46 billion to building a China–Pakistan Economic Corridor of roads, rails, and pipelines stretching nearly 2,000 miles along Afghanistan’s eastern borderlands from China’s western provinces to the now-modernized port of Gwadar.
To the west of Afghanistan, Beijing broke through Iran’s diplomatic isolation last March by signing a $400 billion development agreement with Tehran. Over the next 25 years, China’s legions of laborers and engineers will lay down a transit corridor of oil and natural gas pipelines to China, while also building a vast new rail network that will make Tehran the hub of a line stretching from Istanbul, Turkey, to Islamabad, Pakistan.
By the time these geopolitical pincers pull Afghanistan firmly into Beijing’s BRI system, the country may have become just another Middle Eastern theocracy like Iran or Saudi Arabia. While the religious police harass women and troops battle festering insurgencies, the Taliban state can get down to its real business — not defending Islam, but cutting deals with China to mine its vast reserves of rare minerals and collect transit taxes on the new $10 billion TAPI gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan (which desperately needs affordable energy).
With lucrative royalties from its vast store of rare-earth minerals, the Taliban could afford to end its current fiscal dependence on drugs. They could actually ban the country’s now booming opium harvest, a promise their new government spokesman has already made in a bid for international recognition. Over time, the Taliban leadership might discover, like the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Iran, that a developing economy can’t afford to waste its women. As a result, there might even be some slow, fitful progress on that front, too.
If such a projection of China’s future economic role in Afghanistan seems fanciful to you, consider that the underpinnings for just such a future deal were being put in place while Washington was still dithering over Kabul’s fate. At a formal meeting with a Taliban delegation in July, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi hailed their movement as “an important military and political force.”
In response, Taliban head Mullah Abdul Baradar, displaying the very leadership that American-installed President Ashraf Ghani so clearly lacked, praised China as a “reliable friend” and promised to foster “an enabling investment environment” so that Beijing could play “a bigger role in future reconstruction and economic development.” Formalities finished, the Afghan delegation then met behind closed doors with China’s assistant foreign minister to exchange what the official communiqué called “in-depth views on issues of common concern, which helped enhance mutual understanding” — in short, who gets what and for how much.
The World-Island Strategy
China’s capture of Eurasia, should it be successful, will be but one part of a far grander design for control over what Victorian geographer Halford Mackinder, an early master of modern geopolitics, called the “world island.” He meant the tricontinental land mass comprising the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. For the past 500 years, one imperial hegemon after another, including Portugal, Holland, Britain, and the United States, has deployed its strategic forces around that world island in a bid to dominate such a sprawling land mass.
While for the last half-century Washington has arrayed its vast air and naval armadas around Eurasia, it generally relegated Africa to, at best, an afterthought — at worst, a battleground. Beijing, by contrast, has consistently treated that continent with the utmost seriousness.
When the Cold War came to southern Africa in the early 1970s, Washington spent the next 20 years in an arm’s-length alliance with apartheid South Africa, while using the CIA to fight a leftist liberation movement in Portuguese-controlled Angola. While Washington spent billions wreaking havoc by supplying right-wing African warlords with automatic weapons and land mines, Beijing launched its first major foreign-aid project. It built the thousand-mile Tanzania-to-Zambia railway. Not only was it the longest in Africa when completed in 1975, but it allowed landlocked Zambia, a front-line state in the struggle against the apartheid regime in Pretoria, to avoid South Africa when exporting its copper.
From 2015 on, building upon its historic ties to the liberation movements that won power across southern Africa, Beijing planned a decade-long trillion-dollar infusion of capital there. Much of it was to be designated for commodities-extraction projects that would make that continent China’s second-largest source of crude oil. With such an investment (equaling its later BRI commitments to Eurasia), China also doubled its annual trade with Africa to $222 billion, three times America’s total.
While that aid to liberation movements once had an ideological undercurrent, today it’s been succeeded by savvy geopolitics. Beijing seems to understand just how fast Africa’s progress has been in the single generation since that continent won its freedom from a particularly rapacious version of colonial rule. Given that it’s the planet’s second most populous continent, rich in human and material resources, China’s trillion-dollar bet on Africa’s future will likely pay rich dividends, both political and economic, someday soon.
With a trillion dollars invested in Eurasia and another trillion in Africa, China is engaged in nothing less than history’s largest infrastructure project. It’s crisscrossing those three continents with rails and pipelines, building naval bases around the southern rim of Asia, and ringing the whole tricontinental world island with a string of 40 major commercial ports.
Such a geopolitical strategy has become Beijing’s battering ram to crack open Washington’s control over Eurasia and thereby challenge what’s left of its global hegemony. America’s unequalled military air and sea armadas still allow it rapid movement above and around those continents, as the mass evacuation from Kabul showed so forcefully. But the slow, inch-by-inch advance of China’s land-based, steel-ribbed infrastructure across the deserts, plains, and mountains of that world island represents a far more fundamental form of future control.
As China’s geopolitical squeeze play on Afghanistan shows all too vividly, there is still much wisdom in the words that Sir Halford Mackinder wrote over a century ago: “Who rules the World Island commands the World.”
To that, after watching a Washington that’s invested so much in its military be humiliated in Afghanistan, we might add: Who does not command the World Island cannot command the World.
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The black prison-like fencing that was a mainstay around Capitol Hill during the first half of the year has gone back up ahead of a protest scheduled this weekend, which President Trump has warned is a “setup”.
The fencing has been re-erected in response to the “Justice for J6” rally planned for Saturday at the US Capitol building, which is focused on the 600 defendants being detained for being part of the January 6th incident.
Video of the fencing also reveals that a motion-tracking watchtower has been put into place, presumably fitted with face recognition cameras and whatever other surveillance equipment is at hand to deploy on Americans practising their right to freedom of speech.
Capitol Police have said the fencing will come down again straight away, if the protest is carried out peacefully.
A statement also noted that
“The USCP has asked the Department of Defense for the ability to receive National Guard support should the need arise on September 18.”
“The new protective barrier, even if only temporary, as officials insist, still reinforces public perceptions that Congress is once again walling itself off as fortress on a Hill, above and apart from the people it purports to represent.”
He continues,
“And that perception only further exacerbates the widening gulf of distrust between the government and the governed. Will a new fence be re-installed every time a planned rally threatens potential violence against Congress?”
Meanwhile, President Trump has warned that the event on Saturday could be used as a “setup”.
In an interview with The Federalist, Trump said “On Saturday, that’s a setup,” adding “If people don’t show up they’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s a lack of spirit.’ And if people do show up they’ll be harassed.”
In a further statement, Trump noted
“Our hearts and minds are with the people being persecuted so unfairly relating to the January 6th protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election.”
He added that
“in addition to everything else, it has proven conclusively that we are a two-tiered system of justice. In the end, however, JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL!”
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The European Parliament passed a resolution on Thursday (16 September) making a clear distinction between the Russian people and the regime of President Vladimir Putin, which it described as a “stagnating authoritarian kleptocracy led by a president-for-life surrounded by a circle of oligarchs”.
The resolution, approved by 494 votes to 103, which came on the eve of a three-day vote to elect a new Russian parliament, states that a democratic future for Russia is possible and that the European Council must adopt an EU strategy for this scenario.
“If this week’s parliamentary elections in Russia are recognised as fraudulent, the EU should not recognise the Russian Duma and should ask for the country to be suspended from international parliamentary assemblies, including the one of the Council of Europe,” said Andrius Kubilius, the Lithuanian MEP who drafted the resolution, following the vote.
However, Russia’s ruling party is expected to secure a resounding victory, although the voting conditions may fall short of democratic standards. Lawmakers demanded that the EU be prepared to withhold recognition of the election results if they are conducted in violation of democratic principles and international law.
The Parliament said the EU must establish an alliance with the United States and other like-minded partners to counterbalance the efforts of Russia and China to weaken democracy worldwide and destabilise Europe’s political order. This broad alliance should foresee sanctions, policies to counter illicit financial flows, and support for human rights activists.
On Russia’s aggression and influence on the EU’s eastern neighbourhood, the EU must continue to support ‘Eastern Partnership’ countries like Ukraine and Georgia and to promote European reforms and fundamental freedoms in the region. These efforts should also serve to encourage Russian support for democratic reforms.
The text added that the EU needs to cut its dependency on Russian gas, oil, and other raw materials, at least while Putin is in power. The European Green Deal and the boosting of new resources will play a crucial geopolitical role in achieving this, it said.
MEPs want the EU to build its capacity to expose and stop the flows of dirty money from Russia and to expose the resources and financial assets that autocrats and oligarchs close to the regime have hidden in EU member states.
“[The EU] needs more courage in taking a strong stance vis-a-vis the Kremlin regime when it comes to defending human rights; this is what strategic engagement with the Russian people is all about. It is about ending domestic repression, returning the choice to the people, and freeing all political prisoners,” said Kubilius.
“The Kremlin’s continuous repression of all opposition candidates, free media and NGOs undermines the legitimacy and fairness of these elections. The Russian people must have the right to choose and their choices must be honoured, as in any other democratic country”, he added.
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Our thanks to Mark Taliano for bringing this to our attention.
It is obvious to us that another holocaust of greater magnitude is taking place before our eyes. The majority of the world’s populace do not yet realize what is happening, for magnitude of an organized crime such as this is beyond their scope of experience.
The corporate media narrative that unvaccinated people are filling up the hospitals and dying from COVID is quickly falling apart, perhaps faster than they even expected.
Throughout the previous year, governments and corporations have crushed the exercise of our human rights, constitutional rights, and civil liberties on a massive scale. The scope of the violations integral to the assault on people’s rights is now being rapidly extended into the imposition of government-sanctioned vaccine mandates.
It was scandalous and infuriating to hear President Joseph R. Biden argue last week that his so-called vaccine mandates somehow have nothing to do with freedom or personal choice. In saying that, he has rejected our history, our values and the Constitution he swore to uphold.
Nicholas Wansbutter, a criminal defense lawyer and host of Don’t Talk TV, talks about vaccine passports in Canada. According to him, vaccine passports are extremely problematic for two reasons: 1) issue of consent and 2) human rights implications.
Official sources, namely EudraVigilance (EU, EEA, Switzerland), MHRA (UK) and VAERS (USA), have now recorded many more deaths and injuries from the COVID-!9 “vaccine” roll-out than from all previous vaccines combined since records began.
On August 23rd, 2021, the BC government announced they were moving forward with their plan to implement a Biometric identification (ID) and social credit system in B.C. that is tied to peoples’ COVID-19 vaccine status.
If anecdotal reports and statistics showing a positive correlation between midazolam prescriptions and deaths in the over-65s (3) are to be believed, it appears that euthanasia may have already been taking place on an illegal basis, predominantly in care homes.
The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 last Saturday has raised many of the usual issues about what actually happened on that day. Were hijacked airliners actually crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or was the damage in New York City attributable to explosives or even some kind of nuclear device?
It was surely no coincidence, as the Jimmy Carter administration was looking on in horror at “the loss of Iran” in early 1979, that Washington rapidly moved to increase its presence in the Middle East and surrounding regions. A principal area of focus for the Americans was Afghanistan, which shares a 570 mile border with resource rich Iran to the west.
Last week, on September 9, 2021, the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) Commemorated its Twentieth Anniversary.
A Webinar was held under the title Worldwide Resistance against “Covid Fraud” and the Killer mRNA “Vaccine”.
On Saturday September 18, 2021, we will be holding a Second Webinar, this time under the auspices of our French language website www.mondialisation.ca.
The debate and dialogue will be in French.
Among our speakers and invited guests are: Dr. Pascal Sacré, Pierre de la Chaîne Décodeur and Prof. Michel Chossudovsky. The debate will be chaired by Dr. Micheline Ladouceur.
Below are details of the Webinar. Our English speaking and bilingual readers and authors are cordially invited to participate in this event.
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Webinaire : Crise Covid-19, Fraude scientifique, « Vaccin tueur » et Passe sanitaire
Le samedi 18 septembre 2021 à 19h (Paris) et à 13h (Montréal)
Le site internet du CRM a été créé le 9 septembre 2001, deux jours avant les événements tragiques du 11- Septembre. À peine quelques jours plus tard, notre site internet (bilingue) devenait une source d’information majeure sur le Nouvel Ordre Mondial et la « guerre contre le terrorisme » de Washington.
Pour commémorer notre vingtième anniversaire, nous invitons nos lecteurs et auteurs à participer à un webinaire axé sur la crise actuelle Covid-19.
Les invités au débat :
Dr Pascal Sacré, médecin anesthésiste-réanimateur
Pierre, statisticien, créateur de la chaîne Décoder l’éco.
Michel Chossudovsky, auteur, professeur de sciences économiques,
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The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 last Saturday has raised many of the usual issues about what actually happened on that day. Were hijacked airliners actually crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or was the damage in New York City attributable to explosives or even some kind of nuclear device? These are fundamental questions and the so-called “Truthers” who raise them have been inspired by their reading of the 585 page 9/11 Report, which is most charitably described as incomplete, though many would reasonably call it a government cover-up.
I have long believed that unless one actually sees or experiences something first hand the description of any event is no better than hearsay. The closest I came to “seeing” 9/11 was the panicked evacuation of a CIA office building, where I was working at the time. Another related bit of 9/11 narrative also came from two close friends who were driving into work at the Pentagon when they each independently observed what appeared to be a large plane passing over their cars and striking the building. I consider the sources credible but was it an airplane or a missile? And I was not there to see it with my own eyes, so I am reluctant to claim that my friends actually saw something that in retrospect might have been misconstrued.
Critics of the physical and engineering aspects of the accepted narrative certainly have a great deal of expert evidence that supports their case. The way the towers fell as well as the collapse of Building 7 nearby are suggestive of something other than the impact of an airliner near the top of the structure, but I am no expert in the science of the matter and have avoided expressing a view regarding it.
Apart from what happened, I have always been more intrigued by “Who done it?” I found the 9/11 Report to be conspicuously lacking in its failure to cover possible foreign involvement, to include the Saudis, Pakistanis and the Israelis. Indeed, President Joe Biden has taken steps that have resulted in the declassification and release of 16 pages of the notorious 28-page redaction of documents relating to any possible Saudi role. The document consists of interviews with Saudi student Omar al-Bayoumi, who reportedly helped support several hijackers.
The Saudis are being sued by 9/11 survivors, but it is unlikely that anything really sensitive will ever be exposed, as explained by investigative journalist Jim Bovard. Indeed, the documents released last Saturday did not demonstrate that the Saudi government itself played any direct role in 9/11, though it is clear that wealthy Saudis and even members of the Royal Family had been supporting and funding al-Qaeda. It is also known that that Saudi Embassy and Consulate employees in the U.S. had funded the alleged hijackers.
Friends who were in CIA’s Counterterrorism Center at the time of 9/11 tend to believe that the Saudis were indeed supporting their fellow citizens while in the U.S. but were likely not knowledgeable regarding any terrorist plot. They observed, however, that there was considerable evidence that Israel knew in advance about what was impending and may have even been instrumental in making sure that it succeeded.
The evidence of Israeli involvement is substantial, based on the level of the Jewish state’s espionage operations in the U.S. and also its track record on so-called covert actions simulating terrorist attacks designed to influence political decision making in foreign countries. But, of course, in reporting on the 9/11 tragedy no one in the mainstream media did pick up on the connection, inhibited no doubt by the understanding that there are some things that one just does not write about Israel if one hopes to remain employed. That is true in spite of the fact that the Israeli angle to 9/11 is without a doubt a good story, consigned to the alternative media, where it can be marginalized by critics as a conspiracy theory or the product of anti-Semitism.
In the year 2001 Israel was running a massive spying operation directed against Muslims either resident or traveling in the United States. The operation included the creation of a number of cover companies in New Jersey, Florida and also on the west coast that served as spying mechanisms for Mossad officers. The effort was supported by the Mossad Station in Washington DC and included a large number of volunteers, the so-called “art students” who traveled around the U.S. selling various products at malls and outdoor markets. The FBI was aware of the numerous Israeli students who were routinely overstaying their visas but they were regarded as a minor nuisance and were normally left to the tender mercies of the inspectors at the Bureau of Customs and Immigration.
The Israelis were also running more sophisticated intelligence operations inside the United States, many of which were focused on Washington’s military capabilities and intentions. Some specialized intelligence units concentrated on obtaining military and dual use technology. It was also known that Israeli spies had penetrated the phone systems of the U.S. government, to include those at the White House.
All of that came into focus on September 11, 2001, when a New Jersey housewife saw something from the window of her apartment building, which overlooked the World Trade Center. She watched as the buildings burned and crumbled but also noted something strange. Three young men were kneeling on the roof of a white transit van parked by the water’s edge, making a movie in which they featured themselves high fiving and laughing in front of the catastrophic scene unfolding behind them. The woman wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police, who responded quickly and soon both the local force and the FBI began looking for the vehicle, which was subsequently seen by other witnesses in various locations along the New Jersey waterfront, its occupants “celebrating and filming.”
The license plate number revealed that the van belonged to a New Jersey registered company called Urban Moving Systems. The van was identified and pulled over. Five men between the ages of 22 and 27 years old emerged to be detained at gunpoint and handcuffed. They were all Israelis. One of them had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock and another had two foreign passports. Bomb sniffing dogs reacted to the smell of explosives in the van.
According to the initial police report, the driver identified as Sivan Kurzberg, stated “We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.” The five men were detained at the Bergen County jail in New Jersey before being transferred the FBI’s Foreign Counterintelligence Section, which handles allegations of spying.
After the arrest, the FBI obtained a warrant to search Urban Moving System’s Weehawken, NJ, offices. Papers and computers were seized. The company owner Dominick Suter, also an Israeli, answered FBI questions but when a follow-up interview was set up a few days later it was learned that he had fled the country for Israel, putting both his business and home up for sale. It was later learned that Suter has been associated with at least fourteen businesses in the United States, mostly in New Jersey and New York but also in Florida.
The five Israelis were held in Brooklyn, initially on charges relating to visa fraud. FBI interrogators questioned them for more than two months. Several were held in solitary confinement so they could not communicate with each other and two of them were given repeated polygraph exams, which they failed when claiming that they were nothing more than students working summer jobs. The two men that the FBI focused on most intensively were believed to be Mossad staff officers and the other three were volunteers helping with surveillance. Interestingly, photo evidence demonstrated that they had been seen “casing” the area where they were seen celebrating on the day before, indicating that they had prior knowledge of the attack.
A high-quality photo, top, shows the area the dancing Israelis were staged. Credit | Panamza
The Israelis were not exactly cooperative, but the FBI concluded from documents obtained at their office in Weehawken that they had been targeting Arabs in New York and New Jersey. The FBI concluded that there was a distinct possibility that the Israelis had actually monitored the activities of at least two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers while the cover companies and intelligence personnel often intersected with locations frequented by the Saudis.
The dots were apparently never connected by investigators. Police records in New Jersey and New York where the men were held have disappeared and FBI interrogation reports are inaccessible. Media coverage of the case also died, though the five were referred to in the press as the “dancing Israelis” and by some, more disparagingly, as the “dancing Shlomos.”
Inevitably, the George W. Bush White House intervened. After 71 days in detention, the five Israelis were inexplicably released from prison, put on a plane, and deported. One should also recall that when the news of 9/11 reached Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pleased, saying that “It’s very good. Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” It will “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.” And, of course, it was conveniently attributable to Israel’s enemies.
The possible role of Israel in 9/11 was first explored in book form in 2003 by Antiwar.com editorial director Justin Raimondo in his The Terror Enigma, a short book focusing on Israeli spying and inconsistencies in the narrative that bore the provocative subtitle “9/11 and the Israeli Connection.”
Currently, the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 has inspired some others to take another look at the possible Israeli role. Ron Unz has recently completed an exhaustive examination of the evidence. He observes that 9/11 and its aftermath have shaped “the last two decades, greatly changing the daily lives and liberties of most ordinary Americans.” He asks “What organized group would have been sufficiently powerful and daring to carry off an attack of such vast scale against the central heart of the world’s sole superpower? And how were they possibly able to orchestrate such a massively effective media and political cover-up, even enlisting the participation of the U.S. government itself?”
Ron Unz answers his question, concluding that there is “a strong, perhaps even overwhelming case that the Israeli Mossad together with its American collaborators played the central role” in the attack. His argument is based on the noted inconsistencies in the standard narrative, plus an examination of the history of Israeli false flag and mass terrorism attacks. It also includes new information gleaned from Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman’s recent book Rise and Kill First: the Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations.
To a certain extent, Unz relies on a detailed investigative article written by French journalist Laurent Guyenot in 2018 as well as on an argument made by an ex-Marine and former instructor at the U.S. Army War College Alan Sabrosky in an article where he records how “Many years ago I read a fascinating discussion of the ‘tactics of mistake.’ This essentially entailed using a target’s prejudices and preconceptions to mislead them as to the origin and intent of the attack, entrapping them in a tactical situation that later worked to the attacker’s strategic advantage. This is what unfolded in the 9/11 attacks that led us into the matrix of wars and conflicts, present (Afghanistan and Iraq), planned (Iran and Syria) and projected (Jordan and Egypt), that benefit Israel and no other country — although I concede that many private contractors and politicians are doing very well for themselves out of the death and misery of others. I am also absolutely certain as a strategic analyst that 9/11 itself, from which all else flows, was a classic Mossad-orchestrated operation. But Mossad did not do it alone. They needed local help within America (and perhaps elsewhere) and they had it, principally from some alumni of PNAC (the misnamed Project for a New American Century) and their affiliates within and outside of the U.S. Government (USG), who in the 9/11 attacks got the ‘catalytic event’ they needed and craved to take the U.S. to war on Israel’s behalf…”
Economist and author Paul Craig Roberts has also been motivated by the anniversary to review the evidence and concludes
“Circumstantial evidence suggests that 9/11 was a scheme of George W. Bush regime neoconservative officials allied with vice president Dick Cheney and Israel to create a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ that would generate support on the part of the American people and Washington’s European allies for a Middle Eastern ‘war on terror’ whose real purpose was to destroy Israel’s enemies in the interest of Greater Israel… This is the most plausible explanation, but, if true, it is not one that the U.S. and Israeli governments would ever acknowledge. Consequently, we are stuck with an official explanation long championed by the presstitutes that no one believes.”
Yes, an implausible explanation that no one really believes for the greatest national security disaster in America’s twenty-first century. And Israel gets yet another pass.
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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]
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Throughout the previous year, governments and corporations have crushed the exercise of our human rights, constitutional rights, and civil liberties on a massive scale. The scope of the violations integral to the assault on people’s rights is now being rapidly extended into the imposition of government-sanctioned vaccine mandates. Working people are now being put squarely in the line of fire. They are facing ultimatums from employers that they will lose their jobs if they do not accept the injection into their persons of dangerous medical products.
In the UK, EU and UK, COVID jabs are already confirmed to have injured many millions and, at the very least, to have killed tens of thousands. The real numbers are probably much larger. Studies have pointed to the likelihood that the scale of deaths and disabilities inflicted by the COVID clot shots are far in excess of the officially-reported figures. See this.
The vaccine mandates are targeting legions of blue-collar tradespersons, service providers, and white collar professionals including professors, doctors, and government administrators.
If enforced, vaccine mandates will form the basis of broader systems of vaccine passports meant to govern the movements, interactions, certifications as well as the entry of people into all manner of establishments, domestically and internationally. If realized, this new mechanism would bring about a fundamental remaking of our societies along decidedly authoritarian lines.
Following in the wake of the enormous damage done by the reckless and nonsensical lockdowns, governments have made themselves pushers of dangerous drugs in the form of COVID jabs known to do way more harm than good. See this.
To employ a sports metaphor, let’s assume that the imposition of masking, lockdowns, and social distancing represents a football field of lost territory for the exercise of our fundamental freedoms. The enforcement of vaccine mandates, which make continued employment of workers contingent upon their receiving COVID jabs, expands the scale of the theft of our rights and freedoms by a huge order of magnitude. Imagine losing the equivalent of say about 100 more football fields of exerciseable liberty to the predators seeking to diminish and subordinate us.
Authorities are seeking to impose vaccine mandates on both public sector and private sector workers. Ultimately, however, it is governments that are empowering the leadership of the corporate world to engage in the imposition of injections as a major condition of employment. The same governments that can empower vaccine mandates also retain the imperative to outlaw the practice of forcing workers to take unwanted jabs in order to retain employment.
The forcing of vaccines on people who depend on jobs for their livelihoods amounts to an assault on individual rights unlike anything we have seen to date. It sets many precedents that change the legal framework for all sorts of human relations inside and outside the workplace.
Moreover the adoption of vaccine mandates implies much more than agreeing to take the current set of COVID jabs. Rather it marks the beginning of an agreement to accept cradle-to-grave programs of regular vaccines. The cumulative effect of these programs will basically be to annihilate the natural immunity of those receiving the shots. Their inherited immunity will be replaced by artificial immunity, engineered to generate rich streams of profit that will flow to the indemnified vaccine manufacturers.
The consequences of all this are enormous. For example, what comes next if it is established that governments and corporations have a legitimate legal imperative to coerce people to accept the injection of toxic substances into their bloodstreams? How could it be that activities once seen as basic rights of citizenship could become privileges reserved for those who subordinate themselves to rule of Big Pharma and its vassal states?
If governments and corporations together with their domination of a complicit media can claim the protections of law to force killer vaccines on us, then what else can’t they do? Some of the most oppressive forces in society will have gained vast new powers to invade our most personal space of all, our very bodies. Hence it is that the successful imposition of vaccine mandates would obliterate the legal and political ground supporting many different categories of individual rights.
The billionaires and their banker friends currently pulling the strings of this manufactured viral crisis are being presented with many green lights to advance a wide array of their nefarious schemes to tighten their control over humanity. The attacks on our social fabric include efforts to eliminate the middle class, to reduce the size of the human population and to put the survivors of the murderous culling into a perpetual state of dispossessed servitude.
There is something diabolical about any plan to create a new set of criteria and procedures that cut masses of workers and their dependents off from paychecks and the necessities they buy. In a capitalist society this form of economic punishment has dire consequences. This threat, therefore, ranks near the top level of coercive measures being ushered into place as we enter the autumn of 2021.
The previous nine months have been a time of unprecedented vaccination hucksterism. Deceptive and glitzy advertising campaigns were mounted to cajole citizens into taking the COVID jabs voluntarily in spite of the reality that the process was a medical experiment lacking full regulatory approval. To the ad campaigns were added many gimmicky incentives such as free beers, joints, lap dances, lottery tickets, and money.
Now the stick is replacing the carrot. People are being told that only by taking the vaccine can they retain jobs and participate in society. The forms of prohibited activity for the so-called unvaccinated might include bans on travel, education, as well as the obtaining of various forms of licenses and certification. The prohibited realm reserved solely for the vaccinated might include various forms of sporting, cultural, dining, and recreational events and facilities.
The propaganda machine is now being primed up to prepare the majority population for this outcome. The minds of the vaccinated are being poisoned to hate the “unvaccinated, or, worse yet, the “anti-vaxxers.” The alleged crime of COVID jab resisters is their failure to conduct themselves in a socially responsible fashion. On the basis of this form of psychological warfare, conditions are being created to justify the creation of a new class of lepers and untouchables. The old institution of South African apartheid and the segregationist Jim Crowe laws in the American South are being dusted off and prepared for a new kind of outcast.
Workers and Their Unions Face Off in the Manufactured COVID Crisis
New forms of panic are reverberating through society as people come to the realization that the manufactured COVID crisis is taking on many new and menacing dimensions. Workers are being put in a vice of opposing pressures. Many of them are being instructed that they have to make a choice between being stabbed with potentially lethal and injurious clot shots or they must accept the termination of their jobs and livelihoods.
This awakening of people to heretofore hidden realities is putting a sudden spotlight on the often-compromised leadership of labour unions. In Canada the crisis is also drawing attention to the moribund state of social democracy. Canada’s New Democratic Party has betrayed its founding principles in its drift towards the fascistic tendencies of Blairite neoliberalism.
A former coal miner, Richard Trumka was until recently the leader of the 12 million member strong AFL-CIO, the largest association of organized workers in North America. In June Trumka declared,
For working people getting vaccinated for COVID-19 is a matter of life and death. The battle against Covid-19 cannot be won without working people. And now we have the best possible tool to protect ourselves, to protect our loved ones, and to protect everyone we proudly and successfully serve. And that’s the COVID-19 vaccines. The vaccines are safe and very effective, totally free and widely available……When we get the shot together we show our solidarity. So let’s roll up our sleeves. Let’s get vaccinated. And then let’s get back to healing and rebuilding this country.
A month after he made this video, Trumka died of a heart attack that may have resulted from blood clots engendered by the COVID 19 injections.
There are, of course, many individual workers who disagree with the position of their union leaders on vaccine mandates and related matters. A popular position among union members is that there should be freedom of choice rather than coercion applied in the administration of COVID jabs.
The workers who tend to be most wary of the health effects of the controversial vaccines include police, firefighters, EMS workers and some nurses. Those who are averse to taking COVID shots are starting to join together with a larger array of dissidents who object to vaccine mandates. Many of those who have been vaccinated do not extend their personal choices to granting permission to impose mandatory vaccines.
In Canada the emerging dissident movement of employed people against mandatory injections goes by the name, Frontline Workers for Freedom. Many of those police, firefighters, and EMS workers publicly demonstrating their commitment to freedom of choice do not have the backing of their unions.
While the big nurses’ unions tend to go along with the other big unions, including the teachers’ unions, the nursing profession is full of internal division and even disgust in some circles. The disgust is derived from the ineptitude shown by some health authorities in their handling of the manufactured COVID crisis. A significant nexus for the dissenting nurses is Canadian Frontline Nurses. See this.
The widespread sense among many nurses is that they are being betrayed and demeaned by their employers. The consequential despair of many nurses is causing them to quit in droves. Now looming on the immediate horizon is a further large-scale removal of the remaining nurses if officials carry out their threats to enforce mandatory vaccines.
Much of the growing disarray in health care facilities is being caused by the growing exodus of health care workers combined with the widespread misrepresentation of those who head to hospitals for vaccine injuries. Hospitals often have many available beds but lack sufficient health care workers to fully service the available facilities. Surgeries are often postponed with the false message that everything can be blamed on the irresponsible behavior of the so-called “unvaccinated.”
Almost every professional group and association has been thrown into a chaotic state by the manufactured COVID crisis. Teachers are in crisis. Honest journalists are rebelling against the imposed regime of dishonesty in reporting. Judges and prosecutors are starting to see that all agencies of law enforcement are losing credibility in the eyes of the public. The list goes on and on.
One cannot help wondering if the chaotic breakdown underway isn’t being instigated from above as part of a plan to ruin public services, but especially in the fields of health care and education. Might this ruination be a prelude to the thoroughgoing privatization of anything that remains of government-supported social services? Might the privatization of even fire fighting agencies be on the table?
The unions of university professors have by and large been in lockstep with the position of the AFL-CIO leadership. As an example, let’s consider the position of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, CAUT. CAUT, it seems, is acting pretty much on the basis of the assumption that governments and the mainstream media are acting in good faith to protect the health of the general public.
As a coalition of all the university faculty associations in Canada, CAUT has adopted a very superficial understanding of the manufactured COVID crisis. David Robinson, CAUT’s Executive Director, has stated,
The best available science tells us that vaccines are effective in reducing transmission and the severity of infection, that very high vaccination rates are required to achieve herd immunity, and that the growing community threat from the Delta variant of the virus is best managed by widespread vaccination.
On the shakey basis of these glib assumptions, CAUT officials seem prepared to accept the inherently coercive nature of vaccine mandates. Robinson tries to tiptoe around this issue by stipulating that vaccine mandates are acceptable in universities so long as “human rights accommodations are followed.”
When addressing the human rights of those who quite reasonably refuse to accept COVID jabs, CAUT suggests that “the unvaccinated can be accommodated through masking, physical distancing, or working or studying from home” as long as “all legal privacy issues are fully respected.”
CAUT seems to be playing into the hands of those that envisage some sort of leper colonies for the unvaccinated. No real room is being left for those who seek to express their human rights, safe from the incursions of injections coercively enforced on entire groups of people without their informed consent. Those who are properly informed generally opt against taking part in the huge medical experiment currently running contrary to the legal requirements of the Nuremberg Code. See this.
As it presently stands, therefore, a key requirement to attend many universities is to take the COVID jabs. By doing so, students, faculty members and staff show a willingness to put aside their own critical thought as well as the conclusions they derive from their own independent research. In other words, they must agree to go along with a program of administrative dictate no matter how flawed the reasoning coming from power-serving administrators.
CAUT’s position on vaccine policy is quite consistent with the waning influence and integrity of this ossified organization in decline. CAUT’s compromised position on mandatory vaccines is consistent with its inadequate protection of academic freedom. The responsibility to protect academic freedom constitutes the main reason for CAUT’s existence in the first place. CAUT is duty bound to safeguard academic freedom as its highest priority.
From my own work experience in collaborating with CAUT officials, I can say the organization gives lip service to the goal of protecting academic freedom but it is unwilling to act assertively in controversial cases. CAUT’s failure to do its job is perhaps reflected in the dearth of assertive faculty members at Canadian universities willing to voice controversial positions on the real character of the manufactured COVID crisis
Trade Unions and Prosperity Now and in the Past
What is to be made of the concerted push to institute vaccine mandates, vaccine passports and medical apartheid within the framework of burgeoning surveillance states? This push is creating the basis for much future controversy and division within the realm of trade unionism and labour relations. This development is not surprising. Labour relations have been an area of great contestation throughout major conflicts of many different kinds.
A few snapshots from history might present a small panorama of the historical background of trade unionism as it applies to the current situation. I think of the Ford Motor Company factories in the Detroit area in the 1930s when Henry Ford hired anti-Soviet Ukrainian union busters to keep out organized labour. I think of the decades following World War II when Roosevelt’s New Deal was applied in a way that caused increased wealth and benefits to flow towards unionized workers. Many of them were able to enter the middle class on the basis of good factory jobs.
I think of the last three decades when North American plutocrats undermined trade unionism on this continent by transferring whole industrial complexes to China. The other side of the massive growth in manufacturing in China resulted in a form of deindustrialization throughout North America. Rust belts replaced thriving manufacturing centers.
Millions of jobs were thus ceded away. Domestic workers were ruthlessly deplatformed from well-paid positions leaving whole communities as well as the main elements of the trade union movement seriously crippled. Millions of victims of the process suffered many severe consequences becoming the so-called Deplorables inclined to vote for Donald Trump.
This history has set the framework of the present crisis that exists in large measure because of the propensity of many folks who see themselves as Left Progressives to accept the manufactured COVID crisis at face value. For this constituency, the proclaimed crusade to fight and destroy COVID represents a means of empowering government authorities to act on behalf of what they wrongly assume is the collective good.
In recent times most of the Left is especially guilty of betraying many of its core principles as it sides with Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Media and big corporate networks of many kinds. Those who operate these enterprises from the towering heights of socialism for the very rich have many of their own agendas. The agendas include demolishing the last remnants of the welfare state.
As Todd Gitlin predicted in 1996 in the Twilight of Common Dreams, the Left began to falter when it abandoned its heritage of emphasis on big universal themes like the oppressive orientation of the ruling class towards the working class. In the place of this inclusive approach, the Left became a balkanized realm obsessed with diversity and the splintered perspectives emanating from massive engagements with identity politics. Little by little the conditions evolved to the point that characterizations of any group could only come from members of that group.
Now we are facing an onslaught of booster shots, vaccine mandates and vaccine passports. If these massive initiatives are allowed to go forward, what comes next? Will those who seek to escape the penetration of coercively-injected COVID stabs subsequently find themselves in internment camps for their re-education?
When will those woke individuals who see themselves as Left Progressives actually wake up to what is going on? What would it take for them to say, enough is enough? Can the trade union movement in its diminished state reinvent itself? Can it disentangle itself from the machinations of a ruling class intent on expressing its conquistadorial impulses by ruthlessly exploiting its own manufacturing of the COVID crisis?
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Dr. Hall is editor in chief of the American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
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Washington has elected to withdraw its air defense systems from Saudi Arabia.
This leaves the Kingdom out to dry in a moment when Ansar Allah (the Houthis) are ramping up their cross-border attacks by way of drones and missiles.
The Prince Sultan Air Base, a key Saudi-led coalition facility, used to house a high-altitude air defense unit (THAAD) and a missile defense system in addition to Patriot missile batteries.
Today, the pads remain empty, with the Pentagon admitting that “certain assets” were removed. In desperation, Saudi Arabia has even accepted a Patriot anti-aircraft missile battery and a deployment of 120 soldiers to work on the system.
Meanwhile, against this worrisome backdrop from Riyadh, Iran is gradually increasing its arsenal of locally produced unmanned aerial vehicles, which it transfers to its allies in the region.
The removal of the US defense systems is an encouraging sign for Iran. As a result, the supply of attack drones, which are essentially copies of US-made RQ-170 Sentinel to the Houthis is likely to continue and even increase.
This is further substantiated by a statement by the UN Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg, who assumed the post in August, after the previous envoy Peter Griffiths failed entirely.
On September 10th, Grundberg admitted that Yemen is “stuck in a state of war for an indefinite period”, and it will not be easy to resume negotiations on ending the more than six-year conflict.
On its part, the United States simply said that it would restore aid to the regions under Houthi control, and their terrorist designation would be lifted.
Riyadh is entirely right to feel left out in the open, as not only is Washington removing security assets from the Kingdom, but it is even indirectly supporting the Houthis by providing aid.
What could potentially sway the war further into Ansar Allah’s favor is the battle for Marib city. It is the last major urban center controlled by Yemen’s puppet government, and the area is home to most of the country’s oil and gas reserves.
The expectation is that no negotiations will take place until the Houthis take Marib, as it would be quite a significant leverage. It is an odd goal, as Marib houses nearly 4 million refugees, meaning an incredible number of mouths to feed, while Saudi-backed puppet government is currently providing some form of care for them.
It is essentially another way of funneling resources from Riyadh, in addition to targeting and destroying its military equipment and facilities.
Most recently, Saudi Arabia lost a Chengdu Wing Loong II spy drone, shortly after it lost control over a large area south of Marib city.
Meanwhile, on the southern Taiz front, the Houthis have regained control over the town of al-Kadhah, Maghdar and Ruwai mountains areas, following the withdrawal of Saudi-backed forces due to lack of financial support from the international coalition.
The fight is gaining momentum, and Saudi Arabia, yet again, shows that it is incapable of adequately participating in the chaos.
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On September 9, President Biden announced he would circumvent the democratic process, ordering the Secretary of the Department of Labor to require employers with over 100 workers to “ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week.”
This was essential, as Biden said, “to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated workers.”
As we have explained, the Secretary of Labor will issue these regulations through OSHA by way of an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS). The ETS would allow the Secretary of Labor to issue the vaccine mandate without the normal administrative rulemaking requirements (like notice and public comment periods).
While the Biden Administration tells the public that there’s no time to waste in issuing the mandate, the truth is that OSHA/Labor failed to argue the necessity of a vaccine mandate since the vaccines have been available – a time period approaching one year. Moreover, the Biden Department of Labor is secretly meeting with the US Chamber of Commerce and business lobbyists to gather support for the mandate. As Bloomberg Law reports:
Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda held a virtual meeting with Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s chief policy officer, and other business lobbyists. The Chamber, the largest business lobbying group in the U.S., has yet to publicly declare a position on the coming Occupational Safety and Health Administration emergency rulemaking.
It was one of at least three briefings the department held Friday for labor union leaders and employer associations—constituencies the White House hopes to forge partnerships with to lift the vaccination rate nationwide. Information from the calls was disclosed to Bloomberg Law by eight sources who took part, all of whom requested anonymity because they didn’t have approval to speak publicly.
Why the Vaccine Mandate is Unconstitutional
As you can imagine, the constitutionality of the vaccine mandate will be litigated as soon as OSHA issues the rules. The media is running interference, telling the public that challenges to the mandate are “unlikely to succeed.”
Do not believe them.
The legality of the vaccine mandate will be assessed under what is called the major rules doctrine (also known as the major questions doctrine). Under this doctrine, the courts look to (1) whether the agency action is a major rule; and (2) whether Congress has clearly authorized the agency action.
As Justice Scalia stated in 2014, “We expect congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’”
From here we turn to the first question of the major rules doctrine: there is zero doubt that it is a major rule. It would affect the healthcare decisions – and implicate the personal autonomy – of “some 80 million private sector workers.” It is an action never before taken by OSHA, the Department of Labor, and any other federal agency. It would affect the entire US economy.
In support of my position, we have seen lesser invasive agency rules be determined to be major rules. For example, “rate-regulations” of telephone companies has been held to be a major rule. MCI Telecommunications Corp. v. American Telephone & Telegraph Co., 512 U.S. 218 (1994).
From there we get to the second question: whether Congress has clearly authorized the Department of Labor/OSHA to mandate vaccines. The answer is no.
If Congress clearly authorized (not just authorized, but clearly authorized) Labor/OSHA to mandate vaccines, then we would have seen such authority in the OSH Act of 1970. Look for yourself – the language isn’t there. Instead, there are general grants of authority to “set mandatory occupational safety and health standards.”
Looking to the history of OSHA, this authority has been understood to regulate employer actions to provide a safe workplace (Benzene limits) or employee actions at work (operation of heavy equipment). The OSH Act has never been understood historically to include mandatory vaccinations. This is significant because the Supreme Court recently looked to agency history to determine the CDC lacked the authority to issue its latest eviction mandate.
For an example of “clear authority” relating to public health, look to the authority Congress gave HHS to take action in case of “significant outbreaks of infectious diseases.” Going further, to allow the mandate would be to allow OSHA to require vaccination as a condition of employment. The OSH Act contains no such language or authority.
So there we have it. This is a “major rule” and Congress has not “clearly authorized” Labor/OSHA to issue a vaccine mandate. It is an unlawful – and unconstitutional – seizure of authority by the Executive. Expect further challenges on whether the ETS itself (and the finding of “grave danger”) is legal.
We also observe that we by no means concede Congressional authority to mandate vaccines. (In other words, Congress could not give OSHA/Labor this authority because Congress has no such authority to give.) You may have seen some pundits argue that the 1905 case of Jacobsen v. Massachusetts gives this authority. These arguments are misplaced, as that was the Supreme Court over 100 years ago considering state, and not federal, authority.
One Final Point – Why Justice Kavanaugh Matters
Image on the right is from The National Review
In 2017, when Justice Kavanaugh was sitting on the DC Circuit, he wrote a dissent from a denial of rehearing en banc, in which he thoroughly summarized the major rules doctrine. He argued that the FCC’s net neutrality rule was unlawful, in that it was a “major rule” that was not clearly authorized by Congress.
Kavanaugh’s 2017 dissent was one of the most (or perhaps the most) comprehensive discussions of the major rules doctrine ever written in the DC Circuit. Kavanaugh went through a number of Supreme Court cases in support of his position and argued the doctrine essential to uphold the separation of powers. To this author, it reveals Kavanaugh values this doctrine and believes it should be applied with vigor.
We see an example of this in Justice Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion in the original application to vacate the stay of the CDC eviction moratorium (June 29, 2021), where Kavanaugh wrote “clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation) would be necessary for the CDC to extend the moratorium.”
Whether Kavanaugh has the courage to apply his convictions is another matter.
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The corporate media narrative that unvaccinated people are filling up the hospitals and dying from COVID is quickly falling apart, perhaps faster than they even expected.
WXYZ TV Channel 7 in Detroit asked their viewers on their Facebook Page last Friday to direct message them if they lost a loved one due to COVID-19 if they refused to get one of the COVID-19 vaccines.
This is a clear indication that they are getting desperate to find these stories, and are having a difficult time finding them.
I don’t know if they got any such stories through direct messaging, but the post on their Facebook Page, as of the time of publication today, had received over 182,000 comments, and they seem to be all comments of those who have lost loved ones after receiving a COVID shot, and comments asking them why they are not covering that story.
I paged through many dozens of the comments, and did not see a single one stating that they lost someone to COVID after refusing a COVID-19 shot.
People who have been silenced and censored on Facebook and other Big Tech platforms took advantage of the opportunity to share their stories instead. It is amazing that Facebook left these up, but after so many had commented, it would probably have been an even bigger story if they had taken down the post and comments.
I wonder what WXYZ will do now? Will they do what most corporate media companies do, fueled by almost unlimited resources from their billionaire Wall Street owners who are almost all connected to the pharmaceutical industry, and just go out and hire actors instead to do the story and make them up?
Here are a few screen shots of the comments that are representative of what people are posting, in case they do take this down.
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Chinese hardliners just had their stance justified by the erratic, verging on unhinged, behavior in the United States and by its military.
First the storming of the capitol on Jan 6. Seen from Beijing it looked like a failed coup, a botched but serious attempt to upend US politics. Now, a book by journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa claims US General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called General Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army not once but twice.
First on October 30, 2020, just four days before the election. The second call took place on January 8, two days after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Milley sought to assure Li that the United States was stable and not going to attack.
However, he said, if there were to be an attack, he would alert his counterpart ahead of time. Schizophrenic? This places Li in an impossible position. How does he tell his boss, Xi Jinping? He would have to inform the Chinese president that a US general had just said that they won’t attack with nuclear weapons but if they do they will be notified. Can you trust him to let you know? Is it a veiled threat? At the very least you would have to put your forces on alert.
Imagine this in reverse. If a Chinese general had called his US counterpart. The US would say that China is out of control. The response on the Capitol would be apoplectic. Talk shows would be asking viewers if the US should have launched a pre-emptive strike.
Thus ushers in the age of Aukus. This is not a version of Covid. Australia the UK and US have announced a security pact to share advanced defense technologies.
The partnership will enable Australia to build nuclear-powered submarines for the first time.
The pact will also cover artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and cyber space. At least that’s the official version. In reality it is targeting Beijing where it is viewed as a fig leaf to cover the US withdrawing from the Asia-Pacific region. A new military alliance. Just for argument’s sake let’s suppose the PLA Navy was in a stand-off with a UK or Australian naval vessel. Would the US protect its allies or ring Beijing?
US President Joe Biden has even been snubbed by Xi. There was a time, until quite recently, when a summit with a US president was seen as a huge propaganda victory for China. Not any longer. Biden suggested the possibility of a meeting with Xi during a phone call on September 10, but the Chinese president rejected it. Xi hasn’t left China for more than 600 days, ostensibly because of Covid. But the reasons he didn’t want to meet Biden are political rather than health-related; quite simply, nothing to be gained domestically from it.
The Nixon-Mao meetings of the early 1970s introduced a period of mutual-interest politics anchored by greater engagement. For China it was a path to modernization and growth. For the US the meetings offered the prospect of a huge market and the end of a threat of a Cold-War scenario.
This relationship was not derailed by the bloodshed on and near Tiananmen Square in 1989 or China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 nor its trade surpluses with the US. It survived the US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and occasional White House decision to sell arms to Taiwan or meet with the Dalai Lama. Nor did clashes over censorship and human rights, tapering off in later years, cause too much upheaval. Nixon was the first of 10 US presidents who have managed China relations. Xi is the third Chinese leader since the reforming Deng Xiaoping.
China under Xi is less accommodating, less willing to engage, and less sure of the value of US relations. Its economic success has fuelled a nationalism that the West has never had to deal with before. After all, despite the apparent success of closer ties, a US general has nonetheless suggested that his country could attack China. This will have profound implications.
Trade ties have actually decoupled from political tensions. Official Chinese data show that bilateral trade between the two countries has seen a surge in 2021. Ironically, this bodes ill for future ties. It used to be claimed that closer commercial ties would lead to greater political engagement. This is clearly not the case. China has immense problems, including a slowing economy, pollution and corruption. But despite this, Xi feels China’s time has come. He may even tell Li to put all calls from Washington on hold.
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Geopolitical analyst Tom Clifford reporting from Beijing.
September 16th, 2021 by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
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“This is not about freedom or personal choice.” — President Joseph R. Biden, Sept. 9, 2021
It was scandalous and infuriating to hear President Joseph R. Biden argue last week that his so-called vaccine mandates somehow have nothing to do with freedom or personal choice. In saying that, he has rejected our history, our values and the Constitution he swore to uphold.
He made his ignorant statement while outlining his plan to have the Department of Labor issue emergency regulations requiring every employer in America of 100 or more persons to compel all its employees to receive a vaccine against COVID-19, or the employer will be fined.
He claims the authority to issue these orders under the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act, or OSHA. Though it has been around for 51 years, OSHA is profoundly unconstitutional, as it purports to authorize federal bureaucrats to regulate private workplace property unavailable to the public.
Congress enacted this legislation relying on its Commerce Clause power in the Constitution. But the Commerce Clause — according to James Madison, who wrote it — only empowers Congress to keep commerce regular; it does not empower Congress to regulate the conditions of production of goods and services intended for commerce.
However, notwithstanding the plain language of the Commerce Clause — “Congress shall have power … to regulate Commerce … among the several States” — the Supreme Court, since the era of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, has given Congress a blank check authorizing it to regulate anything that affects commerce. Congress has used this clause to justify its vast expansions of federal power more than it has used any other clause in the Constitution.
Nevertheless, there is no authority for federal workplace regulation in the Constitution, as it was reserved to the states by the 10th Amendment. That amendment declares that the states kept for themselves that which they did not delegate to the feds.
OSHA has regulated everything from the number of legs on a swivel chair to the brightness of lightbulbs to the number of lobsters that may commercially be drawn from the sea. And the states have supinely accepted those regulations.
It is no surprise that the president, wanting to tell people how to live, would look to OSHA to accomplish his goals. Unfortunately for Biden, the Supreme Court has ruled in Roe v. Wade and elsewhere that personal medical privacy and — with respect to declining medications — absolute bodily autonomy trump governmental interests.
Of course, Biden has ignorantly praised Roe, not for its protection of the inviolability of the human body, but for its wretched authorization of abortion. Roe’s failure to recognize fetal personhood is its catastrophic flaw.
Yet, even a stopped clock is correct twice a day. And on this point — you, not the government, control your body — Roe is correct. Professor Murray N. Rothbard has demonstrated conclusively that we each own our bodies. It follows from this that we each can determine what goes into our bodies.
And the Ninth Amendment underscores that we have many personal rights not enumerated in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights and the government is required to respect them. After the right to live, ownership and control of your own body are foremost among those unenumerated rights.
The president, like all of us, is subject to the laws of nature and is obliged to recognize the natural law. It posits that our rights come from our humanity, and not from the government. It was with the natural law in mind that Madison authored the Ninth Amendment and its protection of unenumerated rights.
If self-ownership is not among those rights, then nothing is. If the government owns our bodies, or somehow can trump our personal ownership of them, then we have no rights.
Every state permits a sick person to reject medication. Biden not only rejects that right, but he rejects the right of healthy persons to decline an experimental vaccine.
What’s going on here?
Freedom in America has been milked dry by Leviathan since the Woodrow Wilson years. Leviathan is a continually growing government that recognizes no limitations on its own power. OSHA is but one of hundreds of examples of the do-gooder, nanny-state federal government that has assumed for itself — from nowhere but our complacency — the power to tell us how to live.
Government is essentially the negation of liberty. Liberty is the default position because we are born with our rights. Some liberty should be negated, like the liberty to harm another’s person and property. It should be negated from all — including the government. Government is a thief in the night when it takes — rather than protects — liberty or property.
Does the government work for us, or do we work for the government?
Such a question would have been laughable 100 years ago. But today, the government treats us as if we work for it because we have permitted it to do so. We supinely let the federal government right any wrong, regulate any behavior, tax any event, start any war, kill any foe, seize any property and crush any liberty as if our rights came from it, and as if the Constitution had no meaning or authority.
This is the same government that can’t deliver the mail, fill potholes, stop robocalls, spend within its means, abide by the laws that it has written or follow the Constitution — and Biden wants it to force vaccinate us!
All modern presidents have misunderstood their obligations under the Constitution. From Wilson to Biden, they have argued that their first job is to keep us safe. That obligation is self-assumed. Their first job under the Constitution is to keep us free. Even if the government keeps us safe but unfree, we have the duty to alter or abolish it. The alternative is the twilight of freedom and the coming age of voluntary servitude.
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A war is coming. I have heard it argued that this war must be avoided; that it is “exactly what the establishment wants.” I disagree. I think globalists like those at the World Economic Forum certainly want enough chaos to provide cover for the implementation of their global “Reset” agenda, but they don’t want a full blown rebellion. They only want events in which the outcome is controllable or predictable – They do not want a massive organized resistance that might surprise them.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter because the war is already at our doorstep. A person has two choices: Fight or be enslaved. There is no third option. There is no walking away. There is no hiding from it and there is no passive solution to it.
Joe Biden’s recent declaration of a federal level nationwide vaccine mandate has all but ensured that conflict is inevitable. Why? Because it is the first major step towards a two-tier society in which the unvaxxed are cut out of the economy. The next step? Forced vaccinations under threat of fines and imprisonment, the threat of confiscation of one’s children, or vaccination at the barrel of a gun. Needless to say, this was not at all surprising to me. In December of last year I published an article titled ‘If You Thought 2020 Was Bad, Watch What Happens In 2021’, stating that:
“There will then be a major push to require medical passports proving a person is not infected to enter into any public place. This means submission to 24/7 contact tracing or getting a new vaccine whenever ordered to. Basically, your life will be under the total control of state or federal governments if you want to have any semblance of returning to your normal life…..New mutations of COVID-19 will be conveniently found every year from now on, meaning the public will have to get new vaccinations constantly, and medical tyranny will never go away unless people take an aggressive stand.”
I have also mentioned often in the past that Biden WOULD institute federal level vaccines mandates and possibly even Level 4 lockdowns. We are not to the point yet of lockdowns by executive order, but the Biden Administration is trying to dive headlong into the control agenda with an executive order stating that all businesses in the US with 100 employees or more must require those employees to provide proof of vaccination or demand employees show a negative covid test weekly (which will be impossible for most people). In other words, the Orwellian rise of vaccine passports has officially begun in the US.
Not only was Biden’s announcement an utter violation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it was also condescending and vitriolic towards Americans who refuse to become guinea pigs for the experimental and untested vaccines. Biden suggested that the establishment “Has been patient, but their patience is wearing thin.”
I have to say, Biden is in for a shock if he thinks we care.
I can’t cover every single lie and logical fallacy in Biden’s speech because that is not the purpose of this article. I can only once again point out some very basic logical conclusions and pieces of scientific evidence which debunk most of Biden’s nonsensical blather. Since he seems to be so interested in why we are “hesitant”, let’s go through this ONE MORE TIME, shall we…
1) The median death rate of covid according to almost every single medical study and every official government tally remains at 0.26% of the infected. Given that around 40% of all covid deaths happen among people in nursing homes with preexisting conditions, it is likely that the actual death rate is much lower. But let’s just say that it is in fact 0.26% – Why is there any need to impose draconian medical controls over a virus that 99.7% of people will easily survive? Why not create a support fund for the 0.26% of people that are truly at risk so they can stay home while the rest of us get on with regular life?
2) Throughout the course of the pandemic in the US the largest percentage of hospital ICU beds that have been occupied by covid patients is 17%. That is the PEAK of covid in the ICUs. For the past few months the percentage has been closer to an average of 8% or less. This is according to the government’s own stats, which the CDC now buries instead of posting openly for easy viewing by the public. So, when the corporate media or Biden claims that the ICUs are “overwhelmed” by covid patients, this is a lie
A new nationwide study of electronic hospital records on covid patients also shows nearly half of covid “hospitalizations” are actually people that are asymptomatic, not deathly sick people as the media often portrays.
3) The experimental mRNA covid vaccines have NO long term testing to prove their safety over the long term. At least none that has ever been released to the public. The average vaccine is tested for 10-15 years before it is approved and released for use in humans. The covid vaccines were rolled out in mere months. Again, there is NO PROOF whatsoever that the covid vaccines are safe in the long term, and there are already a number of examples of lack of safety in the short term. Why would we trust an experimental protein spike vax that has nowhere near the same testing history as the majority of other normal vaccines?
4) Multiple studies in nations with high rates of vaccination, including a recent study from Israel, prove that there is no such thing as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” In fact, 60% of infection cases in Israel are actually fully vaccinated people. Furthermore, Israel has found that vaccinated people are 13-27 times more likely to get infected than people with natural immunity, and they are 8 times more likely to end up in ICU.
These findings reinforce data released a month ago out of Massachusetts, where 5100 covid infections were fully vaccinated people and 80 of them died. In other words, the vaccines don’t work so great, especially when compared to natural immunity.
5) Data from the Public Health England and the NHS shows that the vaccinated and unvaccinated have almost identical rate of infectiousness. In other words, a vaccinated person is almost as likely to give you covid as an unvaxxed person.
Now, let’s present some rational questions in the face of this irrational covid circus of fear:
If the experimental vaccines actually work, then how are unvaccinated people a threat to vaccinated people and why should unvaccinated people be forced to take the jab?
If the vaccines don’t work, then, again, why should ANYONE be forced to take an untested and unreliable vax?
Slow-Joe argues that the vaccinations are “safe and effective” against covid, but only seconds later in the same breath he claims that “unvaxxed people are a threat to vaccinated people.” He promotes the lie that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, then says the vaccinated are in danger. Even a child could pick up on the inherent contradictions in Biden’s claims.
As always, the issue of “mutations” is brought up in defense of 100% vaccination campaigns. But if “mutations” are the concern, then why isn’t the government addressing the fact that a vaccinated population is just as likely if not more likely to create mutant variants of a virus when compared to unvaccinated people? Why are the unvaxxed being singled out as the supposed menace to society?
The biggest question is – Why should anyone submit to covid mandates at all? Mandates are not laws, they are color of law restrictions without legal merit. The bottom line? Unconstitutional orders are not to be followed. This leads us to the state and local strategies for fighting back against the federal passport mandates. Let’s get into it:
Simply Ignore The Mandates And Carry On With Life As Normal
How does Biden plan to enforce these mandates on businesses? If they refuse to go along to get along, what can he do about it? Who would he send to threaten or punish these businesses? Who would be dumb enough to follow that order? Does he plan to send the IRS, the FBI, the Health Department? Someone has to do it, right? And what happens when a business is threatened and a crowd of conservatives in the community come to its defense? What happens when local and state law enforcement get in the way of federal agencies? What is Biden going to do about that? Answer – Nothing, at least not anything direct.
The Indirect Method Works Both Ways
If Biden is confronted with solid resistance to the passports in communities and states, there is really only one path he has left, which is indirect pressure through economic penalties. Biden WILL attempt to force states to comply by cutting of federal funds and tax dollars. This idea might terrify some people because there is a percentage of the population in every state that relies on federal EBT and other programs for their survival. However, the federal government can be punished in the same way just as easily by the states. Let me explain…
Confiscate Federal Lands And Resources
Any state that is cut off from its rightful share of tax dollars can easily claim domain over federal lands and the resources on them. It is the EPA restrictions on these lands that have been unfairly used to kill numerous industries across the country. With proper management, these resources can be used to revitalize state economies and offset any federal funds lost.
Offer Businesses Federal Tax Exemptions If They Relocate
Red states can also punish the federal government by stopping IRS tax collections within their borders and turning the tables on Biden. Numerous businesses would be itching to escape Biden’s high tax rates and would bring jobs and wealth into red states, leaving the conformist blue states in the dust.
Boot Federal Agencies Out Of The State Or County
Local law enforcement is refusing to enforce mandates in many places, which is a good start, but eventually sheriffs and communities may have to remove federal presence entirely in order to stop violations if civil liberties.
Offer Safe Havens For Military Personnel That Go AWOL To Avoid Forced Vaccination
A large percentage of soldiers say they will not comply with federal vax requirements and this is completely understandable given the evidence I just presented above. It would be to the benefit of red states to offer protection for soldiers that leave the military based on the principle of health autonomy. Perhaps they could even help in forming state militias…
Reduce Restrictions On Medical Treatment Facilities – Start Vax Free Clinics
30% to 40% of medical professional depending on the state say they will not take the experimental vax, and they are willing to lose their jobs in the process. Why not get these people with valuable medical skills to come to red states and counties and let them set up clinics outside of suffocating federal regulations? This may even reduce the prices on medical care in many cases.
Form Trade Relationships With Other Free States
Conservatives and constitutionalists need to organize and unify, and the best way to do this is to start with trade. It is likely that Biden will attempt to interfere with imports and the supply chain when it comes to red states, so they will need to stick together economically in order to prevent disruptions to the availability of goods. We need to rethink how states interact with each other and build more independent production and trade instead of relying on overseas suppliers. We will also need commodity backed banks with commodity backed currencies, because the buying power of the US dollar isn’t going to last much longer anyway.
Unify For Defense
If Biden and the globalists continue to push for medical tyranny in states and counties that do not want it, there will eventually be calls for secession. There will also be attempts by blue states to restrict the travel of people from red states using covid passport checkpoints. We all know this is coming. All conservative counties should be organizing localized security through public militias, and state governments should be thinking along these lines as well. If there’s one thing authoritarians HATE more than anything else it is suffering the existence of free neighbors. They will try to stop us from being free, and we must be ready to answer their violence with our own.
Finally, I would like to speak to Joe Biden directly, since Joe was so keen on personally addressing us:
Joe, let me clarify this in the simplest terms possible so that you can grasp it – You are not important. You are not a lawmaker and you are not a ruler, you are an employee of the American people, that is all your are supposed to be. And though you may wish to be a dictator, that’s not going to happen. We will not allow it. I realize that you are a puppet and that your globalist handlers make most of your decisions and write most of your statements for you, so you can pass this message on to them as well: WE WILL NOT COMPLY. It’s not going to happen. Get used to the idea.
We are peaceful people and always have been. Our tolerance of your trespasses thus far is proof of that. But do not mistake our peacefulness as weakness. If you keep coming after us, you will regret it. We will teach you an important lesson in humility; a lesson you and your elitist friends sorely need and will not enjoy. This is a promise.
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It was surely no coincidence, as the Jimmy Carter administration was looking on in horror at “the loss of Iran” in early 1979, that Washington rapidly moved to increase its presence in the Middle East and surrounding regions. A principal area of focus for the Americans was Afghanistan, which shares a 570 mile border with resource rich Iran to the west.
The exit of Iran from US auspices, due to a sustained popular revolt, constituted one of the Cold War’s defining episodes; it was a heavy blow to US supremacy and has influenced American foreign policy ever since.
The Iranian revolution was also “a great, unexpected benefit for the Soviets as the United States lost its primary ally in the Persian gulf area”, writes former CIA boss Robert Gates as “A major US ally in a critical region of the world virtually overnight had become an implacable enemy”. The US-backed Shah monarch, having presided over Iran in often brutal fashion for a quarter of a century, was forced to flee the capital Tehran on 16 January 1979.
It was during this time, “at the beginning of 1979” Gates wrote in his 1996 book ‘From the Shadows’, that Carter’s cabinet “began looking at the possibility of covert assistance to the insurgents opposing the pro-Soviet, Marxist government of President Taraki” in Kabul, Afghanistan (1). US plans to intervene covertly in Afghanistan were, therefore, developing almost a year before the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. For a long time, it was claimed in official circles and the media that US support for the Afghan mujahideen (militant extremists) commenced in 1980, that is following the Russian military intervention, which is far from the truth.
The Carter White House was deeply concerned, that as Moscow was consolidating its relationship with the Soviet-friendly government in Kabul from late 1978, the Kremlin would thereafter develop ties to the new Islamic Republic of Iran. Revolts could then spread east to neighbouring Pakistan, possibly leading to the fall of the Zia-ul-Haq military dictatorship supported by the Americans.
This would result in further weakening of US power while potentially strengthening the Soviet position, and perhaps even preventing or delaying the USSR’s later collapse. Before long, president Carter was describing Soviet actions regarding Afghanistan as “the greatest threat to world peace since World War II”. (2)
Afghanistan’s communist president Nur Muhammad Taraki, a long-time leader of the People’s Democratic Party (PDPA), assumed office in late April 1978. In doing so Taraki’s PDPA had ousted and liquidated the pro-Western strongman, Mohammed Daoud Khan, who was in power since 1973.
The US Embassy in Kabul acknowledged they could find no evidence of Russian involvement behind Taraki’s rise to power (3). As early as 30 April 1978 Harold Saunders, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, stated in a secret memorandum that “we need to take into account the mix of nationalism and Communism in the new leadership [of Afghanistan], and seek to avoid driving the new regime into a closer embrace with the Soviet Union than it might wish”. (4)
Once the 60-year-old Taraki had claimed the presidency, it was within Moscow’s interests to pursue relations with the Marxist government there, as Afghanistan shared a border with the Soviet states of Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
On 5 December 1978, Taraki and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed a 20 year friendship and co-operation treaty in the Kremlin (5). This landmark deal involved mutual economic, military and technical aid, tying the two countries irrevocably together. With Soviet influence growing on Afghan soil, the Washington Post reported on 6 December 1978 that American and British planners are “worried about the impact on troubled Iran to the west, as well as on the other Persian Gulf states whose oil is vital to the West”.
US governments had traditionally paid little attention to Afghanistan, until the late 1970s that is. Now everything was changing. In the spring of 1979, the CIA was surveying Afghanistan as a replacement for its essential TACKSMAN signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection facilities (6), which had been located in Iran. These CIA TACKSMAN sites conducted large-scale intelligence operations through interception of radar, weapons systems, communications systems, etc. By using this advanced technology the CIA was able, for example, to secretly monitor Soviet missile test activity.
Gates, who would be the CIA Director under George H. W. Bush, revealed that, “The senior intelligence community leadership, the SCC [Special Co-ordination Committee], and the Congress spent an extraordinary amount of time and effort in the spring of 1979 figuring out how to replace the TACKSMAN sites” (7). The CIA facilities in Iran were unexpectedly lost forever, with the success of that country’s revolution. On 16 April 1979 the CIA Director, Stansfield Turner, said it would take 5 years to completely restore CIA capabilities. (8)
Veteran intelligence analyst Jeffrey T. Richelson observed that “the most important sites operated by the CIA during the Cold War were located in Iran, and known as TACKSMAN I and TACKSMAN II. The first site, a telemetry intercept station, was established in the late 1950s in an ancient hunting castle at Beshahr [a city in northern Iran], on the southeastern corner of the Caspian Sea – with the objective of collecting signals from the Tyuratam test range [in Kazakhstan], which the CIA believed would become a major Soviet test facility”. (9)
The second CIA TACKSMAN site, created in the mid-1960s, was based in north-eastern Iran, just 40 miles away from the country’s second most populous city, Mashhad. At their most proficient, the TACKSMAN centres provided the CIA with around 85% of its entire intelligence data on the Russians’ Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) program.
Richelson continued, “President Jimmy Carter considered the [TACKSMAN] sites sufficiently important that he told his ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, that intelligence cooperation between the CIA and Iran should continue despite the Shah’s poor human rights record” (10). Panicked by Iran’s sudden independence, the Carter administration’s strategy on Afghanistan was developing at a steady pace.
On 2 February 1979, the Washington Post reported an eyewitness statement outlining that at least 2,000 Afghan militants were undergoing training at former army bases in Pakistan, which shares a 1,640 mile frontier with Afghanistan (11). This training program, clearly aimed against the Afghan communists, was jointly co-ordinated by the CIA and ISI, the latter being Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency.
On 5 March 1979 – nearly 10 months before the Soviet military offensive in Afghanistan had begun – the CIA Director Turner, a retired US Navy Admiral, dispatched several covert action options to the SCC on Afghanistan (12). The SCC was subordinated to the National Security Council (NSC), the principal forum used by the American president on foreign policy and military affairs.
Carter was acquainted with Turner since the mid-1940s, when they were in the same class together at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Carter appointed Turner as the CIA Director in March 1977.
Again on 5 March 1979, a CIA memorandum sent to Washington stated that “the insurgents had stepped up their activities against the government” in Kabul “and had achieved surprising successes” while “the Soviets were clearly concerned about the setbacks to the Afghan communist regime, and that the Soviet media was accusing the United States, Pakistan and Egypt of supporting the insurgents”. (13)
On 6 March 1979, the SCC convened a meeting in Washington “and requested new options for covert action” on Afghanistan Gates wrote, who spent 26 years with the CIA and National Security Council.
In mid-March 1979, president Taraki was becoming increasingly concerned as an insurgent revolt erupted in western Afghanistan, the so-called Herat uprising, which was suppressed after a few days by communist forces. Yet the violence had left thousands dead. Taraki was facing resistance from many fundamentalist and Orthodox muslims, because of his progressive programs, such as land reform measures and the introduction of education, literacy and equal rights for women. (14)
On 20 March 1979, Taraki requested the Soviet Union to intervene with ground forces in the country (15). The Kremlin refused, seeing no extensive US interference in Afghanistan at this point, though the Soviets did increase clandestine military assistance to Kabul. Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin said, “The entry of our troops into Afghanistan would outrage the international community, triggering a string of extremely negative consequences in many different areas”.
In late March 1979 the CIA’s Deputy Director, Frank C. Carlucci, was told by the CIA Directorate of Operations (DO) that Pakistan would likely be interested in aiding the Afghan guerrillas. Pakistan’s anti-communist ruler and US ally General Zia, who had taken power in July 1977, sent a senior Pakistani official to meet up with a CIA officer; whereby assistance was discussed for the Afghan mujahideen, including the provision of light weaponry and ammunition (16). Pakistan’s position was that, should US support be withheld, they would not help the mujahideen for risk of incurring “Soviet wrath” on their own.
The implication is clear: without US involvement in Afghanistan, outside backing for the mujahideen would hardly have taken off the ground. Also at this time in March 1979, a high level delegate from Saudi Arabia raised the possibility of setbacks for the Soviets in Afghanistan, and said that his regime was considering officially proposing that Washington aid the insurgents (17). A CIA memo expounded that the Saudis could be expected to dispense with funding to the mujahideen, and encourage Pakistan to follow suit, all dependent on America pulling the strings.
On 28 March 1979 Arnold Horelick, the US National Intelligence Officer covering the Soviet Union, wrote to CIA Director Turner in Langley, Virginia. Horelick felt that “the Soviets may well be prepared to intervene on behalf of the ruling group” in Afghanistan (18). He went on that should Washington offer aid to the insurgents, America could “turn the tables on the Soviets for their actions in Africa and Southeast Asia” and “encourage a polarization of Muslim and Arab sentiment against the USSR”.
On 30 March 1979 the SCC chaired an “historic” meeting in Washington, Gates noted (19). At this conference Walter Slocombe, a US Department of Defense official, pondered a scenario of “sucking the Soviets into a Vietnam quagmire” in Afghanistan. David D. Newsom, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, said that it was official US policy to undermine the Soviet presence in Afghanistan; and to show Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and others that Washington was determined to lead the way, in reversing the perceived Soviet advance into US domains of interest.
American author Steve Galster, who spent considerable time in Afghanistan during the 1980s war, wrote that in March 1979, “At the White House, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned President Carter that the Soviet Union, with its hundreds of advisors in Afghanistan to assist in reforms and counterinsurgency operations, had territorial designs on Afghanistan and possibly the whole South Asia region. Brzezinski and others worried that the USSR might take advantage of its presence in Afghanistan – in order to influence events in neighboring Iran or Pakistan, two traditionally pro-American countries that for years had helped safeguard US interests in the region, namely access to oil and the containment of the Soviet Union”. (20)
An Afghan insurgent commander travelling overseas contacted a CIA official, and asked him that the CIA provide some direct aid to the anti-communist militants (21). Turner reported this to Brzezinski, the influential US National Security Advisor.
From April 1979, accusations by the Kremlin and Soviet media were growing that the US, its allies and also China were instigating unrest in Afghanistan. These claims would prove accurate over time. Gates recalled how, “We learned on April 4 [1979] that the Chinese had informed the Afghans that they might supply arms to the Afghan mujahiden” (22). It is worth remembering at this time that there was a notable improvement in Sino-American relations, with president Carter having established full diplomatic ties with China.
On 6 April 1979, US strategy on Afghanistan was taking definite form, as another SCC conference was held in Washington late that morning. The following options were proposed: a limited propaganda campaign highlighting Soviet involvement in Afghanistan; indirect financial assistance to the guerrilla fighters; direct funding to Afghan émigré organisations to bolster their anti-communist activities; nonlethal material aid; weapons support; along with a variety of training and support options. (23)
Elsewhere during April 1979, US advisers were quietly meeting with “rebel representatives” opposed to Taraki’s Marxist government. (24)
Significantly, in May 1979 a CIA officer met with the Afghan mujahideen’s top commander, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a particularly radical figure in following years dubbed “the butcher of Kabul”. This meeting was convened by a Pakistani military member, who said in an interview in 1988 that he had introduced Hekmatyar to the CIA official. Hekmatyar received more US financial aid than any other mujahideen leader (25). Later, the Ronald Reagan administration “collected radical Islamists from around the world” prominent American analyst Noam Chomsky said, including “the most violent, crazed elements they could find – and tried to forge them into a military force in Afghanistan”. (26)
In early June 1979 Carlucci, Deputy Director of the CIA, observed the unstable conditions in Afghanistan which the US could capitalise on; and he outlined, at a morning CIA staff meeting, that covert action proposals on Afghanistan be brought to a swift conclusion (27). Turner replied to Carlucci that the closing decision rested with Brzezinski, upon a final SCC meeting where president Carter would be in attendance.
This conference “was finally held on July 3, 1979” Gates wrote, with Carter officially authorising CIA aid in order “to help the mujahedin covertly” (28). Carter’s directive of 3 July 1979 (Operation Cyclone) included sanctioning US backing for pro-mujahideen propaganda; along with other acts of psychological warfare, like the establishment of CIA radio access through third-country facilities to brainwash the Afghan population; the provision, either directly or indirectly, of support to the mujahideen, of either cash or “nonmilitary supplies”. (29)
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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Notes
1 Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (Simon & Schuster, 1st edition, 7 May 1996) p. 143
2 Richard A. Melanson, American Foreign Policy Since the Vietnam War: The Search for Consensus from Nixon to Clinton (Routledge, 3rd edition, 31 Dec. 1999) The Carter Administration
3 Steve Galster, Volume II: Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War, Afghanistan: the Making of U.S. policy, 1973-1990, The National Security Archive, 9 October 2001
4 Malcolm Byrne, Vladislav Zubok (and assisted by National Security Archive staff), The Intervention in Afghanistan and the Fall of Detente, The National Security Archive
5 Kevin Klose, “Soviets Sign Treaty With Afghanistan”, Washington Post, 6 December 1978
6 Gates, From the Shadows, p. 132
7 Ibid., p. 116
8 Byrne, Zubok, The National Security Archive
9 Jeffrey T. Richelson, The CIA and Signals Intelligence, The National Security Archive, 20 March 2015
10 Ibid.
11 Byrne, Zubok, The National Security Archive
12 Gates, From the Shadows, p. 144
13 Ibid.
14 Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The Second Cold War: Geopolitics and the Strategic Dimensions of the USA (Springer 1st ed., 23 June 2017) p. 401
15 Charles G. Gogan, Partners in Time, The CIA and Afghanistan since 1979, Summer 1993, World Policy Journal, p. 1 of 10, Jstor.org
16 Gates, From the Shadows, p. 144
17 Ibid.
18 Marvin Kalb, Deborah Kalb, Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama (Brookings Institution Press; 1st edition, 1 July 2011) p. 76
19 Gates, From the Shadows, p. 144
20 Galster, The National Security Archive, 9 October 2001
21 Gates, From the Shadows, p. 146
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., pp. 145-146
24 Galster, The National Security Archive, 9 October 2001
25 Michael Crowley, “Our Man in Kabul?” The New Republic, 9 March 2010
26 Noam Chomsky, interviewed by David Barsamian, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World (Metropolitan Books, 1st edition, 5 October 2005) p. 107
27 Gates, From the Shadows, p. 146
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
Featured image: Brzezinski visits Osama bin Laden and other Mujahideen fighters during training.
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Recently, the staff at the rest stops along the highways in South Korea are forced by the Ministry of Transportation to wear T-shirts that say “conversation is prohibited” and to tell all visitors that they must wear their masks so as to completely cover their faces.
Buddhist monks are being compelled by each Buddhist sect to be vaccinated if they wish to remain in their temples while high school students are compelled to be vaccinated, or thrown out of school. And restaurants in Seoul are slowly starting to demand proof of vaccination when seating groups of more than three people.
But there is a growing resistance to the COVID19 regime, that has been covered even by mainstream media sources like the network SBS.
For example, Kim Woo-gyeong, a lawyer representing the student Hong Ye-young, filed an emergency request to stop mandatory vaccines for third-year high school students in South Korea on July 19 at the Cheongju local court–where the Disease Control and Prevention Agency (DCPA) is located. The request was but part of a legal effort to block the dangerous implementation of the vaccine regime that is supported an association of parents across the country.
Although the request for an emergency halt required a decision from the government within a few days, the response was delayed for over ten days. Moreover, the court notified Kim by phone, days before the hearing, that the DCPA was not prepared to respond to the emergency request and demanded a further delay.
When a hearing was held on August 12, the presiding judge had been inexplicably changed. The new Judge, Kim Seong-soo, summarily dismissed the request without explanation, and brushed off questions concerning the unreasonable delay as a “misunderstanding.” His attitude suggested that his primary role was to block any action.
Lawyer Kim, sensing that due process had reached a dead end, requested the recusal of the judge in light of his bias. The emergency request for a stop of vaccinations went no further, but the larger law suit against the DCPA continues with greater intensity.
The DCPA has become the default government of South Korea over the last year, working together with corrupt elements in the National Intelligence Service and in the corporate world to force-feed the vaccine regime to the Korean people. In most likelihood, the sudden change of the judge was the result of the use of classified directives within DCPA that make it impossible for the government to reveal the nature of internal governance.
The fight against bio-fascism, and against the vaccine regime in specific, is clearly growing in Korea. Although traditionally Koreans tend to have a high level of trust in the government, as opposed to Americans and Europeans, now that the official numbers of dead as result of vaccines have surpassed 700 (which is just a fraction of the actual number killed) an unspoken unease is creeping into conversations. Whereas friends asked each other whether they had been vaccinated as a new greeting, and donned that cute “I was vaccinated” buttons given out by the government, harsh anti-vaccination postings, and demands for the execution of public officials on the internet are increasing.
You would never guess if you looked at the television news. Half of content is people lining up for vaccines, discussions of the merits of different brands of vaccines, and interviews with happy children who tell us how great they feel after their jabs.
It is only right-wing media sources, like the Epoch Times (run by the Falungong cult), that are permitted to report on the dangers of the vaccines in depth. This odd state of affairs does not represent the high quality of journalism at the Epoch Times, a far-right anti-communist journal funded by a handful of rich patrons in Taiwan and elsewhere, but is rather the product of an intentional political game wherein only the most virulent anti-Chinese media is allowed to report on the danger of vaccines so as to make it appear as if the Moon administration is pro-Chinese because it promotes vaccines. The truth is that President Moon is deeply unpopular in China where he is perceived as an American stooge.
Christian groups have bravely stood up against the vaccine regime. The Christian Daily (Gidok ilbo) ran several important articles critiquing COVID19 policy that were widely read. In addition, the Christian doctor Oh Gyeong-seok, located at the Atlanta University of Health Sciences, has taken the lead in the fight to report on the true dangers of masks and vaccines.
But the Christian opposition to the COVID19 regime also has some wrinkles in it. The willingness of Christians to seek out the truth has been critical, but Christians are being manipulated as a means of drawing attention away from the real players.
For example, the government dispatched officials to churches to block Sunday services and to enforce ridiculous social distancing rules during August COVID19 lockdowns.
These actions were taken at the same time that buses and subways were subject to no restrictions. Yet not a single COVID19 case was reported in the crowded subways or buses.
The bias against churches was obvious. Yet, it made no political sense for the Moon administration to single out churches. Most likely that these actions were forced on Moon by the globalists so that he could be branded as a communist in the media.
The drive to blame everything wrong with COVID19 policy on North Korea and China, rather than multinational corporations, is one of the most popular themes in the conservative media.
Perhaps the most important source for information about the COVID19 scam is “Corona Mystery,” a compact and logically structured book packed with scientific facts. Written by Kim Sang-soo, a doctor practicing traditional Korean homeopathic medicine, “Corona Mystery” is written in an accessible style that made it an underground best seller, especially among young people trying to understand what is going on.
Sadly, many of the high school students who have learned the truth about COVID19 from “Corona Mystery” were nevertheless forced by their parents to take the vaccine. The result has been not only serious health problems, but also despair and suicide.
Dr. Kim Sang-soo is the head of MASGOV (Medical Association to Ensure Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations) a group of ethical doctors who have stepped forward to demand an end to the vaccination regime. They issued a declaration on August 15 in which they stated that there was no scientific justification for facemasks, that social distancing policy must be ended immediately, that schools must be reopened and that vaccination policy must be entirely rethought.
The Seoul National University professor emeritus Lee Wangjae has given numerous lectures for the public about the misinformation on COVID19.
Korea has a few brave bloggers willing to take this criminal operation by the horns, providing in-depth reports for the public that are otherwise unavailable. Shin Jaeno, under his pen name “Truth Musician ZENO,” offers some of the most creative and inspiring work. Shin gave up his musical career, and his social life, to dedicate his days to writing broadcasts on COVID19 and documenting criminal actions in Korea, and around the world, that have resulted. He translated many videos from English to Korean for a general audience.
Image for Truth Musician Zeno” by artist Kim Kido
Shin wrote several important protest songs against the COVID19 regime that have inspired young people to be politically active. Although his postings on YouTube, Daum, Naver, and elsewhere are deleted as quickly as he gets them up, he never gives up.
Shin joined forces last year with Kim Hyung-nam, a former government official and a lawyer, to establish the Pandemic Investigation Committee (PIC). This organization has been central in advocating for science in the medical field and for opposing the mask and the vaccine mandates.
The Pandemic Investigation Committee organizes Saturday protests in Gwanghwa Gate Plaza, in downtown Seoul, at which a group of loyal members deliver speeches, distribute materials about the true nature of the covid pandemic, put on amusing performances, and confront the police and government officials who are sent to disrupt.
Another regular protestor of the Pandemic Investigation Committee is Ri Nayun, a vocal critic of South Korean political oppression and an advocate for closer ties with North Korea. She has delivered some of the most passionate speeches at the protests, and takes the lead in questioning the legal authority of government officials who try to stop the protests. She has been on a hunger strike for the last week demanding an end to vaccinations of children.
Ri Nayun’s hunger strike in Seoul
Han Seong-young, a former member of the Korean Federation of Trade Unions (an organization that was previously central in leftist politics but that is promoting vaccines today) also plays a critical role in the administration of the Pandemic Investigation Committee.
Another musician deeply involved in the protests is Choe Sung-nyon (known also by his nickname “choeREDi”). Choe spent time in jail for his protests of the election fraud that brought Park Geun-hye to power in 2013. He was also active in the protests against the fraudulent 2020 election that gave the Democratic Party a gross advantage.
Choe had the tenacity to establish a “Khan Communist Party” in violation of the National Security Law and to take on the full power of the corporate state in his political magazine “Mal.” “Mal” (language) was the title of an important intellectual journal that closed down in 2009. Choe uses music and language to carve a new space for expression in a banal modern society.
The Pandemic Investigation Committee shares the same protest space on the Gwanghwa Gate Plaza with right-wing organizations attacking the Moon administration as a communist front and promoting the US-Korea Alliance. Although the leftists in the PIC might be expected to clash with the right-wing protesters, the groups share common ground on the issue of vaccines, and the criminality of the Moon administration, that makes unexpected exchanges possible.
Kim Taepyong, a government official at the provincial court for Chollanamdo Province, led a spirited protest on September 1 in front of the provincial offices in which he held up a banner with a picture of a wolf declaring that the government was lying about vaccines and must stop making fools of the citizens. Mr. Kim explained, “I was a student activist a long time ago and dreamed of creating a better world. When I watched how the lives of citizens running small stores were destroyed by COVID19, I could not stand it any longer. Even it was me alone, I would protest.”
Oddly, although Koreans have not organized the massive protests that we see in Europe and the United States. The police in Korea have not used the same level of brutality to suppress protests and to enforce fines for not wearing a mask. If anything, harassment of protesters is less today than it was a few months ago.
The true Korean wave
Although the promotion of the bogus response to COVID19 in Korea as a symbol of Korea’s rise to the status of global leadership was a clear set-up used to flatter the population into accepting dangerous policies, Korea still has the potential to play a role in the response to this massive criminal action.
Although relatively small in number, Korea has intellectuals and citizens who are deeply committed to exposing the crime and they are increasing in number. Moreover, the police and the military have not been mobilized to violently suppress opposition to the degree found in Europe or Australia.
Most importantly, neighboring North Korea has gone the furthest to oppose the COVID regime of any other nation. If the two Koreas can find reconciliation quickly, there may be a road to freedom to be found on the peninsula.
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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
Featured image: Kim Woo-gyeong addressing supporters (All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated)
I Shall Fear No Evil
Why we need a truly independent candidate for president
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On September 9, 2021, President Joe Biden publicly issued sweeping statements and demands that make it clear that, whether they like or it, millions more people will have to get vaccinated or risk losing their livelihoods and security.[1] His posture has been described by mainstream media as “aggressive.” Many alternative news and information sources describe Biden’s actions as righteous, arrogant, authoritarian, and incoherent.[2] Biden asserted that choice and freedoms are not the issue. He dismissed both in one breath. One’s right to consent to something was banished in three seconds. Many have also asserted that Biden does not have the legal authority to make and enforce such top-down mandates. Others claim that his White House speech on vaccinations is full of contradictions and disinformation.
Like Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and many other capital-centered ideologues and “leaders,” Biden keeps disinforming the polity with the worn-out dogma that economic recovery is largely dependent on getting everyone vaccinated. We are to believe that the broad and stubborn economic failure confronting everyone today is largely caused by the virus and that once the virus is “under control” through vaccines rush-produced by for-profit companies with a long record of malpractice, the economy will soar and flourish. A variety of mainstream news sources have been desperately reinforcing this disinformation for more than a year; they have no interest in economic science.
However, despite an enormous number of vaccinations issued worldwide, despite a large portion of humanity “taking the jab” already,[3] the economy keeps declining and decaying; many serious economic distortions, problems, and uncertainties persist. Inflation, debt, inequality, homelessness, poverty, under-employment, and environmental destruction, for example, appearing to be growing. More than one million people per month are still filing unemployment claims in the U.S. alone and job “creation” numbers are superficial and unimpressive. In addition, the U.S. labor force participation rate remains historically low and the number of long-term unemployed remains high. On top of all this, millions of employed workers are living pay-check to pay-check, which means that even full-time employment is no guarantee of security and prosperity. Various surveys also show that large majorities are not hopeful about the future and health of the economy.
It is no surprise that euphoric economic growth forecasts made just weeks or months ago by “leaders” and “experts” are already being revised downward—in some cases significantly. The ruling elite is always embracing magical thinking; they are not on good terms with reality.
It is also being said that large numbers of people will end up leaving their jobs—voluntarily or by being fired—rather than compromise their right to conscience and get vaccinated. This could mean even fewer workers taking available jobs and even more retailers, businesses, and services operating in dysfunctional, disruptive, and unreliable ways without employees. Thus, for example, many nurses, teachers, police officers, and other workers are choosing the right to conscience and unemployment over mandated vaccination. Thousands of businesses are already struggling to fill low-paying positions in the context of constantly-rising inflation and an uncertain future. The American Hospital Association said that Biden’s vaccination plan “may result in exacerbating the severe work force shortage problems that currently exist” (See this). Not surprisingly, some organizations have already started to oppose Biden’s vaccination plan.
The economic depression confronting humanity at home and abroad will not be overcome by leaving major owners of capital in power while workers, the people who actually produce the wealth that society depends on, remain marginalized and disempowered. Economic collapse will not be reversed by funneling more socially-produced wealth to different monopolies and oligopolies, while leaving everyone else with less. Fostering policies, agendas, and arrangements that make the rich even richer is a recipe for deeper problems, not a promising path forward. To date, billions of vaccination shots at home and abroad have not stopped or slowed a range of serious economic problems.
Since the start of the never-ending “COVID Pandemic” more wealth has become concentrated in even fewer hands and more people have experienced more psychological, social, and economic problems. Inequality has soared over the past 18 months (See this).
The current economic crisis started long before 2020 and is rooted in the same contradictions that produced big economic problems before 2020. Even if there were no covid virus mutations, the economy would still be declining because economic upheavals are endemic to the capitalist economic system. Depressions and recessions are not caused by external factors. To claim that the economic system is generally sound but runs into problems now and then because of exogenous forces is nothing more than a way to apologize for the outmoded economic system.
Without major changes, without vesting power in workers themselves, economic crises will keep recurring and deepening. The rich and their representatives have shown time and again that they are unable and unwilling to solve economic and health crises, let alone in a human-centered way.
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Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at [email protected].
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This is the way the corrupt agency blames Covid deaths on the unvaccinated.
So far most deaths from the vaccine occur during the first two weeks.To blame these deaths on the lack of vaccination instead of on the vaccine, the CDC rules that you are not actually vaccinated until two weeks after having the second injection.
The CDC defines a “vaccine breakthrough infection” as “the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person 14 days after they have completed all recommended doses of the Food and Drug Administration authorized Covid-19 vaccine.”
This is one of the tricks the corrupt “public health agency” uses to scare people about Covid and use fear to drive them to inoculation.
Another trick, already much reported, is to run the PCR Covid test at 40 cycles which guarantees as much as 97% false positives.This deception is the source of the scary number of “Covid cases.”
There have also been many definitional changes for the purpose of hiding the truth about Covid and the vaccine.Read Joseph Mercola’s article.
Some top scientists are concerned that the future will bring many more deaths from the vaccine as the spike protein it releases into the body does its harm. Until this can be proven not to be the case, it is a criminal act akin to murder to inoculate people with mRNA injections.
The question that presstitutes and “public health” officials shield from the public is why are we being systematically lied to and scared into injections that offer death and injury but not protection?
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.
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After twenty years of direct military engagement and over four decades of destabilization, the United States has left a trail of devastation in Afghanistan.
The crises of food deficits, economic underdevelopment and destroyed towns, villages and urban areas, will require enormous global assistance in preventing widespread famine and further internal conflict.
A recent statement from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) indicated that four million people in the country are in dire need of nutritional assistance. Many of the people in the greatest need of food reside in the rural areas.
FAO Director of the Office of Emergencies and Resilience has told the Associated Press that 70% of the nearly 40 million people in Afghanistan live in rural areas. 7.3 million of the population are facing drought in 25 out of a total of 34 provinces in the country. The lack of food is compounding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic which has not received adequate attention from the western media.
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Director General has warned that if there is not a concerted international effort to support Afghanistan, the consequences will have grave implications: “In an interview with The Associated Press, Filippo Grandi said the world faces a difficult choice. He said it needs to balance the danger that an isolated Afghanistan would descend into violence and chaos against the political minefield supporting a Taliban-led government would present. ‘The international community will have to balance pragmatism, the need to keep Afghanistan stable and viable, and the political considerations that would mean supporting a government led by the Taliban,’ said Grandi.”
On September 14, Acting Foreign Minister of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan, Khan Muttaqi, announced during a press conference that the Central Asian state was appealing to the international community to resume humanitarian aid. With the announcement of the U.S. withdrawal by the administration of President Joe Biden, many of the aid agencies halted their work in the country.
“Afghanistan is a war-hit country and it needs the international community’s assistance in different sectors, especially education, health and development,” Amir Khan Muttaqi emphasized to the international press. The newly created Afghanistan government composed of members of the Taliban, has been holding regular media briefings since it marched into the capital of Kabul during the month of August. (See this)
During the course of its occupation in Afghanistan, the country became a de facto neo-colony of Washington. The U.S. employed thousands of its own citizens and residents along with many Afghanistan nationals.
These functionaries of the Pentagon, State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a host of private consultants and contractors, were paid in U.S. dollars and the local Afghani currency bolstered by the world capitalist monetary system. When the rapid retreat of the U.S. was imminent, the national treasury said to be based on $US10 billion in foreign reserves were frozen by Washington and Wall Street.
At present there is a cash shortage in the country hampering the ability of banks to allow customers to access their money. The Afghanistan government has begun to “nationalize” the accounts of wealthy individuals who were closely allied with the U.S.
“Afghanistan’s Taliban-controlled central bank said it had seized nearly $US12.4 million in cash and gold from former top government officials on Wednesday (September 15), including former vice president Amrullah Saleh, Reuters reported. In a statement, the central bank said the money and gold had been kept in officials’ houses, although it did not yet know for what purpose. In a sign that the Taliban are looking to recoup assets belonging to former government officials, the central bank issued a circular to local banks last week asking them to freeze the accounts of politically exposed individuals linked to the previous government, two commercial bankers said.”
Financial institutions and government officials fear that the lack of currency will fuel inflation making the cost of basic commodities even more expensive. The Pentagon and NATO evacuation of its own nationals, permanent residents and those considered “eligible” for immigration status in western and other countries has resulted in the departure of some of the most educated and skilled personnel in Afghanistan.
Investigation Reveals Drone Attack Killed U.S. Allies
One day prior to the final airlift by the Pentagon, August 29, the U.S. launched a drone attack against a residential location in Kabul. Military officials claimed that the target was being monitored for involvement in another possible bombing directed at the Marines or other soldiers.
Thirteen Pentagon troops were killed in an attack which had been predicted by military intelligence for several days. Thousands of Marines were stationed in and around the Hamid Karzai International Airport in order to process those U.S. citizens, residents and migrants seeking to flee Afghanistan.
Subsequent news reports soon after the attack which killed many civilians, documented that the Afghanistan national targeted had worked with a humanitarian agency based in the U.S. He had been cleared along with other family members to leave Afghanistan during the airlift. The materials he was seen loading into the vehicle by a video camera was in all likelihood personal property and luggage for his family in preparation for travel outside the country on a U.S. military aircraft.
“The Afghan man who was killed in a U.S. drone strike last month was an enthusiastic and beloved longtime employee at an American humanitarian organization, his colleagues say, painting a stark contrast to the Pentagon’s claims that he was an Islamic State group militant about to carry out an attack on American troops. Signs have been mounting that the U.S. military may have targeted the wrong man in the Aug. 29 strike in Kabul, with devastating consequences, killing seven children and two other adults from his family. The Pentagon says it is further investigating the strike, but it has no way to do so on the ground in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover, severely limiting its ability to gather evidence.”
This cold-blooded murder of Afghanis is not an isolated incident. During the entire course of the occupation beginning in 2001, the Pentagon has launched untold numbers of drone and other attacks against those claimed by Washington to be “terrorists”, while afterwards when investigations were conducted, the victims are often times unconnected to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS or any other perceived enemy of the U.S.
The People’s Republic of China has already demanded that the U.S. be punished for the wanton murder of Afghan civilians. This announcement was made by the Minister of the Chinese Mission to the UN in Geneva, Jiang Duan. The call came amid a joint statement emanating from the 48th Session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHCR).
Other nations are seeking to aid Afghanistan in its earliest stage of rebuilding. The Islamic Republic of Iran landed a commercial flight at the Kabul airport on September 15.
Neighboring Pakistan has sent a delegation to Afghanistan while encouraging the world, including the U.S., to engage with the Taliban-led government in Kabul. Moeed Yusuf, the National Security Advisor for Pakistan, urged that Washington should listen to its appeal while the State Department has said it is reassessing its relationship with Islamabad. In addition, Pakistan on September 15 announced it was hosting a visit by the Afghanistan Women’s soccer team.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan held discussions over the telephone on September 14 on the current developments in Afghanistan. Khan urged Putin to maintain close contact with Pakistan in regard to relations with Kabul.
“UN envoy Debora Lyons met the Taliban’s Qatar office deputy head Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanekzai and international partners in Doha and discussed humanitarian needs and the rights of all Afghans, especially women and girls, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said. ‘They also discussed the importance of an inclusive government to enhance Afghanistan’s ability to respond to the daunting economic and development challenges and to ensure the delivery of much needed humanitarian assistance with international support,’ TOLO news quoted UNAMA as saying.”
Therefore, many nations and multilateral institutions are holding discussions and developing cooperative projects with Afghanistan. This posture contrasts with the official positions of the U.S., Britain and the European Union (EU) where all three centers of imperialist power are attempting to thwart the ability of Kabul to reconstruct its society after decades of interventions.
Role of the Pentagon and NATO After the Defeat in Afghanistan
In excess of $US8 trillion has been squandered since the declaration of the so-called “war on terrorism” by the U.S. and NATO. Capitalist countries are facing profound challenges as the combination of failed military adventures, climate change and the social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has stretched their capacity to respond to such enormous crises.
The appearance of a new alignment militarily against China can only result in yet another catastrophic defeat which will have even deeper effects on the economy and social stability of the U.S. Iran has proclaimed that it will not curtail its own national security and foreign policy imperatives in exchange for improved relations with Washington.
Progressive forces inside the U.S. must guard against any attempts by the current administration of President Joe Biden to provoke a military confrontation with Beijing, Tehran, Pyongyang, Havana, Caracas, or anywhere else. There is no such thing as a justified imperialist bombing, intervention or occupation. The actual enemies of the working and oppressed peoples of the U.S. are to be found among the bourgeoisie which is the only class that profits from the war machine.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Afghanistan withdrawal by the Pentagon portrayed in Global Times (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
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In our bizarre economy, we hear many things, and ideas are constantly being thrown out to us. This all tends to flow together and help us develop a strategy as to how we should cope with the changing times. One thing we continue to hear is that a war is being waged to eliminate cash. Not only are most people going along with this but many have embraced the notion.
Some people view carrying cash as dangerous or burdensome.This also dovetails with their desire to spend more than they can afford, when using a credit card it is far easier to continue spending money you do not have. All things considered, when asked, is the war on cash a real thing being directed from those on high, sadly we must answer yes. Cash reflects “options for the people” and it appears those in charge of such things want in gone.
Currencies were developed to facilitate and ease transactions between individuals and businesses. The war on cash is simply another way Washington can continue to show its favoritism towards big business. Small businesses often rely more on small cash transactions and often lack the ability to process other forms of payment. It is ironic that while big businesses and companies like Amazon flourish with each move government makes, the small businesses on Main Street are left worse off.
A cashless society where records are made and kept reflecting every transaction we make even down to buying a candy bar also allows the government to monitor our every move. This is something Big Brother-type governments strongly aspire to under the guise it will extend its ability to protect us or tamp down on crime, tax evasion, and corruption. For some reason, they seem to think this will allow them to collect more taxes, yet it comes at the same time they continue to tilt the tax code in favor of massive companies.
The way the government has handled coins during the pandemic is a clear indication of its unconcern over the role cash plays in our economy. When coin shortages developed, little or no effort to straighten out the mess was instituted. Considering the massive number of coins sitting unused in jars and cans across America it is a situation that could easily be resolved. In fact, coinage has yet to return to full use following the pandemic, and claims of coin shortages persist.
Another place this “war on cash” is showing its head is that as of July 1st my bank started to charge a “cash handling fee” of 13 cents per hundred dollars. Simply put, banks want and feel they are in a position to charge customers for the “inconvenience” of having their employees handle cash.
Let me be clear, banks, saving accounts, and other vehicles designed to hold cash are paying little or nothing in the way of interest. With the numbers just out that the CPI is up for the 15th straight month, cash is under assault. this reflects the fourth straight month above 5% on a year-over-year basis.
While this is the first time the month-over-month CPI has come in below expectations since November 2020 that is not something worthy of celebration. The CPI is routinely criticized for understating and not accurately portraying the true rate of inflation. Another issue is this could be merely the Delta variant’s impactcreating the illusion inflation is not rising as rapidly as some people think.
Inflation, currency debasement, and a slew of other problems have always haunted those holding fiat currencies. This does not mean placing your wealth into one of the new cryptocurrencies is the solution. It does not help that in our world where everything seems to be manipulated, central bankers and their ilk all seem to be moving in the same direction. The masses are trapped in a box and the sides are slowly being moved inward.
Because central banks must keep a lot of liquidity in the system in order to keep it functioning, we have the potential of reaching the place where we drown in paper money and inflation soars. This would signify the end of this war on cash and that cash had lost. It is difficult to justify leaving your wealth in cash that is rapidly losing its value. As we stare into the face of rising inflation and possibly lower negative interest rates the reality that all fiat currencies are in trouble and this is just one big Ponzi scheme becomes very apparent.
How fast events unfold is impossible to predict. Just as important is the order in which the four major currencies fail. We have good reason to be concerned about this because it has the potential to strip us of our wealth and cause major disruptions throughout society. Until then, which may be years away, cash has value and plays a very important part in our lives.
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One of the main fears about the Brazilian Amazon is beginning to materialize: logging is starting to move from the periphery of the rainforest toward the core of the biome, groundbreaking new research shows.
Tracking cut trees through satellite mapping data, the research found that logging activities cleared 464,000 hectares (1.15 million acres) of the Brazilian Amazon — an area three times the size of the city of São Paulo — between August 2019 and July 2020. More than half (50.8%) of the logging was reportedly concentrated in the state of Mato Grosso, followed by Amazonas (15.3%) and Rondônia (15%).
“Around 20 years ago, we feared that the forest would be devastated in the so-called ‘deforestation arch’ and the movement would migrate from the peripheral areas toward the central region of the Amazon,” said Marco Lentini, senior project coordinator of Imaflora, a sustainable development NGO involved in the mapping project. “Our map shows this is happening now: logging is going toward the Amazon core.”
He said the logging pattern was that of “frontier migration,” adding, “This is something that terrifies us. We have to stabilize this frontier.”
The largest seizure of illegal timber in Brazil’s history saw police recover 226,000 cubic meters (8 million cubic feet) of wood on the border between the states of Amazonas and Pará in March 2021. Image courtesy of the Federal Police in Amazonas state.
The research, released last week, was developed by the Simex network formed by four Brazilian environmental nonprofits: Imazon, Imaflora, Idesam, and Instituto Centro de Vida (ICV). The institutions say they set up the alliance to map, for the first time, logging in almost all of the Amazon. They managed to map seven of the nine states that make up the Brazilian Amazon — Acre, Amazonas, Amapá, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia and Roraima — which together account for almost 100% of timber production from the rainforest.
Although the mapping was unable to specify the exact amount of trees illegally extracted from untouched forests, mostly of the illegalities were concentrated at the triple border between Mato Grosso, Amazonas and Rondônia, where intense logging activity was detected in an Indigenous reserve and a conservation unit, according to Vinicius Silgueiro, territorial intelligence coordinator at ICV, a nonprofit based in Mato Grosso. “Protected areas in this region show a large presence of logging and low level of fiscalization, with a lot of signs of illegality.”
The Sismex map covers areas where the Federal Police made the largest seizure of illegal timber in Brazil’s history earlier this year, recovering 226,000 cubic meters (8 million cubic feet) of wood on the border between Amazonas and Pará states. This operation triggered the ouster of the controversial minister of environment, Ricardo Salles, in June, after he reportedly asked for the release of the wood.
Ten municipalities accounted for almost 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of logging, five of them in Mato Grosso, two in Amazonas and the remaining in Roraima, Acre and Pará. Most logging activity, 78%, reportedly occurred on privately owned properties. Legal permits are often used to mask logging in restricted areas through a process known as tree laundering, according to the findings.
A more detailed study developed by Imazon focused on Pará shows that over half of the logging in the state has not received any governmental authorization. From August 2019 to July 2020, 50,139 hectares (123,896 acres) of forest were reportedly devastated, with 55% without authorization from environmental bodies. This represented a 20% growth over the 12 months before, when non-authorized logging totaled 38%, according to Imazon.
The map developed by the Simex network shows concentrations of logging activity in the state of Mato Grosso, followed by Amazonas and Pará. Image courtesy of Simex.Before the advent of the Simex project, only Pará and Mato Grosso had satellite-based maps identifying areas where logging has occurred. Imazon started monitoring Pará in 2008 and ICV joined the iniciative in 2013 by monitoring Mato Grosso. The institutions say that these states were their initial focus for data transparency due to high logging activities.
Logging for timber doesn’t clear forest area as extensively as deforestation does, and vegetation growth over logging sites can make visualization via satellite harder, according to Vinicius Silgueiro, territorial intelligence coordinator at ICV.
“With logging, different than deforestation, there is still some coverage by vegetation. We can identify scars in the forest made by the roads used to move the logs, as well as clear areas for storage. There is a whole infrastructure around logging that helps us find these areas,” Silgueiro told Mongabay in a phone interview.
In most states, however, he said it’s nearly impossible to verify when the logging activity is illegal, due to lack of transparency or technological barriers. Many times, he added, certificates for legal forestry activities are filed on paper, making it hard to cross-reference the database of certificates with the images. The only two states with digitized databases are Pará and Mato Grosso.
Logging activity in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, with trees already tagged and awaiting transportation. Image courtesy of Vicente Sampaio/Imaflora.
Another challenge is that the certificates allowing forest management give the location coordinates, but not the shape file — the digital map — of the area, which hampers efforts to identify through satellite imagery where illegal logging occurs, according to Lentini.
Despite these challenges, there are cases where it is very clear that the logging taking place is illegal, Lentini said: when it happens in protected areas like Indigenous reserves and conservation units. The study found that 6% of logging in the Amazon, or 28,112 hectares (69,466 acres), was in conservation units during the study period; 5% was in Indigenous reserves, at 24,866 hectares (61,445 acres). “These areas don’t have any kind of authorization for legal logging,” Silgueiro said.
A 2018 report by the Greenpeace, titled “Imaginary trees, real destruction,” highlighted the unreliability of Brazil’s forestry licensing and control systems, which it said makes it harder to tackle fraud.
“A critical flaw in the Amazon states’ forestry governance lies in the weakness of the licensing process for sustainable forest management plans,” the report said. For the most part, no field inspections are conducted before management plans are drawn up, or these inspections are of low quality, according to the report.
“This allows the forest engineers … to overestimate volumes or fraudulently add trees of high commercial value to the area’s forest inventory. State agencies subsequently issue credits for the harvesting and movement of this non-existent timber,” which will be logged from forests on Indigenous lands, protected areas or public lands, according to Greenpeace’s investigation.
Pará state environmental authorities seize illegal timber in an inspection operation in 2021. Image courtesy of Agência Pará.
Silgueiro, from ICV, said legal and illegal logging persist in proportions of around 60:40. “The more legal documentation there is for exploring the forest, the more illegal timber there is,” he said. He added that logging fraud will only stop once the whole process becomes traceable through technologies that help estimate the real volume of timber production and track each tree individually. “Traceability of production is essential,” Silgueiro said. “This technology already exists, but producing states are slow at adopting it.”
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Featured image: A truck carries logs cut from the Amazon Rainforest in the state of Rondônia. Image courtesy of Vicente Sampaio/Imaflora.
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It is time for Republicans, Democrats and everyone in between to MEET THE MOMENT right now. The tyrannical top-down approach from President Biden must be met with a strong rebuke from state leaders!
Minnesota Must Become a Health Freedom Sanctuary State:
A permanent banishment of vaccine passports
A banishment of private employer vaccine mandates
A banishment of child masking policies
A permanent ban of emergency lockdowns – without exception
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Featured image is from Minnesota Senate Republican Caucus
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Two decades after 9/11, the US prison at Guantánamo Bay still holds detainees who have been charged with no crime. The crimes of Gitmo must end and the base must be returned to the Cuban republic.
Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn has lost many things over the course of the disastrous US “war on terror.” As one of the thirty-nine remaining detainees in Washington’s extralegal prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he has lost touch with the outside world for nearly two decades.
Presumably, too, he has lost some sense of well-being, and not merely for the psychological and physical distress that imprisonment provokes by design. He was the first prisoner to be subjected to the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program at an agency black site, making his legacy distinctly sinister among his cohort.
His case is thus notorious among the 780 men and children who have been held at Guantánamo. He was the first to be waterboarded, subjected to forced nudity, deprived of sleep for days on end, and held in a box no larger than a human coffin for long stretches of time.
The same fate befell countless others, but his case, detailed at length in the 2012 Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture, is perhaps especially haunting for the precedent that it set. When al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn entered CIA custody following his capture in a US-Pakistani raid in March 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan, he still had his left eye. By the time he was transferred from a black site to Gitmo four years later, he had lost that, too.
Mistaken Identity
At the time of his torture, the CIA believed al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, whom they referred to as Abu Zubaydah, to be the number-three-top-ranking leader of Al Qaeda. As with so many pretenses and declarations that the US government has conjured since September 11, 2001, the agency was incorrect. Allegations of his connection to Al Qaeda have been discredited by both the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the UN Security Council.
The roots of such claims are likely to be found in his role facilitating the travel of a number of militant Islamic fighters in Afghanistan during the early 1990s, after the guerrilla force known as the Mujahideen had purged the country of Soviet forces. The United States had spent over $2 billion arming the Mujahideen, making Washington and al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn allies of sorts, however opaque the nature of that coalition.
On July 15 of this year, I sat in a conference room at the Pentagon and watched fifteen minutes of his most recent Guantánamo Periodic Review Board (PRB) hearing, which was beamed in live from the base in eastern Cuba. For many years, the PRB referred to him as Abu Zubaydah, but at this hearing they used his legal name in lieu of the wartime moniker. Revealing the simultaneously patronizing and intimate relationship that the national-security state has with its remaining Guantánamo detainees, the board ultimately came to call him by his first name, Zayn.
Zayn is perhaps most physically identifiable for the eyepatch that has for many years covered the space where his left eye used to be. On the day of his hearing, however, the eye patch was absent. There was an elegance to him as he waited in the courtroom, flanked by a government-appointed personal representative on one side and an Arabic-language translator on the other. His white shirt was pressed, his beard and hair trimmed neat. He sat taciturn, gazing downward through a pair of round glasses, passing prayer beads between his thumb and forefinger.
Understandably, he was trying to make the best possible physical impression on the Board, which was convened somewhere in Virginia and composed of officials from the departments of Defense, Justice, State, and Homeland Security, as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the opening of the unclassified portion of the hearing, which journalists were permitted to observe from the Pentagon, a PRB official reiterated the entity’s primary function.
They were not assembled to determine the “lawfulness of Zayn’s detention,” the official stressed, but rather to decide whether, nineteen years after his capture and total disconnection from the outside world, he still posed a threat to US national security. Should the board consider a detainee a “continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” his ongoing detention would be deemed necessary.
The hearing’s opening qualification — that the legality of his detention is not up for decision — should hardly be considered startling at this point, however disturbing such tacit acceptance might be. Zayn is one of countless men still held at Guantánamo who has never been charged with a crime.
Legal Limbo
A month to the day after the hearing, images streamed out of Kabul as the Taliban reclaimed the Afghan capital. The “war on terror” was ostensibly drawing to a close, with the seemingly interminable and devastating US intervention in Afghanistan as its longest and perhaps most flagrantly failed instantiation. At least 240,000 Afghans have died in the conflict, a large number of them civilians, and Washington ultimately replaced the Taliban with the Taliban.
Yet even as the forever war meets its nihilistic denouement, the illegal detention at Guantánamo forges on, a bleak national-security plight of Washington’s own making. Barack Obama never made good on his campaign promise and 2009 executive order to close the prison, and while one of the forty men who was being held there when Joe Biden took office has since been transferred to his home country of Morocco, it is unclear how the current administration will contend with the thirty-nine men who remain.
The military commissions war court established at the base to adjudicate the fates of those facing charges is currently handling the cases of twelve men — three facing proposed charges, seven facing active charges, and two who have been convicted. Another ten of the remaining so-called enemy combatants are still held in law-of-war detention without facing charges at all. They are now recommended for transfer to another country, which will oversee the relevant security measures.
The last seventeen neither face charges nor have been recommended for transfer or release. At this point in the prison’s history, this last category may be the most extreme state of legal limbo a Guantánamo detainee could face. It is also the category in which Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn finds himself.
Despite Washington’s flagrant bypassing of international law in the decades after September 11, war is by no means a lawless paradigm. And as scholar Nasser Hussain has argued, Guantánamo is not the lawless place some imagine it to be; rather, it is a space in which emergent laws proliferate to fit the needs of a belligerent government seizing upon a state of exception.
The legal status of the men still held at Gitmo is murky by design, not only because it is unlawful to indefinitely detain a person without charging him with a crime, but because the judicial apparatus at the base seeks to try civilians within the framework of a military court.
Enemies at the Gates
The way that such practices were implemented is itself a vestige of US invasions long past. The United States coercively obtained a lease to the territory on which Guantánamo sits as part of the agreement ending its first military occupation of Cuba in 1902 — another two US military interventions would storm the island before long. The lease had no termination date and could be annulled only with the agreement of both governments. When the agreement was renegotiated in 1934, following a period of tumultuous regime change on the island, it once again cemented a lease of the Cuban territory in perpetuity.
An overseas military presence with no termination date sounds not unlike “forever war,” but the connection is deeper still. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the Bush administration added Cuba to its “Axis of Evil” list, it began kidnapping and illegally detaining men and boys on territory that it claimed was under Cuban jurisdiction and therefore not subject to US law.
This is more than mere historical rhyme. There is a troubling conclusion to be drawn from the 120 years that the United States has coercively occupied the base at Guantánamo. The potential culmination of Washington’s post-9/11 forever wars hardly marks the end of the propensity for unceasing extraterritorial militarism. Much like the resistance that a long history of US economic, political, and military intervention provoked in Cuba before and after the island’s 1959 revolution, the destabilization and antipathy that US empire sows rarely comes to a peaceable and tidy conclusion.
An empire needs enemies beyond its gates, and Washington has proved exceptionally skilled at making them. As historian Ada Ferrer notes in her new book, Cuba: An American History, Alberto Mora, the Cuban American general counsel for the US Navy, described Guantánamo as one of the greatest causes of US combat deaths in Iraq, “as judged by [its] effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat.”
The US government is remarkably adept at forging the conditions by which it justifies its interventions. In December 2001, US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld refused a negotiated peace deal with the Taliban. Instead of accepting a settlement with a government that itself hoped to rid Afghanistan of Al Qaeda and was concerned with gaining recognition from Western governments, Washington engaged in twenty years of warfare that caused unimaginable loss of life. This was not because wresting Osama bin Laden from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan by other means was unfeasible. Washington wanted a war.
As recent images of the humanitarian crisis that US intervention wrought in that country have underlined, Washington’s global crusade against terror has certainly not made the world a safer place. The hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the trauma and devastation that do not end when US combat boots leave Iraqi or Afghan soil, constitute America’s legacy for the people it promised to liberate.
Incommunicado
Where does this leave Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, who never swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and whose purported links to Al Qaeda have been debunked by the US government itself? Whatever connections or intelligence he was suspected of possessing at the time of his capture and torture are now, like the war on terror itself, two decades old. He has no network to facilitate and no information from the outside world to withhold.
His representatives believe that the PRB’s decision to categorize al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn as an ongoing national-security threat, and therefore unfit for transfer or release, is a matter of self-preservation. As his attorney wrote in his most recent PRB statement:
The CIA has a great deal of reason to want Abu Zubaydah to be held incommunicado for the rest of his life. That is because the fabrication of the facts used to justify the creation of the torture program would no longer be held incommunicado.
While the UN National Security Council argues that he was never affiliated with Al Qaeda and is unlikely to affiliate with the organization in the future, it is understandable if a man kidnapped, tortured, and illegally imprisoned for almost two decades might harbor some antipathy towards the United States.
Ultimately, Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn is a danger to US interests because his release might allow him to enumerate, in his own words, what the CIA did to him at its black sites all those years ago. If that is a threat to American safety, it is most certainly one of Washington’s own making.
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Miriam Pensack is a writer, editor, and doctoral candidate in Latin American history at New York University.
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Starting today, iconic Yellowstone wolves crossing the boundary of Yellowstone National Park into the state of Montana face slaughter by trophy hunters with high-powered rifles, including within federally-designated Wilderness areas. Wolves living in Glacier National Park face a similar fate when they exit the national park.
Last month, Montana not only eliminated any cap on the number of wolves that can be killed in hunting and trapping zones bordering Yellowstone National Park and Glacier National Park, but individuals can now kill a total of 10 wolves per season. New regulations also allow unethical baiting for wolves statewide, including within federal public lands and Wilderness areas. Night hunting with artificial lights or night vision scopes is also allowed on private lands statewide.
“Despite a groundswell of public opposition from individuals across Montana, the nation, and world, Montana has declared open season on wolves in the state, clearing the way for nearly 50% of the state’s wolf population to be decimated in the upcoming hunting and trapping season,” said Sarah McMillan, the Montana-based conservation director for WildEarth Guardians.
“Yellowstone’s wolves are nationally and internationally famous and the biological role these iconic wolves play within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is priceless. Yet starting today, an individual can slaughter up to ten Yellowstone wolves for just $12,” explained McMillan.
The general wolf hunting season in Montana runs for the next six months, until March 15, 2022, while the wolf trapping and snaring season will start on November 29, 2021 and also run until March 15, 2022.
In response to the on-going slaughter of wolves, in June, WildEarth Guardians and a coalition of fifty conservation groups asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to immediately restore Endangered Species Act protections to gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains. In July, Guardians and allies also petitioned the Biden administration to list the Western North American population of gray wolves as a distinct population segment. Over 120 Tribes have signed “The Wolf: A Treaty of Cultural and Environmental Survival,” and have called on Interior Secretary Haaland to meet with a Tribal delegation regarding the Treaty and to reinstate protections for wolves. So far, the Biden administration has failed to take any steps to protect wolves.
“As we clearly warned would happen, state ‘management’ of wolves essentially amounts to the brutal state-sanctioned eradication of this keystone native species,” said McMillan. “We must not abandon wolf-recovery efforts or allow anti-wolf states, hunters, and trappers to push wolves back to the brink of extinction.”
Montana’s hunting regulation changes come on the heels of the Biden administration doubling down on its commitment to keep all wolves federally delisted, despite the massive public outcry. In August, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service filed a brief in federal court opposing legal efforts from multiple environmental groups—including WildEarth Guardians, Western Environmental Law Center, and Earthjustice—to challenge the federal delisting rule. This case is set for oral arguments in Northern California District Court in November 2021. As the Northern Rocky Mountain population of wolves was delisted by an act of Congress in 2011, the outcome of this litigation will not impact wolves in Montana.
Gray wolves became functionally extinct in the lower 48 states in the 1960s largely due to rampant hunting and trapping, including deliberate extermination efforts carried out by the federal government. Though first listed as endangered in 1967 under a precursor to the Endangered Species Act, gray wolves only began to recover in the West following reintroductions to central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s. Scientists estimated a steady population of about 1,150 wolves in Montana between 2012 and 2019. However, hunters and trappers killed 328 wolves in Montana during the 2020-2021 season, and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks now estimates that only 900 to 950 wolves remain in the state. The total wolf-kill quota for the 2021-2022 hunting and trapping season in Montana is 450, meaning that nearly 50% of the wolf population in Montana could be eliminated in the next six months.
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Featured image: Gray wolf photo by Jacob W. Frank/NPS; graphic element added by Gus O’Keefe.
The first overt diplomatic achievement by the United States related to 9/11, was Resolution No. 1368. It was adopted at noontime by the UN Security Council on September 12, 2001. The resolution contained the obligatory statements of condemnation and of solidarity with the 9/11 victims and their families.
In the months leading up to 2020, the earth experienced a series of unprecedented wildfires fires from Australia to the Amazon and from Indonesia to California. In California alone, the wildfire season of 2019 destroyed more than 250,000 acres of land, along with 732 structures.
Brnovich describes the mandate as “one of the greatest infringements upon individual liberties, principles of federalism, and separation of powers ever attempted by an American President.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you’re not counted as fully vaccinated until a full 14 days have passed since your second injection in the case of Pfizer or Moderna, or 14 days after your first dose of Janssen, despite the fact that over 80% of deaths after the vaccines occur in this window. How convenient
A Health Impact News subscriber from Europe reminded us that this database maintained at EudraVigilance is only for countries in Europe who are part of the European Union (EU), which comprises 27 countries.
A woman suffering from non-Hodgkin lymphoma was a devoted user of Roundup herbicide for decades before she became ill, her son testified Tuesday in a California trial that marks the fourth such trial pitting a cancer victim against Roundup maker Monsanto.
Since children are at less risk from coronavirus than influenza and pose no risk to others, covering their faces not only risks damage to the developing brain from hypoxia, inhibits excretion of carbon dioxide leading to respiratory acidosis, forces them to inhale accumulated bacteria and fungi, and promotes headaches, dermatitis, and tooth decay, but it clearly worsens rather than protects their state of health.
The WHO “Guidelines” for establishing a Worldwide Digital Informations System for issuing so-called “Digital Certificates for Covid-19” are generously funded by the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations.
Do you know that about 80% of both FDA and WHO budgets come from private entities directly or indirectly linked to big pharma? Do you know that several years ago WHO had changed the definition of a pandemic to exclude mortality as a criterion?
Tickets to the Met Gala are at least $30,000 a pop, though it seems AOC, a young New York City Congresswoman who identifies as a democratic socialist, did not pay for the ticket herself. She was invited and seized the moment to make her protest.
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The Black Lives Matter movement has had a major impact in raising awareness about police brutality and the ongoing persecution of Black people in the United States but has been remarkably parochial in evading discussion of U.S. imperialism in Africa and around the world.
While protest signs commemorating George Floyd and calling for defunding of the police have been legion at many of its demonstrations, few if any signs have called for the abolition of AFRICOM or indictment of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for presiding over the overthrow and lynching of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.
The latter omissions stem in large part from the ignorance of most of the U.S. population—whether Black or white—about Africa and the consequences of U.S. imperialism there.
The major fault for this ignorance lies with U.S. educational institutions and the mass media, which have for decades promoted stereotypes about the continent and its people, and evaded discussion of how it has been adversely impacted by Western colonialism.
Africans are still frequently characterized as “tribal people”—with all the attendant negative perceptions that spring from this word—whose poverty, conflict and disease-ridden countries can only be salvaged under foreign oversight.
Leaders who stand up to the Western powers like Qaddafi are demonized while those who acquiesce to their agenda are presented more favorably.
African voices are meanwhile marginalized—especially those that adopt a Pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist message—and many Blacks come to internalize the message that they are inferior.
Allimadi starts his story with a discussion of European travelogues in the 18th and 19th centuries.
These presented Africans as being “trapped at a level of intellectual, socioeconomic and political development that Europeans had transcended centuries earlier” and helped justify the alleged obligation of Europeans to conquer and colonize Africa.
Sir Samuel Baker—Governor-General of the Equatorial Nile Basin (today South Sudan and Northern Uganda) between 1869 and 1873—set the standard in his 1866 book, The Albert N’Yanza Great Basin of the Nile, in which he wrote that “human nature viewed in its crude state as pictured among African savages is quite on a level with that of the brute, and not to be compared with the noble character of the dog.”
Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness (1902) similarly depicted Africans as “primitive savages” and warned Europeans of Africa’s propensity to drive normal people insane.
The views cultivated by Conrad and other writers helped fuel support for colonization—which was considered a noble yet hazardous undertaking.
These prejudicial comments ignore the flourishing of great African civilizations like ancient Carthage and the Songhai and Mali empires before the era of the slave trade and European colonization, which weakened and divided the continent.
Tunisia, Carthage in the 3rd century B.C. [Source: history.com]
Tomb of Askia, emperor of the Songhai Empire, at Gao, Mali, West Africa. [Source: history.com]
The Times went on to depict the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War in South Africa as a “contest between a civilized nation with great military and naval power and inexhaustible resources and a primitive and barbaric tribe [the Zulu], however brave and unyielding … Sooner or later the powerful nation was destined to bring the savage tribe into abject submission or demolish it utterly.”
When Italy invaded Eritrea in the 1890s, the Times published a triumphalist account, claiming that the natives “welcomed the Italians as liberators.”
The Times adopted a more somber tone in reporting on Italy’s humiliating defeat at the Battle of Adwa in 1896—one of the greatest African victories against European imperialism—which the Times characterized as “terrible.”
In the 1930s, when Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini reinvaded Ethiopia trying to reinvigorate the Roman Empire, the Times tried to diminish the significance of the Ethiopian victory at Adwa, while playing up the brutality of the “savage black warriors” who had “slaughtered nearly 40,000 Italians.”
Times reporter Herbert L. Matthews’s dispatch read like a press release from the Italian military command.
Known for his sympathetic reports of Fidel Castro’s rebel band in Cuba during the 1950s, Matthews had traveled in the same car as Italian military commander Marshal Pietro Badoglio as he entered Addis Ababa—and never bothered to interview any Ethiopians.
Support for Apartheid
The Times continued its pattern of white supremacy by supporting the odious apartheid system in South Africa from its beginning—and for many years thereafter.
In 1926, the “newspaper of record” published an article by Wyona Dashwood which supported the plan of South African Prime Minister James Barry Munnik Hertzog to segregate and disenfranchise Blacks in the Cape province as a way to deal with “the native factor.”
Dashwood claimed that the new system would help stop tribal fighting and give the “semi-civilized native”—whom she depicted as lazy and prone to theft—the chance to “develop along his own lines” and to begin to adapt some of the more “advanced economic, social and political systems of the white man’s civilization.”
Thirty years after Dashwood’s article, in May 1957, the Times ran a piece by Richard P. Hunt which reported on the perspective of apartheid leaders who had just passed a law empowering the new minister of native affairs, Hendrik Verwoerd, to ban Blacks from churches, clubs, hospitals, schools and other places if they would “cause a nuisance.”
An apartheid regime official was quoted as stating that the new powers were “needed to insure that the relations between black and white were to be those of guardian and ward,” which the article did not dispute.
When reporter Joseph Lelyveld began writing more critically about apartheid in the 1960s, his articles were toned down or distorted by editors, who made the system appear less brutal.
Lelyveld wrote to his editor in January 1983 that “virtually all the original reporting” he had conducted over a one-month period for a piece on the underfunding of Black schools had been omitted; the printed article, he said, was “like a salami sandwich without the salami, just slabs of stale bread.”
Always on the Wrong Side of History
Much like with its support for apartheid, TheNew York Times and other mainstream U.S. media outlets were on the wrong side of history when it came to African decolonization.
New York Times article in the 1950s on Africa adopting the “dark continent” trope, with the light seemingly coming from white Europeans. [Source: nytimes.com]
When Times reporter Leonard Ingalls wrote a letter demanding more sympathetic coverage, the foreign news editor, Emanuel Freedman, shot him down, preferring the traditional narrative in which Africans were depicted as “savages” and buffoons.
The Times’s coverage of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya adopted a “witch-craft versus civilization narrative.” The Mau Mau were presented as a “secret tribal society whose campaign of murder [has] forced the imposition of martial law.”
No indication was given that the Mau Mau emerged in response to colonial injustice. Nor that the violence of the Mau Mau rebels paled in comparison to that resulting from Great Britain’s scorched-earth military campaign which led to the deaths of thousands of Kenyans and the detention of thousands more in concentration camps.
Cover of a men’s magazine that adopted stereotypical tropes about the Mau Mau similar to TheNew York Times. [Source: reddit.com]
Henry Wallace in Burnt Cork
The Times’s Kenya coverage fit with the pattern of demonization of radical anti-colonial movements, particularly when they were led by left-leaning Pan-Africanists like Dr. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana—who was voted Africa’s Man of the Millennium at the dawn of the 21st century.
Bigart’s negative association of Nkrumah with Henry Wallace was reflective of a prejudice not only toward Africans but also toward the left-wing and pacifist views which Wallace had embraced.
The comments about primitive bush people meanwhile reinforced deep-seated stereotypes about Africans. And the joke about cannibalism being an antidote to population explosion—a concern reflective of the Western elite’s view of Africans as a threat to be contained—was certainly in poor taste.
Congo
Like Nkrumah, Congolese Pan-African leader Patrice Lumumba was portrayed as a “wild eyed radical.”
Lumumba’s killer, Moïse Tshombe—who led a secessionist drive in the Katanga province backed by Belgian mining interests and white South African mercenaries—was praised in Time magazine by contrast as the “antithesis of the African savage.”
Most admirably, according to Time, Tshombe had “no complexes about being black” and recognized the “brutal side of the African personality, and the phony side of African socialism.”
Pro-Lumumbaist rebels who fought against Tshombe after Lumumba’s assassination were meanwhile depicted by Time as “a rabble of dazed, ignorant savages, used and abused by semi-sophisticated leaders.”
U.S. bombing operations—carried out by right-wing Cuban mercenaries—were hence justifiable, as was U.S. backing of the dictator Joseph Mobutu who was portrayed like Tshombe as a “responsible antidote” to Lumumba-style socialism.
Colonialism Dies Hard
At the end of the Cold War, numerous Western writers took stock of developments in Africa and concluded that the continent should be recolonized.
A characteristic piece from the era by Paul Johnson in The New York TimesMagazine was titled “Colonialism’s Back and Not a Moment Too Soon.”
The article was about the U.S. intervention in Somalia, which Johnson considered “a model for action in other African countries facing similar political collapse.” He concluded in a refrain familiar to Rudyard Kipling that “the civilized world has a mission to go out to these desperate places and govern.”
An ever more apocalyptic and racist article was “The Coming Anarchy” by Robert Kaplan, whose Malthusian doomsday scenario read like a description of Africa from one of the 19th century explorers’ journals.
According to Kaplan, conditions in Africa were so dire, absent the white man’s rule, that Africans no longer resembled human beings.
Wherever Kaplan traveled in a taxi, young men with “restless scanning eyes” surrounded him. He described the men as being “like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.”
Rwanda 1994
Historically, Western writers depicted Africans with alleged European features favorably, while demonizing those with so-called negroid features.
During the Rwanda conflict, Tutsis were adopted by some Western writers as honorary “Europeans” while Hutus were presented as the archetypical Africans.
The Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)—who happened to be staunch American allies—became the “good guys” by extension, and Rwanda’s national army, comprising mostly of Hutu allied with France, became the bad guys.
One of the earliest articles to use this racist characterization—which helped cultivate support for the RPF—was Alex Shoumatoff’s “Rwanda’s Aristocratic Guerrillas.” It appeared in TheNew York Times Magazine on December 13, 1992—two years after the RPF had illegally invaded Rwanda from Uganda and committed legions of atrocities against civilians.
His article informed readers that the Tutsis were “refined and had European features,” while the Hutus were “stocky and broad nosed.” He continued that, in the 19th century, “early ethnologists had been fascinated by these languidly haughty pastoral aristocrats [Tutsis] whose high foreheads, acquiline noses and thin lips seemed more Caucasian than Negroid, and they classed them as false negroes…. The Tutsis were thought to be highly civilized people, the race of fallen Europeans, whose existence in Central Africa had been rumored for centuries.”
After the RPF seized power, Shoumatoff wrote another piece for The New Yorker, sizing up the ethnic mix between Tutsis and Hutus in Burundi. Shoumatoff described the Tutsi as “tall, slender, with high foreheads, prominent cheekbones, and narrow features,” a different physical type from the Hutus, who were “short and stocky, with flat noses and thick lips.”
Such racist observations reinforced traditional stereotypes about Africans and painted a stark dichotomy that lent validation to the Tutsis genocidal campaign against the Hutu, which extended into the Congo.
In a February 1965 speech in Detroit, Michigan, Malcolm X spoke about the damaging psychological impact of the demonization of Africa on Blacks. He said that
“the colonial powers of Europe, having complete control over Africa, they projected the image of Africa negatively. They projected Africa always in a negative light, savages, cannibals, nothing civilized. Why then naturally was it so negative it was negative to you and me, and you and I began to hate it. We didn’t want anybody to tell us anything about Africa, much less calling us ‘Africans.’ In hating Africa and hating the Africans, we ended up hating ourselves, without even realizing it. Because you can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can’t hate your origin and not end up hating yourself.”
Thirty years after Malcolm X spoke those words, The Washington Post published a reactionary article by an African-American reporter, Keith Richburg, “A Black Man in Africa.”
Richburg, who had covered the inter-ethnic massacres in Rwanda, described his revulsion at witnessing the “discolored, bloated bodies floating down a river in Rwanda towards Tanzania.”
Richburg wrote that, as he witnessed the bodies, he realized how fortunate he had been; that he too “might have been one of the victims of the Rwanda massacre or he might have met some similarly anonymous fate in any one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor made the voyage [on the slave ship].”
Richburg’s article formed the basis of his 1997 book, Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, which Milton Allimadi calls “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for the new century.”
According to Allimadi, Richburg offered a classic case of a Black man caught in the psychic pain of what Frantz Fanon called “internal inferiorization.” Under this condition, negative stereotyping results in self-hatred and a desire to be affiliated with the dominant race.
As a youth, Richburg had been taught to believe that he was superior to other Blacks who came from poorer neighborhoods, talked loudly, had darker skin and nappier hair. When he went to the movies with his brother, they would cheer on the British soldiers attacking “Zulu tribesmen” in film.
This exemplifies the disorder Fanon and Malcolm X described. Its impact ultimately has been to neuter and destroy Black radical movements and solidarity. The legacy can be seen today, among other ways, with Black Lives Matter’s silence about Africa—which should be corrected.
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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].
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If anecdotal reports (1) (2) and statistics showing a positive correlation between midazolam prescriptions and deaths in the over-65s (3) are to be believed, it appears that euthanasia may have already been taking place on an illegal basis, predominantly in care homes.
Since benzodiazepines are contraindicated in Acute Pulmonary Insufficiency, risking Respiratory Depression, particularly with intravenous administration (4), the increased use of midazolam during 2020/2021 is especially concerning.
Would doctors who have not adequately physically examined patients, thereby satisfying themselves that sedation is appropriate in every case, particularly in situations which include pulmonary symptomatology, and have subsequently not adequately monitored such treatment such that respiratory failure has ensued, be guilty of medical negligence? (5)
In the current environment where ‘Telemedicine’ has disrupted doctor-patient interactions (6) yet continues to be encouraged by politicians as reported, for example, by the Telegraph, rushing into legislation authorising Assisted Dying at this point in time would surely be premature and present many opportunities for abuse.
Palliative Care is clearly vitally important. However, relief of distress, whilst sometimes inevitably leading to death, does not have as its primary intention the ending of life.
“First, Do No Harm”, has never encompassed Playing God; it has been resisted by physicians for many years and for very good reason.
Further undermining the trust of an already terrified population at this stage would surely be a step too far?
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Janet Menage is GP retired from Wales, UK.
Notes
(1) Fuller A. Care homes accused of using powerful sedatives to make coronavirus victims die more quickly as use rocketed 100%. The Sun 2020 Jul 12.
(2) Interview with Funeral Director, UK: Deaths Jumped 250% When Injections Began: Lindie Naughton Interviews Funeral Director John O’Looney. BitChute 2021 Sep 5.
(3) All cause mortality by age band (65 and over), January 2020 – June 2021, vs National prescriptions issued for midazolam hydrochloride 10 ml/2 mg ampoules for injection, January 2020 – March 2021
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Brnovich describes the mandate as “one of the greatest infringements upon individual liberties, principles of federalism, and separation of powers ever attempted by an American President.”
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced he is suing the Biden administration over the COVID vaccine mandate on federal employees and businesses with over 100 employees.
Brnovich describes the mandate as “one of the greatest infringements upon individual liberties, principles of federalism, and separation of powers ever attempted by an American President.”
I promised Arizonans that we would not stand for the Biden Administration's egregious federal overreach on vaccine mandates.
Today, we have filed the first lawsuit in the nation against the unconstitutional mandates. Arizona will not tolerate this assault on our sovereignty. pic.twitter.com/1eHAUX8GYs
“The federal government cannot force people to get the COVID-19 vaccine. The Biden Administration is once again flouting our laws and precedents to push their radical agenda. There can be no serious or scientific discussion about containing the spread of COVID-19 that doesn’t begin at our southern border.”
The administration has not written or clarified the mandate’s rules. Brnovich said his “lawsuit is valid because it seeks to declare that the federal government doesn’t have the authority to create such rules.”
A reporter asked about Brnovich’s office recognizing federal safety regulations regarding hard hats at construction sites. The AG told the reporter, “Stay tuned for the next lawsuit.”
Um, hard hats don’t inject a substance into your body. But don’t get me started on federal safety regulations because a libertarian could go on forever about them.
Let’s get to the brief.
Brnovich cites the Equal Protection Clause in his brief due to the Biden administration exempting illegal aliens from the vaccine mandate.
The Equal Protection Clause falls under the 14th Amendment, Section 1: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
7. Although the precise contours of the federal vaccination mandates are not yet clear, the violation of the Equal Protection Clause is already evident and egregious. In a nutshell: unauthorized aliens will not be subject to any vaccination requirements even when released directly into the United States (where most will remain), while roughly a hundred million U.S. citizens will be subject to unprecedented vaccination requirements. This reflects an unmistakable and unconstitutional—brand of favoritism in favor of unauthorized aliens.
8. This discrimination in favor of unauthorized aliens violates the Equal Protection Clause. Notably, alienage is a suspect class that triggers strict scrutiny. More typically (and almost invariably previously), this discrimination was against aliens rather than for them. See, e.g., Graham v. Richardson, 403 U.S. 365, 371, 375-376 (1971); Application of Griffiths, 413 U.S. 717, 721 1973). But the same principle applies to favoritism against U.S. citizens in favor of aliens. Defendants’ actions could never conceivably pass strict scrutiny.
“Because Defendants’ respect for individual rights vis-à-vis vaccination mandates appears to extend only to unauthorized aliens, and not U.S. citizens, their actions violate the Equal Protection Clause and should be invalidated,” continues Brnovich. “American citizens should be entitled to treatment at least as favorable as what Defendants afford to unauthorized aliens. This Court should accordingly declare this preferential treatment unlawful and enjoin actions taken pursuant to it.”
Remember when Biden’s Chief of Staff Ronald Klein retweeted this?
Lawyers said the retweet would cause problems for Biden. Well, it has because Brnovich brings it up in the complaint:
13. Recognizing that the Federal Government lacks the authority to directly impose a mandate, even the President’s own Chief of Staff retweeted that what the administration was planning for citizens (but not unauthorized aliens) would be the “ultimate work-around.”
14. The inadvertent admission in the preceding paragraph makes all of the administration’s actions constitutionally suspect. These other violations will be the subject of future challenges. Courts will have an opportunity to review and invalidate those forthcoming mandates as to private employers, federal contractors, federal employees, and health care workers. But this particular component—i.e., the unconstitutional discrimination against U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and aliens lawfully residing and working in the U.S.—is ripe for judicial review and invalidation now.
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According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you’re not counted as fully vaccinated until a full 14 days have passed since your second injection in the case of Pfizer or Moderna, or 14 days after your first dose of Janssen, despite the fact that over 80% of deaths after the vaccines occur in this window. How convenient
Anyone who dies within the first 14 days post-injection is counted as an unvaccinated death. Not only does this inaccurately inflate the unvaccinated death toll, but it also hides the real dangers of the COVID shots, as the vast majority of deaths from these shots occur within the first two weeks
The CDC also has two different sets of testing guidelines — one for vaccinated patients and another for the unvaccinated. If you’re unvaccinated, CDC guidance says to use a cycle threshold (CT) of 40, known to result in false positives. If you’re vaccinated, they recommend using a CT of 28 or less, which minimizes the risk of false positives
The CDC also hides vaccine failures and props up the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative by only counting breakthrough cases that result in hospitalization or death
Hospitals are still also reporting non-COVID related illnesses as COVID-19
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While public health officials and mainstream media claim the COVID-19 pandemic is now “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,”1 we now know this claim is based on highly misleading statistics.
In a July 16, 2021, White House press briefing,2 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Rochelle Walensky claimed that “over 97% of people who are entering the hospital right now are unvaccinated.” A few weeks later, in an August 5, 2021, statement, she inadvertently revealed how that statistic actually came about.3
As it turns out, the CDC was looking at hospitalization and mortality data from January through June 2021 — a timeframe during which the vast majority of the U.S. population were still unvaccinated.4
But that’s not the case at all now. The CDC is also playing with statistics in other ways to create the false and inaccurate impression that unvaccinated people make up the bulk of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. For example, we now find out the agency is counting anyone who died within the first 14 days post-injection as unvaccinated.
Not only does this inaccurately inflate the unvaccinated death toll, but it also hides the real dangers of the COVID shots, as the vast majority of deaths from these shots occur within the first two weeks.5 Now their deaths are counted as unvaccinated deaths rather than being counted as deaths due to vaccine injury or COVID-19 breakthrough infections!
How CDC Counts Breakthrough Cases
According to the CDC,6 you’re not counted as fully vaccinated until a full 14 days have passed since your second injection in the case of Pfizer or Moderna, or 14 days after your first dose of Janssen. This is how the CDC defines a vaccine breakthrough case:
“… a vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after they have completed all recommended doses of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-authorized COVID-19 vaccine.”
In other words, if you’ve received one dose of Pfizer or Moderna and develop symptomatic COVID-19, get admitted to the hospital and/or die from COVID, you’re counted as an unvaccinated case. If you’ve received two doses and get ill within 14 days, you’re still counted as an unvaccinated case.
The problem with this is that over 80% of hospitalizations and deaths appear to be occurring among those who have received the jabs, but this reality is hidden by the way cases are defined and counted. A really clever and common strategy of the CDC during the pandemic has been to change the definitions and goalposts so it supports their nefarious narrative.
For example, the CDC has quietly changed the definition of “vaccine,” apparently in an attempt to validate calling the COVID mRNA gene therapies vaccines. In an August 26, 2021, archived version7of vaccine, the CDC defines it as a “product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.”
But a few days later, a new definition appeared on the CDC’s website,8 which now says a vaccine is a “preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” The differences in the definitions are subtle but distinct: The first one defined a vaccine as something that will “produce immunity.”
But, since the COVID-19 vaccines are not designed to stop infection but, rather, to only lessen the degree of infection, it becomes obvious that the new definition was created to cover the COVID vaccines.
Different Testing Guidelines for Vaxxed and Unvaxxed
It’s not just the CDC’s definition of a breakthrough case that skews the data. Even more egregious and illogical is the fact that the CDC even has two different sets of testing guidelines — one for vaccinated patients and another for the unvaccinated.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the CDC has recommended a PCR test cycle threshold (CT) of 40.9 This flies in the face of scientific consensus, which has long been that a CT over 35 will produce 97% false positives,10 essentially rendering the test useless.11,12,13
In mid-May 2021, the CDC finally lowered its recommended CT count, but only for patients who have received one or more COVID shots.14 So, if you have received a COVID injection, the CDC’s guidelines call for your PCR test to be run at a CT of 28 or less. If you are unvaccinated, your PCR test is to be run at a CT of 40, which grossly overestimates the true prevalence of infection.
The end result is that unvaccinated individuals who get tested are FAR more prone to get false positives, while those who have received the jab are more likely to get an accurate diagnosis of infection.
Only Hospitalization and Death Count if You’re COVID Jabbed
Even that’s not all. The CDC also hides vaccine failures and props up the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative by only counting breakthrough cases that result in hospitalization or death.
In other words, if you got your second COVID shot more than 14 days ago and you develop symptoms, you do not count as a breakthrough case unless you’re admitted to the hospital and/or die from COVID-19 in the hospital, even if you test positive. So, to summarize, COVID breakthrough cases count only if all of the following apply:
The patient received the second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna shot at least 14 days ago (or one dose in case of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose injection)
The patient tests positive for SARS-CoV-2 using a CT of 28 or less, which avoids false positives
The patient is admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 and/or dies in the hospital
Vaccinated Probably Make Up Bulk of Hospitalizations
If vaccinated and unvaccinated were not treated with such varying standards, we’d probably find that the vaccinated now make up the bulk of hospitalizations, making the COVID pandemic one of the vaccinated. An August 30, 2021, exposé by The Epoch Times reveals what’s really happening on the front lines:15
“After a battery of testing, my friend was diagnosed with pancreatitis. But it was easier for the hospital bureaucracy to register the admission as a COVID case … The mainstream media is reporting that severe COVID cases are mainly among unvaccinated people … Is that what’s really going on?
It’s certainly not the case in Israel, the first country to fully vaccinate a majority of its citizens against the virus. Now it has one of the highest daily infection rates and the majority of people catching the virus (77 percent to 83 percent, depending on age) are already vaccinated, according to data collected by the Israeli government …
After admission, I spoke to the nurse on the COVID ward … The nurse told me that she had gotten both vaccines but she was feeling worried: ‘Two thirds of my patients are fully vaccinated,’ she said. How can there be such a disconnect between what the COVID ward nurse told me and the mainstream media reports?”
The heart of the problem is that the U.S. is not even trying to achieve an accurate count. As noted by The Epoch Times, “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have publicly acknowledged that they do not have accurate data.”
So, when you hear that cases are rising, and that most of them are unvaccinated, you need to ask: “Are these people who have had one vaccine and gotten sick, two vaccines and gotten sick, or no vaccines at all? Without more details, it is impossible to know what is really going on,” The Epoch Times says.16
All we do know, according to one doctor who spoke with The Epoch Times, is “the vaccines are not as effective as public health officials told us they would be. ‘This is a product that’s not doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to stop transmission of this virus and it’s not doing that.’”
Counting Non-COVID Illness as COVID Cases
On top of all of that, hospitals are still also reporting non-COVID related illnesses as COVID. As reported by The Epoch Times:17
“Health authorities around the world have been doing this since the beginning of the COVID crisis. For example, a young man in Orange County, Florida who died in a motorcycle crash last summer was originally considered a COVID death by state health officials …
And a middle-aged construction worker fell off a ladder in Croatia and was also counted as a death from COVID … To muddy the waters further, even people who test negative for COVID are sometimes counted as COVID deaths.
Consider the case of 26-year-old Matthew Irvin, a father of three from Yamhill County, Oregon. As reported by KGW8 News, Irvin went to the ER with stomach pain, nausea, and diarrhea on July 5, 2020. But instead of admitting him to the hospital, the doctors sent him home.
Five days later, on July 10, 2020, Irvin died. Though his COVID test came back negative two days after his death and his family told reporters and public health officials that no one Irvin had been around had any COVID symptoms, the medical examiner allegedly told the family that an autopsy was not necessary, listing his death as a coronavirus case. It took the Oregon Health Authority two and a half months to correct the mistake.
In an even more striking example of overcounting COVID deaths, a nursing home in New Jersey that only has 90 beds was wrongly reported as having 753 deaths from COVID. According to a spokesman, they had fewer than twenty deaths. In other words, the number of deaths was over-reported by 3,700 percent.”
No Need to Fear the Delta Variant if You’re Unvaccinated
In a June 29, 2021, interview,18 Fauci called the Delta variant “a game-changer” for unvaccinated people, warning it will devastate the unvaccinated population while vaccinated individuals are protected against it. Alas, in the real world, the converse is turning out to be true, as the Delta variant is running wild primarily among those who got the COVID jab.
In a June 30, 2021, appearance on Fox News (video above), epidemiologist and cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough pointed out that “It is very clear from the U.K. Technical Briefing19 that was published June 18 that the vaccine provides no protection against the Delta variant.”20
The reason for this is because the Delta variant contains three different mutations, all in the spike protein. This allows this variant to evade the immune responses in those who have received the COVID jabs, but not those who have natural immunity, which is much broader.
Even so, the Delta variant is far milder than previous variants, according to the U.K.’s June 18, 2021, Technical Briefing.21 In it, they present data showing the Delta variant is more contagious but far less deadly and easier to treat. As McCullough told Fox News:
“Whether you get the vaccine or not, patients will get some very mild symptoms like a cold and they can be easily managed … Patients who have severe symptoms or at high risk, we can use simple drug combinations at home and get them through the illness. So, there’s no reason now to push vaccinations.”
Contrast that with the following statement made by President Biden during a CNN town hall meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, in late July 2021:22
“We have a pandemic for those who haven’t gotten a vaccination. It’s that basic, that simple. If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, not going to the ICU unit, and not going to die. You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
However, Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency doctor and visiting professor of health policy and management at George Washington University’s Milken School of Public Health in Washington, D.C., contradicted the president, saying he had led the American astray by telling them you don’t need a mask if you’re vaccinated, or that you can’t get it or transmit it. As reported by CNN Health:23
“In particular, Wen took issue with Biden’s incorrect claims that you cannot contract Covid-19 or the Delta variant if you are vaccinated. ‘I was actually disappointed,’ Wen said. ‘I actually thought he was answering questions as if it were a month ago. He’s not really meeting the realities of what’s happening on the ground. I think he may have led people astray.’”
CNN added that Wen had told their political commentator Anderson Cooper that “many unknown answers remain related to Covid-19, and that it is still not known how well protected vaccinated individuals are from mild illness … [or] if you’re vaccinated, could you still be contagious to other people.”
Vaccinated Patients Flood Hospitals Around the World
The U.K. data showing the Delta variant is far milder than previous SARS-CoV-2 viruses deflates the claim that avoiding severe illness is a sign that the shots are working. Since the Delta variant typically doesn’t cause severe illness in the first place, it doesn’t make sense to attribute milder illness to the shot.
But if Delta is the mildest coronavirus variant yet, why are so many “vaccinated” people ending up in the hospital? While we still do not have clear confirmation, this could be a sign that antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) is at work. Alternatively, it could be that vaccine injuries are being misreported as breakthrough cases.
Whatever the case may be, real-world data from areas with high COVID jab rates show a disturbing trend. For example, August 1, 2021, the director of Israel’s Public Health Services, Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, announced half of all COVID-19 infections were among the fully vaccinated.24 Signs of more serious disease among fully vaccinated are also emerging, she said, particularly in those over the age of 60.
A few days later, August 5, 2021, Dr. Kobi Haviv, director of the Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, appeared on Channel 13 News, reporting that 95% of severely ill COVID-19 patients are fully vaccinated, and that they make up 85% to 90% of COVID-related hospitalizations overall.25
In Scotland, official data on hospitalizations and deaths show 87% of those who have died from COVID-19 in the third wave that began in early July were vaccinated.26
In Gibraltar, which has a 99% COVID jab compliance rate, COVID cases have risen by 2,500% since June 1, 2021,27 and in Iceland, where over 82% have received the shots, 77% of new COVID cases are among the fully vaccinated.28
Data from the U.K. show a similar trend among those over the age of 50. In this age group, partially and fully “vaccinated” people account for 68% of hospitalizations and 70% of COVID deaths.29
A CDC investigation of an outbreak in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, between July 6, 2021, through July 25, 2021, found 74% of those who received a diagnosis of COVID19, and 80% of hospitalizations, were among the fully vaccinated.30,31 Most, but not all, had the Delta variant.
The CDC also found that fully vaccinated individuals who contract the infection have as high a viral load in their nasal passages as unvaccinated individuals who get infected.32 The same was found in a British study, a preprint of which was posted mid-August 2021.33,34 This means the vaccinated are just as infectious as the unvaccinated.
Interestingly, a Lancet preprint study35 that examined breakthrough infections in health care workers in Vietnam who received the AstraZeneca COVID shot found the “viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with old strains detected between March-April 2020.”
What’s more, they found no correlation between vaccine-induced neutralizing antibody levels and viral loads or the development of symptoms. According to the authors:
“Breakthrough Delta variant infections are associated with high viral loads, prolonged PCR positivity, and low levels of vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies, explaining the transmission between the vaccinated people.”
Not All Vaccinated Are Confirmed Vaccinated
As if all of that weren’t enough, there’s yet one more confounder. Just because you got the COVID shot does not mean you’ve been confirmed as having gotten the shot. You’re only confirmed “vaccinated” if your COVID injection is added to your medical record, and this sometimes doesn’t happen if you’re going to a temporary vaccination clinic, a drive-through or pharmacy, for example. As reported by CNN:36
“If you are among the countless people who didn’t get the doses at a primary care doctor’s office, there may not be any record of the vaccination on file with your doctor.”
To actually count as a “confirmed vaccinated” individual, you must send your vaccination card to your primary care physician’s office and have them add it to your electronic medical record. If you got the shot at a pharmacy, you’ll need to verify that they forwarded your proof of vaccination to your doctor. Primary care offices are then responsible for sharing their patients’ immunization data with the state’s immunization information system.
Patient-recorded proof of vaccination is only accepted for influenza and pneumococcal vaccines, not COVID-19 injections.37 What this all means is that, say you got the shot several weeks ago at a drive-through vaccination clinic and get admitted to the hospital with COVID symptoms. Unless your COVID shot status has actually been added into the medical system, you will not count as “vaccinated.”
This too can skew the statistics, because we know the CDC ascertains vaccination status by matching SARS-CoV-2 case surveillance and CAIR2 data using person-level identifiers and algorithms.38
As noted by John Zurlo, division director of infectious disease at Thomas Jefferson University, “the lack of reliable vaccine records complicates efforts to precisely understand vaccine effectiveness and determine how many local hospitalizations and deaths are resulting from COVID-19 breakthrough infections.”39
We’re in the Largest Clinical Trial in Medical History
In closing, it’s worth remembering that the COVID injection campaign is part and parcel of a clinical trial. As noted Dr. Lidiya Angelova in a recent Genuine Prospect article:40
“Many people are unaware that they are participating in the largest clinical trial test of our times. It is because World Health Organization, healthcare authorities, politicians, celebrities, and journalists promote the experimental medical treatments (wrongly called COVID-19 vaccines) as safe and efficient while in fact these treatments are in early clinical research stage.
It means that there is not enough data for such claims and that the people who participate are test subject.”
As shown in a graph on Genuine Prospect, under normal circumstances, clinical research follows a strict protocol that begins with tests on cell cultures. After that comes tests on animals, then limited human testing in four phases. In Phase 1 of human testing, up to 100 people are included and followed anywhere from one week to several months.
Phase 2 typically includes several hundred participants and lasts up to two years. In Phase 3, several hundred to 3,000 participants are tested upon for one to four years. Phase 4 typically includes several thousand individuals who are followed for at least one year or longer. After each phase, the data is examined to assess effectiveness and adverse reactions.
The timelines for these stages and phases were not followed for the COVID “vaccines.” Most Phase 3 trials concluded by the end of 2020, and everyone who got the shots since their rollout under emergency use authorization is part of a Phase 4 clinical trial, whether they realize it or not.41 And since the trials are not completed, you simply cannot make definitive claims about safety, especially long-term safety. As noted by Angelova:42
“When I worked at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) … I went to the course Ethical and Regulatory Aspects of Clinical Research … The first rule we learnt was ‘Clinical research must be ethical’ … All ethical aspects of clinical research are dismissed with the COVID-19 vaccines.
People should know that nobody can require such to participate in everyday activities like using public transportation, shopping, going to school and even hospital. People should know that they should not be punished for refusing to take the experimental medical treatments.
COVID-19 vaccines mass use and COVID-19 measures are an infringe[ment] of the Articles 2, 3, 5, 9, 11, 12, 13, 18, 20, 25, 27, 28 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).”
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The fall of Kabul to the Taliban, pre-negotiated with the US in Doha, Qatar, has launched yet another fruitless enterprise, as fruitless as the US effort to keep Afghanistan under its own control: all sorts of IR scholars, pundits, and journalists, in all sorts of specialized and unspecialized publications in the US and Europe, are trying to prove that the 2021 version of the Taliban has not changed in comparison to the version of the Taliban which seized control of Afghanistan in 1996 and that they will again make Afghanistan a cradle for all kinds of terrorists. If they use facts rather than hollow phrases, they commonly seek a confirmation of this thesis in the names of the 2021 Taliban leaders appointed to the interim government, the names which are not particularly different from those of the Taliban who governed the country from 1996.
Yet, all these would-be experts have somehow failed to notice that the times have changed, and so has the geopolitical environment in which the whole overturn took place. Indeed, how can the Taliban remain the same, if the entire world has changed so profoundly, comparing the year of 2001, when the Taliban were overthrown by the US forces, with the year of 2021, when the US forces withdrew before the Taliban’s advance? No matter how rigid they are in their faith as a religious movement, the Taliban as a political organization had no choice but to adapt to the tide of change, if they wanted to seize and exercise power in a changed geopolitical context.
There are many symbolic signs of this new context which are directly linked to the second arrival of the Taliban.
First, both the Taliban and the US sat down to negotiate the withdrawal of the US forces and transfer of power to the Taliban, which signals that the US is no longer the same hegemonic power that refuse to ‘negotiate with the terrorists’, as the Taliban were characterized by the US diplomacy for so many years.
Second, the Taliban have adopted a different political philosophy, which gives precedence to diplomatic – rather than military – means, whenever the former proves more efficient.
Third, the negotiations took place in Qatar, a country that used to be the most isolated among the Arab countries due to its alliance with Iran, which shows that the Americans have accepted not only Qataris, but also Iranians, as mediators and potential partners.
Fourth, despite their ambiguous relations and deep ideological differences, Iranians have also accepted the Taliban as a potential partner, which is also mirrored in the fact that their only Arab ally, Qatar, played the role of the mediator and host to the US-Taliban negotiations.
Fifth, China, Russia, Iran, and Pakistan did not close their diplomatic missions in Kabul after its takeover by the Taliban, which demonstrates that two global and two regional powers intend to cooperate with the Taliban-led government; moreover, that these four powers asses that they can benefit from such cooperation and accept the Taliban as a relevant regional partner of potential strategic significance. Therefore, at the very least, the Taliban are not going to be so isolated as they were during their first incarnation, which will certainly open them up, for the first time, to various foreign policy options.
However, there is one important question that is rarely posed by those who pretend to write and speak about the Taliban. This question is the most basic one: who are, in fact, the Taliban and who actually created them?
In an interview, the (late) National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, proudly admitted that the US intelligence agencies inserted a number of Islamist fighters’ cells into Afghanistan by the end of the 1970s, with the task to penetrate the territory of the then Soviet Union and perform military actions, so as to provoke the Soviet regime to invade Afghanistan.
The idea was to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet Union’s Vietnam-like catastrophe and thus bring the communist empire to a collapse. As we all know, the Soviets had fallen into that trap and the rest is history: they were eventually defeated and expelled by the well-organized Islamist fighters, better prepared for a guerrilla war than the Soviet army.
However, no matter how Brzezinski prided himself for this idea, it is well-known that its execution and implementation were in more than 90% left to a non-American agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan, the country that was the most faithful British and American ally at the time. In an exceptional analysis Forever Friends? Pakistan and the Taliban Still Need Each Other, written by Zahid Shahab Ahmed and published in the National Interest, we can see it clearly:
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Washington approached Islamabad to become its frontline ally in a proxy war against the Soviets. During the Afghan-Soviet War (1979-1989), thousands of mujahideen were recruited from around the world and trained in Pakistan, and then deployed into Afghanistan. In addition to receiving billions in economic and military assistance from the United States, Pakistan expanded its influence in Afghanistan through close relations with the Afghan mujahideen as they later united into the Taliban in the 1990s. In 1994, Mullah Mohammed Omar founded the Taliban with fifty students in Kandahar. By 1995, the group’s control increased to twelve provinces and its size to 25,000 fighters. Due to its quick territorial gains, the Taliban managed to seize control of most of the country and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 1996. To date, their first takeover of Kabul is attributed to Pakistan’s strong backing.
Therefore, the Taliban’s recruitment from among the Afghani and Pakistani Pashtuns and their military training for guerrilla warfare and religious indoctrination with the mixture of Pakistani Deobandi and Saudi Wahhabi Islam are to be treated as a special intelligence operation conducted by the ISI, and the same may be applied to their military victory.
Of course, this operation would not have been viable without adequate coverage by the American CIA and British MI6, and assistance by Saudi Arabia’s GID (General Intelligence Directorate). Thus the Taliban and their hybrid ideology were created for a particular purpose and their heavy-handed policies upon the seizure of power also served a particular geopolitical agenda. It would go beyond the scope of this article to analyse in detail what this agenda was or might have been. Let us only notice that the Taliban in those times prepared the ground, both ideologically and literally, to legitimize the future American ‘War on Terror’, which has brought 20 years of continuous instability to the central part of Eurasia. In other words, there is no reason to look at the Taliban as a genuine occurrence – they had been created as a proxy and were left with no option but to remain a proxy. Whose proxy, that is the only question.
There is no doubt that the second arrival of the Taliban has been prepared and backed, again, by the ISI and Pakistan. On the operative level, the Taliban have clearly remained Pakistan’s proxy. However, in the meantime, Pakistan has totally changed its geopolitical orientation and switched loyalties. Initially created by the British Empire through religious partition of the post-colonial India to enable continuous Anglo-American control of the heart of Eurasia, Pakistan found itself abandoned and cornered by its former sponsors and allies, when they invested their capital and geopolitical weight in the strengthening and rise of its archenemy, Hindu-controlled India. Of course, this was not the first time that the British-American axis supported India against Pakistan, just as they were supporting Pakistan against India.
However, this time it happened in the context of the rise of the most extreme form of religious nationalism promoted by the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, designed to eliminate Muslims as a constituent part of the Indian nation for good, which would force Pakistan to enter yet another conflict with India over a definite line of Muslim-Hindu separation.
Ostensibly, it was a rational calculation by the British and Americans, to support instant economic rise of India and foster a redesign of Indian policy towards extreme, religiously based nationalism, so as to make India capable and willing to confront China, as India’s old and their new geopolitical adversary. However, such a tricky game has only pushed Pakistan to turn towards China as a potential ally and geopolitical patron. Thus the British and Americans have eventually pushed Pakistan away and lost their most faithful ally, and China has been delivered an entirely new leverage to fundamentally change the geopolitical balance in Eurasia.
With Pakistan under the US-UK patronage and Afghanistan under American control, China had a huge problem to secure its most important strategic project, the Belt and Road Initiative, in particular its China/Pakistan and China/Central Asia/West Asia Corridors. Also, the direct access of the Anglo-American intelligence agencies to the very borderland of China, through their stronghold in Afghanistan and the porous borders of the post-Soviet Central Asian republics, made it possible to instigate China’s own ‘Muslim problem’ in the form of the Islamist radicalization of Uighurs in Xinjiang. This, predictably, provoked the Chinese regime to respond in an extremely oppressive manner, which almost put in question its relations with the entire Islamic world, especially the countries of Central Asia, thereby undermining the prospects for their participation in the Belt and Road Initiative. As this problem proved to be too difficult to solve on the internal level, China’s imperative was to take Afghanistan out of the American control and reverse this trend that gravely threatened Chinese strategic interests. In these circumstances, Pakistan’s well-known proxy, the Taliban, appeared on the horizon as the best suited instrument for that purpose. In this context, it is not difficult to imagine why the Taliban were so quickly and efficiently restored by the ISI and why they suddenly became so politically pragmatic and militarily strong.
So, the Taliban’s 2021 takeover was also decisively supported by Pakistan, as it had been the one in 1996. However, this time it has all happened in a totally different geopolitical environment, with Pakistan under China’s geopolitical umbrella, which implies a totally different geopolitical orientation on Pakistan’s, as well as the Taliban’s, part.
Instead of serving the goals of Halford Mackinder’s doctrine of permanent destabilization of Eurasia, so as to secure British-American control over the world’s sea-trade routes, now Pakistan and its proxies have become open to promoting the opposite geopolitical agenda, the Chinese doctrine of building Eurasian land-trade infrastructure as an alternative to the Anglo-American hegemony over sea-trade routes. Such a doctrine, embodied in the Belt and Road Initiative, requires a long-lasting stabilization of the Eurasian geopolitical space, and Afghanistan occupies a strategic place within this constellation.
Of course, most the Chinese officials could do in their public activities was to keep the embassy in Kabul open, recognize the Taliban, and send their Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wang Yi, to meet the Taliban delegation in Tianjin.
On their part, the Taliban described China as a ‘friendly country’ and invited it to participate in reconstruction and development of Afghanistan, guaranteeing the safety of Chinese investments.
However, there is no need to make vain guesses about whether the new version of the Taliban will really prevent various Islamist militant groups to penetrate China’s territory [on behalf of the US], as well as the territory of the post-Soviet Central Asian republics: this time, the Taliban have been resurrected and installed as a watchdog, to serve no other than this very purpose, so as to eventually make Afghanistan a part of a potential strategic alliance of China, Pakistan, and Iran. All in accordance with the Chinese strategic vision to make the Eurasian land-mass stable for transcontinental development of infrastructure, trade, and industry, designed to lead to economic, and eventually political, unification of the Eurasian continent.
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Dr. Zlatko Hadžidedić is the founder and director of the Center for Nationalism Studies, in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (www.nationalismstudies.org).
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The European Union database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, and they are now reporting 24,526 fatalities, and 2,317,495 injuries, following COVID-19 injections.
A Health Impact News subscriber from Europe reminded us that this database maintained at EudraVigilance is only for countries in Europe who are part of the European Union (EU), which comprises 27 countries.
The total number of countries in Europe is much higher, almost twice as many, numbering around 50. (There are some differences of opinion as to which countries are technically part of Europe.)
So as high as these numbers are, they do NOT reflect all of Europe. The actual number in Europe who are reported dead or injured following COVID-19 shots would be much higher than what we are reporting here.
The EudraVigilance database reports that through September 11, 2021 there are 24,526 deaths and 2,317,495 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots:
From the total of injuries recorded, almost half of them (1,126,869) are serious injuries.
“Seriousness provides information on the suspected undesirable effect; it can be classified as ‘serious’ if it corresponds to a medical occurrence that results in death, is life-threatening, requires inpatient hospitalisation, results in another medically important condition, or prolongation of existing hospitalisation, results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or is a congenital anomaly/birth defect.”
A Health Impact News subscriber in Europe ran the reports for each of the four COVID-19 shots we are including here. It is a lot of work to tabulate each reaction with injuries and fatalities, since there is no place on the EudraVigilance system we have found that tabulates all the results.
Since we have started publishing this, others from Europe have also calculated the numbers and confirmed the totals.*
Here is the summary data through September 11, 2021.
Total reactions for the mRNA vaccine Tozinameran (code BNT162b2,Comirnaty) from BioNTech/ Pfizer – 11,711 deaths and 980,474 injuries to 11/09/2021
26,634 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 156 deaths
26,940 Cardiac disorders incl. 1,745 deaths
253 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 21 deaths
257,766 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 1,278 deaths
831 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 51 deaths
3,987 Immune system disorders incl. 23 deaths
24,674 Infections and infestations incl. 330 deaths
11,183 Injury poisoning and procedural complications incl. 141 deaths
21,578 Investigations incl. 121 deaths
11,626 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 73 deaths
148,195 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 74 deaths
510 Neoplasms benign malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 16 deaths
204,423 Nervous system disorders incl. 840 deaths
439 Pregnancy puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 11 deaths
158 Product issues incl. 1 death
18,501 Psychiatric disorders incl. 47 deaths
3,639 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 48 deaths
12,993 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 2 deaths
34,557 Respiratory thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 629 deaths
45,140 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 36 deaths
1,291 Social circumstances incl. 6 deaths
1,142 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 22 deaths
24,083 Vascular disorders incl. 379 deaths
Total reactions for the COVID-19 vaccine JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S) from Johnson & Johnson: 1,203 deaths and 74,607 injuries to 11/09/2021
690 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 31 deaths
1,201 Cardiac disorders incl. 120 deaths
25 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders
560 Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 1 death
42 Endocrine disorders incl. 1 death
1,006 Eye disorders incl. 5 deaths
6,822 Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 56 deaths
19,539 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 303 deaths
96 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 9 deaths
302 Immune system disorders incl. 7 deaths
1,679 Infections and infestations incl. 66 deaths
694 Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 16 deaths
3,861 Investigations incl. 72 deaths
431 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 26 deaths
11,861 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 30 deaths
31 Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 2 deaths
15,493 Nervous system disorders incl. 142 deaths
26 Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 1 death
20 Product issues
988 Psychiatric disorders incl. 11 deaths
280 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 11 deaths
863 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 4 deaths
2,629 Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 136 deaths
2,296 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 5 deaths
212 Social circumstances incl. 4 deaths
546 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 38 deaths
2,414 Vascular disorders incl. 106 deaths
Professor of Ethics in Canada for 20 Years is Fired for Refusing Mandatory COVID-19 Shot
Dr. Julie Ponesse, Professor of Ethics at Huron College of the University of Western Ontario, one of the largest universities in Canada, goes online to give her last lesson on medical ethics to her students, discussing the ethics of mandating a vaccination as a requirement for employment. Within 11 hours after posting this video, the University terminated her employment after 20 years of faithful service.
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In a paper published Sept. 9, Nina Pierpoint, M.D., Ph.D., analyzed studies published in August 2021 which she said prove the Delta variant is evading the available COVID vaccines, leading her to conclude herd immunity to COVID cannot be achieved through vaccination.
Based on what we know about COVID vaccines, mandating them for the public is a “potentially harmful, damaging act,” according to New York physician Nina Pierpont, M.D., Ph.D.
In a paper published Sept. 9, Pierpoint analyzed studies published in August 2021 which she said prove the Delta variant is evading the available COVID vaccines, leading her to conclude herd immunity to COVID cannot be achieved through vaccination.
Pierpont, a graduate of Yale University with a Ph.D. from Princeton University and an M.D. from the John Hopkins University School of Medicine, cites three studies whose findings and data support her conclusions.
The studies include:
One published Aug. 6 in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.”
A third study published Aug. 24, which was funded by the UK Department for Health and Social CareIn her paper, Pierpont states that new research in multiple settings shows Delta produces very high viral loads (meaning, the density of virus on a nasopharyngeal swab as interpreted from PCR cycle threshold numbers), and that viral loads are much higher in people infected with Delta than they were in people infected with Alpha.
Research also shows viral loads with Delta are equally high whether the person has been vaccinated or not. The more virus one has in the nose and mouth, Pierpont writes, the more likely it is to be in this individual’s respiratory droplets and secretions, and to spread to others.
According to Pierpont, due to evolution of the virus itself, all the currently licensed vaccines — all based on the original Wuhan strain spike protein sequence — have lost their ability to accomplish the purpose of a vaccine, which is to prevent infection and transmission.
As a result, vaccine mandates are “stripped of their justification,” since to vaccinate an individual no longer stops or even slows his ability to acquire and transmit the virus to others.
Pierpont also cites data in the studies that show, under Delta, natural immunity is much more protective than vaccination.
“All severities of COVID-19 illness produce healthy levels of natural immunity,” she concludes.
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Ein Artikel in „The Guardian“ vom 13. September „Starker Anstieg der akutmedizinischen Betten, die von Kindern belegt werden, die sonst nirgendwo unterkommen“ sollte nicht nur Eltern alarmieren. „Uncut-news.ch“ veröffentlichte den Artikel. Ich zitiere:
„Ein Drittel der Intensivbetten in England ist mit Kindern belegt, die aufgrund ihrer Krankheit nirgendwo anders hingehen können. Mitten in der COVID-19-Pandemie leiden diese Kinder unter psychischen und neurologischen Problemen. Einige zeigen gewalttätiges oder selbstverletzendes Verhalten, andere haben schwere neurologische Entwicklungsstörungen. Wieder andere sind aufgrund einer Essstörung dort. Doch trotz ihrer individuellen Bedürfnisse haben viele von ihnen keine spezifische psychiatrische Diagnose. Und ohne Diagnose haben sie keinen Anspruch auf ein Bett in einer echten psychiatrischen Abteilung, selbst wenn sie so gewalttätig sind, dass sie nicht nur eine Gefahr für sich selbst, sondern auch für ihre Umgebung darstellen. Das bedeutet, dass diese Kinder schließlich in einem normalen Krankenhaus leben, manchmal monatelang. Noch besorgniserregender ist, dass seit Beginn der Pandemie die Zahl der Kinder in diesen Betten dramatisch gestiegen ist. In den USA berichten Kinderkrankenhäuser im ganzen Land, dass die Zahl der Kinder, die psychiatrische Hilfe benötigen, ‚explodiert‘ ist, so CNN. ‚Mehrere Kinderkrankenhäuser gaben an, dass das Angebot an stationären psychiatrischen Betten so knapp war, dass sie Kinder in ihren Notaufnahmen unterbringen mussten – manchmal wochenlang.‘“(1)
Screenshot from The Guardian
Bereits im vergangenen März forderte ich in einem Kommentar „‘Lockdown Kinderrechte‘: Wir töten die Seelen unserer Kinder“, der in verschiedenen unabhängigen Internet-Plattforen veröffentlicht wurde: „Wenn wir gegen diesen Lockdown-Wahnsinn nicht sofort aufstehen, machen wir uns mitschuldig am Seelenmord unserer Kinder!“
Doch der Großteil der Eltern und Erzieherinnen und Erzieher in Kindergärten und Schulen steht nicht auf, sondern nimmt stillschweigend hin, dass korrupte Regierungen ihre Kinder in den Wahnsinn oder gar Suizid treiben und damit unser aller Zukunft strangulieren.
Natürlich ahnen alle vernunftbegabten Erwachsene seit über eineinhalb Jahren, dass es bei den politischen Wahnsinns-Maßnahmen nicht um den Gesundheitsschutz der Bevölkerung geht, sondern allein um ein weltweites politisches Großexperiment, mit dessen Hilfe diabolische Herrscher versuchen, ihren Willen durchzusetzen. Aber diese Erwachsenen bringen nicht den Mut auf, die Regierenden dazu zu zwingen, diesen Wahnsinn sofort zu beenden.
Im Gegenteil: Durch den direkten und indirekten Impfzwang mit einem „Killer-Impfstoff“ – auch von Kindern und Säuglingen – verschärfte sich die weltweite Situation für die Menschen im letzten halben Jahr noch einmal entscheidend. Sogar Kirchen werden inzwischen zu Impfzentren umfunktioniert. Und die Tatsache, dass „COVID 19“ in Wahlkämpfen – wie zum Beispiel in Deutschland – keine Rolle spielt, ist ein untrügliches Zeichen dafür, dass es um ganz andere Ziele als den Gesundheitsschutz geht.
Wer ist in der Lage, Eltern und Erziehern so ins Gewissen zu reden, dass sie endlich aufstehen und NEIN sagen? Unsere Kinder sind in großer Not und unsere Zukunft ist in Gefahr.
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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel ist Vater, Großvater, Erziehungswissenschaftler und Diplom-Psychologe.
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The title of an unputdownable 1980 classic by Peter Hopkirk comes to mind even as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation are preparing to hold back-to-back summit meetings at Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on September 17.
Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Treasures of Central Asia tells the breathtaking story of the intrepid men who made long-range archaeological raids in far west China looking for the lost cities of the Taklamakan Desert before they were gradually swallowed by the shifting waves of sand (and weren’t rediscovered until the early 19th century.)
Central Asia has been beyond the tour itineraries of External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar. But this time around, he is making a great exception to attend the forthcoming SCO event in Dushanbe in person and possibly catch up on the CSTO summit from the sidelines.
This is an exceptional circumstance as the Taliban’s seizure of power in Afghanistan following the defeat of the US in the 20-year war is expected to be the main topic of discussion. The SCO and CSTO summits are expected to inject some transparency into the prospects, if any, for an anti-Taliban resistance at the regional level backed by a ‘coalition of the willing’ from among the member states of the two security organisations.
The West is not directly represented in the summit meetings but then, India’s presence makes up for it. Delhi also happens to be the flag carrier of the Quad, which is also holding its maiden summit in Washington on September 24 presided over by President Joe Biden in the ‘post-Afghanistan’ setting.
The regional reaction to the events in Afghanistan is not on an even keel. At one end stand Pakistan, Iran and China, which advocate an engagement with the Taliban so as to ‘guide and urge’ its policies in a positive direction in regard of an inclusive government and commitment to rooting out terrorist groups based in Afghanistan. They seem reasonably certain about Taliban’s receptiveness.
On the other extreme stands Tajikistan which refuses to accept a radical Islamist government next-door under any circumstance. In between stand two weathercocks — Russia and Uzbekistan.
So far, no regional state has advocated resistance to the Taliban government, although Russian propaganda apparatus has become patently unfriendly in a U-turn on orders of the Kremlin from Moscow’s effusive praise of the movement as a legitimate indispensable Afghan entity to President Putin’s own arrogant description of the Taliban as not being ‘civilised’ enough for company.
Iran has serious issues with the non-representation of non-Pashtun ethnic groups in the Afghan government. Indeed, Iran has ethnic affinities with the (Sunni) Tajiks and the Hazara Shias of Afghanistan who together account for some 45% of the population. Iran is unlikely to compromise on this issue. In a curious way, Iran is promoting the democratisation of Afghanistan. Which is a good thing.
But Iran has also taken on board the Taliban’s assurances that it will not allow Saudi-Israeli-Emirati backed terror groups to operate from Afghanistan. Fundamentally, Iran feels satisfied that the Taliban has successfully ended the US occupation.
Iran and Russia have not liked the sort of perceived dominance that Pakistan has achieved in Afghanistan. That does not, however, turn into a zero-sum mindset or an urge to be ‘spoiler’, given their high stakes in the overall stability of Afghanistan, especially in border security. Iran has had a serious problem with cross-border terrorism and narcotics trafficking during the 20 years of US occupation.
For Russia too, border security is crucial. For a start, just about 100 kms from the Afghan border in Nurak (Gorno-Badakhshan region Tajikistan ), Russia has its space surveillance system for detecting objects in outer space, the only one of its kind possible for it in the entire post-Soviet space — in the clear sky zone in the Pamir Mountains. The station is fully automated and has the ability to operate without human intervention and gather information on space objects and monitor objects in space, including those in geostationary orbit, at a distance of 120 to 40,000 km. It is an irreplaceable strategic asset for Russia.
But concentrations of terrorist groups have been reported on the Afghan side in the Gorno-Badakhshan region, especially Jamaat Ansarullah, the Central Asian group fighting alongside the Taliban, founded in 2010 by the former Tajik warlord Amriddin Tabarov.
India has common interest with China, Iran and Russia in regard of counterterrorism as but their threat perceptions and approaches vary. India’s main worry is that Pakistan-supported terrorist groups may set up sanctuaries in Afghanistan.
Again, India and Russia have restive Muslim populations that feel suppressed and Delhi and Moscow worry about their ‘radicalisation’. The Taliban’s triumph in Kabul has worried the current Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, a Kremlin appointee, who is nervous that this is ‘an American project’ against Russia.
However, Kadyrov’s own advisor on religious affairs, Adam Shakhidov, has praised the Taliban’s successes in an Instagram comment, attributing them, somewhat cryptically, to its Maturidi-Hanafi creed! The Taliban’s sweep to power in Afghanistan clearly boosted the morale of the North Caucasus militants. The most enthusiastic reaction to the Taliban’s return to power came from the Caucasus Emirate, the pan-Caucasus militant group whose Chechen wing congratulated “the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Mujahideen and all Muslims of Afghanistan on a great, historic victory.”
The Kremlin seems worried. President Putin has reportedly directed that no CSTO member country should have anything to do with the American evacuation plans without his express approval. (Russia has a visa-free regime with the Central Asian countries.)
Clearly, Russia empathises with India’s concerns, which brought the top Kremlin official Nikolay Patrushev to Delhi for consultations. However, Russia also worries about the ISIS waiting in the wings to exploit any chaos. Unlike India, which is a junior partner of the US, Russia is haunted by the spectre of Washington using the ISIS as a geopolitical tool against it. Sections of the Russian security establishment also suspect a tacit US-Pakistan understanding regarding the Taliban.
Can this dense paradigm transform as a common Iran-Russia-India enterprise for the armed overthrow of the Taliban government in Kabul? Certainly not. Each has specific interests and none has an alternative to the Taliban government.
Besides, the circumstances are very different today. India helped the anti-Taliban resistance in the 1990s as a revenge act against Pakistan’s support of terrorism in India. In turn, Taliban hit back at the time of the Kandahar hijacking of an Indian civilian plane. Iran’s support for the resistance also led to a Taliban retaliation in the ghastly killing of 11 Iranian diplomats assigned to its consulate in Mazai-i-Sharif in 1998. Taliban hit back at Russia by recognising the rebel government in Chechnya.
Uzbekistan, the most important Central Asian state, offers a case in study. Tashkent is genuinely worried about the type of government Afghanistan will organise itself and whether the Taliban will succeed in peacefully co-existing with different ethnic groups and political forces. Ideally, Tashkent would prefer an inclusive government in Kabul.
But life is real. Succinctly put, Tashkent is not going to rigidly lock itself into only supporting a coalition government for Afghanistan but is willing to accept any outcome and avoid taking one side over another in a civil war. Tashkent focuses on beefing up its military so that it remains strong and ready to handle any threat. Uzbekistan will not countenance any refugee flow from Afghanistan.
Tashkent will continue to cherrypick security assistance from Moscow, but there’s always a red line to ward off Russian hegemony and preserve its strategic autonomy. Indeed, Tashkent also is the main gateway for Afghanistan to the Central Asian region and will look forward to participation in the Afghan reconstruction.
Overall, Uzbekistan is finessing the same policy approach it took in 1996 when the Taliban seized power in Kabul. Of course, compared to the 1990s, it has become more savvy, self-confident and composed and skilful in diplomacy. Tashkent even became a venue for mainstreaming the Taliban!
Prima facie, it is Tajikistan which may seem closest to the Indian security establishment. But Delhi must also understand President Emomali Rahmon’s, calculus, which has 5 vectors: One, he is syncwith the public opinion which has memories of the violent civil war in the 1990s and abhors radical Islamists.
Like any old fashioned dictator, Rahmon’s number one concern is his domestic politics. The emergent situation is conducive for Rahmon to advance his son Rustam’s prospects as his successor. He has increasingly positioned himself as the protector of Afghanistan’s Tajik community, which also plays well in the domestic gallery.
Rahmon’s government has been lately stoking nationalist sentiments, which may help distract people from the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Ironically, however, the people of Tajikistan do not want to get entangled in any conflict in Afghanistan, a much poorer country and a failed state, which has been known as the graveyard of empires!
Two, Russia does not have a great track record as ‘provider of security’ in Central Asia. It supplies weapons and holds military exercises, but when the crunch time comes, it may prefer to stand in the sidelines. Yet, Rahmon has gone out on a limb on Taliban. It is inconceivable he didn’t consult Putin. Are they playing ‘good cop, bad cop’? Such theatrics are endemic to Central Asian politics and Russiais a seasoned actor.
Three, without doubt, Rahmon’s antipathy toward the role of Islam in politics is authentic. He evicted the Islamists from his coalition government as recently as in 2015 on trumped up charges of an attempted coup, and any traces of co-habitation with an even more patently radical islamist group like the Taliban risks generating blowback in Tajik domestic politics.
Four, an estimated one third of the Tajikistani economy comes from drug trade, much of it controlled by corrupt officials. Tajikistan will want to ensure that this lucrative commodity continues to flow north (to Russia and Europe.) But Taliban has repeatedly stated that it would not allow the production of opium or other narcotics in Afghanistan. Interestingly, Tajik officials have met the Taliban in Kabul to assure them that Dushanbe will not retract on the bilateral agreement on electricity supply. The border crossings also remain open.
Finally, in Rahmon’s calculus, it pays to take a strident stance against the Taliban government. Such a positioning of the country as a key actor vis-à-vis Afghanistan helps Tajikistan receive much-needed financial support from the West. In fact, he is scheduling a visit to Paris and Brussels in October, accepting invitations from President Macron and the president of the EU Council Charles Michel.
All in all, if the Taliban government quickly consolidates power and other regional states opt to develop direct ties Kabul, Rahmon may face pressure to switch course. Tajik intelligence agencies have deep connections inside Afghanistan, including with the Taliban. A policy change in Dushanbe is all but certain to follow if the Taliban pacifies Panjshir.
Hopefully, these events in Dushanbe will be a wake-up call for all those who fantasise about anti-Taliban resistance — at least. Unless Taliban goofs up in a big way, which seems highly unlikely, given the pragmatism there are showing on women’s education and so on, we are looking at a regime that will be around for quite a long while and present a level of governance that the puppets of the richest and most advanced countries failed to provide.
History would have the last laugh if the Taliban becomes the role model for the democratisation of Central Asia and the oligarchies of West Asia — or, everywhere else in the region, especially South Asia where human rights and justice are denied and state repression is a fact of life.
These ‘foreign devils’ gathering at Dushanbe on Thursday don’t realise what they are getting into. A small footnote here will help restore a sense of proportions: Actually, it was following an official Indian Government report in 1875 describing the treasures of those lost ruins of the Taklamakan Desert that a race to excavate began from all corners of the world. And, inevitably, each ran into their own set of problems and interesting circumstances.
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Featured image: Trade caravan on the Silk Road, Central Asia (Source: Indian Punchline)
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The US urge to dominate the World is still looking for a way.
Not that the US can – but that doesn’t mean the Neocons won’t attempt.
Neocons no longer identify themselves as such, but that also doesn’t mean that they have gone away – or that they have changed. Democrat Neocons, btw, never self-identified by this term, and as one observer rightly mentioned 20 years ago – Neocons span both the US parties.
The Al Jazeera article erroneously seems to indicate that Neocons are all Republicans. Only a few to list, and that the term Neocon is “outdated” or that they have “changed”. So let’s have a look.
Republican Party – Neocons
Rightly, Al Jazeera points out, that Republican Neocons seem to have assembled in a group which can be called “Never-Trumpers” – like Liz Cheney. The RINOs. A rather small group, actually.
And here we should add, that US Democrats and their media loooove and idealize these “Never-Trumpers” as “true” Republicans – just like they (including the Obamas) now idealize Bush II.
Republicans – with MAGA in charge – are now distinctly not-Neocon. Donald Trump Jr. strongly denounced Liz Cheney as a “Neocon warmaker” at a Conservative meeting a few months ago. Neocons to Republicans are now outcast, marginalized, or converts. Liz Cheney is outcast. Mitch McConnel is marginalized. And Lindsey Graham is a convert. Even Fox News is against “forever wars” nowadays.
Trump praises the US Military – but NO longer the lousy generals. Good. But the troops, who with their families and base-towns are big voters. The US Military has become a social pillar – one of the few employers of stable jobs left for ordinary Americans. This is what Trump senses. Pragmatically, Trump takes the Military not for fighting wars, but for keeping workers employed and …safe. Of course, Trump liked the US Military to press somebody, but not for starting wars. Not risking war for Europe, meaning not against Russia. US ordinary militaries want a job – not to die. US ordinary soldiers lack self-respect, therefore Trump praises them and their Military as an institution. They just don’t want to die, so Trump winds down US wars and talks big instead. That is better.
Trump made a peace-deal even with Taliban – to get Americans safely out of Afghanistan. Trump’s successor just botched it. And as Trump newly mentioned, the Middle East is quicksand. So Trump did NOT start a war with Iran, even after several hot incidents: Iran had shot down a US drone. Iran attacked a US base in Iraq in response to the US assassination of their Qassem Soleimani. Iran was behind a historic drone-attack on Saudi Arabia’s big refinery. Iran is still in Syria and Lebanon. And Iran sabotaged ships in UAE harbor. Talking “big”, Trump told the World that he has a “big button”, Trump then met with his counterpart in North Korea, declared “victory” – and went home. Trump cares more about realism (war with North Korea is un-winnable) than about Liberal / Neocon criticism. Excellently done, actually.
So Neocons are out of power in the Republican party. And as Trump remains relevant until 2024, (probably until 2030) and China grows fast, the Neocons have small chances of ever regaining the Republican party. The few remaining Republican Neocons will morph – probably into something unpleasant, but for now they are sidelined and cut-down.
Democrat Party – Neocons
Different is the picture with the Democrats.
Many US Democrats calling themselves “progressives” are against US foreign wars. Long ago, I noted that the critique of US imperial wars of choice was common among a lot of people both “progressive” Democrats and non-Neocon Republicans.
But war-critical Democrats have no say in the Democrat party’s foreign policy.
Democrat foreign policy is run by types like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Victoria Nuland who supported Nazis in Ukraine. Feminist extremism. Democrat foreign policy is also run by male war hawks like Joe Biden – and probably Barrack Obama. The New York Times silences it.
Biden’s trick is that Biden stuffed the mouths of “progressives” with false money promises: Welfare galore like Sweden – stimulus – climate – “good paying jobs” for all – union safety – health care safety.
Biden promises 30 years of Cold War on China and “welfare”. Happy Christmas. All year. Right now.
Biden made the Devil’s promise to the Left: “You can have everything” – as long as the Left shuts up and keeps hands-off foreign policy. Because there will be lots of Military and Interventionism too!
These Devil’s promises are sold by Democrat Neocons like Biden to the US Left with the Big Lie that economic reality doesn’t exist. Supported by a Voodoo effort from “progressive” economists called “New Monetary Theory” – that you can just print trillions more money, then ALL get rich!
In other words – Biden promises that the US society can afford BOTH war AND welfare like never before. And not to build up in decades, like China did. No, it’s Magic. Wand waving money-printing.
In just 3 years until 2024. Only fools believe that – but they are millions.
Food prices increased 2.9% in August 2021 (seasonal adjusted, PPI p.14, 3rd row). That is 40% a year.
To pay trillions for war and Big Government – Biden with inflation makes poor Americans poorer.
The Democrat party has a Trifecta of US power – President – Senate – House of Representatives.
Democrats are in US politics the seat of Neocons.
Striving for US World domination.
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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.
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A woman suffering from non-Hodgkin lymphoma was a devoted user of Roundup herbicide for decades before she became ill, her son testified Tuesday in a California trial that marks the fourth such trial pitting a cancer victim against Roundup maker Monsanto.
Under questioning by a lawyer representing plaintiff Donetta Stephens, her son David Stephens recalled his mother’s frequent use of Roundup in the yard and her tendency to wear sleeveless shirts and shorts when outside spraying the weed killer. He described recalling her use when he was a child and that use continuing when he was an adult and had his own children.
Stephens also testified about a family gathering in which his mother broke the news of her cancer to the family, the lengthy series of medical treatments that followed, his mother’s memory loss and other treatment-related problems, and a period in which his mother was hospitalized multiple times and nearly died.
Stephens is one of tens of thousands of plaintiffs who filed lawsuits against Monsanto after the World Health Organization’s cancer experts in 2015 classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen with an association to non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup and other weed killing brands.
Bayer AG bought Monsanto in June 2018 just as the first trial was getting underway.
Three previous trials held to date were all found in favor of the plaintiffs. Jurors in those trials agreed with claims that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based weed killers, such as Roundup, cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and that Monsanto spent decades covering up the risks and failing to warn users.
The Stephens case is being tried in the Superior Court of San Bernardino County in California under the oversight of Judge Gilbert Ochoa. Though the trial started in person, Judge Ochoa ordered the proceedings shifted to a Zoom trial due to concerns about the spread of Covid-19 virus.
In testimony Tuesday, David Stephens broke down, emotionally describing a time when it appeared his mother was near death, and speaking of a photo he took of her that he thought at the time would be the last.
“I took that picture because when you think that your mother is going to die and that could be the last picture…,” Stephens said haltingly. “I wanted to take that picture so I could remember…”
Donnetta Stephens is now in remission from cancer but has been left debilitated, her son testified.
Former Monsanto scientist Donna Farmer will be called to testify next week, according to Stephens’ lawyer Fletch Trammell.
Technical trouble
The trial has been plagued by technical issues since the transition to a virtual setting through Zoom. There have been multiple times proceedings have been halted because a lawyer or juror loses an audio or video connection or experiences other difficulties. The virtual format has also proven problematic at times for the presentation of certain exhibits.
A courtroom attendant has been assigned to monitor jurors to determine if they are paying attention, and to alert the judge to lost connections or other problems.
In Tuesday’s testimony, as Monsanto lawyer Manuel Cachan was attempting to cross examine Stephens, questioning the reliability of his memory regarding his mother’s use of Roundup, the technical trouble kicked in again.
“I’m sorry for the interruption, juror number 13 is having issues, just starting to quote unquote glitch out,” the courtroom attendant interjected.
Minutes later: “Pardon me… juror number 11 has just disconnected,” the courtroom attendant interrupted again.
Some legal observers have speculated that the losing party in the trial will have an easy avenue for appeal given the persistent interruptions and difficulties.
Trial overlap
A fifth Roundup trial was starting jury selection this week in a case involving a boy with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
The child, Ezra Clark, is the subject of a trial beginning this week in Los Angeles County Superior Court. 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 sometimes played in freshly sprayed areas, according to the court filings.
Ezra was diagnosed in 2016, at the age of 4, with Burkitt’s lymphoma, a form of 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, filing on behalf of Ezra.
Opening statements in the Clark trial are scheduled to begin Wednesday morning.
Bayer denies any cancer connection
Bayer has earmarked more than $14 billion to try to settle the litigation and has announced it will stop selling glyphosate-based herbicides to consumers by 2023. But the company still insists that the herbicides it inherited from Monsanto do not cause cancer.
The move is widely seen as Bayer’s best hope for putting an end to claims that exposure to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides, such as the popular Roundup brand, cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and the company failed to warn users of the risks.
During the month-long trial in 2019, lawyers for plaintiff Edwin Hardeman presented jurors with a range of scientific research showing cancer connections to Monsanto’s herbicides as well as evidence of many Monsanto strategies aimed at suppressing the scientific information about the risks of its products. Internal Monsanto documents showed the company’s scientists had engaged in secretly ghost-writing scientific papers that the company then used to help convince regulators of product safety.
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Returning from a trip away, I was disturbed to witness the haunting sight of a tiny, five year old boy in school uniform, standing silently and still, his face encased in a black mask. Only his frightened and traumatised eyes were visible.
Since children are at less risk from coronavirus than influenza (1) and pose no risk to others (2), covering their faces not only risks damage to the developing brain from hypoxia (3), inhibits excretion of carbon dioxide leading to respiratory acidosis (4), forces them to inhale accumulated bacteria and fungi (5), and promotes headaches, dermatitis (6), and tooth decay (7), but it clearly worsens rather than protects their state of health (8).
Not only is physical health harmed but also the psychological and emotional development of the child is inevitably affected by inhibiting normal communication via speech and facial expression (9), risking mental health problems and underdeveloped social skills, including empathy (10).
Those individuals who mandate or enforce such irrational and harmful policies are guilty of nothing less than Institutional Child Abuse. Anyone in a position of responsibility is legally obliged to prevent harm to those in their care and failure to do so represents a dereliction of duty (11).
So, when is the Medical Profession going to speak out and take action to prevent harm to child patients?
In the absence of medical ethics, let us hope that parents can find the courage to protect their offspring from those who continue to undermine the younger generation by means of reckless and unjustifiable policies.
Failure to do so renders the future a very bleak place indeed.
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Indigenous peoples in North America have helped block tar sands mines, oil pipelines, and LNG export terminals. Their successes against the fossil fuel industry have kept enormous volumes of carbon pollution out of the atmosphere.
The efforts of Indigenous peoples in North America have helped block or delay a long list of major fossil fuel projects over the past decade, successfully leading to the avoidance of a massive amount of greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report.
“The numbers don’t lie. Indigenous peoples have long led the fight to protect Mother Earth and the only way forward is to center Indigenous knowledge and keep fossil fuels in the ground,” Dallas Goldtooth, a Keep It In The Ground organizer for Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), said in a statement. The report was coauthored by IEN and Oil Change International, a research and advocacy organization focused on transitioning away from fossil fuels.
Indigenous resistance has been key in blocking at least eight major projects, including the Keystone XL pipeline, the C$20 billion Teck Frontier tar sands mine in Alberta, the Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Oregon, and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to name a few. Taken together, those delayed and canceled projects would have been responsible for nearly 800 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, or about 12 percent of the total emissions of the U.S. and Canada in 2019.
Another half-dozen projects are currently contested, including the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota, the Coastal GasLink pipeline in British Columbia, and the Rio Grande LNG project in Texas, for example. These projects representanother 12 percent of total U.S. and Canadian emissions, which, if opponents have their way, would bring the total carbon pollution avoided due to Indigenous resistance to 1.6 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent. That’s roughly equal to the pollution from 400 new coal-fired power plants or 345 million passenger vehicles.
As the report notes, this is likely an underestimate because it only includes 17 of the largest and most iconic fossil fuel projects in recent years.
“Indigenous peoples continue to exert social and moral authority to protect their homelands from oil and gas development,” the report stated. “Coupling these expressions with the legal authority of Indigenous Rights, frontline communities, and Tribal Nations have made tangible progress stemming fossil fuel expansion.”
Over the past decade, Indigenous lands in the U.S. and Canada have been targeted by dozens of large-scale fossil fuel projects, as the aggressive expansion of fracking and tar sands extraction subsequently led to a pipeline buildout across the continent.
“I spend a lot of my life fighting stupid projects. It’s like one unbelievably bad idea after another,” Winona LaDuke, program director of the Honor the Earth, an Indigenous environmental organization, told DeSmog. Over many years she has fought to protect both the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, where she lives, and other Native American communities from a slew of dirty projects, including coal mines, coal-fired power plants, incinerators and nuclear waste facilities. LaDuke is currently one of the most prominent leaders in the fight against the Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota.
“We don’t have another place to go. This is where we live,” she said.
Fossil fuel projects on Native lands often violate the principles of Free, Prior, and Informed consent, a concept that not only necessitates consultation with Indigenous peoples regarding projects on their territory, but requires their consent. That principle lies at the heart of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), a global resolution adopted by 144 nations in 2007.
Only four countries opposed the declaration: Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States.
Years later, all four holdouts changed their position and announced their support for UNDRIP, but the support has been mostly rhetorical, lacking the force of law at the national level. Decision-making for large fossil fuel projects on Indigenous lands still often takes the form of merely consultation, a check-the-box procedure that governments impose on Indigenous communities rather than conducting a process that would require their affirmative consent before moving forward.
“Free, Prior, and Informed Consent constitutes a much more rigorous standard than consultation, and it is a bare minimum standard needed to uphold the rights of Indigenous Peoples,” the IEN report noted.
More recently, Canada moved to codify UNDRIP in June 2021, but it remains to be seen how it is applied to extractive industries on Indigenous lands.
One of the most infamous examples of the disconnect between professed support for UNDRIP and how decisions are made in practice is the Dakota Access pipeline, which crossed treaty territories of the Oceti Sakowin people. In 2015, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe passed a resolution opposing the pipeline project due to the oil pipeline’s threat to water, treaty rights, and sacred cultural sites, including areas in what is now North Dakota. A broader resistance movement gained further momentum a year later.
Despite Indigenous opposition, the U.S. government approved the project in July 2016, and state police in North Dakota and private security contracts hired by the pipeline’s owner, Energy Transfer Partners, violently suppressed water protectors opposing the project in the months that followed.
“The tribe was denied access to information and excluded from consultations at the planning stage of the project and environmental assessments failed to disclose the presence and proximity of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation,” Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, said in 2016 when she called on the U.S. to halt construction of the pipeline.
As DeSmog previously reported, Energy Transfer’s decision to plow ahead with the project despite concerns of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe cost the company billions of dollars.
According to the recent IEN report, “what happened in Standing Rock should not be seen as an anomalous incident, but rather a disturbing commonality across Indigenous resistance efforts worldwide.”
It is important to note that the poor treatment of Indigenous peoples has occurred under governments from across the political spectrum, including both Conservative and Liberal governments in Canada, and Republican and Democratic administrations in the United States.
For example, the construction of the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota continues under the Biden administration, which has said very little about the project despite loud and repeated protest by Anishinaabe peoples and their allies.
On August 25, 2021, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) sent a letter to the U.S. government regarding the violations of human rights of the Anishinaabe. The letter notes the allegations that the permit approval of Line 3 “has been conducted without adequate consultation with and without obtaining free, prior and informed consent,” and also that the pipeline presents threats to lands, food, and sacred sites of Indigenous peoples. CERD requested information and a response from the U.S. government.
“It’s like a bunch of old cronies up here acting like they own the world,” LaDuke told DeSmog, referring to both Enbridge, the pipeline’s owner, and state officials. “And there’s a bunch of us saying ‘no you don’t.’ And we’re going to keep fighting you guys.”
Both the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have argued that a rapid phaseout of fossil fuels is necessary to avoid catastrophic warming of global temperatures. New fossil fuel projects should therefore be off the table.
The IEN report argues that Indigenous resistance not only goes hand-in-hand with climate action, but it has been an effective strategy of blunting the fossil fuel onslaught. “Indigenous resistance to carbon is both an opportunity and an offering — now is the time to codify the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground, to safeguard both the climate and Indigenous Rights,” the report said.
For Winona LaDuke, there are obvious lessons to be learned from the victories against major oil, gas, and coal projects. “One, we are pretty resilient. Two, support us,” she said, referring to funders and other allies in the climate fight. “We’ve got one percent of the resources of the big NGOs, and we’ve got people all over.”
On September 3, several progressive members of Congress, including Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Cori Bush (D-MO), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), traveled to northern Minnesota to call on the Biden administration to shut down construction of the Line 3 pipeline.
A day later, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was headlining a public event for the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (a state-level affiliate of the Democratic Party), where he was interrupted by activists opposing Line 3. Flustered, he tried to tamp down the outburst, but ultimately ended the event and left in a motorcade while protestors chanted: “Governor Walz, you can’t hide. Line 3 is genocide!”
On September 7, President Joe Biden visited New York to highlight the destructive damage of the recent floods that ravaged the northeast, where he drew connections to the climate crisis. “They all tell us this is code red,” Biden said. “The nation and the world are in peril. And that’s not hyperbole. That is a fact.”
While President Biden spoke passionately about the climate crisis in New York, his administration has been silent on Line 3, allowing construction to proceed. Enbridge has said that it is in the final stages of construction and oil could soon be flowing through the pipeline.
But when asked if she feels hopeful, LaDuke quickly responded: “Oh my God. I have all kinds of hope.” She pointed to the convergence of recent racial justice movements, growing climate concerns, and strengthening Indigenous movements.
LaDuke also sees the oil industry in its own state of crisis, citing the array of major oil companies that have abandoned the Canadian tar sands amid financial troubles and an increasingly bleak future as the world moves on from fossil fuels. Canada’s tar sands are some of the dirtiest forms of oil production on the planet. ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips have sold off assets in Alberta and reduced their presence in the country. Insurance companies, pension funds, private equity, and major lenders have also cut off financial support for Canada’s tar sands.
“Line 3 is the most expensive tar sands pipeline in history. And the last. Nobody’s going to build another tar sands pipeline. It’s the end of the party,” she said. “The new Green revolution is here and the Tribes are pushing it. It’s just the damn state [of Minnesota] that is so backwards. And the Feds.”
She added: “My experience in fighting these guys … the longer you fight them, the better chance you have. So, I’m still in. We’re all in. None of us are backing down.”
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Nick Cunningham is an independent journalist covering the oil and gas industry, climate change and international politics. He has been featured in Oilprice.com, The Fuse, YaleE360 and NACLA.
Featured image: Treaty People Walk for Water demonstration at Minnesota Capitol, August 25, 2021. Credit: Peg Hunter(CC BY-NC 2.0)
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Attached is a letter that I have recently sent to my high school classmates. This is a group with a shared experience spanning more than 50 years. We know each other since our adolescence – all having attended an elite residential school1) for six years. Ever since, contacts have been maintained with and within the group.
I sent the letter after realizing that they have excluded me from the next reunion, the decision having been taken behind my back. Historically I have rarely participated in such events. But this time, I have been expressing my interest to attend – primary because the planned reunion location is close to where my mother lives.
I have edited the original version of the letter a bit to provide some context for readers outside of the original recipient group. I have also added a few reference links.
At this stage in my life, time is precious, and life is good. Why then bother with such unpleasant matter? For two reasons. First, this incidence is a microcosm of what is happening in the larger society. It reveals how our entire social fabric is being torn apart. And the second one is the memory of pastor Martin Niemöller.2Today, a significant majority of Americans consider any questioning of the narrative coming from the government and the legacy media as heresy, even if the questioning is supported by factual arguments. What happens next is generally as follows:
Instead of trying to understand the questions, or having a civil discussion, the majority immediately assigns certain labels to the questioner – conspiracy theorist, XYZ-denier, Trump supporter, Querdenker, etc.
If the questioning is done on social media, then those questions arcensored, ultimately leading to deplatforming of the questioner
If it is done within a physical social group (friends, neighbors, colleagues, even family) then, here too, there is rarely a factual discussion, and the outcome is the same. But the process is different. It all starts rather innocuously enough. There is a quick exchange of glances, a faint smile or subtle turn of the eyes shared among the other members of the group, acknowledging that something is not quite right with the questioner. If the questioner persists, it only goes downhill from there …. all the way to an exclusion from the group.
In my specific case, it all begun about 9 months ago when I had started raising questions about inconsistency and illogic of many things about the Covid-19 pandemic that were being told by the government, health authorities and the legacy media. I did so within a closed WhatsApp group for our classmates only. I have no social media presence. I also put up a blog on my personal website listing the inconsistencies. Back then, at the earlier stage of the pandemic, I was mostly guided by gut feel, coupled with scientific rationale, and some initial scientific data. BTW, when I review the earlier post today, I am amazed how correct my gut feel was!
Anyway, back then I had concluded that considering the incomplete nature of the available safety and efficacy data, and my risk profile, it would be wiser for me to wait with vaccination until confirmed data become available. Although my conclusion included a clear proviso that what is right for me may not be right for everyone, my conclusion did not sit well with my classmates. Remember, at that time, vaccine promotion by the government, the health authorities, and the legacy media was already in full swing. On further questioning on my part, I was accused of “confirmation bias” but was provided no examples. At that point I left the WhatsApp group but kept in touch with them by other means.
Then came the preparation for a reunion. This is the genesis of the letter to my classmates ….
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Dear classmates,
I found out that I have been excluded from the upcoming reunion. Fine – I haven’t attended many of them anyway. Annually wallowing in memories of adolescent mischiefs is not my cup of tea anyway. But as the subgroup was making the decision behind my back, (yes, there always is such a subgroup), I wish that at least one person from that subgroup had the decency to inform me. There goes six years of education at our elite high school1) down the drain….
I assume that I was excluded from the event to protect other attendees from Covid-19. What stupidity! Obviously, you continue to uncritically consume misinformation, half-truths and lies spread by the government and the legacy media. I know you are shocked by my strong statement. After all, none of them have ever lied, right?
If you were not blinded by the propaganda, then you’d realize that your greatest risk of getting infected with SARS-Cov-2 comes not from an unvaccinated person but from a symptomatic person – irrespective of that person’s vaccination status (see here3) and here44)). Interestingly, a recent study finds that some “vaccinated” persons can carry a delta variant viral load that is more than 200 times higher (than that of an unvaccinated person) before becoming symptomatic. If that is true, then maybe you should keep your distance from “vaccinated” persons instead?
Or is it that you are trying to protect me? That, of course, is none of your business. As long I don’t endanger others (see last paragraph), then please leave it up to me to decide what risks I take in life. This holds true for every adult. But if you are still in the business of protecting responsible adults (on their behalf), then how about excluding those with multiple comorbidities and/or a weakened immune system?
If you could think clearly, then the proper plan at the reunion would be to (a) primarily do outdoor activities, (b) have good ventilation by opening doors and windows, when you have indoor activities, (c) check everyone’s symptoms regularly, (d) wash hands frequently, etc.
BTW, I have been jabbed once, which is obviously not good enough. Just curious what your requirement will be for the next group event. 1 booster or 2? And for the subsequent one? 3 or 4 boosters? Or will it be an IV drip constantly pumping the “vaccine” in your body? When something doesn’t work as promised, do you always double down on it? Do you really think that the more the better, especially for an experimental drug based on an unproven technology?
But I am not so naïve to think that protecting me/you was the primary reason for my exclusion. If that were so, then at least one of the powerful decision-makers would have asked me about my vaccination status, and possibly asked about my willingness to take a second one. No, my crime was much more serious – that of Thought Crime. I question the truthfulness of government and legacy media. I also do not blindly trust unsubstantiated claims by big pharma, like Pfizer, which was recently fined almost $3B for fraudulent claims. Such crimes are inexcusable.
Now let’s consider a few examples that demonstrate your immense capacity to be gullible. Despite what you are told ….
Strictly speaking, the jabs are not vaccines – these are experimental gene therapies made with experimental technologies. That’s why the quotation marks around these “vaccines”. The relevant technologies were developed for cancer treatment but were abandoned due to clinical failure. None of the “vaccines” have completed clinical study. Pfizer will be the first one to complete it in 2023! All of them have skipped animal study and therefore, none of them have toxicokinetic data.
The “vaccines” have questionable efficacy. The originally claimed 90+% referred to relative efficacy and not the more relevant absolute efficacy. Besides, proper efficacy could not have been determined anyway because of the extremely shortened study protocol. See how they have now moved the goal post to claim “reduced severity of symptoms”? Reduced symptoms is not a bad thing – but what else are they making up as they go along? A lot, which you’d recognize if you did not have blinders on.
Covid-19 is not an exceptionally fatal disease. Its infection fatality rate in most countries is between 0.1% and 0.5% (the higher number applies to the elderly, institutionalized patients). Neither is it an untreatable disease – provided you don’t follow FDA guideline to wait at home until it gets so bad that you have to go the ER. Long Covid is also not a unique Covid-19 phenomena. Other viral infections have similar issues.
None of the current “vaccines” can stop the infection chain because none provides sterile immunity. Neither do they provide immunity (from getting sick). The only immunity that is iron clad is that of the “vaccine” manufacturers from getting sued for any harm caused by their experimental gene therapy products.
Dangerous mutants are more likely to be caused by those who have taken the current “vaccines“ vs. by the unvaccinated. You can understand this by drawing an analogy with antibiotics resistant bacteria. They emerge when incomplete and uncontrolled use of antibiotics leave behind some of the bacteria alive. These then become resistant to antibiotics (remember, what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger). Similarly, the current “vaccines“ kill only some of the viruses but leave others alive. These surviving viruses mutate to more resistant strains. There is a scientific term for this phenomenon – escape mutation (That’s why a golden rule of epidemiology is to vaccinate before, instead of during a pandemic). Just as it is laughable to blame antibiotics resistant bacteria on those who have never used antibiotics, it is laughable to blame the more resistant Covid mutations on those who have not been “vaccinated“. This doesn’t change even if Fauci says otherwise. He used to be a scientist but has long turned into a politician.
The Pfizer “vaccine” has not been recently approved by the FDA5). Instead, FDA has issued two simultaneous letters – in one of them the EUA of the current Pfizer vaccine was extended, and in the other, a vaccine called “Comirnaty” was approved. Both are from BioNTech, and are manufactured and marketed by Pfizer. The approved “vaccine” Comirnaty is not yet available in the USA.
Naturally obtained immunity is much stronger and longer lasting than one obtained by getting one of the currently available “vaccines”. That’s because the former relies on additional mechanisms than just antibodi
The PCR test can determine neither infection, nor infectiousness. The test method has neither been standardized, nor validated. It certainly cannot determine a “Covid case” because it has never been approved as a diagnostic device, and because only a clinician can determine a “case” (with the help of some diagnostic test, if needed). And yet, PCR test positives are being misrepresented as “cases” – primarily to scare people with large “case” numbers to justify unjustifiable and harmful blunt pandemic measures
I could go on with more examples but will stop here. I had considered most of you to be smart enough to recognize so many inconsistencies, even without my help. But either I was wrong about you, or Mark Twain was right when he said, “It is easier to fool people than to make them concede that they have been fooled”.
But I digress. In case your mind is drifting towards the response I typically on similar discussions, then here are a few hints: I am not a Trump supporter, I am not a Covid denier, and I am not an antivaxxer. Just last month I got my Pneumovax 23 against pneumonia.
Going back to our health authorities, do you know that about 80% of both FDA and WHO budgets come from private entities directly or indirectly linked to big pharma? Do you know that several years ago WHO had changed the definition of a pandemic to exclude mortality as a criterion6)? Do you know that late 2020, WHO had changed its statement on herd immunity to remove the role of natural immunity (version from June 20207) vs. version from Dec. 20208))? Do you know that pharma and health products groups together are by far the largest lobby group in the USA.? Unfortunately, many peer reviewed medical journals are increasingly financially dependent on big pharma as well because preprints make a huge chunk of their revenue. These are not direct evidence of collusion – but let us not be naïve about human nature.
Then there is the issue of medical experimentation on humans. Administration of an experimental drug (which all three “vaccines” are) without Informed Consent violates both Nuremberg Code (1947) and the Declaration of Helsinki (1964). Both were instituted to prevent horrors committed by the Nazi regime on prisoners – think Dr. Mengele. When you got your shot, did any doctor tell you that clinical studies for the vaccine are not complete yet? Did he explain the known and possible adverse effects? If not, then you have been subjects of human experimentation!
I am not a legal expert. But I have many years of professional experience in developing medical products and devices that required clinical studies. In every case, we had to strictly abide by the above two conventions – even for the simplest, and apparently most benign, human clinical studies.
BTW, If Covid-19 is such a dangerous disease, don’t you find it odd that even after 18 months, the health authorities haven’t come up with any early treatment or prophylaxis recommendations? Does resting at home, drinking a lot of water, taking aspirin as needed, checking temperature, etc., and going to the ER if symptoms become severe look like sound advice to you for such a dangerous disease? And while many clinicians are claiming that they can reduce Covid-19 complications and hospitalization by 80+% by using existing safe medications, FDA ia doing everything in its power to shut such voices down.
I am not partial to any individual early treatment medication for Covid-19 because any severe disease requires a regimen of therapeutics. But I will give an example with Ivermectin to show FDA’s shameful and deceptive, if not criminal, behavior. FDA’s website9) suggests that dumb people are overdosing themselves with a horse medicine, thanks to misinformation from some clinicians. First of all, Ivermectin, like many many other human medicines, is also produced for animal treatment. Ivermectin has been in use for almost 40 years to treat humans – in fact, so successfully that two of its inventors were awarded the Medicine Nobel Prize in 2015. A medicine Nobel prize for a horse medicine, right? Not a single proponent of Ivermectin has ever suggested that anyone takes the animal version of the medication. So, what FDA is spreading on its website is a perfect example of someone pointing finger at another person while three fingers are pointed at himself! Then the only reason why some people are overdosing themselves with an animal version of Ivermectin is that FDA has made it extremely difficult for physicians to prescribe, and pharmacies to sell Ivermectin. BTW, Ivermectin is one of the safest medicines, based on a track record of almost 4 billion doses prescribed.
On its website FDA also mentions that it has not yet reviewed clinical data that many clinician groups have been providing for review since more than a year now. Why not? I’ll provide you with some additional dots beyond the ones I have already mentioned earlier: emergency use authorization (EUA) for the “vaccines” would not have been possible if there were any treatment available for the disease; Pfizer’s revenue from its Covid-19 “vaccine” already exceeds $30B+; all vaccine companies have been given complete immunity from any lawsuit concerning harms from these “vaccines”; etc. Now you may choose to connect the dots or not.
Do you remember how within months of the pandemic we were told that we can go back to normal only after sufficient number of the population will be vaccinated – with a vaccine that was not even available? Do you know that until then it took 8-10 years for any vaccine to be developed? From the very beginning, the pandemic measures have in reality been vaccination measures. There is a big difference between the two. As a result, there has been no overall cost benefit analysis. – as if huge costs related to the economy, collateral health and psychological damages, disruption of the civil society, children’s education, etc. simply do not exist. Our friend Khand**r’s health situation is just one example.
Yes, there may be benefits of taking these “vaccines” – for some. I made sure that my mother gets one of the “vaccines”. But there is absolutely no medical, rational, ethical, and legal ground either for vaccine mandate or vaccine pass.
Just a few more things. Have you noticed how in 18 months, a two-week lockdown (to flatten the curve) has morphed into “show your papers”? Today F**k Checkers of unknown credential and technical competence decide what eminent scientific and clinical experts, including Nobel laureates, are allowed to share in the public. This is akin to killing science. Science, especially in a developing area, never has one single answer. Asking questions, proposing alternative hypotheses, creating and sharing new data to support or refute the hypotheses are the ways science advances – not by any edict from the Ministry of Truth. Yet, that’s exactly what is happening. The Ministry of Truth has outsourced the job to private media corporations. Therefore, good science is one of many victims of this pandemic. If you question the official narrative then you get censored, banned, deplatformed or excluded from a reunion.
It is amazing how otherwise intelligent people are not only fine with all these irrational and harmful measures and policies, but they are even clamoring for more. As if they want to prove both Sheldon Wolin right on his prediction of Inverted Totalitarianism, and George Orwell’s vision of the future: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever”.
Life is too short and enjoyable to dwell much on such unpleasant experience. But I had to pen this because my exclusion reminded me of Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the communists….”
Wake the f**k up!
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The Left is currently dividing very publicly over a viral clip on social media of AOC – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – arriving on Monday night at an exclusive gala event in New York in a slinky, white satin, off-the shoulder, Marilyn Monroe-style gown with large red writing across the back demanding: “Tax the Rich.”
Maybe “divided” isn’t quite the right word. As with most left politics nowadays, the two sides seem to be talking across each other. It is as if they speak two entirely different languages.
Tickets to the Met Gala are at least $30,000 a pop, though it seems AOC, a young New York City Congresswoman who identifies as a democratic socialist, did not pay for the ticket herself. She was invited and seized the moment to make her protest.
In an Instagram post, she wrote that she was helping “to kick open the doors at the Met. The time is now for childcare, healthcare, and climate action for all. Tax the Rich.”
Predictably, the right instantly leapt on her “hypocrisy”. Former President Donald Trump led the charge, calling her a “fraud”.
But some on the left were unhappy too. They dismissed her attendance as a performative stunt – another clever move by AOC to build her brand on Instagram as a rebellious truth-teller safely ensconced in the big-business-friendly Democratic party.
Ever the politician, they noted, she was desperate to get herself noticed. Could this be another salvo in her shot for an AOC presidential run in 2024 or 2028?
But with Trump on the attack, liberals lost no time rushing to her side, labelling critics on the left as curmudgeons. They argued she had brought an uncomfortable message for the rich right into their midst. She had taken the fight to the elite. And, given the media attention she invariably attracts, that message has now reached many millions. That could only be a good thing.
All the gotchas are like “but she’s at an event for rich people”
But there is, I think, a deeper reason why this clip makes parts of the left – rather than the rich – uncomfortable.
Watch the video above with the sound off, and it is hard not to notice that AOC is enjoying herself – enjoying the glamour and that very expensive, very chic dress – just a little too much to qualify as any kind of class-struggle warrior.
The impression that this is faux-protest derives, however, from more than AOC’s pleasure at playing a mildly subversive Marilyn Monroe.
Far from “kicking open” the door of the Met, she appears to have been welcomed with a warm embrace. Certainly, she did not appear to be rustling too many feathers among her fellow, wealthy guests.
Turn the sound on, and the interviewers gushing over her and her dress simply confirm that this was a protest that posed no threat to anyone. It was a designer protest at a designer event. She fitted right in with the $30,000-a-head crowd.
If you want to see what happens when a real protest takes place at an elite gala event, watch this clip from two years ago in the UK.
In it, Mark Field, an MP from the ruling Conservative party, assaults a peaceful and well-dressed woman, who like AOC has a ticket, at an expensive dinner in the City of London. To the apparent approval of other guests, Field grabs the woman by the throat – she is wearing a sash highlighting the City’s role in promoting the impending climate catastrophe – and frogmarches her out of the hall.
(I wrote a post at the time, arguing – as I could also here – that media debates around that assault missed the deeper political significance of what was going on and were chiefly intended to polarise opinion in more marginal, tribal terms centred on identity politics.)
My latest: The media have gleefully turned Mark Field's attack on a climate protester into a polarised public debate precisely to drown out far deeper, more urgent issues this episode should have dragged into plain sight https://t.co/XRBxWGQbYZ
The more disturbing point about AOC’s protest – at least for the serious left – is that, rather than taking the fight to the rich, she appears to have become their willing mascot. Her protest is very much part of the bread and circuses provided by the rich as a sop to the poor. And at some level, as her coquettish smile indicates, she understands that. She is openly conspiring in her role as an entertainer, as a distraction.
Watching AOC twirl for the camera, to show us her designer-messaged derriere, I was reminded of the media frenzy at the weekend over Britain’s new tennis star, Emma Raducanu.
After winning the US Open on Saturday, she was encouraged to put on makeup and a similarly chic, if in her case black, dinner dress and lovingly kiss her trophy for the cameras. According to experts, she is about to become Britain’s most bankable sportsperson in decades.
Raducanu kisses US Open trophy after changing into black dress to celebrate win https://t.co/ktNxTaycKB
But Raducanu’s job is to entertain us. That is why she is in the headlines. She is being rewarded for her ability to amaze us, move us, distract us, even titillate us. Is that what AOC’s job is too?
That’s certainly how it looks.
Those who invited her to the gala event and those who spent the evening rubbing shoulders with her do not seem to have been overly troubled by her message of “Tax the rich.” And that is not because they actually want to pay more taxes. It is because they understand that nothing she is doing – including her gown protest – will lead to them paying more tax. In fact, she may even assist them in forestalling efforts to tax them fairly.
By having AOC at their event, New York’s liberal elite look open-minded and socially progressive. They want to present an image of social concern, of being reform-minded, even as they hoard their wealth and fritter it away on a seat at an exclusive gala dinner whose price could support a poor family for an entire year.
If AOC’s protest was a threat, the attendees would not be giggling with her. She played her role perfectly, asking a question – but most certainly not answering it – about “what it means to be a working class woman of color at the Met”.
Well, what does it mean – apart from as entertainment value? How exactly does her attendance advance social justice issues, apart from in flaccid, strait-jacketed, identity-obsessed terms that now pass for meaningful political action?
“We really started having a conversation about what it means to be a working class woman of color at the Met … we can’t just play along, but we need to break the fourth wall.”pic.twitter.com/UZj22DjMl3
Having AOC at the Met Gala is the New York elite’s equivalent of billionaire Bill Gates flaunting his philanthropy, even as that same philanthropy actually helps Gates to grow his fortune even further. AOC is the New York elite’s version of a tax write-off.
But it’s worse than that.
AOC’s protest isn’t just toothless. It’s fully aligned with her evolution as yet another Democratic machine politician, even if one whose distinctive marketing campaign is premised on her being some kind of rebel.
AOC’s invitation to the Met Gala, and her acceptance, is just another stage in her cooptation by the elite. The brashly outspoken rookie politician of a few years ago has been gradually tamed into the more “responsible” politician looking to claw her way up the Democratic party career ladder.
She is becoming a parody of her old self. The rhetoric of political protest on the campaign trail in the 14th congressional district has – once put to the test – morphed into the empty spectacle of protest by a Congresswoman increasingly comfortable hobnobbing with the rich and famous.
She is becoming part of the very elite she supposedly disdains. She is a celebrity politician, just as Raducanu is a now celebrity tennis player. She plays to the camera because there is nothing more to her actions than performance and pageantry. And in these, at least, she can excel.
The point here isn’t primarily to apportion blame. AOC is playing the role she needs to fill to survive politically, a game Jeremy Corbyn failed to play when he was unexpectedly – and accidentally – thrust onto centre stage on the other side of the Atlantic. British elites, liberal and conservative alike, hurriedly joined together to destroy Corbyn through the manipulation of popular political discourse, presenting him as a national security threat and an antisemite.
If they have to, US elites can and will do the same to AOC. But they are increasingly confident that they won’t need to.
Rather, focusing on AOC helps to clarify how our corporate-controlled political systems work; how protest in the mainstream must take the form of hollow spectacles and gestures; and how even the most principled politicians have to make grave compromises, accepting their role as entertainers rather than agents of meaningful change.
The gradual process of cooptation of AOC – her “maturing” as a politician – is already evident.
She has learnt that the political cost of pursuing a vitally important cause like Medicare for all she once espoused so passionately is too high. When she and the small group of democratic socialists in Congress had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to force a vote on Medicare in January, a move that would have put the donor-dependent leadership of the Democratic party in an impossibly difficult bind, they lost their nerve and crumpled. Their passionate campaign commitments turned into so much hot air.
Why would any of us imagine that, having fallen at that early hurdle, she will be ready to jump even bigger obstacles as she pursues a high-flying political career within the Democratic party.
For some on the left, none of that seems to matter. They think AOC deserves support precisely because she is so expert at spectacle, at sounding committed even as she sells out her principles. If they cannot get action, they will settle for performance.
As she justified her attendance at the Met Gala on Monday, AOC argued that “the message is the medium”. But really it was the spectacle that was her message. She was having fun, joshing with the rich as though she was now firmly one of them. And they loved it.
Which was the real point. She will need them to bankroll her political aspirations, and the billionaire media to play softball with her, when she leaves behind her New York congressional district.
A few years hence, the woman whose gown said “Tax the rich” will be all the more credible, and useful to the elite, when she subtly changes tune and demands it is time to “Stop the attacks on the rich”.
She may be more flamboyant and more publicity-savvy than her political rivals, but AOC is no less susceptible to the pressures of a political system systemically corrupt and designed to maintain the privileges of a wealth elite.
With that Met Gala gown, she read the room well. She is on her way up.
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Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
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).
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I am a Public Interest Advocate. I have extensive training, clinical and professional practice experience supporting individuals in exercising their civil and human rights to Informed Consent, and accessing social justice in health care settings in B.C.
In this article I present the following information:
Definitions of Biometric Identification (ID)
BC’s Biometric ID: The BC Vaccine Card, aka “Proof of Vaccination” App & QR Code
Bioethical, Socio-Economic, and Social Justice Analysis
How BC’s Biometric ID Will Work
Places the vaccine card will be required for entry in BC
Cybersecurity Threats from Biometric ID, Vaccine Apps and Potential Risk Mitigation Strategies (including some tips for parents to decrease potential risks and threats to their kids)
Introduction
On August 23rd, 2021, the BC government announced they were moving forward with their plan to implement a Biometric identification (ID) and social credit system in B.C. that is tied to peoples’ COVID-19 vaccine status. This is euphemistically being referred to as, “Proof of Vaccination” (POV) and the “BC Vaccine Card.” These terms are code for Biometric ID.
This creates a convergence, or fusion, of ones’ biological, digital, and physiological identity, vaccination and social status. Vaccine passports create social credit, or status, based on ones’ vaccination status. BC’s system is building upon, and adopting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government’s vaccine status and social credit systems of state control, coercion, and surveillance tied to biometric data and ID. Under the BCNDP government, the ability to participate in BC society will rely upon whether one is up-to-date with what the state tells citizens is their vaccination status. This formalizes governmental, institutional, and state definitions of who is considered an “insider,” “desirable,” or “worthy person,” and who must be considered an “outsider,” an “undesirable” or “unworthy” person in BC.
There are also strong indicators the vaccines wane within several months. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that “booster shots” have no scientific data to support them. However, some nations, most notably Israel, have already been administering third doses of COVID-19 vaccines. They are also already considering administering four doses in the first year that these experimental vaccines have been administered around the world.
Trudeau has publicly stated he has ordered “booster” doses, or “second generation” vaccines up to 2024. People will be required to take the state-sponsored and required number of vaccines, which will change over time. If they do not take them, their status in their passport/Biometric ID will show they are “unvaccinated.” Their social credit and status will change. They will be socially and physically banned and excluded from all of the settings the B.C. government has decided will require this proof. That list will grow as the months go by.
What is Biometric Identification (ID)
Biometrics is defined as: the measurement and analysis of unique physical or behavioral characteristics (such as fingerprint or voice patterns) especially as a means of verifying personal identity (Merriam-Webster).
Biometrics are physical or behavioral human characteristics to that can be used to digitally identify a person to grant access to systems, devices or data (Korolov, 2019).
Biometric identification (ID): Biometric identification consists of determining the identity of a person. The aim is to capture an item of biometric data from this person. It can be a photo of their face, a record of their voice, or an image of their fingerprint (Thales, 2021).
Biometric ID now includes COVID-19 vaccination status. Over time, this information will potentially increase to include other biomedical personal information, which will confer social status and credit, and the ability to access services, and participate in ones’ community.
Proof of Vaccination ID & Biometric Vaccination Status in the BC Vaccine Card
BC Biometric ID: “Proof of Vaccination” App & QR Code
BC Government: “Starting September 13, you need proof of vaccination to access some events, services and businesses. The easiest way to show proof is using the BC Vaccine Card.”
On Sept. 7th more details about the BCNDP & #BCgovernment’s implementation of their Biometric ID and social credit system via the “BC Vaccine Card” were released. Details are provided below. The picture above is what your vaccine status will look like in the BC COVID-19 vaccine app.
Bioethical, Socio-Economic, and Social Justice Analysis
BC Vaccine Passport: “Proof of Vaccination” is the coercive collection, use, and forced disclosure of personal health information and biometric data via BC vaccine passports. This represents a substantive violation of health-related ethics, bioethics, civil and human rights, and a variety of provincial, federal, and international laws, including the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights(2005). The background and mandate of this international declaration states: “At its 32nd session in October 2003, the General Conference considered that it was “opportune and desirable to set universal standards in the field of bioethics with due regard for human dignity and human rights and freedoms, in the spirit of cultural pluralism inherent in bioethics” (32 C/Res. 24).
Social Exclusion, Marginalization and Barriers to Participating in Society: Many individuals and classes of people will be banned and further marginalized from participating in society through the BC government’s implementation of their social credit system. The BCNDP government is increasing barriers, creating institutional barriers, and excluding more and more people who they have decided are “unworthy” of being included in their communities, and BC society. This includes: poor and soci-economically disadvantaged people; people who have no PHN, no smartphones, and no access to the internet. People with inaccurate, or wrong ID. Seniors who may not know how to use technology, or how to navigate complex systems to access their biometric ID. People with disabilities and health conditions which prevent them from getting COVID-19 vaccines, and people who object to getting these vaccines for religious reasons, or conscientious objections will all be considered to have no social status in BC.
No “Do Over” – If/once you choose to download the BC Vaccine passport you will never again have autonomy, freedom, or liberty, or self-determination over your personal or health sovereignty. The state will own you, your biometric data, & your body forever. The state will also decide what health interventions you will be required to have in the future to maintain your social credit and status in BC (and later, in Canada). Once you give your own personal and health sovereignty, bodily autonomy and integrity away you will remain enslaved for the rest of your life, or you will become a non-status person.
In the case of COVID-19 vaccines: If you do not keep getting boosters when your COVID-19 vaccine has “expired” you will no longer have social status, or “social credit.” You will be considered “unvaccinated.” This means you will be banned from accessing the settings the province has decided you will be excluded from. This list will grow over time. They’re rolling out all of the plans incrementally.
There are NO EXEMPTIONS: This includes no exemptions even if you/a loved one has medical, or religious reasons for not receiving a vaccine (now it’s just COVID-19 ones, but new vaccines will roll out later that you will be required to take). This means if you had 1 dose and had a bad reaction, and can’t get a second dose (or third, fourth, fifth…), you will be considered unvaccinated and banned from participating in society.
Adrian Dix: “A major B.C. media outlet referred to him as a “dour Stalinist” after he became NDP leader last April. “[Josef] Stalin was a mass murderer . a totalitarian leader of the 1930s,” he said, exasperated.” (Todd, D. (2017). Vancouver Sun).
BC Definition of “Unvaccinated”: “No dose or <3 weeks since receipt of 1st dose.”
How BC’s Biometric ID Will Work
Downloading the App: To download the app you need your Personal Health Number (PHN); your date of birth; and the date of your 1st or 2nd vaccine dose. If you do not have a PHN, or smartphone, obviously you will be unable to use this app.
After inputting your biometric data: You will receive a BC vaccine card with a QR code that shows how many doses of the vaccine you’ve received.
You will need to show your QR code—either digital or paper—along with photo ID before entering specific events and settings.
Businesses will use a phone app to verify customers’ vaccination statuses. This means BC businesses and other settings will now be collecting customers’ Biometric & personal health information. Details about how, where, and what country/ies this data and information will be stored in, and whether third parties can access this data, and share it are not known at this time.
Permissions and Informed Consent: If you are going to download the BC Biometric app, ensure you have carefully read the Permissions and Consents that are required. These should tell you how, where, what country and whether third party access to your biometric and personal health information will be used. Permissions should also tell you if third parties can also share your personal health/biometric data, and for what purposes.
Exempted businesses and settings: Settings that have been designated as “Essential; “Fast food” restaurants, food courts, drive-thrus, and cafeterias are not included in the program.
Cybersecurity Threats from Biometric ID, Vaccine Apps and Potential Risk Mitigation Strategies
IT Security and privacy experts have already reported that COVID-related apps are highly targeted for hacking and cybersecurity breaches by cyber-criminals. This is because the information contained in these apps is probably enough to steal a person’s identity and commit other crimes in their name, specifically financial crimes.
Protecting Your Biometric Data and Personal Information:Consider getting an IT security assessment of your phone, and existing permissions from other apps and the phone manufacturer.
Additional Cybersecurity On Your Phone: Consider getting expert advice about adding additional layers of cybersecurity on your smartphone if you plan to download the app. Biometric ID and apps likely come with ongoing and chronic cybersecurity risks for you, and your personal health and biometric data.
Unknown Risks and Threats to Children & Youth: Because all of this is being implemented so quickly, with many parts unknown, and so many kids have smartphones, it is unclear to me what steps parents will be able to take to protect and decrease risks and threats from predators and cyber-criminals who will try to access the biometric and personal health information of their kids.
Suggestions for Parents: Not allow their kids to download the Biometric ID’s onto their phones until more is known about the risks and threats. Ensure that parents are present and aware of the permissions and consents if the app is downloaded. Try to do an IT cybersecurity assessment and install cybersecurity protections on their kids’ phones.
Dr. Bonnie Henry, March 31, 2020
Places your vaccine card is required for entry in BC
By order of the Provincial Health Officer (PHO), proof of vaccination is required to access some events, services and businesses. Starting September 13, you must have at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. By October 24, you must be fully vaccinated. The requirement is in place until January 31, 2022 and could be extended.
The requirement applies to all people born in 2009 or earlier (12+) and covers:
Indoor ticketed sporting events
Indoor concerts, theatre, dance and symphony events
Licensed restaurants and restaurants that offer table service (indoor and patio dining)
Pubs, bars and lounges (indoor and patio dining)
Nightclubs, casinos and movie theatres
Gyms, exercise facilities/studios, pools and recreation facilities
Businesses offering indoor group exercise
Indoor adult group and team sports for people 22 years old or older
Indoor organized events with 50 or more people. For example: Wedding receptions, organized parties, conferences and workshops
Indoor organized group recreational classes and activities like pottery, art and choir
Post-secondary on-campus student housing
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