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Afghanistan was at the heart of the 17th Extraordinary Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers representing 57 nations at the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC).
It was up to Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to deliver the keynote address to the session, held on 19 December at the Parliament House in Islamabad.
And he rose to the occasion: “If the world doesn’t act, this will be the biggest man-made crisis which is unfolding in front of us.”
Imran Khan was addressing not only representatives of the lands of Islam, but also UN officials, the proverbial “global financial institutions,” scores of NGOs, a smattering of US, EU and Japanese bureaucrats and, crucially, Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi.
No nation or organization has yet formally recognized the Taliban as the new, legitimate Afghan government. And quite a few are frankly more interested in engaging in an elaborate kabuki, pretending to deliver some sort of aid to the devastated Afghan economy after 20 years of US/NATO occupation instead of actually coordinating aid packages with Kabul.
The numbers are dire, and barely tell the full extent of the drama.
According to the UNDP, 22.8 million Afghan citizens – over half of Afghanistan – are facing food shortages, and soon, acute hunger; while no less than 97 percent of Afghans could soon fall under the poverty line. In addition, the World Food Programme stresses that 3.2 million Afghan children risk acute malnutrition.
Imran Khan emphasized that the OIC had a “religious duty” to help Afghanistan. As for the ‘hyperpower’ that stunned the world with its humiliating withdrawal show after 20 years of occupation, he was adamant: Washington must “delink” whatever grudges it may hold against the Taliban government from the destiny of 40 million Afghan citizens.
Imran Khan did ruffle a few Afghan feathers – starting with former President Hamid Karzai, when he observed that “the idea of human rights is different in every society,” referring to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders Afghanistan.
“The city culture is completely different from the culture in rural areas …,” he said. “We give stipends to the parents of the girls so that they send them to school. But in districts bordering Afghanistan, if we are not sensitive to the cultural norms, then they won’t send them to school despite receiving double the amount. We have to be sensitive about human rights and women rights.”
This was interpreted in a few quarters as Pakistani interference – part of a secret, devious strategic narrative. Not really. The prime minister was stating a fact, as anyone familiar with the tribal areas knows. Even Afghan Foreign Minister Muttaqi said the prime minister’s words were not “insulting”.
Imran Khan also observed that there are already over three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Moreover, Islamabad is sheltering more than 200,000 refugees who overstayed their visas. “They can’t go back. We are already suffering from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. We are not in a position to deal with an influx of refugees.”
Would you ever trust NATO?
Then there’s the ultimate nut to crack: internal Taliban dynamics.
Diplomatic sources confirm off the record that it’s a non-stop struggle to convince different layers of the Taliban leadership to allow for some concessions.
Discussions with the NATO block are for, all practical purposes, dead: bluntly, there will be no help without visible concessions on girls’ education, women’s rights and the heart of the matter – on which everyone agrees, including the Russians, the Chinese and the Central Asians – a more inclusive government in Kabul.
So far, Taliban pragmatists – led by the Doha political office – have been on the losing end.
The OIC meeting at least came up with practical suggestions involving Islamic development banks. Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi was keen to emphasize the necessity of getting Kabul to access banking services.
This is the heart of the problem: there are no solid banking channels after NATO departed. So it’s technically impossible to transfer financial aid into the system and then distribute it across hard-hit provinces. Yet, once again, this is ultimately linked to those lofty western humanitarian aid pledges crammed with conditionalities.
In the end, Qureshi, together with the OIC Secretary-General Hissein Brahim Taha, announced that a ‘humanitarian trust fund’ will be established as soon as possible, under the aegis of the Islamic Development Bank. The fund should be able to incorporate international partners, non-politicized westerners included.
Qureshi put out his bravest face, emphasizing that “the need is felt to forge a partnership between the OIC and the UN.”
Taha, for his part, was quite realistic. No funds whatsoever have been pledged so far for this new OIC humanitarian operation.
As Qureshi mentioned, there is one thing which Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan and other actors may decisively help with: investment “in the people of Afghanistan, bilaterally or through the OIC, in areas such as education, health and technical and vocational skills to the Afghan youth.”
So now it comes to the crunch – and fast. It’s up to the OIC to play the leading role in terms of alleviating Afghanistan’s dire humanitarian drama.
The official declaration calling on all OIC member states, Islamic financial institutions, donors, and unnamed ‘international partners’ to announce pledges to the humanitarian trust fund for Afghanistan will have to go way beyond rhetorical flourish.
At least, it’s all but certain that from now on, it will be up to the lands of Islam to decisively help Afghanistan. A bitter, defeated, vengeful, internally corroded NATO simply cannot be trusted.
Nobody today remembers that the Empire had concocted its own version of the New Silk Road over 10 years ago, announced by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Chennai in July 2001.
That was no ‘community of shared future for mankind,’ but a very narrow obsession on capturing energy resources – in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan; ‘stabilizing’ Afghanistan, as in perpetuating the occupation; giving a boost to India; and ‘isolating’ Iran.
The energy supply routes to the west should have gone through the Caspian Sea, and then across Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey – the three actors of the BTC pipeline – thus bypassing Russia, which was already then being depicted in the west as a ‘threat’.
All this is dead and buried – as post-occupation Afghanistan alongside the five Central Asian ‘stans’ are now back as one of the key foci of interest of the Russia–China strategic partnership: the heart of a Greater Eurasia spanning from Shanghai in the east to St. Petersburg in the west.
Yet to make it happen, it’s imperative that the OIC helps Afghanistan as much as the Taliban must help themselves.
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Featured image: An earlier meeting between Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi and Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureishi (Source: The Cradle)
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The fragility of the American democracy seems to be already visible even to pro-Western analysts. Recent studies and reports indicate that the American state is among the most politically vulnerable to internal threats in the world. This diagnosis is currently shared even by some of the biggest supporters of Washington. The internal reality of the US is showing itself as a major source of concern for the American government, which, on its part, should decline some of its international interests in order to improve its domestic scenario.
In November, the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance named American democracy as one of the most backward in the world. The institute emphasized the emergence of several authoritarian tendencies in the US, which can be perfectly understood when we look back on some recent events, such as the electoral violence last year, the constant allegations of electoral fraud, and others. However, this negative and “pessimistic” opinion about the future of the US now seems shared even by CIA advisers.
Barbara F. Walter, a CIA executive consultant and expert in analyzing scenarios of political instability, pointed out in a recent publication that the US is on the brink of a civil war. Barbara has written a book on this topic, which has been reviewed by The Washington Post. According to her, the process of polarization of American society has already surpassed the stages of “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict”, making it literally on the brink of starting an internal armed conflict.
These are some of Barbara’s words:
“We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe (…) the one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war. […] If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely (…) We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy (…) That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated at +10 on the Polity index”.
The author believes that her country has entered a very dangerous stage of political security, especially after the events earlier this year, when protesters invaded the Capitol during the height of popular demonsrations. For her, this event seems to have paved the way for Washington to enter the stage of “open insurgency”, which is a dangerous step towards a civil war. According to her, this entire scenario is a consequence of the anti-democratic process that advanced during the Trump administration, making the American state a sort of intermediary between an autocracy and a real democracy.
Considering all these factors and pointing to several indices from previous polls, the CIA consultant concludes that her country’s current political status can be defined as “high risk of civil war”, something truly similar to the internal scenario of polarization in the 19th century, before the beginning of the only civil conflict in American history. A combination of bad governance with undemocratic policies and institutional weakening makes Washington vulnerable to all internal threats.
Walter appoints Trump and the Republicans who for her have pushed the US into an “abyss” as culprits. She believes that Joe Biden’s government and the Democrats’ hegemony would be a hope for the American, but at the same time points out that the Trump administration left such a negative legacy that it makes it practically impossible to achieve the Democrats’ goals – materialized in Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, which becomes more and more unachievable.
In fact, much of the data pointed out by Barbara Walter is true, but in the end, the aim of her work seems to be just an attempt to legitimize the actions of Democrats and condemn all aspects of the Trump administration. While it is undeniable that Trump represented several setbacks for American democracy, it seems a real exaggeration to point him as the culprit in this entire process.
The first mistake is to idealize American democracy as the most perfect example of a political regime to be followed. Structural problems such as racism, social inequalities and public security crisis are nothing new in American history, but a reality that has been with the country for decades. The main problem that Trump represented for American democracy was precisely to damage its image, as the Republican president was explicit in its authoritarian and right-wing tendencies, while Democratic praxis consists of disguising such tendencies by promoting an agenda in defense of ethnic, sexual and social minorities. Trump has been explicit and Biden has been more moderate, but both represent the same advanced stage of US democratic decadence.
The arguments exposed in Barbara’s book seem like a true apology for Biden and his model of governance, as well as an attempt to highlight, from a strategic perspective – considering Barbara’s position at the CIA – the importance of implementing the Build Back Better agenda, which currently faces strong rejection in American political society. However, despite her overly pro-Biden stance, Barbara deserves special attention for correctly diagnosing the danger that currently most affects American society.
Civil war is no longer a distant scenario for the world’s greatest power. Social polarization in the country has reached really high levels. Racial tensions, political conflicts, separatist groups and several other factors have contributed to the increase in the country’s internal crisis. The uncontrolled immigration that began with the Biden government makes the situation even worse, escalating social problems and racist and xenophobic reactions. Amidst a scenario of weak democracy, polarization and totalitarian tendencies gain space and, with this, future scenarios such a civil war, Balkanization or even the beginning of a dictatorship are expected.
The best thing for the American government to do is to interpret Barbara Walter’s book as a true warning, a report by a CIA consultant about the problems that affect America, and not as a simple apology for the Biden administration. Washington’s problems are serious and it is no longer a matter of “Republicans vs. Democrats” but of “democracy vs. civil war”.
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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, geopolitical consultant.
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With Julian Assange now fighting the next stage of efforts to extradite him to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 of which are based on the brutal, archaic Espionage Act, some Australian politicians have found their voice. It might be said that a few have even found their conscience.
Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce was sufficiently exercised by the High Court judgment overturning the lower court ruling against extradition to demand an end to the matter. In his opinion piece for the Nine newspaper group on December 14, he argued that rights were “not created in some legal sonic boom at one undefined point of our existence nor switched off like the power to a fridge because of a fear or a confusion as to the worth of their contents.”
The deputy PM proved mature enough to admit that “whether you like him or despite him”, the importance of the case transcended his situation. “So we must hope for the British courts to do so, and we will judge its society accordingly.” (They have not and, accordingly, should be judged.)
The Nationals leader has little time for the role of whistleblowing or disclosing egregious misconduct by a State; less time for Assange as the publisher in history, the exposer of crimes by a great power. “They are a separate matter to the key issue: where was this individual when he was allegedly breaking US law for which the US is now seeking his extradition from London?”
Joyce’s reasoning, while jejune on the historical contributions of WikiLeaks, has the merit of unusual clarity. He argues that the UK “should try him there for any crime he is alleged to have committed on British soil or send him back to Australia, where he is a citizen.” Assange never pilfered any US secret files; did not breach Australian laws and was not in the US when “the event being deliberated in the court now in London occurred.” To extradite him to the US would not only be unjust but bizarre. “If he insulted the Koran, would he be extradited to Saudi Arabia?”
The move by the Nationals leader also brought a few voices of support from the woodwork. Liberal backbenchers Jason Falinski and Bridget Archer are encouraging diplomatic intervention. Falinski suggested that the Morrison government “do what it can to get an Australian citizen back to Australia as quickly as possible” though he refused to entertain “a public spat with America”. Archer believed that “he should be released and returned to Australia”.
The announcement that Caroline Kennedy would be heading Down Under as the new US ambassador to Australia was also seen as an opportunity. Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr suggested to that Prime Minister Scott Morrison take the chance to discuss the Assange case with Kennedy. (This, from a man who once claimed that Assange “has had more consular support in a comparable time than any other Australian” while admitting that he did not “know whether this is the case.”)
Morrison might, suggests Carr, point out that Australia had its own challenges in facing war crimes allegations, notably “war crimes trials pending for Australian troops in Afghanistan who might have done the very things Assange exposed in Iraq.” Washington’s treatment of the publisher could well “turn this guy into a martyr.”
Carr sees such advice as part of the capital of trust between allies. It was a “small transaction under the architecture of what each sees as a mutually beneficial relationship.” It might even show that Australia was capable of behaving “like a sovereign nation” in “one tiny corner of our alliance partnership”. If Canberra were unable to “take up the cause of an Australian passport holder, what scope for any independent action do we allow ourselves?”
The former foreign minister shows, at stages, flashes of ignorance about aspects of the proceedings (the US prosecution, for instance, made a special point in not mentioning the Collateral Murder video in its proceedings), he is at least cognisant of the monstrous defects in the case, not least the fact that a good deal of the indictment is based on falsified accounts from former WikiLeaks volunteer, Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson.
The latest stirring of principled awareness in Australia should be treated warily. Australian governments tend to protect their citizens with a begrudging reluctance, except in the rarest of cases. They are notorious in playing the game of surrender and capitulation. In the context of the US-Australian alliance, one given an even more solid filling with the AUKUS security pact, the hope that Australia would ever be able to exercise sovereign choices on any issue that affects US security is almost inconceivable.
The lamentable behaviour from Canberra regarding Assange’s welfare has also been brought to light by the tireless exploits of lawyer Kellie Tranter. Using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, Tranter developed a timeline revealing how Australian officials were updated on Assange’s condition (legal and physical) yet did little in the way of addressing it. Kit Klarenberg, making use of Tranter’s findings, also discusses the extent Australian officials knew about Assange’s plight.
In April 2019, for instance, the lawyer Gareth Pierce, acting for Assange, wrote to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) warning that the publisher’s possessions were being held by the Ecuadorian authorities. These included a stash of privileged legal documents. DFAT, while claiming it would chase the matter up, concluded in May 2019 that Assange’s possessions were “under the authority and jurisdiction of the Judicial System of the Republic of Ecuador”. Australian diplomats, it followed, were unable to intervene. The result: Assange’s documents, held by the Ecuadorians, were seized by the FBI.
As extradition proceedings were taking place, Peirce wrote to the Australian High Commission that consular representatives would have “undoubtedly noted what was clear for everyone present in court to observe” – that the publisher was “in shockingly poor condition … struggling not only to cope but to articulate what he wishes to articulate.” DFAT’s report of those proceedings, intentionally or otherwise, was stonily silent on the issue.
Throughout, DFAT maintained that Assange had refused consular assistance or support. This was a point the publisher took up in a meeting at Belmarsh prison with consular officials on November 1, 2019, claiming that to be misguided nonsense. He also noted concerns by the prison doctor about his state, being “so bad that his mind was shutting down”, the appalling state of isolation which made it impossible for him “to think or to prepare his defence.”
Little then, can be expected from the compliant minions in Canberra desperately keen not to soil or sour relations with Washington. But it is at least mildly heartening that a few members of the Morrison government have woken up to the fact that this grotesque act of persecution against a publisher should end.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Featured image: Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison in 2019 (Source: WSWS)
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The Austrian government is hiring people to “hunt down vaccine refusers,” according to a report published by Blick.
Yes, really.
The burden for enforcing the fines unjabbed Austrians will have to pay as part of their punishment will fall to their employers, necessitating a new army of ‘inspectors’ to ensure that process is running smoothly.
The city of Linz, which is home to 200,000 inhabitants, has a relatively low vaccination rate of 63 per cent.
In response, “Linz now wants to hire people who are supposed to hunt down vaccine refusers,” reports Swiss news outlet Blick.
The role of the inspectors will be to check on “whether those who do not get vaccinated really pay for it.”
The vaccine refusenik hunters will receive a wage of 2774 euros, which will be paid 14 times a year, making an annual income of 38,863 euros.
Nice work if you can get it.
“The job includes, among other things, the creation of penal orders as well as the processing of appeals,” according to the report, adding that workers need to be “resilient” and willing to work a lot of overtime.
The jobs are only open to Austrian citizens, all of whom will either have to be vaccinated against or fully recovered from COVID.
As we previously highlighted, the unvaccinated in Austria could find themselves imprisoned for a year under a new administrative law that would force them to pay for their own internment.
Austrians who don’t get vaccinated by February face fines of up to €7,200 ($8,000) for non-compliance, and those who refuse to pay would also face a 12 month jail sentence.
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Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia has returned from the frontline in the battle to halt the advances of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
TPLF rebels launched an attack on the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) during early November of 2020 triggering a conflict which has resulted in the deaths of thousands and the displacement of several million people inside the country and in neighboring Sudan.
Abiy, who was elected to a full term of office in 2021, had already declared a unilateral ceasefire in June. Nonetheless, the TPLF continued the conflict by sending its rebel forces into the Amhara and Afar populated areas of Ethiopia.
Ethiopia, a vast country of over 115 million people, the second most populous state on the African continent, is composed of numerous ethnic groups and nationalities. Since the ascendancy of the Abiy administration in the aftermath of a national uprising against the TPLF-led Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) regime in the early months of 2018, the prime minister has sought to unite the country under the political banner of the Prosperity Party (PP).
The TPLF grouping which maintained control of the Tigray province after 2018 in the north of the country has consistently refused to participate in efforts aimed at building national unity in Ethiopia and Pan-African solidarity throughout the Horn of Africa region. The rebels held provincial elections in 2020 despite the call by the central government in Addis Ababa to postpone voting across the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Obviously, the central government was taken unawares after its forces were attacked in the Tigray provincial capital of Mekelle. In the first few months of the war, the ENDF retook Mekelle and other areas of the province prior to announcing a unilateral ceasefire in June for the purposes of allowing humanitarian assistance and the agricultural production of the farmers.
In recent weeks, after the prime minister visited the frontline, the character of the conflict has shifted once again. The Ethiopian military has been able to retake land from the TPLF in the most contested areas of the country.
United States media outlets apparently working in collaboration with the State Department and the Pentagon, began to spread misinformation about the purported “imminent collapse” of the Abiy government in Addis Ababa in November. These reports were contradicted by the Ethiopian government along with visitors to the country who repeatedly stated that the capital city was calm even with the prime minister’s declaration of a state of emergency.
The claims of mass starvation, sexual assault and accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide flourished within the western governmental and corporate press agencies. The Ethiopian administration of Prime Minister Abiy was identified by the U.S. and its allies as the perpetuator of these crimes. However, the government denied these allegations saying the charges were solely being leveled by the TPLF and its supporters to further isolate Addis Ababa.
Eyewitness reports related to the war crimes committed by the TPLF’s Defense Forces (TDF) went largely ignored by the western media. TPLF forces took trucks and other equipment sent to the area for humanitarian purposes. The Abiy government accused elements working within the United Nations framework in Ethiopia as being collaborators with the rebels. In the modification of their allegations of war crimes committed by the central government, in recent weeks the western-backed agencies are now saying that abuses have occurred on both sides of the conflict. The prime minister and his government have categorically rejected any accommodation of the TPLF and its demands which often solidarizes with imperialist interests in the Horn of Africa.
An Ethiopian-oriented news agency, Borkena.com, reported on the recent situation on the battlefront noting that:
“Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) forces retreated to the Tigray region of Ethiopia after facing devastating military defeats in the Afar and Amhara regions of Ethiopia over the past three weeks. Six prominent TPLF military generals whose names are still undisclosed were killed in the Kasagita Front in the Afar region of Ethiopia, as reported by local Ethiopian sources about three weeks ago. After losing a fortified military stronghold in the areas, whose objective was said to be to cut off the supply route to Djibouti and hold Ethiopia in a choke position, losing battles became pervasive in the areas it controlled. In a span of less than two weeks, TPLF was forced to leave cities after cities in the western, Eastern and Wollo front in the center. Shewarobit, Debre Sina, Ataye, Kemissie, Kombolcham Batie, Dessie, Haik, Wuchale, Wurgehsa, Mersa, Woldia and Kobo were freed from TPLF forces one after the other.”
The Role of the U.S. and United Nations in the Conflict
Under the previous administration of President Donald J. Trump, threats against Addis Ababa were made related to the construction and operations of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Project (GERD). The project, which is the largest hydroelectric plant in Africa, has been planned for years by the Ethiopian government to enhance its own internal power supply and to assist other states within the broader region known as the Nile Basin Initiative. (See this)
Neighboring Egypt has sought to sabotage the GERD under the guise that it will severely curtail access to the waters of the Blue Nile which is shared by both countries. The current arrangements imposed by British imperialism during the early 20th century favors Egypt, its then colonial subject. Ethiopia, although occupied by the Italian fascist forces between 1936-1941, has never been subjected to direct colonial control by European powers.
Trump had urged Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to “blow up” the GERD after Ethiopia rejected a deal imposed by Washington. The statement was made to Sudanese interim Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok during 2020, at the time of Khartoum’s illegal “recognition” of the State of Israel.
Unfortunately, the United Nations humanitarian agencies have taken a position similar to the U.S. in regard to the war. Ethiopia has set strict limits on access to conflict areas which have been utilized by certain UN agencies to make accusations against the government in Addis Ababa.
However, what has created even more tension is the declaration by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to conduct an investigation into the claims of war crimes since November of 2020 in the north of Ethiopia. The government in Addis Ababa has rejected the plans for an investigation saying it will not cooperate since these issues are internal matters.
A press briefing was held on December 21 in Addis Ababa featuring the spokeswoman for Prime Minister Billene Seyoum who addressed the announcement by the UNHRC. Borkena.com in an article on the briefing emphasized:
“Ethiopia says the resolution was politically motivated. Politically motivated because it discredited the efforts by the Ethiopian government to investigate rights abuses in the Tigray region. Earlier this year, the Ethiopian government martial court looked into cases of violations by members of the Ethiopian Defense Forces. Those who were found to be guilty were punished in accordance with the martial court. In regard to claims of genocide in Tigray by the TPLF surrogates and some state actors tacitly supporting the designated terrorist group, a joint investigation by the United Nations Human Rights Commission and Ethiopian Human Rights Commission ruled that there was no genocide in Tigray. The press secretary on Tuesday (Dec. 21) reflected a view that the UN Human Rights Council should stop practices that sound as partisanship and consider the importance of investigating rights abuses in the Afar and Amhara regions of Ethiopia where the TPLF carried out multiples of atrocities during the months of occupation in parts of these regions.”
The attacks on Ethiopia have generated mass demonstrations domestically and internationally known as #NoMore. Thousands of Diasporic Ethiopians and Eritreans have held joint demonstrations across the world including the U.S. These actions intensified after the announcement of sanctions by Washington against Ethiopia. In addition, a leaked videotape of a secret meeting involving the U.S., UK, European Union and TPLF officials where plans were being discussed for the imposition of a new government after the removal of Prime Minister Abiy. (See this)
These developments illustrate clearly the real aims and objectives of the war being waged against the Ethiopian government. Anti-imperialists throughout the world, with specific to the western capitalist states, must be in solidarity with the Ethiopian people in these attempts to destabilize and overthrow the legitimate administration inside the country.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Israel was involved in the assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani, the former head of Israel’s military intelligence said yesterday.
Soleimani, who was considered the mastermind of the pro-Iran proxies in the region, was killed in an American drone strike near the Iraqi capital Baghdad in January 2020.
According to Israeli daily Haaretz, former Israeli army intelligence chief Major General Tamir Hayman told the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Centre that the killing of Soleimani was one of “two significant and important assassinations” during his tenure.
The other assassination, he said, was that of the military leader of the Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Bahaa Abu Al-Ata.
“Soleimani’s assassination is an achievement, since our main enemy, in my eyes, are the Iranians. Two significant and important assassinations can be noted in my term,” Hayman said.
Several days after Soleimani was killed, NBC News reported that Israeli intelligence helped the United States target him.
Hayman’s tenure as Israeli army intelligence chief ended in October. He has said that Israel has carried out multiple operations to disrupt the spread of Iranian weapons and funds throughout the region.
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There is an incredible gaslighting campaign happening in the United States right now, as COVID cases reach all time highs in the U.S. northeast and elsewhere.
On television and in corporate press outlets, there is a giant, ongoing memory-holing operation related to the once-promised idea that mRNA shots would stop the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19.
While they now claim otherwise, every single major government health official and pharmaceutical executive has claimed that COVID shots stop the virus.
Let’s take a look at what the top government health officials have said on the record about these shots over the past year.
Let’s start with the worst of offenders, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community. In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere. And that’s when you get a point that you have a markedly diminished rate of infection in the community.”
“Our data from the CDC suggests that vaccinated people don’t carry the virus, don’t get sick and that it’s not just in clinical trials, but it’s also in real world data.” – CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.
“I’m very confident that transmission between people will be reduced by such a highly effective vaccine” -BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin, whose company developed the “Pfizer vaccine.”
ファイザーは、分析の結果、開発中の新型コロナウイルスワクチンは90%以上の予防効果があったと発表 Pfizer’s Early Data Shows Vaccine Is More Than 90% Effective https://t.co/wQFslkmXAL 米ファイザー、ワクチンの効果9割超に https://t.co/tj4t9o2ftP https://t.co/vhTEDGqlsp https://t.co/2l2ju2PuyY
Now, why is it important to hold these people accountable?
Well, first off, they made a false proclamation and need to be held accountable for doing so.
But second, and much more important, is the reality that almost every single one of the failed “public health expert” strategies related to COVID-19 are tethered to the idea that the shots will end the pandemic.
Lockdowns were highlighted as a means of buying time for everyone to get injected with mRNA shots. Today’s “lockdowns of the unvaccinated” are designed to coerce people into taking the shots, with the thesis that they are a threat to the community for remaining unvaccinated.
Mandatory masking (and “social distancing”), particularly among schoolchildren, are justified as a temporary tool to be utilized until one has taken the shots.
Vaccine passports are implemented under the impression that a “fully vaccinated” crowd would not spread COVID among one another.
In August, Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT) submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for all of the data within Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine biological product file — a body of information comprising some 329,000 pages.
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The FDA, arguing its poorly staffed Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research did not have the capacity to quickly redact legally exempt material, such as Pfizer proprietary information and personal private information of trial participants, the agency asked to be allowed to release only 500 pages of this data per month, thus necessitating 55 years for full disclosure.
The agency later requested up to 75 years to complete the task. As of Nov. 17, only a fraction of the data in question had been released.
Here I will discuss one of these released documents, the “Cumulative Analysis of Post-authorization Adverse Event Reports.” This document constitutes one part of Pfizer’s responsibility for pharmacovigilance with respect to their Biological License Agreement with the FDA.
Pharmacovigilance refers to the science and activities relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects or any other medicine-related problem.
Before we examine the quantity, seriousness and nature of the adverse events included in this document it is worthwhile to pause and consider just how significant this report should have been to the public.
Pfizer’s vaccine had yet to complete full safety and efficacy testing, yet its product was being rapidly deployed on a healthy population that dwarfed the size of the vaccine’s clinical trial.
The FDA and Pfizer were well aware that very real risks, if they existed, could not have been identified from the trials alone. There weren’t enough participants, and the participants had not been observed for very long.
Everything may seem okay if you experiment on 20,000 people, but what happens when you experiment on a million people?
The “Cumulative Analysis of Post-authorization Adverse Event Reports” should have been the “everything looks good so far” reassurance the FDA was seeking. Why was it necessary to impel the FDA to make this information public through a court order?
In the discussion section of the document (section 4), Pfizer assures the FDA it “… performs frequent and rigorous signal detection on BNT162b2 cases.”
What does “rigorous” signal detection mean? Did Pfizer survey a large number of vaccine recipients for adverse events and investigate them? No, it didn’t.
This report is merely a compilation of unsolicited, in other words, passive, reports of adverse events directly brought to Pfizer’s attention by recipients, cases reported by the health authorities, cases published in the medical literature, cases from Pfizer-sponsored marketing programs, non-interventional studies and cases of serious adverse events reported from clinical studies regardless of causality assessment.
In the report, Pfizer admitted the “magnitude of underreporting is unknown.”
It is well accepted that passive reporting will inescapably lead to underreporting. Nevertheless, according to Pfizer’s report:
“Due to the large numbers of spontaneous adverse event reports received for the product, the MAH (Marketing Authorisation Holder) has prioritised the processing of serious cases, in order to meet expedited regulatory reporting timelines and ensure these reports are available for signal detection and evaluation activity.”
The authors continued:
“Pfizer also taken a [sic] multiple actions to help alleviate the large increase of adverse event reports. This includes significant technology enhancements, [sic] and process and workflow solutions, as well as increasing the number of data entry and case processing colleagues.”
In other words, the number of adverse events reported overwhelmed Pfizer’s expectations, yet the vaccine maker concluded, “The findings of these signal detection analyses are consistent with the known safety profile of the vaccine.”
This paradoxical statement will prove to be an important clue as we dissect the data below.
What does the document reveal?
Through Feb. 28, a total of 42,086 recipients (cases) reported 158,893 events, or adverse reactions to the Pfizer vaccine. Approximately 50% of these events were deemed serious.
Figure 1: Total Numbers of BNT162b2 AEs by system organ classes and event seriousness
An overview of the characteristics of the recipients is given here:
Of note, 1,223 recipients of the vaccine had a fatal outcome. More than 11,000 had not recovered. The outcome of 9,400 was unknown. Nearly three-quarters were female.
These numbers are concerning, but do they represent a significant safety concern? The answer to that question depends entirely upon the number of people who had been vaccinated up to that point.
Pfizer provided this number to the FDA in the general overview section of the document, section 3.1.1. — but in the document released under the FOIA request, that number was redacted:
“It is estimated that approximately (b) (4) doses of BNT162b2 were shipped worldwide from the receipt of the first temporary authorisation for emergency supply on 01 December 2020 through 28 February 2021.”
In the above, “(b)(4)“ indicates that this number has been redacted.
The cumulative number of doses distributed worldwide as of Feb. 28 is not proprietary information, nor does it constitute personal, private data of individuals.
Yet without this key number there is no way to calculate the incidence of serious events, i.e., a safety signal.
The FDA chose, without explanation or any legal justification, to withhold this crucial piece of data.
Despite the FDA’s obvious intention to obfuscate, Pfizer provided a means of estimating this number when it unequivocally concluded: “… these signal detection analyses are consistent with the known safety profile of the vaccine.”
What was the known safety profile of the vaccine?
As of Feb. 28, the only known safety profile of the vaccine was determined by the initial results from the phase 3 trials from the autumn of 2020.
Thus, if these data are consistent with its known safety profile, and roughly 79,000 serious adverse events had occurred up to that time, we can estimate that approximately 13,550,000 (79,000 x 171.6) doses had been distributed.
Admittedly there is uncertainty in this calculation. Perhaps a different interpretation of the safety profile was implied.
However, Pfizer reported the number of doses that had been distributed, not administered.
Fewer doses would have been administered than delivered. Moreover, serious adverse events in the trials were distributed across participants who were fully vaccinated (having received two doses).
Here we are using the number of doses as the denominator. This estimation will result in the lower limit of the true incidence of adverse events.
In other words, by using these assumptions we are giving Pfizer’s vaccine the maximum benefit of the doubt.
Using this estimate of total doses given, the incidence of a fatal outcome is 1223/13.55 million or 1 in 11,079.
Permanent sequelae (conditions that result as a consequence of vaccination) = 520/13.55 million, or 1 in 26,057. Furthermore, 11,361 out of 13.55 million, or 1 in 1,193, had not yet recovered from an adverse event.
Pfizer inexplicably chose to group recipients who “recovered” with those who were “recovering.” How many in this large group (19,582) were still suffering from harm at the time of the report? On what basis did Pfizer determine a recipient still had a chance of full recovery?
With no clarification from the vaccine manufacturer, we are forced to lump them in with another large group of 9,400 whose ultimate outcome was “unknown” — leaving us with a high limit of 1 in 466 recipients having had an undetermined outcome.
Although none of these adverse events and fatalities were shown to be directly or indirectly caused by vaccination, Pfizer offered more data of concern around adverse events of “special Interest” (AESI).
According to Pfizer, 1,403 cardiovascular AESIs, 932 hematologic, 3,600 musculoskeletal, 501 neurologic and 3,674 “other” serious AESIs all occurred with a median time of onset of 24 hours or less from vaccination.
The 275 strokes and 449 cases of facial paralysis reported occurred with a median time of onset of two days from vaccination.
Though it is impossible to establish an unassailable causative link between vaccination and injury at this time, the temporal relationship between them is correlative and highly suggestive of causation.
Nevertheless, the authors of the Pfizer report concluded at the end of each AESI category that “This cumulative case review does not raise new safety issues.”
The report also included 24 serious cases in children younger than 12. Of those, 13 cases had not yet been resolved at the time of reporting. The mean age of these recipients was 3.7 years.
We must assume that very few children of that age were inoculated at that time given that Pfizer had authorization for use on adults only. With no number of inoculated children reported, we cannot know what the risk of injury is in children under 12.
Conclusions
Pfizer’s repeated assurances that no new safety issues exist are disingenuous at best.
The FDA was overtly obstructive by withholding crucial information required to make an accurate assessment of harm. However, by using reasonable estimations based on Pfizer’s own claims and published trial data, it is likely a safety signal does exist — and that safety signal was ignored by the very organization that is supposed to be listening for it, the FDA.
Pfizer’s estimated incidence of potential vaccine fatality, 1 in 11,079, is approximately twice that reported in VAERS. Given that the potential vaccine fatalities in this document have been passively reported, we can assume the actual incidence is higher.
More comprehensive analyses have demonstrated a VAERS underreporting factor of vaccine fatality approaching 41 or greater.
Underreported or not, the real and growing tragedy is that until an injury associated with vaccination is proven to be caused by it, it remains, for all intents and purposes, a non-existent signal to the very institutions responsible for public health and safety.
On what grounds can we as physicians and healthcare providers assure our patients this vaccine is safe if adverse events are not investigated or even acknowledged?
Is a nod from the FDA really good enough?
Or should we demand transparency, discussion or at the very least, unredacted data? What does the public expect of us?
Important article by Jane M. Orient, M.D. published by the AAPS
***
In addition to being subjected to various forms of censorship, for the first time in living memory American doctors are getting threat letters from licensure boards warning them against distributing “harmful misinformation.” Medical boards in 12 states have disciplined doctors because of this allegation. While it is claimed that there’s an epidemic of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, the warnings don’t spell out what that means.
We don’t have an epidemic of patients dying because doctors told them to refuse treatment or to drink Clorox or aquarium cleaner.
In fact, no patients need to have suffered any harm at all for the medical board to investigate a doctor’s no-longer-free speech. All it takes is an anonymous complaint
Pharmacists who were converted into the overseers of physicians’ prescribing practices will complain that a doctor had prescribed ivermectin for COVID-19.
Or an employer might complain that a doctor supported a worker’s request for a medical exemption that wasn’t on the CDC’s list of acceptable reasons.
Or the doctor might have spoken at a political meeting at which mask mandates were being challenged.
Or a patient might complain that a doctor wasn’t wearing a mask in his private consulting room, even when no COVID-19 patients were anywhere near and the doctor had demonstrated immunity.
“Harmful misinformation” appears to mean anything that contradicts or asks questions or raises doubt about the dogma that “vaccines are safe and effective,” or suggests a treatment not endorsed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and their corporate sponsors.
One source of the allegedly “harmful misinformation” is a database created and maintained by the CDC, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
Anybody can enter a suspected vaccine adverse reaction, and the public can access it. So, “it can be abused by people trying to sow fear,” write Shayla Love and Anna Merlan in VICE News. One person filed a fraudulent report, promptly removed, claiming that an influenza vaccination had turned him into the “Incredible Hulk.”
Flawed as it is, VAERS is the best CDC has to offer for looking for “danger signals.” Of course, correlation doesn’t prove causality. As Lindy McGee from Texas Children’s Hospital correctly pointed out, “I can report if I get hit by a truck after I’ve gotten a vaccine and that would be reported as associated with a vaccine. It does not make any implication of causality.” However, there is a double standard. If you get hit by a truck, but test positive for COVID-19, the hospital will get paid for counting you as a COVID death.
Adverse reports to VAERS are many times higher for COVID-19 vaccines than for all other vaccines combined since the database was established in 1988. The website vaers.hhs.gov clearly states: “Knowingly filing a false VAERS report is a violation of Federal law (18 U.S. Code § 1001) punishable by fine and imprisonment.” So, presumably most of the approximately 20,000 reports of death concern people who really did die soon after getting the jab, most within a few days. It could be 20,000 coincidences, but the count is not “misinformation.”
Love and Merlan call the compilers of VAERS information at openvaers.com/covid-data “dumpster divers.” Matt Motta of Oklahoma State University and Dominik Stecuła of Colorado State University refer to that January article favorably in their Aug 25 essay that says VAERS is only good for researching “vaccine hesitancy.” They don’t mention that the featured VAERS death count of 329 from Jan 22, 2021, has steadily increased.
Also viewed as “misinformation” is the opinion of physicians and researchers that hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and other “repurposed” drugs are beneficial in COVID-19, as shown in more than 1,000 studies. Reports of dying patients who recovered when hospitals were legally forced to step aside and allow off-protocol treatment are ignored.
The safe option for doctors is to promote the jab or keep silent, and not to suggest anything different from what Anthony Fauci approves. By silencing doctors who are ethical professionals, one opens the gates for the reckless charlatans.
Recall that in Orwell’s Newspeak, the meaning of words is inverted. The Ministry of Love is in charge of torture; the Ministry of Plenty, of starvation; and the Ministry of Truth, of propaganda.
Just as President Biden’s unconstitutional vaccination mandates were being ripped up by the courts, authoritarian politicians, public health bureaucrats, and the mainstream media, announced a new Covid variant to justify another round of lockdowns and restrictions. The things that didn’t work last time would be a good idea to do again this time, they claim.
For these authoritarians, the timing of omicron’s emergence was perfect.
The variant was first discovered in South Africa, with the US and European media running endless scare stories. Authoritarian politicians used the manufactured fear to justify another attack on liberty.
Europe shut down and became a virtual prison camp. In Austria, Germany, and elsewhere, citizens became non-persons without a vaccine passport.
South African health officials reported that the variant seemed to be more contagious but far milder than previous variants, as usually happens with such viruses. But the lockdowners would not hear of it. From Boris Johnson in the UK to DeBlasio in New York City, the variant was perfect cover for them to put their boots back on the necks of terrorized citizens.
As to be expected, Fauci reveled in the emergence of the new variant, warning of “record deaths” for the unvaccinated. Similarly, President Biden warned that this would be a “winter of death” for the unvaccinated.
But here’s something the media isn’t reporting about the omicron outbreaks: they are taking place among the fully vaccinated. Cornell University, with 97 percent of the campus fully vaccinated and a mask mandate, has announced that it would return to online only instruction after a massive Covid outbreak.
Likewise, the National Football League has postponed several games this weekend due to Covid outbreaks, even though the League is virtually 100 percent vaccinated. And the National Basketball Association, which is above 95 percent fully vaccinated, has just announced that due to a surge in Covid cases it too will postpone games.
The vaccine is not working to prevent infection or transmission of the virus: cases are raging in states with the highest vaccine levels. Yet the “experts” continue to maintain that the only thing that can stop the spread of omicron is vaccines! More people are catching on that this makes no sense. If vaccines don’t stop the spread, how can vaccines stop the spread?
Meanwhile, South Africa, with one of the lowest rates of vaccination, has just announced that they are only seeing a tiny fraction of hospitalizations with omicron compared to previous variants. South Africa’s Covid response authority has written to the health minister recommending an end to containment efforts, contact tracing, and quarantines.
Unvaccinated South Africa is ending Covid restrictions while the hyper-vaccinated North is locking down. Something doesn’t add up.
Fauci loves to say that to question him is to question science, but this has nothing to do with science. It’s about power. Fauci, the political authoritarians, and the corrupt Big Pharma billionaires are trying to make a last stand, desperate to push omicron as a justification for further tyranny and profits. But actual science is not cooperating.
Omicron is spreading and vaccines are not stopping it. Thus far nearly half of omicron infections are asymptomatic. Some experts are predicting that omicron will spell the end of Covid-19. But we know that as long as people like Fauci are around, Covid-19 will never end. Unless, of course, we repudiate the charlatans and profiteers and reclaim our liberty!
The top eight Pfizer and Moderna shareholders saw their combined wealth rise by $10 billion in a seven-day windfall after the Omicron variant was discovered, according to a report in the Daily Mail.
With the discovery of Omicron making headlines globally from November 24, the personal wealth of Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel rose by $824 million alone amid the company’s rapid share growth, with the pharma boss selling 10,000 shares of his own stock in that period for a cool $3.19 million.
Investment giant Vanguard Group Inc. saw the value of its shareholdings in Pfizer and Moderna increase by more than $2.7 billion after the Omicron news, with Blackrock Inc.’s shares rising by more than $2.4 billion and Baillie Gifford & Co’s Moderna stock valuation climbing by more than $1.5 billion.
State Street Corp.’s Pfizer shareholdings increased in value by more than $1 billion, and Capital World Investors’ shares rose by more than $900 million, followed closely by Bancel’s $824 million and Flagship Pioneering’s $652 million gain on Moderna stock.
Bancel’s share value reportedly rose by $1.7 billion at one point during the last week of November, but a lost legal dispute concerning company patents brought his stocks down to an $824 million valuation.
Neither company denied the staggering figures when contacted by the Daily Mail.
Reacting to the news, Irish senator Sharon Keogan said politicians needed to “check the stock market” and “join the dots” in assessing who benefits from the global response to COVID, and to cease making the participation of people in society “contingent upon the consumption of the product of a private company under direct or indirect threat of force.”
The Pifzer CEO’s recent prediction that people will need an annual COVID vaccination for many years to come was sardonically compared by the senator to a Coca-Cola CEO recommending a can with every meal, “because I’m sure he’s just concerned for people’s safety.”
Keogan then laid out the remarkable discovery that “in the week of Omicron it was discovered the wealth of the eight top Pfizer and Moderna shareholders rose by a combined €9 billion ($10 billion USD).”
“Governments globally have collectively made ordinary participation in society contingent upon consumption of the product of a private company under direct or indirect threat of force,” Keogan lamented in her December 9 speech.
“Over the past two years, the livelihoods of ordinary people have been steadily siphoned into the pockets of pharma and tech giants — the only hope we have is in recognizing that this is an entirely unsustainable (situation), and will end,” she predicted.
LifeSiteNews last week reported how at least 75 federal legislators in the United States held stock in Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, or Pfizer in 2020.
The three companies are responsible for producing experimental, abortion-tainted COVID-19 injections.
The paper trail shows Big Pharma corporations also shelled out millions of dollars to finance electoral campaigns and lobby the federal government.
The data raised serious ethical concerns about the objectivity of the U.S. legislature, prompting questions about how much government actors stand to profit from coercive jab mandates that have deprived Americans of their rights and handicapped a struggling economy.
LifeSiteNews’ Ashley Sadler further reported in late November how Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization, had found Pfizer attempted to “silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximize profits in the worst public health crisis in a century” through its vaccine contract negotiation strategies with various nation states.
Public Citizen’s report noted that Pfizer has negotiated contracts with nations to ensure it retains the right to actually “silence governments” while funneling disputes through private arbitrators rather than public courts.
In Brazil, for example, Pfizer demanded the country waive its “sovereign immunity waiver on public assets” and agree to a “lack of penalties for Pfizer if deliveries were late.”
After first arguing Pfizer’s terms were “unfair and abusive,” Brazil ultimately agreed to them, even consenting to “resolve disputes under a secret private arbitration under the laws of New York” and to “broadly indemnif[y] Pfizer for civil claims.”
In addition to Brazil, Pfizer also required Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Peru to waive their sovereign immunity.
Indian news channel WION also reported that Pfizer had astoundingly asked Argentina to put “its bank reserves, its military bases, and its embassy buildings at stake as collateral.”
But Pfizer’s alleged “bullying” and apparent moves to silence governments has not been limited to Latin American countries.
The report added that in the United Kingdom, “[a] secret panel of three private arbitrators — not a U.K court — is empowered under the contract to make the final decision” in the event of a contractual dispute with Pfizer, while “[b]oth parties are required to keep everything secret.”
The same is true in the United States, in which both the U.S. government and Pfizer have agreed not to discuss the “existence, subject matter or terms” of the contract “without the prior written consent of the other.”
Pfizer is not unfamiliar with being hit with massive criminal and civil liability claims, which may explain its eagerness to defend itself against future lawsuits.
In 2009, in the largest pharmaceutical settlement in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice at the time, Pfizer was forced to pay a $2.3 billion settlement “to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products.”
According to the DOJ, Pfizer misbranded an anti-inflammatory drug that had been pulled from the market, promoting its sale “for several uses and dosages that the FDA specifically declined to approve due to safety concerns.”
Pfizer’s subsidiaries pleaded guilty to a felony for misbranding the drug “with intent to defraud or mislead,” and the company was ordered to pay a criminal fine totaling $1.3 billion, “the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the United States for any matter.” Pfizer paid out another $1 billion “to resolve allegations” related to the illegal promotion of three other drugs.
The reluctance of health authorities to approve the use of ivermectin as a viable and inexpensive treatment or prophylactic for COVID-19 has come under sustained criticism from many experts, with clear evidence emerging that some academics were coerced into suppressing favorable data.
Many critics have noted that the “emergency use authorization” given to the experimental vaccines by the FDA could only have been obtained in the absence of safe and effective alternative treatments, such as ivermectin.
The European (EEA and non-EEA countries) database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, verified by European Medicines Agency (EMA), and they are now reporting 32,649 fatalities, and 3,003,296 injuries, following COVID-19 injections.
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 (EEA and non-EEA countries) reports that through December 4, 2021 there are 32,649 deaths and 3,003,296 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots:
From the total of injuries recorded, almost half of them (1,409,643) 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 December 4, 2021.
Total reactions for the mRNA vaccine Tozinameran (code BNT162b2,Comirnaty) from BioNTech/ Pfizer: 15,061 deaths and 1,399,513 injuries to 04/12/2021
38,170 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 217 deaths
43,454 Cardiac disorders incl. 2,204 deaths
404 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 38 deaths
18,886 Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 10 deaths
286,356 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 1,544 deaths
971 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 62 deaths
499 Immune system disorders incl. 30 deaths
33,416 Infections and infestations incl. 441 deaths
12,583 Injury poisoning and procedural complications incl. 180 deaths
23,958 Investigations incl. 159 deaths
12,472 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 96 deaths
161,308 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 114 deaths
650 Neoplasms benign malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 25 deaths
223,680 Nervous system disorders incl. 1,007 deaths
533 Pregnancy puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 14 deaths
191 Product issues incl. 1 death
20,150 Psychiatric disorders incl. 60 deaths
4,093 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 63 deaths
15,594 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 2 deaths
38,722 Respiratory thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 817 deaths
49,877 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 53 deaths
1,533 Social circumstances incl. 6 deaths
1,499 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 26 deaths
27,179 Vascular disorders incl. 457 deaths
Total reactions for the COVID-19 vaccine JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S) from Johnson & Johnson: 1,989 deaths and 105,819 injuries to 04/12/2021
1,029 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 41 deaths
1,952 Cardiac disorders incl. 169 deaths
36 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders
1,080 Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 2 deaths
72 Endocrine disorders incl. 1 death
1,415 Eye disorders incl. 7 deaths
8,743 Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 80 deaths
27,925 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 533 deaths
130 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 11 deaths
473 Immune system disorders incl. 9 deaths
4,676 Infections and infestations incl. 157 deaths
974 Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 20 deaths
4,927 Investigations incl. 111 deaths
664 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 50 deaths
15,331 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 45 deaths
59 Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 4 deaths
20,725 Nervous system disorders incl. 219 deaths
43 Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 1 death
32 Product issues
1,479 Psychiatric disorders incl. 17 deaths
443 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 26 deaths
2,249 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 6 deaths
3,799 Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 259 deaths
3,241 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 8 deaths
337 Social circumstances incl. 4 deaths
718 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 58 deaths
3,267 Vascular disorders incl. 151 deaths
*These totals are estimates based on reports submitted to EudraVigilance. Totals may be much higher based on percentage of adverse reactions that are reported. Some of these reports may also be reported to the individual country’s adverse reaction databases, such as the U.S. VAERS database and the UK Yellow Card system. The fatalities are grouped by symptoms, and some fatalities may have resulted from multiple symptoms.
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Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen ordered his country’s military to destroy or submit to warehouses all weapons that were produced in the US. The reason for such a harsh reaction by the Cambodian leader is because of provocative actions and further threats of sanctions from US authorities.
The White House has decided to punish Cambodia for daring to build their country’s military with Chinese support. What infuriates Washington is not so much the fact that the port of Ream in southern Cambodia is a part of the Belt and Road Initiative, but rather their belief that the Chinese are building a new naval base on a site that was recently constructed with American funding, something that Cambodian officials vehemently deny.
Despite this denial, Washington has imposed a series of sanctions against Cambodia, including an embargo on the supply of American weapons and military equipment.
Hun Sen wrote on his Facebook page: “The US embargo on the supply of weapons is a warning to the next generation of Cambodian citizens, to the leaders of the government. If you want your own independent defence bloc, don’t use American weapons.”
Cambodia’s leader, according to some sources, dreams that one day his eldest son, Lieutenant General Hun Manet, will become his successor. Manet is currently deputy commander-in-chief of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces and Hun Sen believes that he is a future prime minister. In this way, if the US continues to sanction and antagonise Cambodia, the split between the two countries could become generational.
In modern international law, only sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council are recognized. Unilateral sanctions, such as those imposed by the US against a plethora of countries, are illegal according to international law, something that countries like Russia and China repeatedly highlight. With this in mind, the sanctions the US imposed against Cambodia were unilateral, and therefore illegal.
None-the-less, like other countries, Cambodia has the opportunity to buy weapons from elsewhere, and therefore the embargo is unlikely to affect the impoverished Southeast Asian country in a major way. It is recalled that Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in the Southeast Asia region and does not procure major weapons like advanced frigates or fourth/fifth generation fighter jets. Therefore, Cambodia’s military needs are modest and can be easily supplied from other countries.
Southeast Asian countries are a favoured destination for Russian, Chinese, Israeli and French military suppliers. The US lost its monopoly on a variety of products in the region and it appears that it is difficult for the Americans to acknowledge this bitter truth.
It is recalled that in 2016, the US refused to supply weapons to the Philippines, citing human rights violations in the country. At the time, the Filipino president asked China and Russia for help and his country received new weaponry. However, it appears once again that the US, despite being under a new administration, has not learned its lesson that countries will just simply move onto another supplier if the only way they can procure new military equipment is with conditions attached that dictates their domestic and foreign policies.
Cambodia is a minnow state within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), but it took over the chairmanship of the bloc last week from Brunei. On December 6, Hun Sen stated that Myanmar should be entitled to attend the Association’s forum as a member of the ASEAN family. He also announced plans to meet with the ruler of Myanmar, General Min Aung Hlaing, saying: “If I don’t work with the leader, who can I work with?”
Although it is unlikely that there will be a substantive breakthrough in overcoming the crisis in Myanmar during Cambodia’s chairmanship of ASEAN, Phnom Penh has a greater willingness and ability than Brunei to coordinate action on Myanmar, especially as it does not place preconditions on meeting with General Hlaing like the Bruneians did.
Last week while on a trip to Malaysia, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington plans to impose further sanctions against Myanmar’s military leaders. Blinken did not rule out the possibility of assessing the actions of the Myanmar military against citizens as genocide. At the same time, Washington recently announced additional sanctions against organisations and individuals linked to Myanmar’s military.
With Cambodia holding the ASEAN chairmanship for the next mandate period and having ambitions to try and resolve the Myanmar crisis, it will surely lead to another point of tension with Washington. The US is trying to break China’s influence across Southeast Asia, and this has directly led to tensions with Cambodia, the Philippines and Myanmar.
This suggests that the problems between Washington and Phnom Penh will not subside anytime soon. Rather, off the back of US weapon embargoes and Cambodia’s intentions to reconcile Myanmar and ASEAN, relations will only continue to deteriorate, especially as Cambodia continues to unapologetically strengthen its relations with China.
La Federazione Russa ha consegnato agli Stati Uniti d’America, il 15 dicembre, il progetto di un Trattato e di un Accordo per disinnescare la crescente tensione tra le due parti. I due documenti sono stati resi pubblici, il 17 dicembre, dal Ministero degli Esteri russo. La bozza di trattato prevede, all’Art. 1, che ciascuna delle due parti «non intraprenda azioni che incidono sulla sicurezza dell’altra parte» e, all’Art.2, che «si adoperi per garantire che tutte le organizzazioni internazionali e alleanze militari a cui partecipa aderiscano ai principi della Carta delle Nazioni Unite».
All’Art. 3 le due parti si impegnano a «non utilizzare i territori di altri Stati allo scopo di preparare o effettuare un attacco armato contro l’altra parte». L’Art. 4 prevede, quindi, che «gli Stati Uniti non stabiliranno basi militari nel territorio degli Stati dell’ex Urss che non sono membri della Nato», ed «eviteranno l’adesione di Stati dell’ex Urss alla Nato, impedendo una sua ulteriore espansione ad Est». Nell’Art. 5 «le parti si astengono dal dispiegare le loro forze armate e i loro armamenti, anche nell’ambito di alleanze militari, nelle aree in cui tale dispiegamento può essere percepito dall’altra parte come una minaccia alla propria sicurezza nazionale». Quindi «si astengono dal far volare bombardieri equipaggiati con armamenti nucleari o non nucleari e dallo schierare navi da guerra nelle aree, al di fuori dello spazio aereo e delle acque territoriali nazionali, da cui possano attaccare obiettivi nel territorio dell’altra parte».
All’Art. 6 le due parti si impegnano a «non usare missili terrestri a gittata intermedia o corta al di fuori dei loro territori nazionali, nonché nelle zone dei loro territori da cui tali armi possano attaccare obiettivi sul territorio dell’altra parte». L’Art.7, infine, prevede che «le due parti si asterranno dallo schierare armi nucleari al di fuori dei loro territori nazionali e riporteranno nei loro territori le armi già schierate al di fuori» e che «non addestreranno personale militare e civile di paesi non nucleari all’uso di armi nucleari, né condurranno esercitazioni che prevedano l’uso di armi nucleari».
Il progetto di Accordo stabilisce le procedure di funzionamento del Trattato, basate sull’impegno che le due parti «risolveranno tutte le controversie nelle loro relazioni con mezzi pacifici» e «utilizzeranno i meccanismi delle consultazioni e informazioni bilaterali, comprese linee telefoniche dirette per contatti di emergenza». Il Ministero degli Esteri russo comunica che la parte statunitense ha ricevuto spiegazioni dettagliate sulla logica dell’approccio russo e di sperare quindi che, nel prossimo futuro, gli Stati uniti avviino seri colloqui con la Russia su tale questione critica.
Tace per ora la parte statunitense. Si fa sentire però la Voce dell’America, megafono multimediale di Washington che parla in oltre 40 lingue a centinata di milioni di persone in tutto il mondo: dice che «molti esperti sono preoccupati per questa mossa della Russia, che vuole sfruttare il fallimento del negoziato come pretesto per invadere l’Ucraina». Tace per ora la Nato, in attesa degli ordini da Washington. Tace l’Italia che, pur non essendo destinataria diretta della proposta russa, è parte in causa: tra le armi nucleari che gli Usa schierano al di fuori del proprio territorio vi sono le bombe B-61 installate a Ghedi e Aviano, tra poco sostituite dalle più micidiali B61-12, al cui uso viene addestrato il nostro personale militare nonostante l’Italia sia ufficialmente paese non nucleare. E gli Usa si preparano a installare in Italia anche nuovi missili nucleari a gittata intermedia.
Mentre i media calano una quasi totale cappa di silenzio sulla proposta russa, i gruppi parlamentari la ignorano come se non avesse niente a che fare con l’Italia, esposta a crescenti pericoli quale base avanzata delle forze nucleari Usa contro la Russia. Trovino almeno il tempo di leggere in pochi minuti la bozza che la Russia ha consegnato agli Usa per aprire la trattativa, e abbiano il coraggio politico di esprimere pubblicamente il loro giudizio. Se è negativo, spieghino perché è in contrasto con la nostra Costituzione e la nostra sicurezza.
On December 15, the Russian Federation delivered to the United States of America the project of a Treaty and an Agreement to defuse the growing tension between the two parties.
The two documents were made public by the Russian Foreign Ministry on December 17.
The draft treaty foresees in Art. 1, that each of the two parties “shall not undertake actions that affect the security of the other party” and,
In Art.2, that “shall seek to ensure that all international organizations and military alliances in which it is taking part adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.”.
In Art. 3 the two parties commit themselves “not to use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party“.
Art. 4 provides then, that “the United States shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former USSR that are not members of NATO”, and “shall deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former USSR to prevent further eastward expansion of NATO“.
In Art. 5 “the parties shall refrain from deploying their armed forces and armaments, including in the framework of military alliances, in the areas where such deployment could be perceived by the other party as a threat to its national security.”
Thus “they shall refrain from flying heavy bombers equipped for nuclear or non-nuclear armaments and from deploying warships in areas, outside national airspace and territorial waters, from where they can attack targets in the territory of the other party.”
In Art. 6 “the parties shall undertake not to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party” and that “shall not train military and civilian personnel from non-nuclear countries to use nuclear weapons, nor conduct exercises involving the use of nuclear weapons.”
InArt.7 “the parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and return such weapons to their national territories”, and “shall not train military and civilian personnel from non-nuclear countries to use nuclear weapons” nor “conduct exercises involving the use of nuclear weapons.”
The draft Agreement established procedures for the Treaty operation, based on the commitment that the two parties “will resolve all disputes in their relations by peaceful means“, and “will use the mechanisms of bilateral consultations and information, including hotlines for emergency contacts.” The US party was given detailed explanations regarding the logic of the Russian approach, and the Russian Foreign Ministry hoped that in the near future the United States will enter into serious talks with Russia on this critical issue.
The U.S. party is silent for now. However, the Voice of America, Washington’s multimedia megaphone that speaks to hundreds of millions of people around the world in more than 40 languages, is making its voice heard: it said that “many experts are concerned about the Russia’s gambit, which wants to use the failure of the negotiations as a pretext to invade Ukraine”.
NATO is silent for now, waiting for orders from Washington. Italy is silent, even though it is not the direct recipient of the Russian proposal but it is part of the cause: among the nuclear weapons that the US deployed outside its territory there are the B61 bombs [tactical nuclear weapons] installed in Ghedi and Aviano bases, soon to be replaced by the more deadly B61-12, and our military personnel is trained for their use despite Italy being officially a non-nuclear country. And the U.S. is preparing to install in Italy also new nuclear missiles with intermediate range.
While the media is maintaining an almost total silence on the Russian proposal, the Parliamentary groups are ignoring it as if it had nothing to do with Italy, the country is exposed to growing dangers as an advanced base for US nuclear forces against Russia. Make them at least find the time to read in a few minutes the draft that Russia handed over to the USA to open the negotiations, and have the political courage to publicly express their opinion. If it is negative, let them explain why it is contrary to our Constitution and our security.
First published by il manifesto, December 21, 2021. Translated from Italian by the author.
Manlio Dinucci is an award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
The CIA and British intelligence are feeding the public through their media assets the story that Russia’s security concern is really a cloak behind which hides Moscow’s plan to create a new Russian sphere of influence over eastern Europe.
Of course, Washington has a sphere of influence over eastern Europe called NATO, but it would be the end of the world for Russia to have any influence with countries that border it.
Another part of the CIA disinformation is that the White House is willing to discuss part of the Russian security demand but not the parts the White House disagrees with. This, of course, is nonsensical as the Kremlin made it clear that its demand for a halt to NATO expansion is not divisible. Expansion stops. Period. Or there will be “dire consequences.”
Western orientated Russian intellectuals at the Russian International Affairs Council are already at work undermining the Kremlin’s position on the non-expansion of NATO. The mission of the Council is to facilitate Russia’s peaceful integration into the global community, something that can only happen on Washington’s terms.
The Council’s director, Andrei Kortunov, quickly undermined the Kremlin’s position by describing the Kremlin’s ultimatum as “a bargaining position.” Washington already doesn’t take the Kremlin seriously, and Kortunov’s idiotic statement makes it certain Washington will dismiss the ultimatum as well. Indeed, as I reported, NATO’s Stoltenberg, the White House press spokesperson, and Biden’s national security adviser have already dismissed the Kremlin’s demand.
To make certain that the Kremlin understands that its demand is rejected, General Tod Wolters wants an even more aggressive response to the Kremlin. He is calling for NATO/US troops to be deployed in Romania and Bulgaria. Called Enhanced Forward Presenceit amounts to the US military occupation of Eastern Europe–the exact opposite of the response demanded by Russia.
Perhaps the Kremlin is learning, belatedly, that years of sweet-talking the West created the expectation that Russian complaints never have to be taken seriously. As I warned, the Kremlin’s behavior encouraged more provocations, which eventually would go too far and force the Kremlin to put a foot down.
With the CIA misrepresenting the Kremlin’s expression of a non-negotiable security concern as a plot to rebuild the Soviet Empire and the Russian International Affairs Council describing the Kremlin’s red line as just a bargaining position, we will see if the foot stays down or whether the Kremlin blows forever its credibility.
In the UK, after Government manipulation of hospitalisations and deaths to exclude more recent data, the truth is now emerging. In Scotland for August to November 2021 over 85% of deaths were in the vaccinated. Boosters are merely boosting COVID infections. Some 40,000 deaths have occurred in the USA, UK and EU following vaccination but Omicron is mild. The UK Government has manipulated the data to blame the unvaccinated but the vaccinated are at greatest risk.
It was clear from the first cases in South Africa and now in the UK and EU that the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus results in mild disease and very few deaths even “with COVID”. Indeed South African experts have advised stopping stop and trace and quarantining because most of the infected have no symptoms.
Considering the thousands of deaths and millions of injuries worldwide caused by the COVID vaccines there is very little difference between the decline in deaths between the least and most vaccinated countries.
LEAST VACCINATED COUNTRIES:
(Average vaccination rate 21%)
Decline of deaths from most recent peak:
Tanzania 100%
Nigeria 98%
Ethiopia 89%
Kenya 91%
Egypt 36%
S. Africa 92%
Pakistan 95%
Russia 18%
Average decline in deaths for 8 least vaccinated countries: 77%
MOST VACCINATED COUNTRIES
(Average vaccination rate 88%)
Decline of deaths from most recent peak:
UAE 90%
Cuba 98%
Chile 89%
Portugal 91%
Singapore 83%
Cambodia 94%
S. Korea 17%
Canada 98%
Average decline in deaths for 8 most vaccinated countries: 82%
If we take the 3 least vaccinated countries their decline in deaths from the recent peak averaged 95% whereas the three most vaccinated achieved 92%
With a vaccination rate 4 times the least vaccinated countries the 8 most vaccinated countries produce a mere 5% better decline in deaths from their recent peaks. A paltry return for vaccines which have caused nearly 2,000 deaths in the UK, 9,000 in the USA and 31,000 in the EU.
Even the Lancet has shown the vaccines do not work – as the third jab and talk of a fourth testify. To quote from the Lancet study:
“In the UK it was found that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated and 23% for unvaccinated)”
VACCINATED AT GREATEST RISK OF DEATH
In the UK, after Government manipulation of hospitalisations and deaths to exclude more recent data, the truth is now emerging. In this graph from Scotland for August to November 2021 over 85% of deaths are in the vaccinated.
An exposure of how the Government has manipulated the data to blame the unvaccinated appears here: It turns out that the source of the statement “Of the Covid patients treated in intensive care in recent months, the majority – nearly 75 per cent according to the latest data – have chosen not to be vaccinated.” was data from May to July. The data above (from Scotland from August to November) suggests the exact opposite.
More evidence of the failure of vaccines in the face of new infections comes from the USA where one of the largest US outbreaks of the new Omicron variant to date is believed to have occurred at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where almost all 930 cases over the past week are believed to be of the variant.
All of the confirmed Omicron cases in the Cornell University case are among people who are fully vaccinated, and some of them are in people who’ve also had the booster.
The booster is of course more of the same in the hope that the third dose will do what the first two doses were supposed to do! And the new variant, “omicron”?
Most of the Omicron cases in the United States have been among the vaccinated, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an update on Friday 10/12/21. Most patients have experienced mild symptoms.
OMICRON IS WEAK
Indeed it was clear from the first cases in South Africa that the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus results in mild disease, without prominent symptoms and it:
“presents mild disease with symptoms being sore muscles and tiredness for a day or two not feeling well. So far, we have detected that those infected do not suffer loss of taste or smell. They might have a slight cough. There are no prominent symptoms. Of those infected some are currently being treated at home”
– as Angelique Coetzee, the chairwoman of the South African Medical Association described it. Indeed the case fatality rate in S Africa – deaths as a proportion of cases 10 days earlier – was at the lowest level since covid started.
In the UK a mere 12 deaths have been “with” Omicron – in other words not death “from” Omicron!
The World Health Organization’s weekly epidemiological update for Dec. 7 showed that all 212 Omicron cases documented across eighteen European Union (EU) countries were either mild or asymptomatic.
Everywhere the Omicron variant seems to be supplanting the Delta variant but with much milder symptoms so that as the South African doctor Omar Hamada said the Omicron variant of COVID-19 may provide natural immunity without inducing severe illness, as the symptoms so far resemble more of a “mild, common cold” in South Africa.
“If the infectivity is greater, but the virulence or severity is less, this may be actually something good in terms of getting people immune to it without necessarily having to depend on a vaccine that’s not incredibly effective,” said Hamada.
BOOSTERS
The boosters being touted by Governments are controversial among experts. “The boosters are a perfect way to bias our immune system so we’re LESS able to respond to this new variant,” said Dr Robert Malone the inventor of the mRNA vaccine.
“This is [like] jabbing everybody with a flu vaccine from three seasons ago and expecting it to have effects against the current [flu strains].”
A top World Health Organization (WHO) official said there was “no evidence” to suggest that the vaccine booster doses would offer “greater protection” to healthy people. Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO’s emergency director, questioned the logic of some countries trying to produce more booster doses to vaccinate anyone aged 18 and older.
“Right now, there is no evidence that I’m aware of that would suggest that boosting the entire population is going to necessarily provide any greater protection for otherwise healthy individuals against hospitalisation and death,” Ryan said.
France has even banned the Moderna booster.
UK BOOSTERS BOOST INFECTIONS
On 1st October when the Boosters started in the UK 153,912 were vaccinated. On 18th December there were 904,598 vaccinated an increase of 487%
New Infections on 1st October were 34,752 while on 18th December there were 90,109 new infections – an increase of 159%.Since there is a delay between vaccination and infection it is probable that that percentage increase in infections will catch up with the prior increase in vaccinations. And that further increase will lead the politician to call for more vaccinations and ruinous lockdowns!! which will in turn lead to more infections and so on ad absurdum and ad infinitum.
worldindata.org compared the European countries which had given boosters with those countries that had not and found that the infections gap between them was growing – from 19% more infections for the Booster countries to 21%.
It is quite clear that (as in previous periods of vaccine increases) there has been a consequent increase in COVID infections. This is a world wide pattern since vaccination programmes started. The excuse (if there is one at all given the horrendous numbers of deaths) was that those who fell ill were not so seriously ill as those who were unvaccinated. But that too we now know (see above) is rubbish.
The terrible toll of deaths and serious injuries among nurses, doctors, airline pilots and sportsmen around the world is unprecedented for any vaccine, never mind one which has proved so useless in preventing infections, infectiousness and deaths. The next Freenations post will deal with those deadly consequences.
The Democrats have held the presidency and a majority of both houses of Congress for only eleven months, but they have already put their stamp on the transformation of the United States from top to bottom. In reaction to those cascading accusations of “domestic terrorism,” many Americans are beginning to believe that the country is literally coming apart, with little in the way of a binding national spirit or sense of purpose. And the heavy hand that is being wielded to impose a revolution in areas like education and health mandates raises concerns that much worse is to come over the next three years.
That the country is in deep trouble is a view that I have come to share and each morning has become a chore to get up out of bed and scan through the news service headlines that had accumulated since the night before. I sometimes notice that there is more space given to reviews of television shows, the doings of “celebrities,” and sporting events than to the more serious issues that confront the American people. One might suspect that most readers don’t really care about the state of the nation, but I rather think that what we are seeing is a deliberate and all-encompassing media driven propaganda campaign designed to deliver bread and circuses while also reducing the choices that people are able to make in many of the aspects of their daily lives.
Three weeks ago there was an article featured in The New York Times, which is, of course, one of the worst and most persistent of the national libtard media, which headlined “A Pollster’s Warning to Democrats: ‘We Have a Problem’: Focus groups with Virginia voters led to a bluntly worded memo on what Democrats need to do going into the midterms.” The article begins with “Brian Stryker, a Democratic pollster, didn’t work for Terry McAuliffe’s campaign in the Virginia governor’s race. But Mr. McAuliffe’s narrow defeat in a liberal-leaning state alarmed him and most every Democratic political professional.”
Stryker was subsequently commissioned to do polling and prepare a no-holds-barred memo on what went wrong. “The [poll’s] participants hailed from the suburbs of Washington and Richmond and had the same political profile: Each supported Mr. Biden in 2020, and either voted for Mr. Youngkin in November or strongly considered supporting him.” The Times article consists mostly of an interview by the newspaper on the points made in the memo.
I confess that I read the entire article, a rare achievement with the NYT, and then sat back to have a good laugh. I was, after all, an actual Virginia voter involved in the campaign to defeat McAuliffe due largely to his “anti-parent involvement in education” beliefs as well as his close ties to the Clintons. I noted immediately that the polls undertaken by Stryker were focused on the limousine liberal voters in northern Virginia and around the capital Richmond. Those are not necessarily the voters who turned Virginia blue and their ability to send their children to private schools made education less of an issue than it was for ordinary working people who had to rely on the public system. So the responses were, one might suggest, skewed.
Most Virginians I know who voted against McAuliffe did so for a whole basket of issues relating to the Democrats punishing the white working and middle classes and disadvantaging their children because of their skin color. They were also responding to surging homicides and unpunished looting, arson and rioting nationally, which has been linked to the Democrats opportunistic support of the BLM phenomenon generated behavior. People in Virginia in general no longer feel safe on the streets of their towns and even in the schools because of the Democratic Party tendency to pander to the various constituencies harboring grievances that it has embraced. Note particularly one question from the NYT journalist to Stryker and the response:
“Q: What drives this perception that Democrats are fixated on cultural issues?
A: We probably haven’t been as focused on the economy as we should be. I think some of that is voters reading us talking about things that aren’t economic issues. Part of it is just a natural reaction, too: We’re in an economy they feel is tough. It’s hard for them to think we’ve solved problems when they see so many.”
Stryker not so skillfully dodges the question because the problem is that the Democratic Party is indeed “fixated on cultural issues,” which is why they are willing to turn public education into a “feel good waste of time” that many parents loathe and the taxpayer/homeowner is required to fund. McAuliffe lost the election when he declared that parents should not interfere in the education of their children and that there are too many school teachers who are white. Nevertheless, it is odd that Stryker was seemingly unable to figure out that it was not the economy that drove voters to reject McAuliffe, that citing the economy is the equivalent of no answer at all. Just maybe he was talking to the wrong people.
One can only hope that the Democrats are heading for a fall in 2022, but the punditry that makes its living off of the mainstream media is persisting in its attacks. Another recent article is by Max Boot, a ramshackle neocon of no particular distinction who wears a funny hat to distinguish himself from the other odd-looking neocons. Characteristically Jewish and born in Russia, he has inevitably exploited the usual networking to find a home as an opinion contributor at the extreme liberal Washington Post though he sometimes pretends to be a conservative. His article is entitled “Democrats are on course to lose in 2022 and 2024. If they do, we may lose our democracy.”
Boot is concerned because opinion polls show that Joe Biden and his party are seen increasingly unfavorably while the Republicans are gaining support. He describes the GOP as “extremist and authoritarian” but to give him some credit for being more alert to real issues than Stryker he observes that the Democrats are suffering from “progressive overreach” recounting how “[He] recently visited [his] alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, and got an earful from friends about the excesses of ‘cancel culture,’ the unwillingness of many progressives to confront crime and homelessness, and, above all, all the damage done by Zoom classes and mask requirements for young children. These are complaints from liberals in one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Democrats are living in a dreamland if they continue to dismiss such worries as phony Republican attacks. Similar concerns cost Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia — and could haunt them again next year… [Biden]needs to attack the far-left activists who want to defund the police, boycott Israel and divide Americans by race.”
But Boot still is blind to what is happening to America fueled by the party that he clearly prefers. It is the Democrats who have introduced the COVID vax mandate; who opened up the southern border to unlimited illegal immigration; who promote racial and ethnic preferences; who continue to saber rattle against Iran, Russia and China; who refuse to arrest and try the rioters, looters and arsonists in America’s cities; who seek to restrict free speech and freedom of association; who continue the persecution of journalist Julian Assange; and who are going after ordinary Americans who protest against the destruction of the schools as “domestic terrorists.” If Max Boot really wants to know who has totalitarian tendencies and is threatening democracy in the United States all he has to do is turn around and look at his Democratic Party friends. And when he figures it out, he can explain it all to Brian Stryker.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
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Recent research from Israel gives some impressive data. For simplicity and a fair comparison, we look at data for 6 to 8 months after the event; in other words, the event being getting COVID infection and natural immunity or getting vaccination.
Here are the numbers in terms of confirmed infection rate per 100,000 risk days. The reason the researchers used ‘risk days’, rather than just ‘people’, is that the composition of each group changed over time. For example, some previously infected people chose to get vaccinated.
Here are the key data:
1. recovered from infection: 14
2. vaccinated and booster: 89
3. hybrid (natural immunity plus vaccination): 17
The point here is that the infections rate is much higher for vaccination and booster versus natural immunity from prior infection; in fact, it is more than six times greater. And even getting vaccination when having natural immunity adds a little higher infection rate.
Only one big scientific conclusion: Vaccination increases COVID infection and natural immunity is far more protective. You lose a little protection when you get vaccinated on top of having natural immunity, and that is not counting the many possible harmful health impacts of vaccines that can occur soon or much later than when you get the shots.
Every day all I hear about are all kinds of people, including many high level politicians like governors and senators getting COVID despite being vaccinated and also having received booster shots. Don’t reasonable, intelligent people say to themselves “than why in the hell is the government still pushing vaccines?” Now we also are hearing that omicron variant is becoming dominant. But the vaccines were not working when delta was the dominant variant. I guess the vaccines may be even more ineffective for the highly mutated omicron. Yet we still cannot get the government to sanction use of ivermectin and other treatments that a relatively few doctors are using with great success.
The real science data shows vaccines do not work and for many people they produce all kinds of bad health impacts. Who do you want to trust?
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Just like when U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s American Government, during the 1962 Cuban Crisis, warned that Soviet missiles in Cuba would mean World War 3, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s Russian Government warned, on 20 December 2021, that if its adjoining nation of Ukraine becomes a NATO member (which would present the danger of U.S. missiles only a 7-minute flight-time away from Moscow), it would mean WW3.
Soviet communism is gone, the Soviet dictatorship is gone, the Soviet response to NATO, the Warsaw Pact, is gone; but America and its allies have continued the Cold War against Russia; and, now, finally (after decades of NATO expansion right up to Russia’s borders), Russia has laid down the gauntlet to them, just as America had laid down the gauntlet to the Soviet Union and its allies, in 1962, regarding Cuba.
Russia’s RT News bannered on December 20th, “Russia promises ‘military response’ to any further NATO expansion”. Of course, any “military response” would be against NATO — all of it — and probably within less than an hour, most people on both sides of that nuclear war would be either dead or doomed soon to die — and even throughout the world there would be billions of deaths.
No military conflict between Russia and America (and its ‘allies’ or vassal-nations) would be able to remain non-nuclear, because whichever side would be losing any non-nuclear war would promptly release all of its nuclear stockpile against the other, and so the nuclear exchanges would become a part of any U.S.-v.-Russia war.
The reader-comments at that news-report were informative, especially if a reader there clicks onto “Best” so as to be reading first the most “like”ed of the reader-comments (and this means that the most representative of all of the comments are being posted at the top). Here they are:
COMMENTS — “BEST” (the top-listed ones)
TheFishhv2
About time. NATO expansion must stop, because NATO’s intentions are not good. This organization has done a lot of damage in the last 25 years, and it must be reigned in.
Sun Tzu TheFishhv2
NATO is a defense organization pal, they never attacked anyone!
1Beak1 Sun Tzu
How true as they were in Libya, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia – What a wretched Liar.
LaCarreta Sun Tzu
NATO in its 72 years of existence never defended a single member state only attacked, bombed, invaded a number of foreign nations.
On May 7, 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (Operation Allied Force), five U.S. Joint Direct Attack Munition guided bombs hit the People’s Republic of China embassy in the Belgrade district of New Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists and outraging the Chinese public.
NWOD Sun Tzu
LOL, NATO is an aggressive imperialist enterprise. It has NEVER acted defensively – name a time it has – and every single war, battle, sabotage, and threat it has engaged in has been aggressive, unlawful and evil.
TheCruXx Sun Tzu
And how can you explain it to the world, that NATO was in several wars, when NO ONE ATTACKED THEM, OR ANYONE OF THEM. Kinda odd for a defense club…
LeftForward Sun Tzu
The best defense?
Libertarian4Eva TheFishhv2
When Russia is done with eastern Europe, think they’d mind coming to our US southern border? It’s not like it is defended at all, anyone can get through, and frankly the Russian troops would be good business for Texas. Considering our true enemy is in Washington DC, I think it would be a good breath of fresh air to have the visitors.
ELPuerco
One should keep in mind that during the 1990 negotiations between the Soviet Union and the US-led Western “bloc” over the issue of German reunification (the so-called fall of the German wall), the Western side promised that NATO would not expand itself into Eastern Europe. And yet, expand it did – and it has been expanding, and getting very close to Russia. To this day, Washington maintains a policy of “encircling” and “containing” Moscow. In fact, declassified documents that became public in 2017 show us that between 1990 and 1991, security assurances against any such NATO enlargement were given to Soviet authorities by western leaders of the highest level. This 1990 promise was broken, which makes Russia the aggrieved party – and not the other way around, as US narratives would have it. Basically, the so-called Iron Curtain fell, while its western counterpart (NATO) has grown larger and stronger – even though the Cold War supposedly ended. And that brings us to the current crisis.
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Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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Fool me once, shame on the trickster for resorting to trickery. Fool me twice, shame on me. When someone has earned the reputation of a trickster, one ought to be very skeptical of that trickster. Thus, to be fooled twice by the same trickster brings shame on the gullible person.
The United States has been duping the gullible among its citizenry and also gullible people in the world for quite a while. Near the end of WWII, there was the lie that the US had to drop nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to get Japan to surrender. There was the American deception surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident that served as a pretext to deepen American militarism in Viet Nam. There was the twisting of facts about Iraq’s possessing weapons of mass destruction that resulted in over a million Iraqis being killed, the country’s infrastructure being destroyed, and Iraq being occupied by US military to this day. The US lied to USSR/Russia about no eastward NATO expansion; the US lied about Syria using chemical weapons. Why would anyone continue to believe the word of a serial, unrepentant liar?
Nowadays, the US barks that Russia is about to invade Ukraine. Then there is the allegation that China is committing genocide against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Considering the US involvement in the oppression and killing of Palestinians, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, and Iranians — the notion that the US would shed a tear for Muslims is sadly risible.
Scads of disinformation have been revealed about a purported genocide of Uyghurs.
With the outrageous claims against China dismissed as flimsy artifices, the US seized upon an interpersonal altercation: an alleged sexual assault of a Chinese female tennis player by a retired former high-ranking Communist Party official.
There was a deleted post on Weibo, a Chinese social media site, by the player, Peng Shuai. The post purportedly contained the allegation of sexual assault. Then she became a meme: #Where is Peng Shuai. Western media implied the Chinese state had deleted the post, scrubbed the net of references, and disappeared Peng.
I wrote an article with the commonsense title “Jumping to China-bashing Conclusions: Due process calls demands waiting for the facts.” In any justice-based system, people must not be tried in media; they must be tried in a functioning court of law by a preponderance of the evidence. That is why one must scrutinize the information and evidence before jumping to conclusions.
Yet, the WTA, a professional body overseeing professional women’s tennis, had already deemed China to be guilty by suspending its tournaments in that country.
Recently, on 19 December, Peng was approached by a reporter from the Singaporean Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao. Peng looks genuinely surprised by the encounter, like a deer in the headlights, but knowing that she has to get this over with. (See the interview here.)
Peng emphatically states, “First, I would like to emphasize a very important point: I have never said nor written about anyone sexually assaulting me. This point must be very clearly emphasized.”
Whether a post on social media is a personal matter or not, people can debate, but Peng maintains it is. Peng also affirmed that an earlier email to the WTA denying a sexual assault was hers.
Unanswered in the interview was why the wording in the Weibo post seems to allege a sexual assault.
The WTA remains unsatisfied. It issued a statement: “We remain steadfast in our call for a full, fair and transparent investigation, without censorship, into her allegation of sexual assault, which is the issue that gave rise to our initial concern.” The tennis body headquartered in the US is, in effect, demanding that a powerful country of 1.4 billion people with a 5000-year history should submit a domestic crime allegation to its dictate. This demand presented to a country that rues its century of humiliation by outside powers will curry as much influence as an ant to a hungry aardvark.
Peng said she has no travel plans now. It seems the WTA ought to do its due diligence and visit Peng in China.
Not too quickly though, as Sinophobes in the West see a need to keep the heat turned up to try and spoil the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Talk about being a bad sport.
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Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp@gmail. Twitter: @kimpetersen. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
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).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
In mainstream culture, social and political violence by the poor depicted in cinema is generally situated in narratives that try to maintain the legitimacy of the state. Consequently it also tries to delegitimize violence that may threaten the state. For example, the recent Mexican-French film New Order (2020) depicts the street violence and demonstrations of the poor as mindless violence, murder, and robbery, rather than as an inevitable reaction to decades of extreme poverty and oppression.
In these scenarios, the indigent, the poor, the working class, have no rational program, no ideological agenda, and no democratic future where they could be in the driving seat of economic and cultural progress. They are forever condemned to explosive, cathartic and senseless cyclical violence that is then simply stage-managed by the state through its courts, police, army and prisons. It could be argued that the main reason for these depictions of the poor is that mainstream culture is itself one of the tools used in the maintenance of that status quo.
Two recent Irish films, Arracht (‘Monster’) (2019) and Herself (2020), depict violence in very different eras. Arracht is based in Connemara in the middle of the nineteenth century, while Herself is set in a modern urban setting in Dublin. On another level, both films show how violence is allowed to be depicted in mainstream cinema.
Arracht, for example, is a well made film with much work gone into the authenticity of the depiction of the potato blight and the subsequent desperation of the local inhabitants. The narrative centres on Colmán Sharkey who lives on the Atlantic coast with his wife and young son. Colmán has taken on Patsy Kelly as a farmhand and fisherman, a dodgy character who was in the Royal Navy. The landlord has raised the rents and Colmán decides to talk to him personally, bringing Patsy with him. However,
“At the landlord’s estate, Colmán unsuccessfully tries to persuade him not to raise rents due to the famine devastating the country. Patsy wanders off where he encounters the two collection agents and the landlord’s daughter. He murders all three before being discovered by Colmán, who is shocked by what he finds and notices a frightened young girl has witnessed the scene. Patsy kills the landlord, leading to a confrontation with the Sharkey brothers in which Sean [Colmán’s brother] is fatally stabbed. Enraged, Colmán brutally beats Patsy and leaves him for dead.”
Soon these murders enter local nationalist folk culture in the form of a ballad sung by local fishermen. It is assumed that Colmán killed the landlord and he is seen as an heroic resistance fighter. However, it was shown that Colmán is not a violent person from an earlier scene when Patsy disarms an armed man sent to collect the rents, and Colmán orders Patsy to return the gun.
We know that the violence in the landlord’s house was committed by Patsy and not Colmán. In this case it is the actions of a sociopath (Patsy) which are immortalized in culture despite Colmán’s non-violent approach to resistance. There is a sleight of hand here that shows radical nationalist culture as illegitimate violence carried out by sociopaths and furthermore depicts the singers of the ballad as being ignorant of the facts of the situation, and that they are glorifying deeds that are basically portrayed as terrorism.
Given the severity of colonial oppression in Ireland in the nineteenth century, violence against the landlords or representatives of the state is unsurprising. Resistance by the peasants is delegitimized and limited to the legal and courts system, which is upholding the landlord rent increases and evictions that are exacerbating the conflict in the first place.
A similar cinematic sticking point over legitimate and illegitimate violence occurs in Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins set during the Irish War of Independence. Jordan has the IRA explode a car bomb even though car bombs were not used until much later during the Troubles. Some critics focused in on this event as legitimating the later IRA campaign which they saw simply as modern terrorism unlike the earlier struggle for independence.
In Herself, the contemporary story of a woman (Sandra) fighting back against her violent ex-husband in the courts system, is a more positive narrative in that it shows her struggle against the structural violence of state bureaucracy. Furthermore, her tenacity in also resisting criminal violence by her ex-husband works well on both literal and symbolic levels.
While her battle against domestic violence is an uphill struggle against the prejudices of the state court system she eventually wins custody of her children. Her decision to build her own house in the back garden of the wealthy doctor she works for is an interesting twist in that her desire to be free and independent is determined by middle class power and control. However, her determination to create something for herself is significant as the learning processes involved in building a house counters modern consumerist ideology with the practical knowledge of production.
Furthermore, Sandra organizes a team to help her build the house, working for free, which harks back to an old Irish social tradition of a meitheal (where neighbours would come together to assist in the saving of crops or other tasks).
Unfortunately, the finished house is then burned down by her ex-husband in a criminal act of revenge. Yet this does not deter her (or her friends) from starting afresh. Thus the film carries a positive message that one can win out through struggle within the system, but also symbolically without the system, with the collective help of others despite enormous setbacks and challenges.
Despite the fact that the legitimacy of the state is maintained in Herself (winning custody of her children through the courts, her husband being caught and put away for years), the message of struggle, learning, and co-operation towards a common goal is quite subversive. She learns not only how to fight the system but also how to construct a new way of being within the system which has profound possibilities for the future (learning new skills, working collectively, solidarity, etc.).
A similar situation can be seen in The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006), a film by Ken Loach set during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) and the Irish Civil War (1922–1923), wherein the First Dáil sets up a parallel court system to the colonial institutions, which not only became accepted and recognized by the local people (de facto) but were eventually to become de jure with the setting up of the new Irish state.
However, whether the message is conservative (Arracht) or progressive (Herself), it is usually oblique, as overtly radical content rarely gets screened. Cinema is an extremely costly business, and screenplay and finished film decisions are made by wealthy and conservative producers. Yet, every now and then films depicting working class life and struggles are produced which are significant, for example, Salt of the Earth (1954), The Organizer (1963) (Italian), The Battle of Algiers (1966)(Italian-Algerian), Blue Collar (1978) (USA), Norma Rae (1979) (USA), Vera Drake (2004) (UK), I, Daniel Blake (2016) (UK).
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Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Europe is on a precipice. It has marched, blindly, towards something very much resembling tyranny. Austria will shortly criminalize those who refuse the Covid vaccine. Germany looks set to follow.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, is wondering out loud if every member state should do likewise and make offenders of those who reject this form of medication.
In Italy you are deprived of your livelihood rather than your liberty if you say no to vaccination: the unvaxxed are not permitted to work. Anywhere. In Greece, everyone over the age of 60 must pay the government 100 euros for every month they remain unvaxxed. As if the Greek government, in cahoots with its masters in Brussels, had not immiserated Greek pensioners enough already.
Police in Rotterdam opened fire on people protesting against Covid restrictions. Three were seriously injured. Austrian cops have wielded batons and shields against the thousands who took to the streets of Vienna to say no to mandatory vaxxing. In Brussels, the black, bureaucratic heart of the EU project, water cannons and tear gas were unleashed upon citizens agitating against vaccine passes. The irony is almost too much: in the European quarter of Brussels, the very part of Europe in which the modern European sensibility was forged by politicians, experts and technocrats, ordinary people make a blow for freedom and the forces of this supposedly liberal new continent beat them down. Rarely has modern Europe’s bluster about ‘human rights’ and ‘respect’ been so savagely exposed.
What is happening in Europe right now is nothing short of terrifying. We are not merely witnessing another round of Covid restrictions. This isn’t just the introduction of another set of emergency measures that some people believe are necessary to stave off the latest Covid wave and the Omicron threat lurking on the horizon. No, we are living through a chilling overhaul of the entire relationship between the state and the individual, with the state empowered to such an extraordinary degree that it can now instruct its citizens on what to inject into their bodies, and the individual so politically emaciated, so denuded of rights, that he no longer even enjoys sovereignty over himself, over that tiny part of the world that is his own body and mind. We are witnessing the violent death of European liberalism and the birth pangs of a new and deeply authoritarian era.
Many seem not to recognise how serious a development mandatory vaccination is. Even those of us who are pro-vaccination, who have been happily vaxxed against Covid-19, should look with nothing less than horror upon the proposal that it should be an offence not to be vaccinated; that a citizen should be fined thousands upon thousands of euros if he refuses this treatment. One of the ideas being discussed in Austria ahead of its mandatory vax law that will be introduced in February is that citizens who refuse vaccination will be summoned to a local court. If they ignore the summons twice they will face a fine of 3,600 euros. If they continue ignoring the state’s demand that they receive medical treatment that they do not want, they’ll be fined 7,200 euros. These are life-ruining fines. There is no talk – yet – of imprisoning people who reject the vaccine, but the Austrian state is making it crystal clear that it will happily wield its power to propel the unvaxxed into destitution.
Germany has already enforced a lockdown of the unvaccinated – that is, it has used the full force of the law to divide the populace between those who have made the ‘right’ (italics added) medical decision, and thus may enjoy some crumbs of liberty, and those who have not, and thus deserve nothing less than house arrest.
Now, outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel says mandatory vaxxing is likely to be introduced early next year. Ursula von der Leyen seems to think that every EU member state should force vaccination upon its citizens. How to ensure that everyone gets vaxxed ‘needs discussion’, she said recently. We must ‘potentially think about mandatory vaccination’, she continued. The 500million inhabitants of the European Union, of this supposed bastion of human rights, this political union we were told was necessary to preserve the dignity and freedom of modern Europeans, face the prospect of a neo-imperial diktat instructing them to receive medical treatment or else face severe consequences.
We underestimate at our peril just how grave an assault on personhood mandatory vaccination represents. To my mind, forced vaccination is such an obscenity that even justice secretary Dominic Raab’s assurance that it won’t happen in the UK was far too soft for my liking. ‘I don’t think’ it will happen here, he said. Don’t think? He should have said it will never happen here, over my dead body, because it would represent such an intolerable assault on the Enlightenment-derived liberties upon which our nation is built.
Everyone is saying mandatory vaccination goes against the Nuremberg Code, which insists voluntary consent must be given for medical intervention. But the ideal of individual sovereignty goes back much further than that. In his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), the great Enlightenment philosopher John Locke sought to ‘settle the bounds’ between the individual and officialdom…
To Locke, as to other great European thinkers whose ideas gave rise to our Enlightened continent, the desire to ‘save’ an individual is not a good enough reason to meddle with his soul or his body. ‘God Himself will not save men against their wills’, he wrote. Yet where God once failed, the EU hopes to succeed. Where even the Almighty once feared to tread, held back by the small matter of man’s will, of man’s right to govern his own soul and body, the bureaucracies of 21st-century Europe will now rush in. They will brush aside the apparently trifling matter of bodily autonomy, they will discard the rights of self-government hard fought for over generations, and cajole people by brute law to submit themselves to medical intervention.
This spells the end of freedom as we know it.
Bodily autonomy is the foundation stone of self-government, and self-government is the thing that gives freedom meaning. If we do not enjoy sovereignty over our minds and our flesh, then we are not free in any meaningful way. And it won’t just be the minority of people who feel forced to receive the vaccine whose freedom will suffer under this new regime of state power over people’s bloodstreams and muscles and flesh – everyone’s freedom will. The state diktat determining that only those who receive a certain form of medical treatment will get to enjoy freedom will make freedom itself contingent upon doing what the state wants you to.
Even the vaxxed will not be truly free people in this world. Rather, we will be the beneficiaries of state favour, the enjoyers of small privileges, in return for our agreeing to receive an injection. We will have a license from on high to go about our daily lives. And we will know that that license could swiftly be revoked if we refuse medical treatment in the future. The redefinition of ‘freedom’, the making of liberty contingent upon submission to medicine, will throttle the rights of all of us – vaxxed and unvaxxed alike.
Strikingly, there is very little pushback from the so-called human-rights lobby against the proposed new regime of forced medication. Europhiles in the UK and elsewhere – the kind of people who assured us the EU was the great modern defender of the dignity of the individual – are meek as mice in the face of these state threats to strongarm citizens into medical compliance.
It wasn’t meant to be like this, you see. It was Brexit Britain, they said, that would become a hotbed of deranged authoritarianism, while the EU would hold a candle for the modern principles of rights and respect. And now that the opposite has proven to be the case, they look the other way, or they subtly give their nod to what amounts to a tyranny of the state over the souls and flesh of individual human beings. European liberalism is dying, the European Union stands exposed as a seat of extreme authoritarianism, and the future of this continent looks very uncertain indeed. Covid will look like a blip in the affairs of man in comparison with the fallout from this political and moral crisis of the European continent.”
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Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer.
Featured image: In Upper Austria nurses and doctors campaign against forced jabs. Their “experiences do not correspond to the image in the mainstream media”. Facebook/Free west Media
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“Worse Than the Disease: Reviewing Some Possible Unintended Consequences of mRNA Vaccines Against COVID-19,” by Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., and Dr. Greg Nigh, is one of the most comprehensive descriptions of the many possible unintended consequences of the mRNA gene transfer technologies incorrectly referred to as “COVID vaccines”
As of December 3, 2021, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has logged 19,886 COVID jab related deaths. Pfizer — the only company that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted full licensing for an as-yet unavailable COVID shot — accounts for 13,268 of them
Calculations suggest VAERS COVID-related reports are underreported by a factor of 41. That means that in the U.S. alone, the actual death toll may be closer to 374,576. Including international deaths reported to VAERS would put the death toll at 815,326
Key side effects that are now being reported in massive numbers include miscarriages, heart attacks, myopericarditis, thrombocytopenia (low platelet count), shingles, Bell’s palsy and a variety of permanent disabilities, many of which involve neurological dysfunction
The side effects we now see being reported were entirely predictable based on the known science detailed in Seneff’s and Nigh’s paper
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MIT scientist Stephanie Seneff’s paper,1 “Worse Than the Disease: Reviewing Some Possible Unintended Consequences of mRNA Vaccines Against COVID-19,” published in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research in collaboration with Dr. Greg Nigh, is still one of the best, most comprehensive descriptions of the many possible unintended consequences of the mRNA gene transfer technologies incorrectly referred to as “COVID vaccines.”
December 9, 2021, their paper was reprinted in the Townsend Letter, the Examiner of Alternative Medicine.2 Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT who has been conducting research at MIT for over five decades, has spent a large portion of her career investigating the hazards and mechanisms of action of glyphosate.
Her attention was diverted to the science of mRNA gene transfer technologies in early 2020, when Operation Warp Speed was announced. As noted in her paper, many factors that lacked precedent, yet were being implemented at breakneck speed, included:
The first-ever use of PEG in an injection
The first-ever use of mRNA gene transfer technology against an infectious agent
The first-ever “vaccine” to make no clear claims about reducing infection, transmissibility or death
The first-ever coronavirus vaccine ever tested on humans (and previous coronavirus vaccines all failed due to antibody-dependent enhancement, a condition in which the antibodies actually facilitate infection rather than defend against it)
The first-ever use of genetically modified polynucleotides in the general population
An Insanely Reckless Process
In a May 2021 interview with me, Seneff said:
“To have developed this incredibly new technology so quickly, and to skip so many steps in the process of evaluating [its safety], it’s an insanely reckless thing that they’ve done. My instinct was that this is bad, and I needed to know [the truth].
So, I really dug into the research literature by the people who’ve developed these vaccines, and then more extensive research literature around those topics. And I don’t see how these vaccines can possibly be doing anything good …”
At the time, just five months into the mass inoculation campaign, Seneff suspected the COVID shots would end up killing far more people than the infection itself. Today, a full year into it, the statistics are grim beyond belief, proving her educated prediction to have been an astute one.
mRNA Jabs Are Shockingly Hazardous
As of December 3, 2021, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has logged an astounding 927,738 COVID jab related adverse events, including 19,886 deaths.3 VAERS can receive reports from vaccine manufacturers and other international sources, and if we exclude those, the death toll reported in U.S. territories exclusively stands at 9,136.4
Of the total death reports, Pfizer — the only company that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted full licensing for an as-yet unavailable COVID shot — accounts for the vast majority: 13,268, compared to 4,894 for Moderna, 1,651 for Janssen and 73 for an undisclosed brand.
Pfizer also accounts for the vast majority of hospitalizations post-injection, and while those over the age of 66 make up the bulk of deaths, the 25-to-50 age group accounts for most of the hospitalizations. Key side effects that are now being reported in massive numbers include:5
All of these consequences were predicted by Seneff and Nigh in their paper, which makes the events all the more tragic. Importantly, VAERS is notoriously underreported, so the real-world impact of these shots is far greater than what those data suggest.
The Cure Is Indeed Worse Than the Disease
Calculations6 performed by Steve Kirsch, executive director of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, and his team of statisticians suggest VAERS COVID-related reports are underreported by a factor of 41. This is a conservative estimate, supported by calculations using a variety of sources besides VAERS itself.
That means that in the U.S. alone (using the data for U.S. territories only), the actual death toll may be closer to 374,576 (including international deaths reported to VAERS would put the death toll at 815,326), and those are deaths that occurred within days or weeks post-injection.
As Seneff and Nigh explain in their paper, there’s overwhelming reason to suspect that these gene transfer injections will have devastating impacts in the long term, resulting in excess deaths over the next decade.
What’s more, it’s clear that the death toll from the COVID-19 infection itself in the U.S. has been vastly exaggerated, as it’s based on positive PCR tests and even mere suspicion of COVID in the absence of testing. Many died from other causes and just happened to have a positive COVID test at the time of death.
Kirsch estimates the real death tally from COVID-19 to be about 50% of the reported number (which is likely conservative). This means about 380,000 Americans died from COVID-19 (rather than with COVID), whereas the COVID shots may have killed more than 374,570 in the first 11 months alone.
As predicted in the title of Seneff’s paper, it seems the cure may indeed end up being worse than the disease. This is particularly true for children and young adults, who have either died or been permanently disabled by the shots by the thousands, while having an extraordinarily low risk of dying from or being seriously harmed by the infection itself.
Seneff suspects that in the next 10 to 15 years, we’ll see a dramatic spike in prion diseases, autoimmune diseases, neurodegenerative diseases at younger ages, and blood disorders such as blood clots, hemorrhaging, stroke and heart failure.
The Spike Protein Is the Most Dangerous Part of SARS-CoV-2
The reason we’re seeing all these problems from the COVID shots is because they program your cells to continuously produce SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which we now know is the most dangerous part of the virus. Many experts noted this from the start, wondering what the vaccine developers could possibly be thinking, selecting this as the antigen for their shots.
While the mRNA injections can cause harm in many different ways, one basic problem is that they can overstimulate your immune system to the point of failure. In summary, as your cells start producing the viral spike proteins, your immune cells rally to mop up the proteins and dump them into your lymphatic system. (This is why many report swollen lymph nodes under the arms.)
The antibody response is part of your humoral immunity. You also have cellular immunity, which is part of your innate immune system. Your innate immune system is very powerful. If you’re healthy, it can clear viruses without ever producing a single antibody. Antibodies are actually a second-tier effect when your innate immune system fails.
The problem is that your innate immune system will not be activated and likely will fail to protect you if you get a COVID-19 shot, because it’s bypassing all of the areas where your innate immune system would be brought to bear.
Normally you breathe the virus in and stimulate the production secretory IgA antibodies that protect your respiratory system. When you bypass that route of exposure with a jab in the arm, no secretory IgA antibodies are produced, leaving you susceptible to the infection.
As explained by Ronald Kostoff in an excellent December 8, 2021, Trial Site News article, “COVID-19 ‘Vaccines’: The Wrong Bomb Over the Wrong Target at the Wrong Time”:7
“An effective vaccine would focus on cellular immunity in the respiratory and intestinal tract, in which secretory IgA is produced by your lymphocytes that are located directly underneath the mucous membranes that line the respiratory and intestinal tract.
The antibodies produced by these lymphocytes are ejected through and to the surface of the linings. These antibodies are thus on site to meet air-borne viruses and they may be able to prevent viral binding and infection of the cells.
Unfortunately, the main inoculants used presently for COVID-19 focus on antibodies (IgG and circulating IgA) that occur in the bloodstream. These antibodies protect the internal organs of the body from infectious agents that try to spread via the bloodstream.”
When you are injected with the COVID jab, your body will only induce IgG and circulating IgA — not secretory IgA, and these types of antibodies do not effectively protect your mucous membranes from SARS-CoV-2 infection. So, as noted by Kostoff, the breakthrough infections we’re now seeing “confirm the fundamental design flaws” of this gene transfer technology.
“A natural infection with SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) will in most individuals remain localized to the respiratory tract,” Kostoff writes.8 “The vaccines used presently cause cells deep inside our body to express the viral spike protein, which they were never meant to do by nature.
Any cell which expresses this foreign antigen on its surface will come under attack by the immune system, which will involve both IgG antibodies and cytotoxic T-lymphocytes. This may occur in any organ, but the damage will be most severe in vital organs.
We are seeing now that the heart is affected in many young people, leading to myocarditis or even sudden cardiac arrest and death. In other words, we are dropping the wrong bomb on the wrong target at the wrong time!”
In the end, your body will essentially believe that your innate immune system has failed, which means it must bring in the backup cavalry. In essence, your body is now overreacting to something that isn’t true. You’re not actually infected with a virus and your innate immune system has not failed, but your body is forced to respond as if both are true.
Effects Likely to Persist Long Term
What’s more, the synthetic RNA in the mRNA vaccines contains a nucleotide called methyl-pseudouridine, which your body cannot break down, and the RNA is programmed to trigger maximum protein production. So, we’re looking at completely untested manipulation of RNA.
It is very important to recognize that this is a genetically engineered mRNA for the spike protein. It is not identical to the spike protein mRNA that SARS-Cov-2 produces. It’s been significantly altered to avoid being metabolized by your body.
The spike protein your body produces in response to the COVID-19 vaccine mRNA locks into your ACE2 receptor. This is because the genetically engineered new spike protein has additional prolines inserted that prevent the receptors from properly closing, which then cause you to downregulate ACE2. That’s partially how you end up with problems such as pulmonary hypertension, ventricular heart failure and stroke.9,10
As noted in a 2020 paper,11 there’s a “pivotal link” between ACE2 deficiency and SARS-CoV-2 infection. People with ACE2 deficiency tend to be more prone to severe COVID-19. The spike protein suppresses ACE2,12 making the deficiency even worse. According to Seneff, the gene transfer injections essentially do the same thing, and we still don’t know how long the effects last.
Manufacturers initially guessed the synthetic RNA might survive in the human body for about six months. A more recent investigation found the spike protein persisted in recovered COVID patients for 15 months.13
This raises the suspicion that the synthetic and more persistent mRNA in the COVID shots may trigger spike protein production for at least as long, and probably longer.14 What’s more, the number of spike proteins produced by the shots is far greater than what you experience in natural infection.
As explained by Dr. Peter McCullough,15 this means that after your first shot, your body will produce spike protein for at least 15 months. But, when you get shot No. 2 a few weeks later, that shot will cause spike protein production to go on for 15 months or longer. With shot No. 3 six months after that, you produce spike protein for yet another 15 months.
With regular boosters, you may never rid your body of the spike protein. All the while, it’s wreaking havoc with your biology. McCullough likens it to “a permanent install of an inflammatory protein in the human body,” and inflammation is at the heart of most if not all chronic diseases. There’s simply no possible way for these gene transfer shots to improve public health. They’re going to decimate it.
Long-Term Neurological Damage Is To Be Expected
In her paper,16 Seneff describes several key characteristics of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that suggests it acts as a prion. This could help explain why we’re seeing so many neurological side effects from the shots. According to Seneff, the spike protein produced by the COVID shot, due to the modifications made, may actually make it more of a prion than the spike protein in the actual virus, and a more effective one.
For a detailed technical description of this you can read through Seneff’s paper, but the take-home message is that COVID-19 shots are instruction sets for your body to make a toxic protein that will eventually wind up concentrated in your spleen, from where prion-like protein instructions will be sent out, radically increasing your risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases.
Lung, Heart and Brain Diseases Are Predictable Consequences
Seneff also goes into great detail describing how the spike protein acts as a metabolic poison. While I recommend reading Seneff’s paper in its entirety, I’ve extracted some key sections below, starting with how the spike protein can trigger pathological damage leading to lung damage and heart and brain diseases:17
“The picture is now emerging that SARS-CoV-2 has serious effects on the vasculature in multiple organs, including the brain vasculature … In a series of papers, Yuichiro Suzuki in collaboration with other authors presented a strong argument that the spike protein by itself can cause a signaling response in the vasculature with potentially widespread consequences.
These authors observed that, in severe cases of COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 causes significant morphological changes to the pulmonary vasculature … Furthermore, they showed that exposure of cultured human pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein S1 subunit was sufficient to promote cell signaling without the rest of the virus components.
Follow-on papers showed that the spike protein S1 subunit suppresses ACE2, causing a condition resembling pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a severe lung disease with very high mortality … The ‘in vivo studies’ they referred to … had shown that SARS coronavirus-induced lung injury was primarily due to inhibition of ACE2 by the SARS-CoV spike protein, causing a large increase in angiotensin-II.
Suzuki et al. (2021) went on to demonstrate experimentally that the S1 component of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, at a low concentration … activated the MEK/ERK/MAPK signaling pathway to promote cell growth. They speculated that these effects would not be restricted to the lung vasculature.
The signaling cascade triggered in the heart vasculature would cause coronary artery disease, and activation in the brain could lead to stroke. Systemic hypertension would also be predicted. They hypothesized that this ability of the spike protein to promote pulmonary arterial hypertension could predispose patients who recover from SARS-CoV-2 to later develop right ventricular heart failure.
Furthermore, they suggested that a similar effect could happen in response to the mRNA vaccines, and they warned of potential long-term consequences to both children and adults who received COVID-19 vaccines based on the spike protein.
An interesting study by Lei et. al. (2021) found that pseudovirus — spheres decorated with the SARS-CoV-2 S1 protein but lacking any viral DNA in their core — caused inflammation and damage in both the arteries and lungs of mice exposed intratracheally.
They then exposed healthy human endothelial cells to the same pseudovirus particles. Binding of these particles to endothelial ACE2 receptors led to mitochondrial damage and fragmentation in those endothelial cells, leading to the characteristic pathological changes in the associated tissue.
This study makes it clear that spike protein alone, unassociated with the rest of the viral genome, is sufficient to cause the endothelial damage associated with COVID-19. The implications for vaccines intended to cause cells to manufacture the spike protein are clear and are an obvious cause for concern.”
The COVID Shots Activate Latent Viruses
As mentioned earlier, shingles infection is turning out to be a rather common side effect of the COVID shot, and like the neurological, vascular and cardiac damage we’re seeing, activation of latent viral infections was also predicted.
One reason why latent viral infections are cropping up in response to the shots is because the shots disable your type I interferon pathway. A second reason is because your immune system is overburdened trying to deal with the inflammatory spike proteins flowing through your body. Something’s got to give, so latent viruses are allowed to break through.
That’s not the end of your potential troubles, however, as these coinfections may worsen or accelerate other conditions, such as Bell’s Palsy, myalgic encephalomyelitis and chronic fatigue syndrome.
Herpes viruses, for example, have been implicated as a trigger of both AIDS18 and chronic fatigue syndrome.19 Some research suggests these diseases don’t appear until viruses from different families partner up and the type 1 interferon pathway is disabled.
With all of that in mind, it seems inevitable that, long term, the COVID mass injection campaign will result in an avalanche of a wide range of debilitating chronic illnesses.
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Protests across the Western world exploded over the weekend with righteous indignation over vaccine passports and mandates, and the mainstream media responded with blatant, intentional silence.
In major cities across the Western world, tens of thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands in each city, marched against their government’s anti-freedom, anti-human agenda regarding COVID-19, mandatory vaccines, and the dehumanizing apartheid state the entire world seems hellbent on imposing.
These protests are so widespread that it would almost be easier to list the countries which didn’t have demonstrations rather than those that did.
Nonetheless, here are only a select number of cities that saw massive pro-freedom demonstrations, collectively constituting millions of freedom fighters:
London, England saw an easy hundred thousand protesters come out in solidarity against vaccine mandates, wielding signs of non-compliance and demanding the government return their freedoms as they marched on Parliament.
For a 24th consecutive week, thousands take to the streets in cities across France to protest Macron’s draconian vaccine pass regime and the COVID tyranny spreading across Europe. The French have shown they can do this for years if need be. Paris today.pic.twitter.com/3QbJmq9xo4
As Michael Senger notes, this will be the 24th consecutive week of protests in France over the “draconian vaccine pass regime and the COVID tyranny spreading across Europe.”
In Vienna, Austria, tens of thousands of freedom fighters tore down barricades and stormed the streets to protest lockdowns and vaccine-based segregation.
Those in Vienna were joined in protest by their brothers and sisters in Salzburg.
Thousands continue to take to the streets in cities all across Austria against compulsory vaccination, lockdown for the unvaccinated, and other aberrations of COVID tyranny. Salzburg today.pic.twitter.com/GsMWFt9hGK
Tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands, of Germans rallied in Hamburg to protest the emerging state of totalitarianism that hasn’t existed in the country since WWII.
Australians picked up the torch once again in Melbourne on December 17, filling the streets to oppose COVID prison camps and vaccine passports. Again, barely a mention by the mainstream media.
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“…the ones who call the shots (in war) won’t be among the dead and lame And on each end of the rifle we’re the same” — John McCutcheon
In World War I, as happens to be true in most American wars, the Christian church leadership joined in the patriotic fervor with very un-Christ-like, nationalistic and racial/religious domination stances.
Astonishingly, religious leaders on every side of the conflict truly believed that God was on their particular side. And so the pulpits all over Europe, including British, Scottish, French, Belgian, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Russian and Italian reverberated with flag-waving fervor, with clear messages to their doomed warrior-sons that it was their God-given Christian duty to march off to kill the equally brain-washed young Christian soldier enemies, who were also certain that God was on their side.
Five months into the miserable death and destruction of the perpetually dead-locked trench war (featuring the now-infamous mass slaughter via artillery, machine gun and poison gas weaponry), the first Christmas of the war on the Western Front came around.
Christmas was the holiest of Christian holidays on all sides of the war, but in this time of homesickness and having to live in the cold, rain and snow, the first Christmas of the war had special meaning. December 24, 1914 reminded the soldiers of the good food, warm homes and beloved family relationships that they had left behind – and which they now suspected that they might never experience again. The physically exhausted, spiritually-deadened, combat-traumatized soldiers on both sides of No Man’s Land desperately sought some respite from the water-logged, rat-infested and now increasingly frozen trenches.
The frontline soldiers on both sides were at the end of their emotional ropes because of the unrelenting artillery barrages against which they were defenseless. If they weren’t killed or maimed by the bombings, what would eventually destroy many of the survivors was the “shell-shock” (now known as combat-induced posttraumatic stress disorder – PTSD), with the horrifying nightmares, sleep deprivation, suicidality, depression, hyper-alertness and other mental and neurological distresses. Other common “killers” were the bad food, lice, trench foot, frostbite and gangrenous toes and fingers.
Suicidal “over the top” assaults against enemy machine gun nests were stupidly and repeatedly ordered by senior officers like Sir Douglas Haig, who didn’t have to participate in the bloody assaults. Sir Winston Churchill, in his British naval command role at the time, had obviously learned nothing from Haig’s disastrous tactic when, a year later, he also ordered repeated assaults against Turkish machine gun fire at the infamous massacre of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli, a blunder for which the disgraced Churchill resigned his commission in the British Admiralty.
The day-to-day horrors of trench warfare were punctuated by the screams of agony coming from the wounded soldiers who had to be left hanging on the barbed wire or lying in the bomb craters in No Man’s Land – their deaths often lingering on for days. The effect on the troops in the trenches who had to helplessly ignore the pleas for help was traumatizing. For any number of reasons, the morale of the troops on both sides of No Man’s Land had hit rock bottom during the months approaching Christmas.
Christmas in the Trenches
So, on December 24, 1914, the exhausted troops settled down to open Christmas gifts from home, expecting to have some respite from the war for a day or so. A magnanimous (and deluded) Kaiser Wilhelm had even ordered 100,000 Christmas trees with millions of ornamental candles to be sent up to the German front, expecting that such an act would boost troop morale. Using the supply lines for such militarily unnecessary items seemed to be an acceptable investment for the over-confidant emperor, but his generals disagreed. Nobody, however, suspected that the Christmas tree idea would backfire and instead be a catalyst for a famous event in the history of peace-making that was nearly censored out from recorded history.
That spontaneous event, the Christmas Truce of 1914, was expressed in a variety of ways at a multitude of locations all along the 600 miles of trenches that stretched across France, but it was an event that would never again be duplicated in the history of warfare.
The tradition that has emerged from this true story was that, in the silence of Christmas Eve night, the Germans started singing Christmas carols, with the British, French, Scots and Canadians doing the same, the two sides joining together bilingually when the Germans sang “Stille Nacht”. Before long, the divine spirit of peace and “goodwill towards men” prevailed over the demonic spirit of war.
While participating in the group sing along, the men sensed their common humanity, and the natural aversion to killing emerged, overcoming the brain-washing they had all been subjected to since basic training. And for a precious day or two, these men rose to a level of humanity that would not allow them to continue killing other humans even if ordered to do so.
Individual unarmed soldiers, disobeying orders from their superiors, cautiously stood up and walked out of their trenches into No Man’s Land. Nobody began shooting and slowly both trenches emptied out and a unique Christmas eve celebration began that had never happened before and – if the world’s military establishment has anything to say about it – will never happen again.
Soldiers that were deadly enemies just moments before shared chocolates, cigarettes, beer, wine, Schnapps, pictures from home and soccer games. Names and addresses were exchanged, and every soldier who genuinely experienced the dramatic event was forever changed.
Of course, on their way each soldier had to step around shell holes and over the frozen corpses of their dead friends, which were given respectful burials the following day; former enemies helping one another with the solemn job.
Fostering Peace on Earth in Times of War is Considered Treason
Fraternizing with the enemy (and refusing to obey orders in time of war) has historically been regarded by military commanders and politicians as an act of treason which has always been severely punished, sometimes by summary execution. In the case of the Christmas Truce of 1914, trying to avoid drawing public attention to this potentially contagious incident, most commanding officers threatened various punishments but only a few executions took place. One punishment that many of the newly antiwar German soldiers faced was their transfer to the Eastern Front where they would then be expected to kill and die in the equally suicidal battles against Orthodox Christian soldiers from Russia.
The prize-winning movie (almost winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film) that beautifully characterizes the spirit of the Christmas Truce is “Joyeux Noel” (French for “Merry Christmas”). “Joyeux Noel” tells the moving tale that has been adapted from the many surviving stories and letters home from soldiers who had been there.
This unique story of war resistance needs to be retold over and over again if our modern-era of false flag-generated wars of empire and corporate domination are to be effectively de-railed. These never-ending wars – always followed by armed occupations that inevitably generate armed resistance and revolt later – are fought by naïve but thoroughly indoctrinated, macho adolescents – many of whom are from devout Christian families. These not quite emotionally mature adolescents are at high risk of becoming spiritually damaged by active engagement in the “killing fields”. Indeed, combat soldiers are often doomed to a life overwhelmed by the realities of combat-induced PTSD (or sociopathic personality disorder), with suicidality, homicidality, loss of religious faith, traumatic brain injuries, and even neurological and autoimmune disorders because of the Pentagon’s aggressive over-vaccination agendas (often with experimental, poorly tested, fast-tracked vaccines, usually injected without informed consent as a part of some secret biodefense weapons research project.
Of course, militarists of every era in history do whatever they can to prevent soldiers from experiencing the humanity of their enemies. Shouldn’t that be the job of the chaplains, who are supposed to be nurturers of the souls of those soldiers who are in their care? Evidence suggests that military chaplains avoid counseling soldiers about Jesus’ Golden Rule, his clear command to love their enemies or the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. I’m sure that there would be consequences for a chaplain if one was discovered doing that. Military chaplains are part of the apparatus of war that pays very little attention to any of the Ten Commandments, especially the ones that say: “thou shalt not kill” or “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s oil”. In their defense, military chaplains, in their seminary training and, likely even in their Sunday School upbringing, may have never heard about the profoundly important gospel truths about non-domination, non-retaliation and the unconditional love of friend and enemy.
Theological Blind Spots of War
A couple of these theological blind spots are illustrated at the end of “Joyeux Noel” in a powerful scene depicting a confrontation between the Christ-like, antiwar Scottish chaplain and his pro-war bishop just as the humble chaplain was administering “last rites” to a dying soldier. The bishop had come to chastise the chaplain and relieve him of his duties because of his “treasonous and shameful” behavior on the battlefield (ie, being merciful to and fraternizing with the enemy).
The authoritarian bishop refused to listen when the chaplain proclaimed that he had just performed “the most important mass of my life” and that he wished to stay with his men, most of whom were losing their Christian faith. The bishop angrily denied the chaplain’s request and sent him home.
The bishop then delivered a rousing pro-war sermon to some fresh troops that had been brought in to replace the ones who were now refusing to kill anymore. The words of the sermon were chosen by the film-writers directly from a homily that had been delivered by an Anglican bishop in England later in the war. The subtle response of the chaplain to his sacking was very well portrayed by the filmmakers.
“Joyeux Noel” is an important film that deserves to be annual holiday fare. It has ethical lessons far more powerful than the scores of commonly recommended Christmas films such as “It’s A Wonderful Life” or “A Christmas Carol”.
Some of the lessons of the story of the Christmas Truce are illustrated in John McCutcheon’s important song, “Christmas in the Trenches”. Here are the lyric. Pay close attention to the last line:
Christmas in the Trenches
By John McCutcheon
Oh my name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school
From Belgium and to Flanders, Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear
Twas Christmas in the trenches and the frost so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France where still no Christmas songs were sung
Our families back in England were toasting us that day
Theie brave and glorious lads so far away
I was lying with my mess-mates on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I now listen up me boys, each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear
He’s singing bloody well you know, my partner says to me
Soon one by one each German voice joined in in harmony
The cannons rested silent and the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war
As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen struck up some lads from Kent
The next thing sang was Stille Nacht, tis ‘Silent Night’ says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky
There’s someone coming towards us now the front line sentry said
All sights were fixed on one lone figure trudging from their side
His truce flag like a Christmas Star shone on the plane so bright
As he bravely trudged unarmed into the night
Then one by one on either side, walked in to No Man’s Land
With neither gun nor bayonet, we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare lit football game we gave them hell
We traded chocolates, cigarettes and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played the squeeze box and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men
Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each began to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wondrous night
Whose family have I fixed within my sights
Twas Christmas in the trenches and the frost so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed, the songs of peace were sung
For the walls they’d kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone forever more
Oh my name is Francis Tolliver, from Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas comes since World War I have learned its lesson well
For the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same
Check out the video of McCutcheon singing his song below:
For a good pictorial history of the reality of WWI’s trench warfare, watch below:
The full version of “Joyeux Noel” is still available online here. I strongly suggest family viewing for the holidays.
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Dr Gary G. Kohls lives in the USA and writes a weekly column, entitled Duty to Warn, for the Duluth Reader, Duluth, Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American Friendly Fascism, corporatism, Oligarchy, militarism, racism, malnutrition, and Big Pharma’s over-drugging and over-vaccinating agendas as well as other movements that threaten the environment, democracy, civility, health and the sustainability and livability of the planet and the future of the children.
Roger Wicker, membro da Comissão dos Serviços Armados do Senado dos EUA, disse, numa entrevista à Fox News (8 de Dezembro), não excluir a possibilidade de uma intervenção militar directa dos EUA contra a Rússia para “defender a Ucrânia” e, sem que o entrevistador lhe tivesse pedido, acrescentou: “Sabe que não excluímos a possibilidade de uma acção nuclear como primeira utilização”. Esta é uma mensagem transversal a Moscovo sobre a determinação dos EUA em apoiar um eventual ataque de Kiev contra os russos de Donbass. Seria certamente apresentada como uma resposta a um ataque efectuado pelos russos de Donbass. Na mente daqueles que, desde 2014, têm concretizado a estratégia de tensão contra a Rússia esta seria ainda uma jogada vencedora.
Moscovo teria duas alternativas: não intervir militarmente em defesa dos russos de Donbass, deixando-os subjugados pelo ataque ucraniano apoiado de facto pela NATO e forçados a abandonar a região e a refugiar-se na Rússia, decisão que seria traumática para Moscovo sobretudo a nível interno; ou intervir militarmente para impedir o ataque ucraniano, expondo-se à condenação internacional por agressão e invasão de um Estado soberano.
Os generais ucranianos avisaram que não seriam capazes de “repelir as tropas russas sem uma infusão maciça de ajuda militar do Ocidente”. A infusão já começou: os Estados Unidos, que já deram a Kiev uma ajuda militar de 2,5 biliões de dólares, forneceram-lhe em Novembro mais 88 toneladas de munições como parte de um “pacote” de 60 milhões de dólares, incluindo mísseis Javelin já posicionados contra os russos de Donbass. Ao mesmo tempo, os EUA enviaram para a Ucrânia mais de 150 conselheiros militares que, juntamente com os de uma dúzia de aliados da NATO, dirigem, de facto, as operações.
A situação é ainda mais explosiva porque a Ucrânia – agora parceira mas, de facto, já membro da NATO – poderia ser oficialmente admitida como o 31º membro da Aliança, com a consequência de que, de acordo com o Artigo 5º do Tratado do Atlântico Norte, os outros 30 membros da NATO teriam de intervir militarmente na frente de Donbass em apoio à Ucrânia contra a Rússia. O Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros russo pediu à NATO que não admitisse a Ucrânia, para não aumentar ainda mais a tensão militar e política na Europa, recordando que desde o fim da Guerra Fria a Rússia recebeu repetidas garantias de que a jurisdição e as forças militares da NATO não avançariam um centímetro em direcção a Leste, mas estas promessas não foram cumpridas. O Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros russo propôs assim que a NATO abrisse negociações sobre acordos a longo prazo que impediriam uma maior expansão da NATO para Leste e a instalação de sistemas de armamento na vizinhança imediata do território russo. A proposta foi categoricamente rejeitada em 10 de Dezembro pela NATO através do Secretário Geral Stoltenberg: “A relação da NATO com a Ucrânia será decidida pelos 30 membros da Aliança e pela Ucrânia, e por mais ninguém”.
Imediatamente a seguir, ontem, 13 de Dezembro, os Ministros dos Negócios Estrangeiros do G7 (EUA, Canadá, Reino Unido, França, Alemanha, Itália, Japão) e o Alto Representante da União Europeia, reunidos em Liverpool, declararam que estavam “unidos na sua condenação do reforço militar da Rússia e da sua retórica agressiva em relação à Ucrânia” e que “a Rússia não deve ter dúvidas de que uma nova agressão militar contra a Ucrânia teria como resposta, consequências maciças e custos graves”.
Entretanto, a Finlândia, membro da União Europeia e parceira activa da NATO contra a Rússia, anunciou a compra de 64 caças F-35A da Lockheed Martin pelo preço de 8,4 biliões de euros, que, incluindo as infraestruturas, sobe para 10 biliões de euros, aos quais o governo acrescentará mais 10 biliões de euros para a sua manutenção e modernização. Os 64 aviões F-35A de ataque nuclear serão colocados na fronteira russa, apenas a 200 km de São Petersburgo e, de facto, sob comando dos Estados Unidos que, como recorda o Senador Wicker, não excluem serem os primeiros a usar armas nucleares.
That’s even worse than in America (which is famously controlled by the owners of its arms-producers and “MIC”), where the published answer is “No data.”
In other words: military procurement — selling (mainly) military products-weapons or services (the types of things that constitute the bulk of governmental purchases) to the French Government — is allowed by French laws to be corrupt. A prospective seller to the French Government is allowed to donate not only to a candidate but to a political party. (Obviously, this gives those government contractors immense influence over French foreign policies, and especially over ‘defense’ policies, including how much and which corporation’s weapons to buy.)
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However in order to be able to contribute lots of money to a particular candidate or party, a coordinated operation that might include many cooperating donors from a given weapons-producer might be necessary. By contrast, in the United States, which nominally prohibits almost every type of corruption, the fine-print exceptions allow massive donations from any billionaire or mega-corporation via PACS and other allowed tricks.
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On balance, therefore, France seems to be less corrupt than America, and far less corrupt than Germany, according to these legal yardsticks. And if military procurement were not an issue, then France would appear to be significantly less corrupt than America, as well as vastly less corrupt than Germany.
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But, just as there are legal ways around the nominal anti-corruption provisions in America, there likewise are legal ways around the nominal anti-corruption provisions in France. Furthermore, in one way, France is far more corrupt even than America, because in France there is actually much more secrecy regarding campaign donations than there is in America. Also, an EU study of the various member-nations’ campaign-finance laws found that even foreign donations have been, at least until 2019, virtually unregulated, in all EU nations. Nonetheless, like in America, the owners of France’s weapons-producers have especially ready legal pathways to control the government (which is their main customer, the biggest buyer of their products).
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So, in France, politicians who are unfavorable toward NATO and other weapons-marketing organizations will probably need to rely more on regular, run-of-the-mill donors, than on billionaires or their generally war-profiteering corporations.
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In other words, any such candidate will need to have considerable left-wing populist appeal, in order to compete effectively against the better-financed contenders, who are more military-contractor-backed.
In any case, the main path to corruption in France seems to be through military procurement. That could turn out to be a major reason why one of France’s perennial Presidential candidates, Marine Le Pen, whose policies would be a threat to military contractors, will again lose.
Marine Le Pen is basically a populist leftist who inherited from her conservative populist father the Front Nationale Party and switched the name to the National Rally Party and moved it to a populist left ideological position, but her father’s reputation still haunts leftist voters, who, in a second-round election therefore peel off to the more-establishment liberal opponent, who then receives the endorsements of the candidates who had been eliminated in the first round, so that the French military-industrial complex will end up being represented by the next President. This is likely to happen again.
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She also needs to retain at least some portion of the voters who had supported her fascist father, whom she despises (but can’t say so publicly, because she needs at least some of those voters, too). Therefore, she talks about her father as little as possible, and maintains ambiguity on lots of issues, in order to hold together, as much as possible, a populist coalition that’s both left and right, progressive and conservative. But the billionaires — both the conservative fascist ones and the liberal fascist ones — know that they wouldn’t be able to control France (as they do) if she were to become President. So, their media always refer to her as “far-right” in order to scare away voters, by portraying her as being secretly just like her father was — even though most of her policy-commitments are opposite to that (but only few voters actually base their votes on policy-positions, and politically involved billionaires know this). She continually walks a political tightrope. But one thing about Marine Le Pen seems clear: France’s billionaires fear her; none supports her.
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On December 10th the Financial Times headlined “Valérie Pécresse, the woman who could beat Macron”, and Victor Mallet presented a credible case that that establishment conservative is the likeliest person to end up as the winner, in the second round. However, Mallet noted that “her hardline stance on law and order and her commitment to economic reform and fiscal orthodoxy will play well on the French right.”
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If so, then a second-round contest between her and Le Pen could very likely produce a bigger-than expected liberal vote for Le Pen, as being a lesser-of-two-evils, in their view. The biggest barrier to that happening would be that this time, Le Pen might not end up in the second round, because Éric Zemmour, who hates her (and Muslims), and who appeals more than she does to rich conservatives, many of whom might be invested in armaments stocks, could end up reducing her first-round vote so that Le Pen won’t make it to the second round. He might even be largely financed in order to keep her out of the second round, so that Pécresse, or the current President, Macron, will win. Right now, Zemmour is campaigning mainly against Le Pen, but, if the final contest will be between Pécresse and Le Pen, then he would probably endorse Pécresse, which would cause many conservative voters to vote for her.
“The monthly poll puts National Rally candidate Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, her competitor on the far-right, neck and neck with 14.5% of voter intentions, a score that would knock both of them out of the second round.”
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That is exactly what France’s military-industrial complex, and French billionaires, would hope for. If Pécresse wins, then America’s billionaires will also win, because then there will be a France that is even more of a U.S. vassal than is now the case, under Macron.
Once again, NATO is on the verge of unnecessarily escalating tensions in Eastern Europe for the sole purpose of confronting Russia. According to recent statements by some of its top officers, the Western military alliance plans to deploy troops in Romania and Bulgaria as a way to strengthen the current “security scheme” for Ukraine. In practice, this type of attitude only tends to further increase polarization and discord between the states in that region, undermining any search for international peace and stability.
According to a recent report by Der Spiegel, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Tod Wolters, suggested that the Western alliance should send military forces to Bulgaria and Romania. The reason for such maneuver would be the supposed need to face the growth of the Russian military presence on the western border. Basically, Tod Walters advocates that Romania and Bulgaria be included in NATO’s current defense scheme for Ukraine, whose remnants also include Poland and the Baltics.
In that way, it would be possible to create an Eastern Europe almost entirely occupied by the alliance. Such an extended occupation plan has been called “Enhanced Forward Presence” and seems to be NATO’s bet in order to gain positions and undermine any Russian or Belarusian influence in Eastern Europe.
There is no doubt that such a plan would be harmful to the search for regional peace, but the big problem is that such a measure has also been called for by the Romanian and Bulgarian governments themselves, which seem increasingly misled by NATO’s narratives about supposed Russian plans for that region. States with less military and economic power and low international influence tend to be the most affected by the spread of this type of fallacious discourse and that is why there is currently a tendency among Eastern European nations to more and more demand a NATO presence in their territories. Romania and Bulgaria – as well as the Baltics and Poland – fear suffering the collateral effects of a possible conflict between Ukraine and Russia and have bet on the western alliance as an important ally in the face of this (non-existent) threat.
NATO has so far not provided any precise information about the possibility of boosting its troops in Romania and Bulgaria and has not commented about Wolters’ words. However, under pressure from the international media, spokespersons for the alliance said that the topic could be discussed in upcoming summits. Amid the current tensions on the Russian western border, any form of hardening opposition to Moscow is expected to be discussed, which worries security analysts around the world, considering the harmful effects of this type of attitude on the negotiation and rapprochement process that could start soon.
The recent virtual summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin brought, despite the tensions and uncertainties, some kind of “hope”, as the meeting ended with a mutual promise of willingness for dialogue between the leaders of NATO and Russia. Moscow demanded an end to NATO military maneuvers in Eastern Europe as an elementary condition for a summit between Russia and the Western governments to happen. Now, with such a possibility of sending more troops to the region, the possibility of such a Moscow-NATO summit has diminished, further threatening the search for the pacification of the European space.
There are only two ways to interpret the deployment of new NATO troops at the present time: either the alliance is giving a clear signal that it has no interest in the summit or a peaceful solution to the eastern European situation, or it is giving the green light to the dialogue saying, on the other hand, that if its interests are not reached, the occupation of the region and the encirclement against Russia will increase even more. In both cases, NATO’s game looks like a big strategic mistake.
If Russia has no interest in invading or declaring war on any European country and NATO leaders and strategists know it does not. The Russian interest in the end of NATO’s occupation of Eastern Europe is to quell the violence and hostility that have remained for decades in the region, paving the way for a possibility of peaceful dispute between Moscow and the West to influence local states.
Russia is also interested in protecting its own borders, which suffer direct and collateral effects from the increase of enemy forces, but there is no “fear” on the part of Moscow regarding the presence of troops in neighboring countries, simply because there is no interest in the confrontation. That is why trying to play Russia using hostile forces in neighboring countries as a trump card seems like a big strategic mistake.
For the sake of peace and security of all states, the best thing for NATO to do is to decline any interest in escalating hostilities, focusing on the possibility of peaceful dialogue with Russia in search of a joint solution for the benefit of all sides.
Lucas Leiroz, researcher in Social Sciences at Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
Incisive article. First posted on GR on May 15, 2021
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Say it’s 2014 and you’ve had this idea for a technocratic Great Reset of the world economy for some time now, but it only works if the entire planet is rocked by a pandemic. How do you go about selling your idea?
“The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future” — Klaus Schwab, WEF
If you are World Economic Forum (WEF) Founder Klaus Schwab, you attempt to sell your vision of a global Utopia via a Great Reset of the world order in three simple steps:
Announce your intention to revamp every aspect of society with global governance, and keep repeating that message
When your message isn’t getting through, simulate fake pandemic scenarios that show why the world needs a great reset
If the fake pandemic scenarios aren’t persuasive enough, wait a couple months for a real global crisis to occur, and repeat step one
It took Schwab and the Davos elite about six years to watch their great reset ideology grow from a tiny Swiss seed in 2014 to a European super-flower pollinating the entire globe in 2020.
The so-called “Great Reset” promises to build “a more secure, more equal, and more stable world” if everyone on the planet agrees to “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.”
But it wouldn’t have been possible to contemplate materializing such an all-encompassing plan for a new world order without a global crisis, be it manufactured or of unfortunate happenstance, that shocked society to its core.
“In the end, the outcome was tragic: the most catastrophic pandemic in history with hundreds of millions of deaths, economic collapse and societal upheaval” — Clade X pandemic simulation (May, 2018)
So, in May, 2018, the WEF partnered with Johns Hopkins to simulate a fictitious pandemic — dubbed “Clade X” — to see how prepared the world be if ever faced with such a crisis.
A little over a year later, the WEF once again teamed-up with Johns Hopkins, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to stage another pandemic exercise called Event 201 in October, 2019.
Both simulations concluded that the world wasn’t prepared for a global pandemic.
And a few short months following the conclusion of Event 201, which specifically simulated a coronavirus outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared that the coronavirus had reached pandemic status on March 11, 2020.
“The next severe pandemic will not only cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global impact and suffering” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
Since then, just about every scenario covered in the Clade X and Event 201 simulations has come into play, including:
Governments implementing lockdowns worldwide
The collapse of many industries
Growing mistrust between governments and citizens
A greater adoption of biometric surveillance technologies
Social media censorship in the name of combating misinformation
The desire to flood communication channels with “authoritative” sources
A global lack of personal protective equipment
The breakdown of international supply chains
Mass unemployment
Rioting in the streets
And a whole lot more!
After the nightmare scenarios had fully materialized by mid-2020, the WEF founder declared “now is the time for a “Great Reset” in June of this year.
Was it excellent forecasting, planning, and modeling on the part of the WEF and partners that Clade X and Event 201 turned out to be so prophetic, or was there something more to it?
Timeline
Below is a condensed timeline of events that tracks the Great Reset agenda that went from just a “hope” in 2014 to a globalist ideology touted by royalty, the media, and heads of state the world-over in 2020.
2014-2017: Klaus Schwab calls for Great Reset and WEF repeats message
Ahead of the 2014 WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Schwab announced that he hoped the WEF would push the reset button on the global economy.
The WEF would go on to repeat that message for years.
Between 2014 and 2017, the WEF called to reshape, restart, reboot, and reset the global order every single year, each aimed at solving various “crises.”
2014: WEF publishes meeting agenda entitled “The Reshaping of the World: Consequences for Society, Politics and Business.”
2016: WEF holds panel called “How to reboot the global economy.”
2017: WEF publishes article saying “Our world needs a reset in how we operate.”
Then in 2018, the Davos elites turned their heads towards simulating fake pandemic scenarios to see how prepared the world would be in the face of a different crisis.
2018-2019: WEF, Johns Hopkins & Gates Foundation simulate fake pandemics
On May 15, 2018, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted the “Clade X” pandemic exercise in partnership with the WEF.
The Clade X exercise included mock video footage of actors giving scripted news reports about a fake pandemic scenario (video below).
The Clade X event also included discussion panels with real policymakers who assessed that governments and industry were not adequately prepared for the fictitious global pandemic.
“In the end, the outcome was tragic: the most catastrophic pandemic in history with hundreds of millions of deaths, economic collapse and societal upheaval,” according to a WEF report on Clade X.
“There are major unmet global vulnerabilities and international system challenges posed by pandemics that will require new robust forms of public-private cooperation to address” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
Then on October 18, 2019, in partnership with Johns Hopkins and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WEF ran Event 201.
During the scenario, the entire global economy was shaken, there were riots on the streets, and high-tech surveillance measures were needed to “stop the spread.”
Two fake pandemics were simulated in the two years leading up to the real coronavirus crisis.
“Governments will need to partner with traditional and social media companies to research and develop nimble approaches to countering misinformation” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security issued a public statement on January 24, 2020, explicitly addressing that Event 201 wasn’t meant to predict the future.
“To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise. For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction. Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic.”
Intentional or not, Event 201 “highlighted” the “fictional” challenges of a pandemic, along with recommendations that go hand-in-hand with the great reset agenda that has set up camp in the nefarious “new normal.”
“The next severe pandemic will not only cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global impact and suffering” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
Together, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation submitted seven recommendations for governments, international organizations, and global business to follow in the event of a pandemic.
The Event 201 recommendations call for greater collaboration between the public and private sectors while emphasizing the importance of establishing partnerships with un-elected, global institutions such as the WHO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Air Transport Organization, to carry out a centralized response.
One of the recommendations calls for governments to partner with social media companies and news organization to censor content and control the flow of information.
“Media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including though [sic] the use of technology” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
According to the report, “Governments will need to partner with traditional and social media companies to research and develop nimble approaches to countering misinformation.
“National public health agencies should work in close collaboration with WHO to create the capability to rapidly develop and release consistent health messages.
“For their part, media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including though [sic] the use of technology.”
Sound familiar?
Throughout 2020, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have been censoring, suppressing, and flagging any coronavirus-related information that goes against WHO recommendations as a matter of policy, just as Event 201 had recommended.
2020: WEF declares ‘Now is the time for a Great Reset’
After calling for a great reset in 2014, the Davos crowd repeated the same ideology for a few more years before pivoting towards simulating faux pandemic scenarios.
A few months after the WEF established that nobody was prepared to deal with a coronavirus pandemic, the WHO declared there was a coronavirus pandemic.
All of a sudden! the great reset narrative that the WEF had been nurturing for six years, found a place to pitch its tent in the “new normal” camp.
“The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future,” Schwab declared on June 3, 2020.
And that’s where we’re at today.
The Davos elites said they wanted a global reset of the economy many years ago
They role-played what would happen if a pandemic were to occur
And now they’re saying that the great reset ideology is the solution to the pandemic, and it must be enacted quickly
The great reset is a means to an end.
Next on the agenda is a complete makeover of society under a technocratic regime of un-elected bureaucrats who want to dictate how the world is run from the top down, leveraging invasive technologies to track and trace your every move while censoring and silencing anyone who dares not comply.
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Tim Hinchliffe is the editor of The Sociable. His passions include writing about how technology impacts society and the parallels between Artificial Intelligence and Mythology. Previously, he was a reporter for the Ghanaian Chronicle in West Africa and an editor at Colombia Reports in South America. [email protected]
Moscow has outlined an eight-point draft treaty of security guarantees that would lead to lower tensions in Europe and defuse the crisis over Ukraine if the West were to adopt it. The demands include ending Ukraine’s path towards NATO membership, limiting the deployment of troops and weapons close to Russia’s borders, and a return to the pre-1997 status quo, i.e. before NATO’s eastward expansion.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Friday that although there was no deadline for beginning talks to ease tensions, Moscow wants to begin negotiations “without delays and without stalling” and stressed that “we can go any place and any time, even tomorrow.” He also emphasized that “this is not about us giving some kind of ultimatum, there is none. The thing is that the seriousness of our warning should not be underestimated.”
Effectively, he warned that ignoring Moscow’s request for discussions could lead to a “military response” similar to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Moscow’s call for talks comes as a Ukrainian soldier was killed on Friday during fighting with Donbass defense forces. Although Kiev is amassing forces and attaining new weapon systems like the US-made Javelin anti-missile system, the West lambasts Russia for deploying over 100,000 troops on its border to deter Ukraine from any new military adventures.
US President Joe Biden warned his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin of “sanctions like he’s never seen” before should Ukraine be attacked, an unlikely prospect since Moscow has repeatedly stressed that it has no interest in war or territorial expansion in Ukraine. Despite this guarantee though, it has not lessened the Western media campaign to demonize Russia.
The Guardian reported that the “Kremlin’s aggressive proposals are likely to be rejected in western capitals as an attempt to formalize a new Russian sphere of influence over eastern Europe.” This is extremely problematic as it claims that Moscow’s suggestion for Russia and NATO to “not consider each other adversaries” and “resolve all disputes peacefully and refrain from the use of force” is an “aggressive proposal.”
It brings to question why the London-based newspaper finds it “aggressive” to resolve disputes peacefully?
Although the British tabloid believes that Moscow’s proposals “are likely to be rejected” by the West, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said “there’s no reason we can’t do that moving forward to reduce instability, but we’re going to do that in partnership and coordination with our European allies and partners.”
A senior White House official told reporters on Friday that Washington disagreed with parts of Moscow’s proposal, but was willing to discuss its content.
“We are prepared to discuss them. That said, there are some things in this document that the Russians know will be unacceptable,” the official told reporters on condition of anonymity, demonstrating that the US is willing to negotiate rather than reject everything as The Guardian appears to hope.
Although it is unlikely that the West will stop military exercises in Poland and the Baltic states as the Kremlin hopes, demands like banning Ukraine from joining NATO and limiting the types of weapons near Russia’s borders could find success. The Kremlin likely does not expect all their demands to be met, however the proposals could force negotiations in the context of increased military tensions in eastern Ukraine.
Russia-based experts doubted that the West would accept the proposals, with Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, explaining that the “publication of Russian proposed agreements with US and NATO on [European security] may suggest that Moscow (rightly) considers their acceptance by the West unlikely.”
Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), agreed with Trenin’s assessment and said: “This is a bargaining position — [the Kremlin] is trying to get some degree of partial acceptance. Of course, there is a real risk to making these sorts of demands, especially if the West takes a harsh position, but clearly, the Kremlin thinks that the risk is justified in the circumstances.”
Regardless of whether the Kremlin knew if their proposal would be accepted or not, at the very minimum, an opening for negotiations has been made. It is now in the West’s hands to pursue this opening from Moscow, or face a Russia that has clearly said they will use a “military response” if NATO continues to encroach on its sphere of influence and security interests in Ukraine. It is likely that Washington will explore negotiations with Moscow as it too wants to pool more resources towards opposing and challenging China in Asia-Pacific rather than Russia in Eastern Europe.
American foreign policy, wrapped up in hubris inside American exceptionalism, is incapable of recognizing a dangerous situation.
And a dangerous situation is what we have.
The Russian deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov speaking for the Kremlin has made it clear that Russia will tolerate no further movement of NATO toward Russia’s borders.
Russia has ruled out any possibility of the former Russian provinces of Ukraine and Georgia becoming NATO members. If this red line is ignored, the consequences, Ryabkov said, “will be dire.” Russia will respond militarily, and the West, he said, will find it has undermined its own security, not Russia’s.
In other words, as the Kremlin sees it, the incorporation of Ukraine and/or Georgia into NATO is an unacceptable threat to Russian national security. Period. It is not negotiable.
In a rational world such an unequivocal statement by a preeminent military power with hypersonic nuclear missiles would be taken seriously.
But the Western World is no longer rational. It is a world drunk on arrogance. The NATO secretary replied to what is, in effect, an ultimatum from a nuclear power by rejecting out of hand that power’s security concern:
“Whether Ukraine joins NATO is up to the bloc’s member states and its leadership, and Moscow doesn’t have input into the decision.” The idiot NATO secretary went on to boast, foolishly, that NATO was so little impressed with Russian objections that NATO was “already training Ukrainian troops and consulting with them, and are conducting joint exercises and providing military supplies and technology.”
The White House spokesperson replying for President Biden and the National Security Council said Washington “will not compromise” on NATO expansion, adding that Washington won’t accept the idea of halting NATO expansion, despite what Russia demands.
In other words–be certain to understand this and its consequences–Washington’s position is that Russia has NO legitimate national security interests except as defined by Washington.
Here we have a highly dangerous situation. One power says you are treading on me and we won’t tolerate it; the other power says you have no say in the matter.
During the 20th century Cold War we Cold Warriors heard every word, every intonation of what the Soviets said. To risk nuclear war because some fool had wax in his ears or was feeling macho that day was out of the question. In those days there were departments of Russian studies in US universities that were not dependent on funding from the military-security complex. There was public debate. There was always an independent expert, such as Stephen Cohen, to remind everyone of how the Russians saw the situation.
Today independent scholarship has disappeared. Russian studies programs in universities are Russophobic in keeping with their funding. As there are no objective scholars, there are no knowledgeable people in the US intelligence community. We can see this in the recent statement of Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan, who reports that US intelligence agencies believe that Putin is “giving serious consideration” to an invasion of Ukraine.
Washington has been saying this since 2014 when Washington overthrew the Russian friendly Ukrainian government hoping to seize in the process the Russian naval base in Crimea. It is a fixed message. There is no thought. Just repetition of propaganda. So we have a National Security Council incapable of nothing but the repetition of propagandistic slogans.
In effect Washington is already at war with Russia.
Meanwhile last Thursday evening, December 16, Washington and its neo-nazi Ukraine puppet decided to confirm Russian suspicions that Washington and Ukraine represent revanchist Nazism. Only two countries voted against the UN resolution condemning Nazism. Yes, it was the United States and Ukraine. The utter total stupidity of the US vote is extraordinary. That Washington supports Nazism is the last thing the Kremlin needed to hear.
My generation was the last generation in the West to be educated instead of indoctrinated, and even we were fed lies about World War I and World War II.
Subsequent generations are largely unaware that in German-occupied Western Ukraine large armies were organized and incorporated into the German army’s march into Russia. It was remnants of these “Banderas” (Stepan Bandera) that Washington used to overthrow the Ukrainian government and install an American puppet state on former Russian territory while the Kremlin, ignoring its backyard, was enjoying the Sochi Olympics.
The mistakes that people make have more to do with world history than any good decisions.
I am watching Washington, which I know so well from a quarter century of high level participation, make the mistake of a lifetime. The Washington regime is so full of arrogance that it is unable to comprehend that Russia has run out of patience.
The Russians see a real problem. All Washington sees is a propaganda opportunity. This is a situation that leads directly to Washington miscalculating. The miscalculation will be fatal.
Update to America’s Foreign Policy Dilemma
In America Russophobia is running amuck.
The Propaganda Ministry repeats daily that Russia is on the verge of invading Ukraine.
The American people, long trained to regard Russia as the enemy, have heard the allegation so many times it has become a fact.
The arrogant Biden regime has rebuffed Russia’s security concern, and the Republicans are no better. Blind belligerence towards Russia is building as Republican senators add their voices to the propaganda that Putin intends to invade Ukraine and “rob the Ukrainian people of their sovereignty.”( Washington already did that when it overthrew the elected Ukrainian government in 2014 and established a puppet state in Kiev.)
The Republicans want to rush $450 million more in weapons to “the brave Ukrainian armed forces.” And for good measure, the Republicans want to have Russia designated a terrorist state.
The Ukraine crisis is in part an armaments marketing program as the Republicans backing the bill are in tight with the military/security complex. But everyone is overlooking the effect on the Kremlin whose trust in Washington has reached zero on the scale.
Perhaps in preparation for what the Kremlin sees will be a showdown over Washington’s indifference to Russia’s security concern, the Kremlin has ordered two strategic nuclear missile forces to combat duty. Additionally, Russia has closed the northern sea route and deployed radio engineering regiments and electronic domes to jam US over-the-horizon radar. If US naval provocations continue in the Black Sea, Russia might also close the Black Sea.
Meanwhile, the neo-nazi Ukrainian battalions armed by Washington are escalating the situation with the Donbass Russians.
Washington is setting itself up for an embarrassing backdown or a major confrontation for which Washington holds few cards.
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When Julius Caesar, after some hesitation, crossed the small river Rubicon in 49 B.C., he took a decisive and irreversible step against his opponents in Rome. “Thither go,” he is said to have exclaimed, “where the sign of the gods and the wrong of the enemy calls. The die is cast.” (1) “The sign of the gods” was a figure that appeared to him and crossed the river in front of him to the sound of trumpets.
Should not those fellow citizens whose minds are free and who have cast off all timidity follow Caesar’s courageous example and cross the Rubicon together?
That is, courageously confront the enemies of humanity and stand up to them, because through long hesitation the evils grow stronger. Every further criminal attack on humanity by the diabolical “elite” must be thwarted with civil disobedience and further non-violent activities. It must not be allowed that a small insane clique of power-obsessed super-rich terrorises as well as tries to subjugate the whole of humanity and is already planning the next global economic and social crisis – while we citizens hesitate to put a stop to them once and for all.
Two examples from the invaluable fund of alternative media
In order to adequately describe the current global political situation – according to Michel Chossudovsky “the worst crisis in modern history” – and to glimpse the possible future, I draw on two recent articles from the indispensable fund of modern independent media. Both have been published on the academic website “Global Research” and provide an unvarnished insight into current world events.
“Never before had humanity been exposed to so intense barrage of falsehood and absurdity in the guise of truth, science, concern, and fact.” (2)
His article provides context to the attempted human destruction project we are witnessing and adds comments on reconstruction. Few could have guessed, let alone understood, according to Snefjella, the attack on humanity that was officially launched publicly in March 2020.
Professor Chossudovsky’s second article, dated 14 December 2021, provides a glimpse of the future and is titled:
Klaus Schwab, the founder and CEO of the WEF and architect of the “Great Reset” describes the crisis scenario as follows, according to Chossudovsky:
“The frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyber attack could bring a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole. The COVID-19 crisis would be seen in this respect as a small disturbance in comparison to a major cyberattack.” (emphasis added)
WEF executive director Jeremy Juergens adds:
“I believe there will be another crisis. It will be more significant. It will be faster than what we’ve seen with COVID. The impact will be greater, and as a result the economic and social implications will be even more significant.” (emphasis added) (4)
So, what are we waiting for?
Embrace the warmongers too
Crossing the Rubicon requires also keeping an eye on the geopolitical situation and stopping the criminal warmongers. This is the concern of the new “Krefeld Appeal” of 16 November 2021 “Falling into the arms of the warmongers”. It was signed by well-known personalities, received much attention worldwide and warns against a war against humanity.
The new “Krefeld Appeal” complements the Public Declaration
“We Europeans Say NO to a War Against Russia”, which was already written many years ago. Both appeals can be viewed on the homepage of the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” (NRhZ) and can still be signed. Please, dear fellow citizens, make up your own minds (5).
If we let it happen, everyone dies alone
In the autumn of 1946, the German author Hans Fallada wrote his last novel, “Everyone Dies for Himself”. With it, he created a panorama of the lives of “normal” people in Nazi-era Berlin: after their son is killed in Hitler’s war, a Berlin couple wants to set signs of resistance. The quiet, sober couple write messages on cards and distribute them around the city. But they dared to resist the Nazis alone; therefore it was futile.
In 1943 they were both executed. Hans Fallada learned of their fate from a Gestapo file that came into his hands through the poet Johannes R. Becher, later Minister of Culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). More than 60 years after Fallada’s death in 1947, his novel became an international event and, in the words of “The New York Times”, a “major literary event” (6).
In the preface to his book, Hans Fallada addresses a few words to the reader:
“Some readers will find that there is quite a lot of torture and death in this book. The author takes the liberty of pointing out that this book deals almost exclusively with people who fought against the Hitler regime, with them and their persecutors. In these circles, quite a lot died in the years 1940 to 1942 and before and after. About a good third of this book is set in prisons and asylums, and dying was very much afoot in them as well. It also often didn’t please the author to paint such a bleak picture, but more brightness would have meant lying.” (7)
What distinguishes the noble from the common?
I leave the serious final word to Hermann H. Mitterer, an officer of the Austrian Armed Forces and former colleague. He too, in the preface of his 2019 book “Population Exchange in Europe. How the Global Elite Use Mass Migration to Replace the Native Population”, to his readers, saying:
“It is not wealth, not social position, not academic education that distinguishes the noble from the common. It is the ability to recognise the importance of supra-temporal values and the will to give personal sacrifice and, if necessary, one’s own life for their preservation.” (8)
(6) Fallada, Hans (2011,9). Every man for himself dies. Berlin. Book cover
(7) op. cit., p. 5.
(8) Mitterer, Hermann H. (2009). Population Exchange in Europe. How a global elite uses mass migration to replace the native population. Rottenburg, p. 4
Dr Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a retired rector, educationalist and graduate psychologist.
“It’s Christmas Eve! It’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be! It’s a sort of a miracle because it happens every Christmas Eve… There are people that are having trouble making their miracle happen… It’s not just the poor and the hungry, it’s everybody that’s gotta have this miracle!”— Scrooged (1988)
What a year.
It feels as if government Grinches, corporate Scrooges, and cancel culture humbugs have been working overtime to drain every last drop of joy, kindness and liberty from the world.
After endless months of gloom and doom, it can be hard to feel the joy of Christmas in the midst of rampant commercialism, political correctness and the casual cruelty of an apathetic, self-absorbed, dog-eat-dog world.
Then again, isn’t that struggle to overcome the darkness and find the light within exactly what Christmas—the celebration of a baby born in a manger—is all about? The reminder that we have not been forgotten or forsaken. Glad tidings in the midst of hard times. Goodwill to counter meanness. Innocence in the face of cynicism. Hope in the midst of despair. Comfort to soothe our fears. Peace as an answer to war. Love that conquers hate.
As “fellow-passengers to the grave,” we all have a moral duty to make this world (or at least our small corners of it) just a little bit kinder, a little less hostile and a lot more helpful to those in need.
No matter what one’s budget, religion, or political persuasion, there is no shortage of things we can each do right now to pay our blessings forward and recapture the true spirit of Christmas.
For starters, move beyond the “us” vs. “them” mentality. Tune into what’s happening in your family, in your community and your world, and get active. Show compassion to those in need, be kind to those around you, forgive those who have wronged you, and teach your children to do the same. Talk less, and listen more. Take less, and give more. Stop being a hater. Stop acting entitled and start being empowered. Learn tolerance in the true sense of the word. Value your family. Count your blessings. Share your blessings. Feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and comfort the lonely and broken-hearted. Build bridges, and tear down walls. Stand for freedom. Strive for peace.
One thing more: make time for joy and laughter. Shake off the blues with some Christmas tunes, whatever fits the bill for you, be it traditional carols, rollicking oldies, or some rocking new tunes. Watch a Christmas movie that reinforces your faith in the things that truly matter.
Here are ten of my favorite Christmas movies and music albums to get you started.
First the movies.
It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). An American classic about a despondent man, George Bailey who is saved from suicide by an angel working to get his wings. This film is a testament to director Frank Capra’s faith in people. Sublime performances by James Stewart and Donna Reed.
The Bishop’s Wife (1947). An angel comes to earth in answer to a bishop’s prayer for help. Cary Grant, David Niven and Loretta Young help energize this tale of lost visions and longings of the heart.
Miracle on 34th Street (1947). By happenchance, Kris Kringle is hired as Santa Claus by Macy’s Department Store in New York City for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Before long, Kringle, who believes himself to be the one and only Santa Claus, has impacted virtually everyone around him. Funny, witty and heartwarming, this film is stocked with some fine performances from Maureen O’Hara, John Payne and young Natalie Wood. Edmund Gwenn won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for his role as Saint Nick.
A Christmas Carol (1951). This is the best film version of the penny-pinching Scrooge’s journey to spiritual enlightenment by way of visits from supernatural visitors. Alastair Sim as Scrooge gives one of the finest film performances never to win an Oscar. The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) provides a wonderful glimpse into how Charles Dickens came to write A Christmas Carol.
A Christmas Story (1983). Ralphie is a young boy obsessed with one thing and only one thing: how to get a Red Ryder BB-gun for Christmas. Ralphie’s parents are wary, and his mother continually warns him that “you’ll shoot your eye out.” Based on Jean Shepherd’s autobiographical book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, at the heart of this timeless comedy is the universal yearning of a child for the magic of Christmas morning. A great cast, which includes Darren McGavin, Peter Billingsley, Melinda Dillon and a voice-over narrative by Shepherd himself.
One Magic Christmas (1985). If you grew up in a family where times were tough, this film is for you. A guardian angel comes to earth to help a disillusioned woman who hates Christmas. This tale of redemption and second chances is a delight to watch. And Harry Dean Stanton makes a first-class offbeat angel.
Prancer (1989). This story of an eight-year-old girl who believes that an injured reindeer in her barn is actually one of Santa’s reindeer is one of the most down-to-earth Christmas films ever made. It’s a testament to the transforming power of love and childhood innocence. Sam Elliott and Cloris Leachman are fine in supporting roles, but Rebecca Harrell shines. Filmed on location in freezing, snowy weather, this film is a treat for those who love Christmas.
Home Alone (1990). Eight-year-old Kevin, accidentally left behind at home when his family flies to Paris for Christmas, thinks he’s got it made. Hijinks ensue when two burglars match their wits against his. A funny, tender tribute to childhood and the bonds of family.
Elf (2003). Another modern classic with a lot of heart. Buddy, played to the hilt by Will Ferrell, is a human who was raised by elves at the North Pole. Determined to find his birth father, Buddy travels to the Big Apple and spreads his Christmas cheer to everyone he meets. This film has it all: Santa, elves, family problems, humor, emotion and above all else, a large dose of the Christmas spirit. One of the best Christmas movies ever made.
The Christmas Chronicles (2018). The story of a sister and brother, Kate and Teddy Pierce, whose Christmas Eve plan to catch Santa Claus on camera turns into an unexpected journey that most kids could only dream about. Kurt Russell’s star turn as Santa makes for movie magic.
Now for the music.
Out of the hundreds of Christmas albums I’ve listened to over the years, the following, covering a broad range of musical styles, moods and tastes, each in its own way perfectly captures the essence of Christmas for me.
It’s Christmas (EMI, 1989): 18 great songs, ranging from John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” to Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” The real treats on this album are Greg Lake’s “I Believe in Father Christmas,” Kate Bush’s “December Will Be Magic Again” and Aled Jones’ “Walking in the Air.”
Christmas Guitar (Rounder, 1986): 28 beautifully done traditional Christmas songs by master guitarist John Fahey. Hearing Fahey’s guitar strings plucking out “Joy to the World,” “Good King Wenceslas,” “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas,” among others, is a sublime experience.
Christmas Is A Special Day (The Right Stuff, 1993): 12 fine songs by Fats Domino, the great Fifties rocker, ranging from “Amazing Grace” to “Jingle Bells.” The title song, written by Domino himself, is a real treat. No one has ever played the piano keys like Fats.
Christmas Island (August/Private Music, 1989): “Frosty the Snowman” will never sound the same after you hear Leon Redbone and Dr. John do their duet. Neither will “Christmas Island” or “Toyland” on this collection of 11 traditional and rather offbeat songs.
A Holiday Celebration (Gold Castle, 1988): The classic folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary, backed by the New York Choral Society, sing traditional and nontraditional holiday fare on 12 beautifully orchestrated songs. Included are “I Wonder as I Wander,” “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” and “The Cherry Tree Carol.” Also thrown in is Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
The Christmas Album (Columbia, 1992): Neil Diamond sings 14 songs, ranging from “Silent Night” to “Jingle Bell Rock” to “The Christmas Song” to “Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Diamond also gives us a great rendition of Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” A delightful album.
A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy, 1988): 12 traditional Christmas songs by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. The pianist extraordinaire and his trio perform “O Tannenbaum,” “The Christmas Song” and “Greensleeves.” Also included is the Charlie Brown Christmas theme.
The Jethro Tull Christmas Album (Fuel Records, 2003): If you like deep-rooted traditional holiday songs, you’ll love this album. The 16 songs range from “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” to Ian Anderson originals such as “Another Christmas Song” and “Jack Frost and the Hooded Crow.” With Anderson on flute and vocals, this album has an old world flavor that will have you wanting mince pie and plum pudding.
A Twisted Christmas (Razor Tie, 2006): Twisted Sister, the heavy metal group, knocks the socks off a bevy of traditional and pop Christmas songs. Dee Snider’s amazing vocals brings to life “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” “Deck the Halls,” “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” among others—including “Heavy Metal Christmas (The Twelve Days of Christmas).” Great fun and a great band.
Songs for Christmas (Asthmatic Kitty, 2006): In 2001, independent singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens set out to create a Christmas gift through songs for his friends and family. It eventually grew to a 5-CD box set, which includes Stevens’ original take on such standards as “Amazing Grace” and “We Three Kings” and some inventive yuletide creations of his own. A lot of fun.
Before you know it, Christmas will be a distant memory and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming of “us vs. them” politics, war, violence, materialism and mayhem.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, there may not be much we can do to avoid the dismal reality of the American police state in the long term—not so long as the powers-that-be allow profit margins to take precedence over people—but in the short term, I hope you’ll do your part to “spread a smile of joy” and “throw your arms around the world at Christmastime.”
As you celebrate the season, take to heart the closing sermon in The Bishop’s Wife:
“Once upon a midnight clear, there was a child’s cry, a blazing star hung over a stable, and wise men came with birthday gifts. We haven’t forgotten that night down the centuries. We celebrate it with stars on Christmas trees, with the sound of bells, and with gifts… We forget nobody, adult or child. All the stockings are filled, all that is, except one. And we have even forgotten to hang it up. The stocking for the child born in a manger. It’s his birthday we’re celebrating. Don’t let us ever forget that. Let us ask ourselves what He would wish for most. And then, let each put in his share, loving kindness, warm hearts, and a stretched out hand of tolerance. All the shining gifts that make peace on earth.”—The Bishop’s Wife (1947)
American multinational aircraft manufacturer and government contractor Boeing has issued a statement declaring that it will not enforce Joe Biden’s controversial and divisive COVID-19 vaccine mandate after a series of federal rulings have dealt the White House devastating losses.
In a statement first obtained by Seattle-based KIRO, Boeing announced their intention to suspend the mandate.
“We continue to encourage our employees to get vaccinated and get a booster shot if they have not done so,” a Boeing spokesperson said.
“Meanwhile, after careful review, Boeing has suspended its vaccination requirement in line with a federal court’s decision prohibiting enforcement of the federal contractor executive order and a number of state laws.”
Boeing employs over 140,000 workers across the United States, and is the second largest federal contractor in the country.
Being a federal contractor, Boeing was subject to an executive order from the Biden White House demanding that all of its employs be vaccinated.
Related Report
This executive order was halted by a federal judge earlier this month.:Joe Biden and his White House’s legally questionable vaccine mandate for federal contractors’ was halted nationwide by a federal judge on Tuesday, it was confirmed this morning.
Set to take effect on January 4, 2022, the mandate applied to nearly one quarter of the entire United States workforce, as the mandate targeted all companies that do business with the federal government such as Microsoft, Google, Lockheed Martin, and General Motors.
This latest vaccine mandate shutdown comes after Kentucky federal judge’s grant of a preliminary injunction involving a lawsuit in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio.
The Biden regime’s government contractor mandate sparked a vast flurry of federal lawsuits from Arizona, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, and Georgia, which argued that the regime did not have the legal authority to require the experimental injections, and that any such mandate was in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.
This marks the latest defeat to the Biden regime’s vaccination agenda, even as the vaccine is seemingly rendered useless by the spread of the Omicron variant.
The Danes are now publishing extremely detailed daily data about Covid cases and hospitalizations – not just about Omicron, but all Covid variants.
And, in news that will surprise precisely no one who has been alive the last two years, they paint a picture entirely different than what the media claims.
Omicron – which continues to appear significantly less dangerous though more transmissible than earlier variants of Covid – has been used as a cover for vaccine failure.
Most new Covid cases in Denmark occur in people who are vaccinated or boosted – and that is true for both Omicron and earlier variants. More than 76 percent of non-Omicron Covid infections in Denmark are in vaccinated people, along with about 90 percent of Omicron infections.
Further, only 25 of the 561 people currently hospitalized in Denmark for Covid have the Omicron variant. The Danes do not provide an exact number for patients in intensive care with Omicron, saying only that it is fewer than five.
Perhaps the most stunning fact about Omicron and Denmark is that its rise actually parallels a marked slowdown in the growth of Danish hospitalizations and intensive care patients. Those rose roughly fivefold between mid-October and late November, as the Danes left the happy vaccine valley. Since then they have barely budged, rising about 20 percent.
Danish Covid hospitalizations over the last three months: note that the rise predates Omicron.
The Danish data also show that people with Omicron are both less likely to be hospitalized than those with other variants and released from the hospital much more quickly – in line with what South African health authorities have reported.
On Friday, for example, the Danes reported that the total number of hospital patients with Omicron since the epidemic began reached 77, up by 20 patients from Thursday.
But the number of Omicron patients currently hospitalized rose only by eight between Thursday and Friday, from 17 to 25. Thus 12 out of the 17 Omicron patients on Thursday appear to have been released overnight.
Compared to Monday’s report, the trend is even more clear. The number of Omicron cases has roughly tripled, but the number of people hospitalized has barely budged, from 14 to 25.
About the only reason for concern in any of the Danish data is that Omicron still appears to be preferentially infecting younger people – though not people under 15, who are more likely to be unvaccinated.
Overall, though, the figures out of Denmark largely back those from South Africa – and make clear that the reason that Europe has seen a massive rise in cases and hospitalizations this fall has nothing to do with Omicron and everything to do with vaccine failure.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials skipped the start of oral arguments Tuesday as a federal district court weighed whether the agency can take 75 years to fully release documents on Pfizer’s Comirnaty COVID vaccine, according to a lawyer representing plaintiffs who sued the FDA for the documents.
A U.S. Department of Justice lawyer representing the FDA told the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas the agency will produce more than 329,000 related documents as fast as it can, while safeguarding personally identifiable information and Pfizer trade secrets.
Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT), the group behind the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and subsequent lawsuit, is seeking safety and effectiveness data, adverse reaction reports and a list of active and inactive vaccine ingredients.
PHMPT is a group of more than 30 scientists, medical professionals, international public health professionals and journalists. The group’s lawsuit argues the FDA is overestimating the time needed and understaffing the job.
“Assuming a low average of 50 pages per hour per person, even to review the hundreds of thousands of pages the FDA estimates, the agency would need just 19 reviewers to work full-time for 12 weeks to review and produce these documents — which is a tiny fraction of its approximately 18,000 employees,” said PHMPT in a legal brief filed Monday.
FOIA does not mandate any particular processing schedule, only that the agency process requests “as soon as practicable,” the FDA said in a legal brief filed Monday.
“The bottom-line issue still remains what processing schedule is ‘practicable’ for the agency,” the FDA said.
At the agency’s proposed rate of 500 documents per month, the last documents would be released in 2096.
A quote from Business Intelligence Associates, an e-discovery company, estimated 400,000 pages could be produced within six to eight weeks at a cost of $132,000, according to PHMPT.
PHMPT wants the FDA documents released within 108 days. That’s the same amount of time the FDA spent reviewing the responsive documents for “the far more intricate task” of licensing Pfizer’s vaccine, the group said in its lawsuit.
“Americans must routinely produce documents, pay fines, and otherwise expend resources to comply with the law. Courts don’t inquire as to the ability or financial resources to comply with the law — they must comply.
“In fact, it would be laughable if a billionaire defendant came before a court and claimed poverty to escape making a document production, but that is the FDA’s position.”
The FDA budget for fiscal year 2019 was $6.1 billion.
In the FDA’s 64-page briefing, the agency argued it needed the full 75 years to redact and release the documents out of “fairness” to other FOIA requesters.
“Fairness would be giving millions of Americans who are mandated to receive this liability-free vaccine today assurance regarding the FDA’s review by allowing independent scientists access to the same data the FDA reviewed, without making them wait decades.
“Fairness would be allowing Americans injured by the vaccine today, who cannot sue Pfizer or anyone else for the harm, hope that independent scientists with access to that data can more readily develop treatments for their ailments.
“Fairness would be our federal health authorities allocating more than one person spending a few hours each month to review Pfizer’s documents for public disclosure after having given Pfizer over $17 billion of taxpayer money to develop and market the product.
“That would be fair to the American people.”
Siri noted that no decision has been made by the court and that a transcript of this week’s hearing should be released soon.
U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) earlier this month introduced a bill that would force the FDA to release them in 100 days.
Dr. Marty Makary, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, on Tuesday accused government officials of practicing “modern-day McCarthyism” against anyone who suggests young healthy people, especially those who recovered from COVID, don’t need booster shots.
Dr. Marty Makary on Tuesday accused public health officials of “modern-day McCarthyism,” and publishing studies not worthy of “a 7th-grade science experiment.”
The public health researcher and professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health told members of the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis some COVID policies have become “too extreme, too rigid and are no longer driven by clinical data.”
Makary zeroed in on natural immunity and COVID booster shots for teens. He criticized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) rush to push boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds based on lab experiments suggesting boosters raise antibody levels against Omicron.
Vaccine makers announced the results of the experiments without releasing any of the underlying scientific data, Makary said.
“Is this what we’ve come to,” Makary asked? “Pharma tells us what to do and the CDC just falls in line?”
Makary assured committee members he isn’t “anti-vax” — he’s been vaccinated for COVID.
But he’s a strong proponent of acknowledging natural immunity, and not requiring people who have recovered from COVID — especially young people — to get the vaccine.
That viewpoint has made him the target of criticism, Makary said.
“We have a modern-day McCarthyism whenever somebody questions COVID booster shots for kids,” Makary said.
Makary reminded committee members that, despite a combined annual budget of about $58 billion, neither the CDC nor the National Institutes of Health have produced credible studies on natural immunity to COVID — something his research team is undertaking, using private money.
The CDC did publish two studies earlier this year, claiming to show vaccine immunity trumps natural immunity. Those studies were so flawed, in Makary’s opinion, they were “worse than a 7th grade science experiment.”
Makary accused the CDC of knowingly publishing flawed studies so people would get the vaccine, rather than wait to acquire natural immunity by getting and recovering from the virus.
“Many lives are being destroyed” by the government’s failure to recognize natural immunity, Makary said.
The company says the implanted chip will be able to read any device that uses the Near Field Communication (NFC) protocol.
“Implants are a very versatile technology that can be used for a variety of purposes, and now it is very helpful to have your Covid passport at your fingertips. If your phone runs out of battery, the Covid passport will always be available,” company representative Hannes Sjoblad.
He explained that the chips can be implanted either between the thumb and forefinger, or in the arm itself just above the wrist. The microchip itself is the size of a grain of rice. Hannes Sjoblad argues that the implementation process is completely reversible.
According to the researcher of digital cultures Moa Petersen, at the moment in Sweden, about 6 000 people have already implanted a chip in their hand, but this does not mean that they all loaded their Covid passports there. The chips can store not only certificates, but also office documents, bus passes or gym membership.
In the crudest, most political judgement in memory, two High Court judges in London have ordered the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States, where a trial in a kangaroo court awaits him, followed by a life lost in a barbaric prison system.
“Let us look at ourselves, if we have the courage, to see what is happening to us” – Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre’s words should echo in all our minds following the grotesque decision of Britain’s High Court to extradite Julian Assange to the United States where he faces “a living death”. This is his punishment for the crime of authentic, accurate, courageous, vital journalism.
Miscarriage of justice is an inadequate term in these circumstances. It took the bewigged courtiers of Britain’s ancien regime just nine minutes last Friday to uphold an American appeal against a District Court judge’s acceptance in January of a cataract of evidence that hell on earth awaited Assange across the Atlantic: a hell in which, it was expertly predicted, he would find a way to take his own life.
Volumes of witness by people of distinction, who examined and studied Julian and diagnosed his autism and his Asperger’s Syndrome and revealed that he had already come within an ace of killing himself at Belmarsh prison, Britain’s very own hell, were ignored.
The recent confession of a crucial FBI informant and prosecution stooge, a fraudster and serial liar, that he had fabricated his evidence against Julian was ignored. The revelation that the Spanish-run security firm at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where Julian had been granted political refuge, was a CIA front that spied on Julian’s lawyers and doctors and confidants (myself included) – that, too. was ignored.
The recent journalistic disclosure, repeated graphically by defence counsel before the High Court in October, that the CIA had planned to murder Julian in London – even that was ignored.
Each of these “matters”, as lawyers like to say, was enough on its own for a judge upholding the law to throw out the disgraceful case mounted against Assange by a corrupt US Department of Justice and their hired guns in Britain. Julian’s state of mind, bellowed James Lewis, QC, America’s attack dog at the Old Bailey last year, was no more than “malingering” – an archaic Victorian term used to deny the very existence of mental illness.
To Lewis, almost every defence witness, including those who described from the depth of their experience and knowledge, the barbaric American prison system, was to be interrupted, abused, discredited. Sitting behind him, passing him notes, was his American conductor: young, short-haired, clearly an Ivy League man on the rise.
In their nine minutes of dismissal of the fate of journalist Assange, two of the most senior judges in Britain, including the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Burnett (a lifelong buddy of Sir Alan Duncan, Boris Johnson’s former foreign minister who arranged the brutal police kidnapping of Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy) referred to not one of a litany of truths aired at previous hearings in the Old Bailey and the District Court – truths that had struggled to be heard in the lower court presided over by a weirdly hostile judge, Vanessa Baraitser. One episode of her insulting behaviour towards a clearly stricken Assange, struggling through a fog of prison-dispensed medication to remember his name, is unforgettable.
What was truly shocking last Friday was that the High Court judges – Lord Burnett and Lord Justice Timothy Holyrode, who read out their words – showed no hesitation in sending Julian to his death, living or otherwise. They offered no mitigation, no suggestion that they had agonised over legalities or even basic morality.
Their ruling in favour, if not on behalf of the United States, is based squarely on transparently fraudulent “assurances” scrabbled together by the Biden administration when it looked in January as if justice might prevail.
These “assurances” are that once in American custody, Assange will not be subject to the Orwellian SAMS – Special Administrative Measures – which would make him an un-person; that he will not be imprisoned at ADX Florence, a prison in Colorado long condemned by jurists and human rights groups as illegal: “a pit of punishment and disappearance”; that he can be transferred to an Australian prison to finish his sentence there.
The absurdity of this lies in what the judges omitted to say. In offering its “assurances”, the US reserves the right not to guarantee any pledge made in court should Assange do something that displeases his jailers. In other words, as Amnesty has pointed out, it reserves the right to break any promise, or all of them.
There are abundant examples of the US doing just that. As investigative journalist Richard Medhurst revealed last month, David Mendoza Herrarte was extradited from Spain to the US on the “promise” that he would serve his sentence in Spain. The Spanish courts regarded this as a binding condition.
“Classified documents reveal the diplomatic assurances given by the US Embassy in Madrid and how the US violated the conditions of the extradition “, wrote Medhurst, “Mendoza spent six years in the US trying to return to Spain. Court documents show the United States denied his transfer application multiple times.”
The High Court judges – who were aware of the Mendoza case and of Washington’s habitual duplicity – describe the “assurances” as a “solemn undertaking offered by one government to another”. This article would stretch into infinity if I listed the times the rapacious United States has broken “solemn undertakings” to governments, such as treaties that are summarily torn up and civil wars that are fuelled. It is the way Washington has ruled the world, and before it Britain: the way of imperial power, as history teaches us.
It is this institutional lying and duplicity that Julian Assange brought into the open and in so doing performed perhaps the greatest public service of any journalist in modern times.
Julian himself has been a prisoner of lying governments for more than a decade now. During these long years, I have sat in many courts as the United States has sought to manipulate the law to silence him and WikiLeaks. The obsession to “get him” has been unrelenting.
This reached a bizarre moment when, in the tiny Ecuadorean embassy, he and I were forced to flatten ourselves against a wall, each with a notepad in which we conversed, taking care to shield what we had written to each other from the ubiquitous spy cameras – installed, as we now know, by a proxy of the CIA, the world’s most enduring criminal organisation.
This brings me to the quotation at the top of this article: “Let us look at ourselves, if we have the courage, to see what is happening.”
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote this in his preface to Franz Fannon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the classic study of how colonised and seduced and coerced and, yes, craven peoples do the bidding of the powerful.
Who among us is prepared to stand up rather than remain mere bystanders to an epic travesty such as the judicial kidnapping of Julian Assange? What is at stake is both a courageous man’s life and, if we remain silent, the conquest of our intellects and sense of right and wrong: indeed our very humanity.
(Julian’s fiancée, Stella Moris, has revealed that Julian suffered a stroke on 27 October, the opening day of a previous High Court hearing).
The New York Times (NYT) has revealed that a top secret US cell known as Talon Anvil sidestepped safeguards and repeatedly ordered airstrikes that killed an untold number of civilians in Syria under the guise of targeting ISIS fighters.
According to the report published on 12 December, the shadowy group operated from anonymous rooms “cluttered with flat screens” in three shifts around the clock between 2014 and 2019.
Among US officials, Talon Anvil was known to disregard safeguard procedures to function at the “speed of war,” and obscured a countless number of civilian deaths including farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and villagers taking shelter in buildings.
The NYT report also claims that Talon Anvil played an “outsize role” in the dropping of over 100,000 bombs in the war-torn country.
“They were ruthlessly efficient and good at their jobs … but they also made a lot of bad strikes,” a former Air Force intelligence officer who worked on hundreds of classified Talon Anvil missions told the NYT.
Among the many bombing campaigns that Talon Anvil was responsible for is the 2019 airstrike in the eastern Syrian governorate of Dayr al-Zawr which killed over 60 civilians, including dozens of women and children. This particular attack has been described as being “part of a pattern of reckless strikes that started years earlier.”
US Air Force officials who spoke with the NYT on condition of anonymity said that over the years they notified their commanding officers several times about Talon Anvil’s disregard for civilian lives. However, the military leaders seemed reluctant to scrutinize the strike cell as it was “driving the offensive” on the battlefield.
According to Larry Lewis, a former Pentagon and State Department adviser, every year that Talon Anvil operated in Syria the civilian casualty rate increased significantly.
Lewis also claims that US military commanders “enabled the tactics by failing to emphasize the importance of reducing civilian casualties.” He singles out General Stephen J. Townsend, who commanded US troops in Syria in 2016 and 2017, as being “dismissive of widespread reports from news media and human rights organizations describing the mounting toll.”
Talon Anvil’s operations were highly classified and the strike cell as a whole never existed in an official manner. It was run by a classified Special Operations unit called Task Force 9, whose other tasks included training allied Syrian and Kurdish armed groups.
The strike cell reportedly worked out of “bland office spaces” both in Iraq and Syria and were in control of a “fleet of Predator and Reaper drones that bristled with precision Hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs.”
They carried out most of their operations based on tips from allied forces, secret electronic intercepts, drone cameras, and other information to find enemy targets.
A former member of Talon Anvil told the NYT that the strike cell often decided that something was an enemy target with scant supporting evidence. But as suspicion mounted over their tactics, Talon Anvil began to classify nearly all of its attacks as defensive – even when targets were 100 miles away from the front lines.
“It’s more expedient to resort to self-defense,” said Lewis. “It’s easier to get approved.”
The drone operators were also known to turn away the drone cameras away from targets before launching bombs or missiles to avoid accountability.
The operators also pressured analysts, who watched drone footage after strikes had taken place, to report that they had seen weapons or other evidence that would justify a strike hit. If they refused, the cell would simply ask for another analyst.
To the majority of politically correct conformists of Western Europe, North America and beyond, Jesus Christ is a dangerous subverter of the status quo. This, in spite of the fact that they claim to be adherents of the values he proclaimed.
The message put across by the most followed figurehead of the Christian faith, juxtaposed into this moment of time, is far too radical for any western government to go anywhere near. Yet these same governments – or at least the majority of their members – will proclaim their belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ.
This goes to the very heart of the definition of ‘hypocrisy’.
To proclaim unity over division, love over hate, freedom of the individual over authoritarian control, justice over injustice and self enlightenment over top down dogma – the central message of Jesus’s teachings – is currently to be labelled ‘not normal’.
To all those who prefer to do what they are told – to be ‘not normal’ means ‘not one of us’ – even if this means supporting a modern day policy of segregation, suppression and slandering of those guilty of of not conforming to ‘the rules of the game’.
Some 2,000 years ago it appears that the same conditions prevailed. To go against them was ‘a criminal offence’. An offence against the diktats of the Holy Roman Empire, and the punishment was to be ostracised, imprisoned or put to death.
The non conformist of the politically correct status quo today is faced by precisely the same techniques of oppression, with only the death sentence being largely outlawed. Which does not mean that those considered the greatest threat to the state won’t ‘loose their lives’ via some covert secretive way or other.
Jesus stood fully against fascism, many facets of which were at large amongst the corrupt officials of the Roman Empire. He also exposed the fake officialdom and materialistic ambitions of the clerks, stewards and ‘money hoarders’ who dominated the great cities of that era.
Has anything changed?
To stand-up against the top-down politically repressive cabal today is to be vilified as ‘a terrorist’ or ‘a mental case’ – and singled-out for special surveillance and monitoring.
To speak the truth and to speak-out against the lies perpetuated in the parliaments of the western world, is to be instantly framed as a ‘conspiracy theorist’, of which Jesus was perhaps the original role model.
Yet the very people who stand-up on their moral soap-boxes to proclaim the good Christian values they profess to follow – and demand from others – are the very ones to condemn the ‘conspiracy theorist’ for daring to carry forward the wisdom of the teachings of he who the fake moralists also proclaim as their traditional value model.
It is well known that passages of The New Testament, in the course of many translations and editorial abridgements, have been expurgated and watered down so as to sterilise the more radical teachings of Jesus Christ. This is paralleled today by the leading voices of the resistance to a totalitarian take-over being blocked from having a public voice by the mainstream media and by social media sites owned by corporate clones and deep state financiers.
The truth, it seems, has always been dangerous.
This planet has been in the hands of the oppressors of truth for well over 2,000 years. Their ambitions have grown steadily greater throughout the passage of time. Now they want to claim not only ‘full spectrum dominance’ over every aspect of the daily life of the planet, but to take control of the human soul itself. To digitalise and genetically engineer the very molecules, cells and genes of the human species to fit their cold anti-life vision.
To breed-out the God instinct that leads humanity in the direction of justice, love, wisdom, truth – and oneness with the Supreme Creator.
The great scamdemic being manifested today by the perpetrators of the demonic anti life/pro death control obsessed cabal, is built upon the underlying use of fear to keep people in a permanent state of imbalance, anxiety and stress. A state which makes control mechanisms very easy to put in place.
Yet a significant proportion of those who are complicit in aiding the cabal to do their hatchet job call themselves Christians, which means followers of the teachings of Jesus.
This Christmas, let’s encourage those we personally know; those in our families and social milieux and those in positions of power in society, to join in meditating on what values we are committed to uphold in the great battle for the future direction of the planet.
Peace, love, wisdom and truth; or division, hate, foolhardiness and lies? The great teachings of spiritual masters – or the power pursuits of aspiring fascists?
Let’s not be kind to hypocrites, even if we find ourselves to be one of them. The future of the soul of man is at stake.
Be bold, brave and bright this Christmas – or don’t celebrate it at all. Don’t be just another hypocrite.
Seasons greetings.
Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher. He is co-founder of HARE The Hardwick Alliance for Real Ecology see https://hardwickalliance.org/ Julian’s acclaimed book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info
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In my video dated 11th December I detailed some of the health problems which face the gullible folk who have succumbed to the lies and misinformation shared so widely and enthusiastically by governments, the medical establishment and the mainstream media.
It has been established that there is much that no one yet knows about the covid-19 jabs and the eagerness of the Medicines and healthcare products regulatory agency in the UK to licence a product about which information appeared to be lacking has never been adequately explained. We do know however that, as I was the first to reveal, the MHRA received a huge sum of money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – which has financial links with jab producers such as Pfizer.
As far as the effect on the brain is concerned the big question is, can the lipid nanoparticles carry the mRNA jab across the blood brain barrier?
The blood brain barrier is a semi permeable barrier of cells which prevent some substances in the blood from crossing into the protective fluid around the central nervous system.
It is vital to know if this happens because if it does then all bets are off as to what might happen to the brain.
And after all, liquid nanoparticles are already used to deliver other drugs across the blood brain barrier.
If the LNPs carry the mRNA jab into the brain then the neurons, the brain cells, might be marked as foreign by the body’s immune system. And as more booster jabs are given the problem will get worse.
The worry is that brain cells might be targeted and killed by cytotoxic T cells.
It has now been established that mRNA has been found in all human tissues except the kidney. It has been found in heart, lung, liver, testicles – and brain. A Japanese study, for example, showed that the vaccine does end up in the brain.
Also worrying is the fact that researchers have called for studies to investigate any relationship between jabs and acute CNS demyelination.
How much damage will this do?
How long will it take before brain damage can be identified?
I don’t have the foggiest idea.
And nor does anyone else.
In a normal experiment with a new drug, doctors would be looking and checking all the possible problems before releasing the drug for widespread use.
But the covid-19 jabs are being rolled out to billions without any one having the faintest idea what will happen.
If you have been jabbed, the first certainty seems to be that the mRNA vaccine will enter your brain.
The second certainty is that the more covid jabs you have, the more dangerous this will be.
How many of your brain cells will die is something only time will tell. And children, of course, will be more vulnerable because they are more vulnerable anyway and because they are likely to live longer.
Some experts, advisors and regulators will tell you that the risks are small. But how can they know that? And what is small? They told us that the blood clotting problems were small.
In my view, having one of these jabs is the equivalent of taking a huge dose of LSD and waiting to see what happens. And hoping that you’re not going to end up like Peter Green for example.
And, remember, the covid-19 jabs don’t stop you getting covid-19 and they don’t stop you passing it on. According to the NHS’s own guidelines in the UK you can still get or spread covid-19 even if you have had three jabs.
The choice about whether or not to be jabbed should be yours.
But governments want to make these jabs compulsory.
If this jab were being given for a lethal disease with a 50% mortality rate then the risks might be worth taking. It’s not and they’re not.
Thank you for watching an old man in a chair. And thanks to Brand New Tube and to Muhammad Butt. Please subscribe to my channel on Brand New Tube and spread my videos about on other platforms such as Rumble, Brighteon, Odysee and Bitchute. My thanks to everyone who does this. Put this video on Twitter and Facebook too. If you get your wrist slapped regard it as a war injury. Please do translations too. All the papers and so on that I refer to can easily be found on the internet. If I give you all the links I’ll never do anything else. We do put up transcripts of the videos on both websites and when possible we add important links.
For the record, this channel has not been monetised – none of my videos ever has been. There are no ads, no sponsors and no requests for funds on videos or websites.
Don’t forget to watch my friend Dr Colin Barron’s amazing videos which are always fantastic and often incredibly funny. And visit his website www.colinbarron.co.uk.
Read www.theLightpaper.co.uk for all the news considered too truthful to print by the mainstream media. An amazing 200,000 copies are distributed. That’s a bigger circulation than The Guardian. Make sure you get hold of a copy of `We are the 99%’ recorded by Darren and the Daz Band which is the anthem for the Resistance Movement. It’s vital it’s the Christmas Number One. There is a link to it on both my websites. And visit and astandinthepark.org which will give advice on how and where to stand in a park.
Please visit my own websites www.vernoncoleman.org and www.vernoncoleman.com.www.vernoncoleman.com is more old fashioned but contains hundreds of articles on animal issues, politics and much else in addition to health. You can find free books on both sites and brand new stuff is added every weekday. There are hundreds of original articles to read and, of course, the feature detailing vaccine damage is updated every week. New articles are added most days.
Vernon Coleman’s Wednesday Review will, God willing, appear here every Wednesday at 7pm. If it doesn’t then either something has happened to me or the video has been suppressed as has so much of my work these days.
We all need to pray for the truth to be shared by the many, not just the few. Whatever your religion you need to pray because the people running this fraud respect only lies but, in the way that vampires fear sunlight, they fear the truth – it is your government’s greatest enemy and our only weapon. Finally, although it may feel like it at times, please remember that you are not alone. More and more people are waking up and once they are awake they don’t go back to sleep. – which means our numbers are growing daily.
If we are going to win this war then we have to fight hard and with determination and passion and the truth. Remember, this is primarily a propaganda and media war.
Distrust the government, avoid mass media and fight the lies.
Thank you for watching an old man in a chair.
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Vernon Coleman’s no 1 bestselling bookEndgame explains the awful truth behind the covid fraud and the global warming fraud – and explains where we are heading. Endgame is available from Amazon as a paperback and an eBook.
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This article was originally published in February 2021.
As I reported on my website back in March, on March 19th, the public health bodies in the UK and the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens decided that the new disease shouldno longer be classified as a ‘high consequence infectious disease’ (click on the link below to see the proof). The coronavirus was downgraded to flu level.
Here is the statement
As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK. There are many diseases which can cause serious illness which are not classified as HCIDs.
A couple of days after this decision, the UK Government introduced lockdowns and introduced the most oppressive Bill in British Parliamentary history.
The Emergency Bill, which was 358 pages long, turned Britain into a totalitarian state and gave the Government and the police unprecedented powers. Public meetings and elections were banned and there were new powers relating to ‘restrictions on use and disclosure of information’.
There are still people who do not know that the coronavirus was downgraded to `flu’ threat back in March. Please send the link to MPs and newspapers. It proves that everything that has happened since March has been a lie.
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First published by Global Research on October 22, 2021
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The price of energy from all sources conventional is exploding globally. Far from accidental, it is a well-orchestrated plan to collapse the industrial world economy that has already been weakened dramatically by almost two years of ridiculous covid quarantine and related measures.
What we are seeing is a price explosion in key oil, coal and now especially, natural gas energy. What makes this different from the energy shocks of the 1970s is that this time, it is developing as the corporate investment world, using the fraudulent ESG green investment model, is dis-investing in future oil, gas and coal while OECD governments embrace horrendously inefficient, unreliable solar and wind that will insure the collapse of industrial society perhaps as early as the next months. Barring a dramatic rethinking, the EU and other industrial economies are willfully committing economic suicide.
What only a few years ago was accepted as obvious was that ensuring an abundant, reliable, efficient and affordable energy defines the economy. Without efficient energy we cannot make steel, concrete, mine raw materials or any of the things that support our modern economies. In the past months the world price of coal for power generation has doubled. The price of natural gas has risen by almost 500%. Oil is headed to $90 a barrel, highest in seven years. This is a planned consequence of what is sometimes called the Davos Great Reset or the Green Agenda zero carbon madness.
Some two decades ago Europe began a major shift to mis-named renewables or Green Energy, mainly solar and wind. Germany, the heart of EU industry, led the transformation with former chancellor Merkel’s ill-conceived Energiewende, where Germany’s last nuclear power plants will close in 2022 and coal plants are rapidly being phased out. This all has now collided with the reality that Green Energy is not at all able to deal with major supply shortages. The crisis was entirely predictable.
Green Chickens Come Home to Roost
With the widespread covid lockdowns of industry and travel in 2020 EU natural gas consumption fell dramatically. The largest EU gas supplier, Gazprom of Russia, in interest of an orderly long-term market, duly reduced its deliveries to the EU market even at a loss. An unusually mild 2019-2020 winter allowed EU gas storage to reach maximum. A long, severe winter all but erased that in 2021.
Contrary to EU politicians’ claims, Gazprom has not played politics with the EU to force approval of its new NordStream 2 gas pipeline to Germany. As EU demand resumed in the first six months of 2021, Gazprom rushed to meet it and even exceed record 2019 levels, and even at the expense of replenishing Russian gas storage for the coming winter.
With the EU now firmly committed to a Green Energy agenda, Fit for 55, and explicitly rejecting natural gas as a long-term option, while at the same time killing coal and nuclear, the incompetence of the think-tank climate models that justified a 100% CO2-free, electric society by 2050 has come home to roost.
Because financial investors on Wall Street and London saw the benefit of huge profits from the Green energy agenda, working with the Davos World Economic Forum to promote the laughable ESG investing model, conventional oil, gas and coal companies are not investing profits in expanded production. In 2020 worldwide spending on oil, gas, coal dropped by an estimated $1 trillion. That is not coming back.
With BlackRock and other investors all but boycotting ExxonMobil and other energy companies in favor of “sustainable” energy, the prospects of one exceptionally cold and long winter in Europe and a record lack of wind in northern Germany, triggered a panic buying of gas on world LNG Markets in early September.
The problem was the restocking was too late, as most available LNG from the USA, Qatar and other sources that normally would be available had already been sold to China where an equally confused energy policy, including a political ban on Australian coal, has led to plant closings and a recent government order to secure gas and coal “at any cost.” Qatar, US LNG exporters and others have flocked to Asia leaving the EU in the cold, literally.
Deregulation of Energy
What few understand is how today’s Green energy markets are rigged to benefit speculators like hedge funds or investors like BlackRock or Deutsche Bank and penalize energy consumers. The headline prices for natural gas traded in Europe, the Dutch TTF futures contract, is sold by the London-based ICE Exchange. It speculates on what future wholesale natural gas prices in the EU will be in one, two or three months hence. The ICE is backed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Société Générale among others. The market is in what are called gas futures contracts or derivatives.
Banks or others can speculate for pennies on the dollar, and when news broke on how low EU gas storage for the coming winter were, financial sharks went on a feeding frenzy. By early October futures prices for Dutch TTF gas had exploded by an unprecedented 300% in only days. Since February it is far worse, as a standard LNG cargo of 3.4 trillion BTU (British Thermal Units) now costs $100-120 million, while at the end of February its cost was less than $20 million. That’s a 500-600% rise in seven months.
The underlying problem is that, unlike the case for most of the postwar period, since the political promotion of unreliable and high-cost solar and wind “renewables” in the EU and elsewhere (e.g. Texas, February 2021) electric utility markets and their prices have been deliberately deregulated to promote Green alternatives and force out gas and coal on the dubious argument that their CO2 emissions endanger the future of humankind if not reduced to zero by 2050.
The prices borne by the end consumer are set by the energy suppliers who integrate the different costs under competitive conditions. The diabolical way EU electricity costs are computed, allegedly to encourage inefficient solar and wind and discourage conventional sources, is that, as French energy analyst Antonio Haya put it, “the most expensive plant of those needed to cover demand (marginal plant) sets the price for each hour of production for all the production matched in the auction.” So today’s natural gas price sets the price for essentially zero cost hydro-electric electricity. Given the soaring price for natural gas, that is defining EU electricity costs. It’s a diabolical pricing architecture that benefits speculators and destroys consumers, including households and industry.
A fundamental aggravating cause for the recent shortages of abundant coal, gas and oil is the decision by BlackRock and other global money trusts to force investment away from oil, gas or coal—all perfectly safe and necessary energy sources—to buildup of grossly inefficient and unreliable solar or wind. They call it ESG investing. It is the latest rage on Wall Street and other world financial markets ever since BlackRock CEO Larry Fink joined the Board of the Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum in 2019. They set up front ESG certifying companies that award ESG “politically correct” ratings on stock companies, and punishing those who do not comply. The rush into ESG investing has made billions for Wall Street and friends. It has also put the brakes on future development of oil, coal or natural gas for most of the world.
The ‘German Disease’
Now after 20 years of foolish investment into solar and wind, Germany, the once-flagship of EU industry, is a victim of what we can call the German Disease. Like the economic Dutch Disease, the forced investment into Green Energy has resulted in the lack of reliable affordable energy. All for an unproven 1.5C claim of IPCC that is supposed to end our civilization by 2050 if we fail to reach Zero Carbon.
To advance that EU Green Energy agenda, country after country with a few exceptions have begun dismantling oil, gas and coal and even nuclear. Germany’s last remaining nuclear plants will permanently close next year. New coal plants, with latest state-of-art scrubbers, are being scrapped even before being started.
The German case gets even more absurd.
In 2011 the Merkel government took an energy model developed by Martin Faulstich and the state Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU) which claimed that Germany could attain 100% renewable electricity generation by 2050. They argued that using nuclear longer would not be necessary, nor the construction of coal-fired plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS). With that, Merkel’s catastrophic Energiewende was born. The study argued, it would work because Germany could contract to buy surplus, CO2-free, hydro-electric power from Norway and Sweden.
Now with extreme drought and a hot summer, the hydropower reserves of Sweden and Norway are dangerously low coming into winter, only 52% of capacity. That means the electric power cables to Denmark, Germany and now UK are in danger. And to make it worse, Sweden is split on shutting its own nuclear plants which give it 40% of electricity. And France is debating cutting as much as one-third of its clear nuclear plants meaning that source for Germany will also not be sure.
Already on January 1, 2021 because of a German government mandated coal phase-out, 11 coal-fired power plants with a total capacity of 4.7 GW were shut down. It lasted only 8 days when several of the coal plants had to be reconnected to the grid due to a prolonged low-wind period. In 2022 the last German nuclear plant will shut and more coal plants will permanently close, all for the green nirvana. In 2002 German nuclear power was source for 31% of power, carbon-free electric power.
As for wind power making up the deficit in Germany, in 2022 some 6000 wind turbines with an installed capacity of 16 GW will be dismantled due to the expiration of feed-in subsidies for older turbines. The rate of new wind farm approvals is being blocked by growing citizen rebellion and legal challenges to the noise pollution and other factors. An avoidable catastrophe is in the making.
The response from the EU Commission in Brussels, rather than admit the glaring flaws in their Green Energy agenda, has been to double down on it as if the problem were natural gas and coal. EU Climate Czar Frans Timmermans absurdly declared, “Had we had the green deal five years earlier, we would not be in this position because then we would have less dependency on fossil fuels and natural gas.”
If the EU continues with that suicidal agenda, it will find itself in a deindustrialized wasteland in a few short years. The problem is not gas, coal or nuclear. It is the inefficient Green Energy from solar and wind that will never be able to offer stable, reliable power.
The Green Energy Agenda of the EU, US and other governments along with the Davos-promoted ESG investing will only guarantee that as we go forward there will be even less gas or coal or nuclear to fall back on when the wind stops, there is a drought in hydroelectric dams or lack of sunshine.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize this is a road to economic destruction. But that’s in fact the goal of the UN 2030 “sustainable” energy or the Davos Great Reset: population reduction on a massive scale. We humans are the frogs being slowly boiled. And now the Powers That Be are really turning the heat up.
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Featured image is from NEO
Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
Author Name: F. William Engdahl
ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2
Year: 2007
Pages: 341 pages with complete index
List Price: $25.95
Special Price: $18.00
This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”
This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.
The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.
VAERS data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention included a total of 965,843 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 20,244 deaths and 155,506 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020, and Dec. 10, 2021.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today released new data showing a total of 965,843 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and Dec. 10, 2021, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.
Foreign reports are reports received by U.S. manufacturers from their foreign subsidiaries. Under U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, if a manufacturer is notified of a foreign case report that describes an event that is both serious and does not appear on the product’s labeling, the manufacturer is required to submit the report to VAERS.
Of the 9,295 U.S. deaths reported as of Dec. 10, 21% occurred within 24 hours of vaccination, 26% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 61% occurred in people who experienced an onset of symptoms within 48 hours of being vaccinated.
In the U.S., 480 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of Dec. 10. This includes279 million doses of Pfizer, 184 million doses of Moderna and 17 million doses of Johnson & Johnson (J&J).
Every Friday, VAERS publishes vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed. Historically, VAERS has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.
U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to Dec. 10, 2021, for 5- to 11-year-olds show:
4,181 adverse events, including 80 rated as serious and 2 reported deaths. One death occurred in an 11-year-old girl from Georgia vaccinated Sept. 14, prior to the authorization of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine in the 5 to 11 age group.
The second death (VAERS I.D. 1890705) occurred in a 5-year-old girl who died four days after her first Pfizer shot.
U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to Dec. 10, 2021, for 12- to 17-year-olds show:
The most recent deaths involve a 13-year-old girl from Texas (VAERS I.D. 1913198) who died 31 days after receiving her COVID vaccine. According to her VAERS report, the girl received her first dose of Pfizer on Aug. 1.
Two weeks later, she complained of vague upper back pain and was diagnosed with a rare soft tissue cancer located on her heart despite having no previous medical history. Parents requested a VAERS report be filed in case her cancer was related to the vaccine. Her cancer and heart condition rapidly and progressively worsened and she died Dec 1.
61 reports of anaphylaxis among 12- to 17-year-olds where the reaction was life-threatening, required treatment or resulted in death — with 96% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
571 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis (heart inflammation) with 561 cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
143 reports of blood clotting disorders, with all cases attributed to Pfizer.
U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to Dec. 10, 2021, for all age groups combined, show:
19% of deaths were related to cardiac disorders.
54% of those who died were male, 42% were female and the remaining death reports did not include the gender of the deceased.
An advisory panel to the CDC on Thursday voted 15 – 0 to “preferentially recommend” mRNA COVID vaccines Pfizer and Moderna over the J&J shot for adults 18 years and older.
The recommendation came after the agency’s advisory panel said the rate of rare blood-clotting disorders following the J&J vaccine was higher than expected.
The CDC signed off on the panel’s updated guidance late Thursday.
The panel effectively discouraged vaccine providers and adults from using J&J’s shot but stopped short of recommending the vaccine be pulled from the market. The interim recommendation applies to J&J’s primary series vaccine dose and the booster dose.
The CDC’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force excluded “reports where [the] only thrombosis is ischemic stroke or myocardial infarction,” which significantly reduced the number of cases involving blood-clotting disorders.
16,000 physicians and scientists say kids shouldn’t get COVID vaccines
COVID vaccines are “irreversible and potentially permanently damaging,” said Dr. Robert Malone, in a statement explaining why 16,000 physicians and medical scientists around the world signed a declaration publicly declaring healthy children should not be vaccinated against COVID.
Malone said the viral gene injected into children’s cells forces the body to make toxic spike proteins that could cause irreparable damage to critical organs. The novel technology used by the vaccines has not been adequately tested, Malone said.
Malone said there is no benefit for children to be vaccinated against the small risks of a virus, given the COVID injuries parents, or their children, may have to live with for the rest of their lives.
Doctor says ‘many lives are being destroyed by government’s failure to recognize natural immunity
Dr. Marty Makary, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, on Tuesday, accused government officials of practicing “modern-day McCarthyism” against anyone who suggests young healthy people, especially those who recovered from COVID, don’t need booster shots.
Makary told members of the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis some COVID policies have become “too extreme, too rigid and are no longer driven by clinical data.”
Makary criticized the CDC’s rush to push boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds based on lab experiments suggesting boosters raise antibody levels against Omicron.
He reminded committee members that, despite a combined annual budget of about $58 billion, neither the CDC nor the National Institutes of Health have produced a credible study on natural immunity to COVID.
Studies show Pfizer vaccine less effective against Omicron
As The Defender reported on Dec. 14, three studies released within days of each other showed the PfizerBioNTech COVID vaccine is less effective against the Omicron variant.
According to a preprint study by researchers at the UK’s University of Oxford in England, there’s “a substantial fall in neutralization” of antibodies in the fully vaccinated “with evidence of some recipients failing to neutralize at all.”
According to the study, breakthrough infections in those previously infected or double-vaccinated individuals could increase, although there is currently no evidence of increased potential to cause severe disease, hospitalization or death.
As though a self-identified nuclear alliance which reserves the right to the first use of nuclear weapons, which has 70 members and partners (120 in all if the collective partnership with the African Union is factored in) on six continents, including eight members and as many partners which have land and sea borders with Russia, and that has waged unprovoked wars on three continents will instantaneously and miraculously transform itself into a reliable “security partner” – perhaps on the occasion of a star appearing over Bethlehem.
The very Russia it was established, is being maintained and has expanded to contain and confront.
If the 18th century Russian fabulist Krylov could return to life he might be commissioned to compose a tale in which the clever fox convinces sheep that the wolf has been transmogrified into one of them, no longer fitted with fangs and claws, desiring only to graze on weeds and shrubs: with which consequences it’s not hard to imagine.
The following excerpts are from this morning’s TASS:
Russian Foreign Ministry published a draft agreement on guarantees of security between Russia and the United States Friday. The document includes eight articles and covers the main aspects of mutual guarantees of security between Moscow and Washington.
The document reflects the calls, repeatedly voiced by Moscow in the past, and offers a solution to the accumulated problems and threats, including those that emerged after Washington withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
NATO eastward expansion
“The United States of America shall take measures to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and deny accession to the Alliance to the former USSR republics,” the treaty says.
Besides, the Russian draft stipulates US’ obligation not to establish military bases in former Soviet states that are not NATO members, not to use their infrastructure to carry out any military activity, and not to develop bilateral military cooperation with them.
US and NATO keep putting forward ultimatums in response to Moscow’s proposals on security guarantees, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told a briefing on Friday.
“Of course, we saw the NATO statement released late last night. There is nothing new, except the statement that relevant proposals have been examined, and then the same argument and position which we have been listening to for many years,” the diplomat said responding to a question from TASS.
In this regard, Ryabkov advised his NATO colleagues to “abandon their own cliches,” their accustomed behavioral patterns and “misconceived paternalism.”
“We were told yesterday that it is up to Moscow, whether relations will look up. So, it is for NATO and, in particular, for the US. If Washington is not able to choose on its own and agree to the negotiations we propose, then let them consult further. We have learned that the strongest side of the alliance is its unity. Let’s see where the lowest common point is and who dictates it in the North Atlantic Alliance, budling [sic] the US stance,” he concluded.
The US and NATO haven’t shown readiness to hold talks with Russia on security guarantees, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said at a news conference on Friday.
“We don’t have any grounds yet to say they (the US and NATO – TASS) are ready to start talks, which we are proposing to start literally tomorrow because the issue is pressing,” the diplomat said.
Ryabkov didn’t rule out the West may try to delay the talks.
“On the other coast, they excel at using tactics, procedures and processes the way they need, so that if they aren’t comfortable, substantive work doesn’t take place or gets delayed so that everything eventually comes to nothing,” he said. “It’s a risk.”
The diplomat said it’s very hard to agree on things when the interests of Russia, on the one hand, and the US and NATO, on the other hand, are as different as they are at the moment.
But “the responsibility of the politicians that deal with European security on the other side, I hope, is sufficient to make the only right choice and agree to the Russian proposals,” he said.
Russia on Friday released draft agreements titled the Treaty Between the US and Russia on Security Guarantees and On Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The proposals were handed over to a US representative at a meeting at the Russian Foreign Ministry on December 15.
A fateful week is ending today for international security with the Russian Foreign Ministry releasing the two documents on security guarantees that Moscow had proposed to Washington as the basis for discussions to ease the tensions over NATO’s eastward expansion and to cease the alliance’s deployments close to Russia’s borders, including in Ukraine.
Out of the two documents, one is a draft treaty with the US which contains the following six provisions:
Russia and the US shall not use the territory of other countries to prepare or conduct attacks against the other;
Neither party shall deploy short- or intermediate-range missiles abroad or in areas where these weapons could reach targets inside the other’s territory;
The US shall not open military bases in the post-Soviet countries that are not already NATO members, use their military infrastructure, or develop military cooperation with these states;
Neither party shall deploy nuclear weapons abroad, and any such weapons already deployed must be returned. Both parties shall eliminate any infrastructure for deploying nuclear weapons outside their own territories;
Neither party shall conduct military exercises with scenarios involving the use of nuclear weapons; and,
Neither party shall train military or civilian personnel from non-nuclear countries to use nuclear weapons.
The second document is in the nature of a multilateral agreement with the member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). It also contains 6 provisions, which are:
NATO shall not expand further east and must commit to excluding Ukrainian membership;
NATO shall not deploy additional forces or arms outside the borders of its members as of May 1997 (before the alliance started admitting Eastern European countries);
NATO shall not conduct any military activity in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, or Central Asia;
Russia and NATO shall not deploy short- or intermediate-range missiles within range of each other’s territories;
All parties shall refrain from conducting military actions above the brigade level which shall be confined to a border zone to be mutually agreed upon; and,
Neither party shall regard the other as an adversary or create threats to the other, and all parties shall commit to settling disputes peacefully, refraining from the use of force.
Russia’s proposals are true to its stated position spelt out in great detail and repeatedly in the recent months seeking security guarantees from the West against the backdrop of larges scale military deployments by the NATO countries in the countries of Central Europe and the Baltic states in the recent years, and, secondly, amidst the growing signs that NATO is preparing further eastward expansion that may include Ukraine, Georgia and Black Sea.
The latter part is crucial for Russia’s security as NATO (read the US) is almost certain to deploy nuclear missiles in Ukraine and Georgia, which would give it decisive tactical advantage to take Russia by surprise by launching a nuclear attack (since the flight time will be extremely short and Russia’s reaction time becomes correspondingly shortened, and, secondly, the tactical missiles of intermediate range would be in a position to hit deep inside Russian territory.
It was a foregone conclusion that the US will never agree to a security treaty of the kind Russia has proposed, because the NATO expansion — in contravention of the assurances given to Mikhail Gorbachev at the time of German unification that the alliance would not expand “an inch” beyond the Cold War era level in the late 1980s — is a long-term US strategy to gain unilateral advantage over Russia and tilt the global strategic balance in favour of the West, which would put Moscow on the defensive in its foreign and security policies.
In sum, the Western strategy is to dictate to Russia from a position of strength. Moscow has been protesting. But the NATO and the US chose to ignore Russia’s protests and kept expanding in stages since 1997. Today, an intolerable situation has arisen for Russia as the NATO forces are virtually at its gates. The developing situation is reminiscent of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when Washington threatened to militarily stop Soviet missile deployments in Cuba.
The Biden administration’s strategy is to first weaken Russia’s global reach and strategic capability and thereupon tackle the challenge of China’s rise. The Biden Administration is taking a gambit that China will remain neutral in the upcoming confrontation between the West and Russia. But President Xi Jinping’s initiative to hold a virtual meeting with President Putin on Wednesday has signalled that Beijing is backing Russia.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin’s remarks in Beijing today point in such a direction. Interestingly, Ambassador Wang was responding to a pointed question from the Tass news agency. The relevant extracts are reproduced below:
“In his virtual meeting with Russian President Putin, President Xi Jinping said China will continue to carry out flexible and diverse cooperation with Russia and other member states of the Collective Security Treaty Organization to safeguard security and stability in the region. What challenges are China and Russia facing in this aspect? What can China and Russia do to safeguard regional security?” Tass
“On December 15, President Xi Jinping had a virtual meeting with Russian President Putin. The two head of states had an in-depth exchange of views on core and major issues of common concerns including safeguarding regional security, and achieved new, important consensus.
“The world is witnessing the combined forces of changes and a pandemic both unseen in a century against the backdrop of complex and profound changes in international and regional landscape. We believe that China and Russia, two permanent members of the UN Security Council, take on important mission in defending regional peace and stability and promoting development and revitalization of all countries. For some time, certain countries have been drawing ideological lines, building new military blocs and stoking regional tensions, which have all brought grave threats and challenges to regional peace and stability and global strategic stability. China and Russia firmly reject this. We will continue to follow the two leaders’ consensus, take up responsibility, unite all forces that love peace and support peace, and make active contribution to realizing sustained, universal and common security in the region and the wider world.” Wang Wenbin
The release of the two documents in Moscow earlier today implies that Moscow is under no illusions that the US strategy is about cornering Russia and browbeat it on the global stage.
A grave crisis is developing in international security, since from this point, Moscow’s options are narrowing down to“coercive diplomacy” in the pursuit of its security needs. In sum, there is real danger of military confrontation with the NATO powers, since the US, Britain, France, etc. have already deployed special forces on Ukrainian soil, which will act as “trip wires”.
In a series of highly provocative remarks on Thursday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has asserted the alliance’s prerogative to intervene in Ukraine and bluntly rejected Moscow’s notions that it could have a say on the alliance’s future expansion plans.
Stoltenberg spoke with the prior approval of the Biden Administration. Moscow’s decisions to release the security documents has come a day later. The White House spokesperson Jen Psaki has since reacted, virtually endorsing Stoltenberg’s tough line.
On November 7, Nicaragua held elections in which current president Daniel Ortega received 75% support and, as a result, begins a new term of office in January. Not surprisingly, the US government described the election as a “sham.” Of more concern is that many on the left seem to agree. William Robinson’s NACLA article, Nicaragua: Chronicle of an Election Foretold, is a scathing critique, repeated in an interview with The Real News.
In this article, we will show that Robinson’s claims are based on falsehoods and elite bias. He appears to be out of touch with the reality faced by most Nicaraguans.
Robinson says Ortega’s election was foretold because “Seven presidential candidates are imprisoned [and]… opposition figures [are] detained without trial”
Prior to the elections, several people were accused of treason because of involvement in US attempts to overthrow Nicaragua’s elected government. They allegedly violated new laws controlling the use of foreign money for “political purposes” as well as older ones which penalize seeking foreign intervention in Nicaraguan affairs. Some of the detainees aspired to the presidency, but none were credible contenders. Here are the seven “presidential candidates”:
Arturo Cruz, who lives most of the time in the US, is an academic who has never been a leading figure nor a candidate of any kind in Nicaraguan politics. He was charged after openly lobbying for sanctions against Nicaragua.
Cristiana Chamorro denied wanting to run for election but changed her mind shortly before her arrest. Her “non-profit” VioletaBarrios deChamorro Foundationreceived millions of dollars from USAID to influence the elections via an array of opposition media outlets, several owned by the Chamorro family. She refused to comply with new transparency laws and closed her foundation. She is under house arrest as the sources of $7 million found in her personal bank accounts are being investigated.
Juan Sebastián Chamorro has never been a leading figure nor a candidate in Nicaragua’s electoral politics. His non-profit, FUNIDES, received money under US regime-change programs. He is charged with seeking foreign interference, military intervention and sanctions against Nicaragua.
Félix Maradiaga has never been a leading political figure or electoral candidate. His non-profit, the Institute for Strategic Studies and Public Policy (IEEPP), has been a major conduit for US funding and interference. He was actively involved in the violent coup attempt in 2018 and sought sanctions against his own country at the Organization of American States (in June 2018).
Medardo Mairena has been disowned both by the mainstream Constitutionalist Liberal Party (PLC) and his own anti-canal movement. He was convicted for organizing the murderous attack on the Morrito police station in 2018, when five people were killed. He was released in the 2019 amnesty.
Miguel Mora, another “candidate” unlikely to have been selected, was guilty of inciting the violent attack against Radio Ya in 2018. Also released in the amnesty, he would have been ineligible to stand. Mora is notorious for publicly suggesting a Panama-style invasion of Nicaragua by the United States.
Noel Vidaurre is a well-known politician from the Conservative Party, which has collapsed into electoral insignificance. Vidaurre never had sufficient support to be a candidate but while seeking ithe called for economic aggression against his own country. He is under house arrest and accused of treason.
Robinson says, “The repression particularly decimated the left-leaning opposition party Democratic Renovation Union (UNAMOS), formerly called the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS).”
Robinson calls the MRS/UNAMOS “left-leaning”, completely ignoring its rightward shift in the last two decades.
One leading member, the former Sandinista Dora María Téllez, supported right-wing candidates in recent elections; she praised the 2019 coup in Bolivia and actively collaborated with US plans to end Sandinista (FSLN) rule. Both she and Ana Margarita Vigil, who also has a lengthy history of collaboration with the US, are charged with inciting foreign interference in the elections. Tellez was one of the main organizers of the violent roadblocks in 2018, seen distributing money, drugs and food to the thugs running them.
The author Sergio Ramirez is a former Sandinista, Nicaragua’s Vice-President from 1985 until 1990, who founded the MRS in 1995 in opposition to Daniel Ortega. When he competed for the presidency in 1996, he received a derisory 7,665 votes nationwide.Clearly, he is more popular among elites abroad than in his homeland. Since opposing the FSLN, Ramirez’s non-profit organization, Fundación Luisa Mercado has received US money via the Chamorro Foundation. He must have forgotten that in 1988 he said it was a “crime” to receive US government funds, “because they are part of a campaign against Nicaraguan sovereignty and integrity.”
Robinson appears to blame the opposition’s rightward shift on “repression” but does not explain why, when its supposedly radical young leaders came to the US, they were celebrated by the far right in Washington – Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Rep Ileana Ros-Lehtinen – and looked to Trump for help.
Robinson says, “There is little evidence to corroborate the claim that the 2018 mass uprising was instigated by Washington … or that the United States has since carried out a destabilization campaign aimed at overthrowing the regime.”
Ever since the FSLN regained power in 2007, the US has been funding anti-government media and “civil society” groups. At the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Elliott Abrams spoke out aggressively beginning in 2015. Kenneth Wollack, now chairman of the state-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), bragged to the US Congress on June 14, 2018 that they had trained 8,000 young Nicaraguans to take part in the uprising. Yorlis Luna has described in detail the indoctrination process. An article for Global Americans, which Robinson has disparaged elsewhere, gave some details of the NED “laying the groundwork for insurrection.”
When the uprising and coup attempt failed, the US increased its open opposition to the Nicaraguan government with the Nica Act. Washington imposed sanctions on Nicaraguan government officials and opposed international loans to Nicaragua in bodies like the World Bank, which halted its funding for three years as a result. Rather than stepping back, Washington escalated its interference. In 2020, it was revealed that Washington was planning for “government transition” in Nicaragua. A major contract called Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua (RAIN) outlined different transition scenarios.
It is reasonable to assume that non-public agencies such as the CIA were also active.
Robinson suggests the US government was actually helping the FSLN government and says, “USAID also granted several hundred million dollars directly to the Ortega government from 2007 until 2018.”
Robinson’s assertion is untrue. The vast majority of USAID funds went to non-governmental organizations and other “partner organizations.” The USAID Nicaragua website shows they provided $115 million from 2014 to 2018 with the majority to “support Nicaraguans in their efforts to restore democratic norms and practices.” To give just one example, over 2,000 Nicaraguans received so-called “political party training.”
It is understandable that any country might object to this and see it as interference in its domestic affairs. What is not understandable is how Robinson got this basic information so wrong.
Robinson says, “The independent organization Urnas Abiertas reported an abstention rate of approximately 80 percent after the opposition called for an election boycott.”
The organization Urnas Abiertas claims that only 830,000 voted, not the 2,921,430 votes officially recorded, implying that some two million were falsified. The near impossibility of two million votes being faked has already been explained. Urnas Abiertas provides no evidence of how it was done, nor have they quoted any of the thousands of poll watchers from opposition parties who would have seen it happening. While Robinson calls Urnas Abiertas “independent,” Ben Norton has shown that it is heavily dominated by opposition figures.
Official results show 66% of registered voters took part, which was far from unexpected given that 2.8 million voters had earlier checked their entries on the electoral register.
Robinson says, “CID-Gallup…found that 76 percent of the country’s electorate believed the country was moving in the wrong direction. The poll reported that 19 percent of the electorate planned to vote for Ortega, 65 percent stated they would favor an opposition candidate….”
Out of an electorate of almost 4.5 million, 2,759,743 cast a valid vote (62%) and of these 2,093,834 (75%) voted for the Ortega-Murillo ticket. Opinion polls by M&R had shown Ortega’s support at 70%.
Methodologically, the M&R polls are strong, using face-to-face interviews of over 4,200 potential voters. However, Robinson chooses to focus on results from CID-Gallup (not part of the international Gallup group) which found that only 19% would vote for Ortega. While Robinson says M&R polls are “contracted by the FSLN” he offers no proof, and fails to say that at least some of the CID-Gallup polls are paid for by the opposition, and in this case rely on just 1,200 cell phone interviews. In the past, he has pointed out that CID-Gallup was employed in US government propaganda campaigns in Nicaragua.
Robinson says, “The vote was carried out in a climate of fear and intimidation, with a total absence of safeguards against fraud”
Some 160 international witnesses, covering all regions of the country, reported enthusiastic participation in the elections by Nicaraguans young and old. Families frequently came together on foot or on motorcycles, some on crutches or in wheelchairs. Eyewitness reports are here, here, here, and here. A 4-minute video captures images from the day.
Safeguards against fraud included having opposition “poll watchers” in the 13,459 voting stations from start to finish. Votes are counted at each voting station with all parties ratifying the results, which are then posted outside for the public to see. Detailed results can be checked at the CSE website.
One element of the information war against Nicaragua is to spread false claims. This included a tsunami of social media posts fomenting violence in 2018, much of it produced by troll farms. More recently, 24 NGOs were closed which include 15 medical bodies which broadcast false information about Nicaragua’s response to Covid-19, undermining the government’s efforts (see below) and making people hesitant to go to public hospitals. A new law specifically penalizes the publishing of false information “likely to spread anxiety, anguish or fear.”
Nicaraguans are free to speak out against the government and they do so without fear. Here is an article which documents interviews with various Nicaraguans, both favorable and opposed to the FSLN.
Robinson says, “the economy began to tank in 2015.”
This is untrue. From 2009 to 2017, World Bank figures show that economic growth never fell below 4.4%. It only did so in 2018-20, when the coup attempt was quickly followed by the pandemic.
The FSLN government’s achievements over 14 years are remarkable. In a letter to a cynic, Becca Mohally Renk, points out that they include: infant mortality reduced by 61% since 2007, the percentage of people with a university degree rising from 9% to 19%, electricity coverage growing from 54% to 99%, the lowest homicide rates in the region, and many more. Far from “suppressing” students, workers, feminists, and environmentalists as Robinson claims, the government ensures free university provision, promotes trade union rights, has an unparalleled record on gender equality and recently became the first Latin American state to grant territorial rights to all its indigenous communities.
Robinson says, “Nicaragua… has the lowest rate of vaccination in Latin America, with only 4.9 percent of the population inoculated as of October.”
While it’s true that vaccination against Covid-19 proceeded slowly at first because of limited supplies, by December over 70% of the population aged 2 and above had received at least one dose, and many older people had received booster doses. UNICEF and the World Health Organization congratulated Nicaragua on its vaccination campaign.
Nowhere are the Nicaraguan government’s advances more obvious than in healthcare. With 21 new public hospitals built since 2007, and thousands more trained health workers, Nicaragua was much better prepared for Covid-19 than neighboring countries. With community healthcare, door-to-door education and contract tracing, Nicaragua has kept Covid deaths to levels which are 55% of the average for Latin American countries, according to the respected Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Robinson says, “The worldwide Left similarly demanded sanctions against apartheid South Africa, sought to block U.S. and international financing for the Pinochet dictatorship, and currently calls for ‘boycott, divestment, and sanctions’ against Israel.”
The comparison of Sandinista Nicaragua to apartheid South Africa, Pinochet’s Chile and apartheid Israel is an indication of how wrong Robinson is on this topic. Nicaragua has endured over 100 years of US sponsored attacks, invasions, occupations, and dictatorships. They have a huge need and legitimate right to defend their sovereignty. It is disgraceful that some former progressives are supporting Washington’s escalating attacks and sanctions on Nicaragua.
Robinson says, “Ortega will now start his fourth consecutive term in office… in the midst of economic and political crisis. With its legitimacy shattered in the aftermath of the 2018 mass uprising and its violent repression, the regime has to rely more on direct coercion to maintain control.”
Robinson talks about “the government’s repression of the popular uprising” in 2018. He appears to acknowledge that support for the uprising faded almost as quickly as it began, but he completely misreads the reasons, which were that people realized they had been misled about state violence by the fake news spread on social media. Then they experienced the opposition’s house burning, looting, destruction of public buildings, kidnappings and murder. They saw that Sandinista sympathizers were targeted and that the police, confined to their stations by the government as a step towards a negotiated peace, were directly attacked and 22 police officers killed.
It is not surprising that Nicaraguans rejected the opposition’s call to abstain from the elections, opting instead for the peace and stability offered by continuing Sandinista government. That is what more than two million Nicaraguans voted for on November 7, and the international left, including William Robinson, should now accept this result.
Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be contacted at [email protected]. John Perry lives and works in Masaya, Nicaragua and can be contacted at [email protected].
Germany’s new Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock came into office on December 8th without her knowing that America’s stationing missiles in Ukraine on Russia’s border, and only a 7-minute flying distance away from Moscow, would be even more unacceptable to Moscow than, in 1962, would have been, to Washington, the Soviet Union’s stationing missiles in Cuba, fifteen minutes of flying-time away from Washington, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. She’s evidently so much of a neoconservative (supporter of U.S. imperialism) that Baerbock had been ignoring this crucial and simple fact of international relations throughout her entire prior 17-year career in politics, before becoming appointed as Germany’s Foreign Minister.
She didn’t even know why Germany’s leader, during 2005-2021, Angela Merkel, had — along with France’s leader Francois Hollande — established in the Minsk agreements for settling the Ukrainian war the “Normandy Format” for negotiations between Ukraine (on Russia’s border) and its 2014 breakaway Donbass region, in order to establish, at Minsk, a truce-agreement between those two sides (Ukraine and its breakaway region) and agree to negotiate between themselves a permanent peace-settlement, by which Donbass would again be a part of Ukraine and voting in Ukrainian Presidential elections, but would be granted, by Ukraine, some degree of internal autonomy (and guaranteed peace). It would peacefully settle the Ukrainian war.
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Baerbock hasn’t yet committed herself on whether to honor or even respect the armistice treaty that Merkel, Hollande, and Putin, had jointly achieved between Ukraine and Donbass, at Minsk. However, she has committed herself clearly on all other issues as supporting the same views that the U.S. Government has endorsed. The U.S. Government did not participate, in any way, in the Minsk agreements, and so she could come out rejecting them — or else endorsing only the Minsk provisions that the Ukrainian side had favored, and rejecting the provisions that the Donbass side had favored. In other words: she could come out seeking to replace the Minsk agreements, or even as outright endorsing a resumption of Ukraine’s 2014-2015 effort to conquer Donbass militarily and treating all residents there as being “terrorists” until those residents become conquered.
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Baerbock’s ignorance serves well the U.S. Government’s long-term goal of conquering Russia (because it allows her to be the neocon that she has always been), but it disserves the people of Germany by subordinating the interests of the German people to the interests of America’s billionaires who own oil-and-gas (and other) companies that are in competition against ones in Russia, and it could even lead to another World War in which Europe (including especially Germany) would be the main battleground. This is clearly NOT in the interests of the German people.
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Baerbock, in service to America’s billionaire investors in fracked gas that becomes liquefied into canisters and then would be shipped into Germany and other EU countries to replace the much cheaper pipelined gas from Russia, has always criticized Germany’s policy of buying the far less expensive German gas; but in these times of soaring gas prices in Europe, her policy is even more costly to Germans than it had previously been. She is apparently determined to do everything to prevent the recently completed Nord Stream 2 gas-pipeline from Russia into Germany from being allowed to begin operation — and she does this in order to serve American investors, who aim to increase their sales to Europe.
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She also was apparently ignorant about the Minsk accords and their Normandy format and the reasons why Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande had created them in order to establish a constructive truce in the hot war that was then raging between the invader Ukraine and its former region Donbass (which people Ukraine’s Government routinely referred to as “terrorists” in Ukraine’s “Anti-Terrorist Operation” or “ATO”). And that is what is not only psychopathic (like her insistence on buying U.S. gas instead of Russian gas), but shocking.
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On December 17th, NATO’s chief, its Secretary General (who always expresses the U.S. President’s viewpoint) Jens Stoltenberg, contemptuously called Russia the “aggressor” and rejected Russia’s “red lines” (national-security demands), and he especially emphasized that Russia would have no say, whatsoever, regarding whether or not NATO will accept Ukraine’s bid for membership in the anti-Russian military alliance. Since Baerbock has consistently endorsed the views that have been expressed by NATO’s Secretaries General, one may reasonably expect that she will ignore what Lavrov had said to her on December 14th. If she, on this matter, will not ignore the information she received from Russia, that would indicate a fundamental change in her expressed positions, and the likelihood for a Third World War will then be considerably reduced.
Korea’s soaring number of Covid infections follows the exact pattern we see in other areas with very high rates of mRNA injections of the population.
South Korea was hailed in 2020 as the champion of Covid control. At first, the country had much lower case counts and deaths than most European countries. Then came the experimental “vaccines.” On Thursday, South Korea, which is almost entirely “vaccinated,” announced that it would reinstate stricter social distancing rules. The decision comes after the number of new infections and serious cases spiral out of control.
The government will be imposing the country’s strictest corona restrictions since the pandemic’s beginning. On January 2, 2021, gatherings will be limited to four people as long as they are fully vaccinated. In addition, restaurants, cafes, and bars will be forced to close by 9 p.m., while movie theatres and internet cafes are open until 10 p.m.
The tighter restrictions will leave few options for the unvaccinated. They will be mandated to dine out alone or rely on takeout.
Cases Soar Despite 92% of the Population Receiving Two Jabs.
South Korea was only six weeks into its newly implemented “living With COVID-19” policy, which had placed no restrictions on opening hours and allowed gatherings of up to eight people regardless of their “vaccination” status.
The number of new Covid cases has almost quadrupled since last month. In addition, the number of severe cases has tripled, despite more than 92 percent of South Korean adults being fully “vaccinated.”
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) registered more than 7850 new cases on Tuesday, setting a new daily record. The following day they reported 7,622 cases, and last week, more than 7,000 cases were reported for the first time.
The number of serious cases has reached an all-time high, with some 87 percent of intensive care unit beds taken up in the Seoul metropolitan area and about 81 percent in use nationwide. In addition, many ‘breakthrough infections’ are registered.
Daily Confirmed COVID-19 Cases per million people
Below is a graph of South Korea’s 7-day rolling average. According to Our World Data’s site, the number of confirmed cases is even lower than the actual number of infections due to limited testing.
‘Vaccinated’ Areas See Spike In Covid Cases
Korea’s soaring number of Covid infections follows the exact pattern we see in other areas with very high rates of mRNA injections of the population. Three of the most ‘vaccinated’ countries, Lithuania, Waterford, Ireland, and Gibraltar, also had to go into new lockdowns due to massive Covid infection spikes.
Note: A dramatic increase was recorded following the November 26 announcement regarding the Omicron Variant.
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Imagine humanity would one day – very soon – decide to stop wearing masks. In unison. Not in the streets, not in restaurants, not in shops, not in sports events – simply nowhere. Against all orders of a good portion of the 193 UN member governments, or at least the western governments. And, indeed, against the entire UN system – against the orders of Mr. Antonio Guterres, himself. Yes, indeed. Many of the UN agencies, not all yet, have started mandating vaxxing for their staff… or else.
How come, it hasn’t occurred to everyone yet, that there is something wrong? Badly wrong. Can it be that it is simply cognitive dissonance? You know that there is something horribly wrong, but your comfort zone doesn’t allow you to admit it? That was the case in the Third Reich – that brought forward Hitler’s tyranny. The rest is history.
The alternative to imagine would be that all those who have decided not to get vaxxed – stick to it and make it public. They defy the totally illegal and unconstitutional orders of the government, the UN system which gets their marching orders from the dark invisible cult, that threatens with death, those who don’t comply.
But just imagine, nobody would listen to these absurd and anti-constitutional orders, not even the police, nor the military – both law enforcement bodies would side with the people – with the very people, whose rights they have sworn to defend.
Actually, the latter has happened more than once already around the globe, where police brutality used to be particularly strong, suddenly a group of front-line police have taken off their helmets and marched with the people – in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and elsewhere. Lately, a similar trend may be crystallizing, in Australia’s State of Victoria, where people of Melbourne have been in a lockdown literally for months.
A police lady quit and came to the fore giving interviews and divulging that the majority of her colleagues think alike, but they are afraid of losing their jobs and / or being punished by Victoria’s tyrannical governor. This is a good start. See this.
It has to happen in unison. In solidarity. In most European countries you are not allowed to go to restaurants or any public event unless you can show the vaxx-certificate – an infamous QR-code on your cell phone, that would be read by another cell phone, programmed to read your QR-code.
You have no idea what is or what will eventually be put on this QR-code. The goal is all your personal information, from your complete health record to your criminal record, your bank accounts – just everything. But you wouldn’t know. You cannot read what is on the QR-code. “They” can, since it is programmed that way.
The objective is to have in essence this QR-code implanted in your body. That’s pretty much what Klaus Schwab proudly said in his brief (about 2 min video below ) interview with the French Swiss TV in 2016. He frames it something like this: Humans will become “transhumans”.
The video has since been “fact-checked” out of the internet. Mr. Microsoft, Bill Gates, actually spoke of an implanted Operating System in the human body. So, we, humans, need to have a body that can respond to electromagnetic waves, in other words our bodies have to be transformed to electromagnetic fields (EMF). That’s being done, by the mRNA- “vaxx” that is injected into our tissues.
Have you noticed, Pfizer and Moderna, the frontrunners of mRNA – which are absolutely not vaccines, you better believe it – are the only ones that are allowed in the West? Now they have added AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson — they are only different in as much as their “killing” mechanism is different.
They also produce blood clots and spike proteins. The former may lead to respiratory blockages all the way to embolisms of the lung or brain, or even heart. The spike protein spreads to all your cells. They eventually attack your immune defense system making you much more vulnerable to any kind of disease, especially cancers. Why are they not allowing the Russian Sputnik V or any one of the Chinese vaccines, both of which are based on traditional vaccination methods?
The Russian and Chinese ones do not work for the population reduction agenda.
Do you know that the mRNA vaxxes inject you with graphene, a highly poisonous fluid, that creates of your entire body an electromagnetic field (EMF), receptive to 5G and soon 6G ultra-short shortwaves that eventually will be able to manipulate your brain and all your info, now gradually being stored on your personalized QR-code, transforming you, human, into – in Klaus Schwab’s words, a “transhuman” – no longer in possession of your own will or your bank account?
Your money, by the way, if you haven’t noticed already, will soon no longer be physical money that you can touch and hand over to a cashier or a provider, but it’s going to be all electronic, digital money, over which you still may have control, because “they” let you. But once they decide that you must give up control, it will be gone.
Have you noticed at what speed ATM machines are disappearing? How cashiers in banks disappear? They will soon no longer be necessary, because you don’t control cash anymore. There are entire countries in northern Europe which are almost there: Full digitization. In some countries, among them Sweden, some people have already voluntarily let a nano-chip be implanted under the skin of their wrist. The chip works like a built-in bank account. Young people love it. It’s so cool. You swipe your hand, not even a card anymore – and the payment is made. Except, these people have no idea, how this will be played out in the future.
Mind you, this only applies to the people who survive the false vaccination – or rather inoculation campaign. Because, do you know, that considerably more people have died and are dying from receiving the poisonous mRNA-jab, than from covid itself? – No, of course not. Government and the paid mainstream media won’t tell you about it. The MSM gets billions from governments for lying to you.
Let’s go back to mask wearing. This was the first step – in the Lockstep Phase – remember the 2010 Rockefeller Report – where the authors describe the “Lockstep Phase”, as meaning that all 193 UN member countries do the same at the same time – in “lockstep”? – Well, we are already beyond this phase now.
This Lockstep phase has every government in the world order their people to wear masks, everywhere. Unbought science has long proven that mask wearing does not prevent covid nor any viral disease, but causes tremendous damage, as it reduces oxygen intake by 20 to 50 percent, depending on the type of mask. Instead, you are breathing your own CO2.
But that’s not all, the psychological damage done by forced mask wearing is tremendous. It’s sheer humiliation; it’s depressive. You talk to people, but you cannot recognize them in many cases, the voices are muffled, often difficult to understand – and the facial expression that says so much in a conversation is gone. Depressions have skyrocketed, and so have suicides. But the governments and the well-paid mainstream media, as well as the bought science, do not report about these disastrous effects.
About the “bought science”: Many people can simply not imagine the corrupt world we have become in the span of, say, two decades.
Let’s put the beginning of the countdown at 9/11.
That’s when the Big official lies started, and the coercion of the truth tellers took hold. Most scientists, police or other first-hand witnesses have families, they have a career, they have a steady income. They do not want “trouble”. And trouble can go from harassment, to job loss to death. This is no joke. That’s how the “system” works today. You are either in the Matrix and live a life of a certain comfort, or you take the Red Pill – and you are on your own.
Lately it has gone a step further – to the internet, “the goldmine” of all information, is being severely censored.
All inconvenient information is either completely deleted or is being “fact-checked’ away. If you check who is behind the fact-checkers, something most people don’t do, you see that they are big interest groups, in the case of covid, mostly pharmaceuticals, helped by Bill Gates et al. It is therefore ever more difficult to find referenced information.
Youtube just declared that any information, no matter how scientifically proven it is, that goes against the classical “climate change narrative” will be deleted. So simple. We are dominated, no – more than we – the TRUTH – is being dominated and manipulated by private interests.
Yes, the world needs a Great Reset, but no à la Klaus Schwab, not according to the WEF, but according to a design growing out of the people. That’s why solidarity and not submission is so important. – When do we wake up to this simple matter?
There are nevertheless some excellent exceptions. In the US at least Texas and Florida and others, mostly Republican States, do not follow the mask-wearing mandate, nor all the consequential narrative that goes with it, like testing. People are free to wear or not to wear. Most don’t wear. And the covid-incidence is actually also less than in other States, say California, where this absurd rule is strictly enforced. Maybe this “lesser covid incidence”, like in Texas, goes hand-in-hand, with the number of people who do not opt getting the jab and also, State Government reporting is more honest than in vaxx-mask-imposing states.
Something to think about.
To increase the cadence of fear – Bill Gates declared already in 2018 that there may be a much deadlier disease than covid waiting for humanity, a Marburg-R epidemic. See this.
It is a hemorrhagic fever which was first described in 1967, with a brief outbreak that killed 376 people. It’s described as being about as deadly as Ebola. In the video below is a message from Kieran Morrisey – University Hospital Manager, Dublin. See also this.
Real or false? It doesn’t matter. It’s first designed to instill fear, and fear, we now know, lowers our defense system and makes us vulnerable to obey orders – just what we as humanity should stop doing and becoming ourselves again: Sovereign human beings.
The next step is full digitization. Make-believe vaccination which are coerced by any means by the Biden Administration, which is a prime example for many European countries, and the QR-code are progressing fast, without the people not even noticing.
Don’t forget Agenda ID2020 – also a Bill Gates invention – is in full Swing. See this and this.
It’s now being tested in West Africa, where people have “volunteered” to partake in an exercise where they have access to their money only through a body-implanted “bank account”. This account can and is being monitored from outside. It’s part of what is awaiting us in the west as the great reset takes hold. See also this (last third of same video as above) Dr. Carrie Madej: First U.S. Lab Examines “Vaccine” Vials, Horrific Findings Revealed.
To some extent it’s also being tested by some people in Sweden who have voluntarily implanted a chip under their skin that caried the details of their bank account. Maybe more and they don’t know it?
This is the future QR-codification of the world.
Therefore, be aware of what QR-codes are really destined for, what they can and will do in the future, if we do not stop them. It’s time and again the same question. We have to be aware – and we have to become free of fear, we have to become disobedient and instead becoming ourselves again. We have to return to what we were born to be, sovereign human beings.
And – we have no time to lose. We must act fast.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Featured image: Public domain image from Wiki’s COVID-Protest page.
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).
“That’s the one precept every religion has in common. The Golden Rule…None of us practice it. And if we did, a miracle would happen. Joy and justice would be inter-twined in our journeys! And the world we create because we’re writing our own history.
“Then, and then only, will there be light at the end of the tunnel!”
– Paul Hellyer (From his last presentation to Winnipeg. Oct 20, 2016) [1]
Warm. Friendly. Courageous as hell. Gentle as a warm summer breeze.
Those are the thoughts I have of Paul Hellyer from his last visit to Winnipeg now more than five years ago. He left me and a crowd of well over a hundred people engaged in spite of not having particularly dynamic oratorical skills. Such were the power of the man, his ideas and the urgency with which he learned and taught his ideas to major cities all across the country.
Hellyer was a high profile federal cabinet minister in the 60s. He ran for the leadership of both the Liberal and the Progressive Conservative parties. In the late 90s he founded and led the Canadian Action Party. [2]
Mr. Hellyer was a Canadian nationalist and a political campaigner. He was notable essentially for his critiques of the Free Trade Agreements, beginning with the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement in the 1980s. But he was also a fervent believer in the Bank of Canada remaining a public bank, and remaining the prime lender at low or no rates of interest for major government projects as it was before that focus was removed by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1974. [3]
In spite of all his accomplishments, and him also being the longest serving member of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada, this author can personally attest to the complete lack of interest of a local visit by this man now past his 93rd birthday.[4]
And now, sadly, as Christmas approaches, Paul Hellyer will not be joining Winnipeggers, or anyone, to greet the holiday season. His long and exciting life came to a close on August 8 of this year.
To mark the passage of a dear member of the Canadian community, and a good friend, we present this tribute in audio made up of the voices of a number of individuals who knew his record and met him. We also include a brief message of his own from an except of our last full interview with him in 2016.
As a bonus, we include on this page a copy of his talk in Winnipeg.
Ronald Stagg is a Professor of History at Ryerson University. He has taught there over three decades. His research interests include Canadian social history and Canadian-American relations, and his teaching interests are in social protest and in the relationship between film and history.
Howard Bertram was a member of the Canadian Action Party, founded and led by Paul Hellyer.
Barrie Zwicker has been a journalist for a time spanning 7 decades. He is also a media critic and a documentary producer. He met Paul Hellyer in person during 9/11 visibility conference in 2004.
Rocco Galati has been a constitutional lawyer for 32 years. He is the Executive Director of the Constitutional Rights Centre Inc. In the past he won multiple suits against the government. Galati was named twice by Canadian Lawyers’ Magazine as one of Canada’s top 25 lawyers.
Grant Cameron is a UFOlogist. His interests have turned to the involvement and actions of the President of the United States in the UFO problem. He has made over 20 trips to the National Archives and most of the various Presidential archives looking for presidential UFO material. HE recently wrote the book, THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT UFO STORY: The Wilbert Smith Files.
Victor Viggiani is the News Director of Zland Communications an international news service, and a close friend to Paul Hellyer.
CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.
WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.
Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.
CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am.
Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.
Taylor C. Noakes (Aug 13, 2021), ‘Former federal defence minister Paul Hellyer dies at 98’, The Canadian Press; https://www.thestar.com/politics/2021/08/13/former-federal-defence-minister-paul-hellyer-dies-at-98.html?rf
“Current Chronological List of Members of the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada”. Privy Council Office. Archived from the original on February 15, 2016. Retrieved June 17, 2013.
Seriously ill patients facing death from late stage COVID infection increasingly face hospital protocols that have a terrible record of saving lives. In fact, nearly all such patients die. This explains why over 1,000 Americans are dying every day from COVID. In a week, more people die from late stage COVID than died in the 9/11 attacks. Yet this is not major news on mainstream media outlets. Getting used to COVID deaths has produced complacency rather than rage.
As we approach 800,000 COVID related deaths in the US it is important to note that many and probably most of these occur in a hospital. The evidence clearly shows that approved hospital protocols for seriously ill COVID patients in intensive care units are ineffective.
Patients suffer in ICUs on a ventilator, getting oxygen, perhaps a steroid, often with pneumonia, and worst of all being given remdesivir that has a terrible track record, does not save lives and has deadly side effects. Staying many weeks in an ICU until they die means big money for the hospital.
Some may ask why doctors are not standing up and fighting for these patients, fighting to save their lives. Few doctors are brave enough to stand up against the entire medical establishment to administer IVM to a dying patient. Almost all US physicians in hospitals have capitulated to the evil, ineffective public health system. They rather let their COVID patients die than truly follow the science and save their lives. So, here is the science case for this use of IVM.
Late stage COVID disease
Patients and their families desperate for a better outcome often find evidence for using IVM. This usually happens after they see their relative getting worse and worse in the ICU as the hospital keeps using the government approved protocol.
In fact, there is some solid medical research that supports using IVM for late stage COVID disease. Peter McCollough, the preeminent medical expert on COVID agrees there is a valid scientific explanation of why IVM works in late stage COVID infection. Beyond its anti-viral character, it is also an anti-inflammatory medicine.
Here is the title of an April 2021 medical research study: “Anti-inflammatory activity of ivermectin in late-stage COVID-19 may reflect activation of systemic glycine receptors.” It noted that “the clinical utility of ivermectin in the cytokine storm phase of COVID-19 reflects, at least in part, an anti-inflammatory effect.”
Dr. Pierre Kory, widely seen as a leading expert on IVM, has said: “In more advanced stages, the drug is useful thanks to its anti-inflammatory properties. Contrary to many other drugs, ivermectin is beneficial in all stages of the infection.”
A Yale University professor and renowned cancer researcher Dr. Alessandro Santin said “he has seen ivermectin work at every stage of COVID.” He is positive about hospitalized patients receiving treatments like steroids and oxygen also getting IVM. He noted that it can work “quelling the destructive cytokine storm in late infection.” He said “Ivermectin can really be the game-changer against COVID-19.” And reported seeing cancer patients “radically improve their shortness of breath and oxygenation” within 24 to 48 hours of their first dose.
A published medical 2021 study of patients hospitalized with confirmed severe acute COVID respiratory syndrome at a four-hospital consortium in South Florida. There were 280 patients with 173 treated with IVM and 107 in the usual care group. There were lower mortality rates in the group treated with IVM as compared with the group treated with usual care: 15.0% vs 25.2%, respectively, a big reduction in deaths. Mortality was even lower for a subgroup of patients with severe pulmonary involvement (what most court cases are): 38.8% vs. 80.7% for IVM and usual care, respectively, a very significant result. The study said: “We showed that ivermectin administration was associated significantly with lower mortality among patients with COVID-19, particularly in patients with more severe pulmonary involvement.”
To be clear: This controversial generic has been used globally for many years and is very safe and cheap. The official public health system, however, does not support the use of IVM for addressing COVID despite its very wide use globally, including very successful use in India where its use has wiped out the pandemic in most of the country. Normally, IVM has been used as an early treatment and with very successful outcomes; this being explained by the drug’s ability to kill the virus in the initial stage of COVID infection called viral replication. The protocols of a number of front-line doctors include IVM who have used it for early treatment to keep patients out of the hospital and alive.
Using courts and fighting hospital opposition
Below are some case examples of critically ill patients seen as being on their death bed who were given IVM, when hospitals capitulated to court orders sought by family members, and then fully recovered!
In the past year there have been over 100 court cases trying to get access to IVM for very ill patients, usually for whom hospital doctors say have little chance of surviving. Sadly, only about 10% of these legal actions have been successful. Hospitals are literally killing late stage COVID victims by withholding IVM. Few judges have been willing to conclude that what hospitals are doing are not saving lives and that it is medically and morally appropriate to give these patients a chance at recovering with IVM use. There seems to be inadequate use of the medical evidence given above.
Nor has there been strong calls for CDC and FDA sanctioning use of IVM as compassionate off-label drug use for late-stage patients.
Case of Sun Ng, age 71
In Illinois a court forced a hospital to capitulate to family demands to give a very sick elderly patient IVM. The hospital used the approved ways to treat the patient, including the unsafe and very expensive drug remdesivir, intubation and ventilator use for a month in the ICU. None of it worked and Mr. Ng was given only a 10 to 15% percent chance of surviving.
Ng’s only child, Man Kwan Ng, with a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering, did her own research and decided that her father should take IVM. The hospital refused. The daughter went to court. Judge Paul M. Fullerton of the Circuit Court of DuPage County granted a temporary restraining order requiring the hospital to allow IVM be given to the patient. As usual, this hospital refused to comply with the court order. But the legal fight continued. One physician who testified described Sun Ng as “basically on his death bed.” The judge was informed IVM can have minor side effects such as dizziness, itchy skin, and diarrhea at the dosage suggested for Ng. And the judge said that the “risks of these side effects are so minimal that Mr. Ng’s current situation outweighs that risk by one-hundredfold.”
The judge issued a preliminary injunction that day directing the hospital to “immediately allow … temporary emergency privileges” to Ng’s physician, Dr. Alan Bain, “solely to administer Ivermectin to this patient.” [As of several months ago, Dr. Bain had treated over 40 patients with IVM.] But the hospital resisted the order. Then the judge admonished the hospital and restated that it must allow Bain inside over a period of 15 days to do his job. Then the hospital filed a motion to stay the order but judge Fullerton denied it, again directing the hospital to comply. The hospital finally gave in. He passed a breathing test that he hadn’t been able to pass in the prior three weeks, looked more alert and aware. The first dose of IVM showed immediate results and he got it for four days. He recovered from COVID-19 and was discharged by the hospital some six weeks after admission.
The attorney in this case was Kirstin M. Erickson of Chicago-based Mauck and Baker.
New York cases
Ivermectin was at the center of three successful court cases in three upstate counties of New York involving hospitalized COVID patients – 65, 80 and 81 years old. The three patients were in ICUs and on ventilators when given IVM and had little chance of living. All were given IVM under court order and recovered and were discharged.
The attorney for these cases was Ralph Lorigo. He has helped many families, with about 100 similar cases nationwide, he was the subject of an article titled “Ralph Lorigo has built a potentially lucrative brand as the go-to guy for desperate people willing to buck science in the pandemic’s fourth wave. Lorigo called hospitals “arrogant” in the matter. “They only stick to their protocols,” he said. “It’s like they think they’re gods. They wear white coats, but they’re not God.” Absolutely correct.
The case that received the most attention was for a 80-year-old Buffalo woman with COVID whose feisty, take-no-prisoners family took a hospital to court. Judith Smentkiewicz was on a ventilator when her family was told she’d likely spend another month in the ICU, where they gave her a 20 percent chance of survival. The family did some research and read about IVM’s success. They pressed an ICU doctor to give it, and, on day 12 of infection, he did. Within 48 hours of a single dose, Smentkiewicz had improved so much that she was moved out of critical care.
But doctors on the new unit declined to continue IVM even as the woman’s condition declined. The family went to court. The hospital fiercely objected. Smenkiewicz’s personal physician for 20 years was called in. “We reviewed the limited studies on the use of ivermectin for COVID-19 and recommend [his emphasis] she receive 15 mg orally Day 1, Day 3 and Day 5,” wrote Dr. Stephen Scravani in a letter to the court. The judge ordered the treatment resumed. The result, Smentkiewicz was released to a rehabilitation facility shortly, recovered from COVID. “It is a miracle from where she was,” Lorigo said.
Texas case
A 74-year-old man battled his COVID infection for almost a month and was put on a ventilator. Pete Lopez’s was previously prescribed IVM at a VA hospital, but was admitted before he was able to take it. The family won a court order against Memorial Hermann in Sugar Land, Texas to treat him with IVM but the hospital refused to administer the drug. And so, Lopez died.
Pennsylvania case
Keith Smith age 52 was on a ventilator in a medically induced coma from COVID. His wife got a complicated court order to force the hospital to give IVM; but there were two frustrating days of lawyers negotiating its implementation. The brief order denied the request for an emergency injunction to force UPMC [hospital] to administer IVM. However, the order directed UPMC to allow the doctor who had prescribed the drug or another physician or registered nurse to administer it under the doctor’s “guidance and supervision.” Like most situations there was a legal battle. After too long a delay, about a month, Smith, who was getting dialysis treatment received his first dose of IVM. Sadly, he died. IVM works, but if major body organs are devastated with use of the standard protocol, it can be too late for IVM to save the life.
Virginia case
Kathy Davies was hospitalized for several months, including being placed on a ventilator and given remdesivir that has a terrible record compared to IVM. According to attorney Thomas Renz, the death rate for COVID patients prescribed remdesivir (26%) exceeds the fatality rate of COVID patients prescribed ivermectin, which is recorded by the CMS database at 7.2%.
Her family fought for several weeks for her to get IVM. But hospital doctors refused, so the family hired a legal team, and the court hearing the case said the patient had the right to try IVM, if it was prescribed by her doctor. But the hospital blocked the doctor.
The hospital in Warrenton, Virginia, was held in contempt by a court that had authorized the use of IVM treatment for Davies according to a report from Just the News. Fauquier Health was ordered to provide the dose authorized by the court or it could be fined. Supposedly the hospital agreed to comply – following a week of arguing with the court. But it did not.
Next, as the report confirmed, “Judge James. P. Fisher, of the 20th Judicial Court of Virginia, agreed with the arguments presented by the Davies family attorney and ruled to hold the hospital in contempt of court and compel the $10,000 a day fines, which could be applied retroactively. The hospital, at this point, complied and allowed the Ivermectin to be administered to the long-suffering patient.”
After 41 days on a ventilator, Kathy received her first dose of IVM and continues receiving it.
Florida Case
In November it was reported that a Florida teacher who drew national attention for trying to get a hospital to administer her IVM died from COVID. Tamara Drock, 47, died 12 weeks after being admitted to Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center for treatment. Her husband sued the hospital in an attempt to require it to administer IVM. “If she had walked out of the hospital, she could have had the medication. Every person in Florida has a constitutional right to choose what is done with their own body,” he said. A doctor at Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center agreed to give Drock IVM, but the family’s attorney, Jake Huxtable, said the proposed dosage was too low. Palm Beach County Circuit Judge James Nutt rejected the initial lawsuit. This case brought up the option that has not been widely seen, namely late stage COVID patients leaving the hospital if they could arrange for an independent doctor providing IVM.
Montana and Idaho conflicts
One Montana hospital went into lockdown and called police after a woman threatened violence because her relative was denied IVM. Another Montana hospital accused public officials of threatening and harassing their health care workers for refusing to treat a politically connected COVID patient with IVM or hydroxychloroquine, that 82-year-old patient died. And in neighboring Idaho, police had to be called to a hospital after a COVID patient’s relative verbally abused her and threatened physical violence because she would not prescribe IVM or hydroxychloroquine. These three conflicts occurred from September to November.
Several Illinois cases
In May, a DuPage County judge ordered Elmhurst Hospital to allow a comatose COVID patient to receive IVM after none of its physicians agreed to administer it. The woman’s daughter said she improved and ultimately returned home after an outside doctor gave her the drugs.
A Springfield judge reached a different conclusion, ruling against a woman seeking to force Memorial Medical Center to provide IVM to her 61-year-old husband, who reportedly had been hospitalized with COVID for nearly six weeks.
In another case, friends and supporters of Veronica Wolski, besieged Chicago’s Amita Health Resurrection Medical Center with hundreds of calls and emails demanding that Wolski, who was hospitalized with COVID-related pneumonia, be given IVM. The hospital said it did not use IVM to treat COVID, and Wolsk soon died.
In another DuPage case, court documents show a winding road that led Leslie Pai, a 68-year-old photographer, to Advocate Condell’s intensive care unit. According to the lawsuit, Pai entered NorthShore Glenbrook Hospital with COVID- on Aug. 31. She was already taking IVM as a preventive measure and brought some to the hospital, but according to the complaint, officials there threw it out, saying it was not allowed in the facility. The staff at NorthShore Glenbrook wouldn’t budge in their opposition to IVM, the complaint said, so on Sept. 11 Tiffany Wilson had her mother transferred to Advocate Condell, where she was placed on a ventilator and put into a medical coma. Advocate Condell doctors weren’t willing to give her IVM, either, so Wilson filed suit in DuPage County, home of the hospital’s parent company. Hayes granted a temporary injunction allowing an outside physician, Dr. Alan Bain, to give her the drug. But things did not go well because hospital doctors said Pai had harmful effects from IVM.
The hospital’s lawyers said Pai had received a “mega dose” of the drug, but Jon Minear, one of Pai’s attorneys, said doctors misunderstood the dosage Bain prescribed. He added that her medical records indicated that her condition had improved. The daughter Wilson in an affidavit said her research into IVM led her to believe its risks are “infinitesimally small,” and that it offers her mother an excellent chance at a full recovery. The hospital maintained its opposition and the legal battle continued.
Kentucky case
A judge denied a request to force doctors at a Louisville hospital to treat a COVID patient with IVM. Angela Underwood filed a lawsuit in Jefferson County Circuit Court to compel doctors at Norton Brownsboro Hospital to give her husband, Lonnie IVM; she represented herself in the case. “As a Registered Nurse, I demand my husband be administered ivermectin whether by a Norton physician or another health care provider of my choosing including myself if necessary,” Underwood wrote in her complaint, which was later amended to request her husband be treated with “intravenous vitamin c.” Jefferson Circuit Judge Charles Cunningham wrote in a ruling that the court “cannot require a hospital to literally take orders from someone who does not routinely issue such orders.” Cunningham wrote that Underwood could try to find a hospital that “believes in the efficacy of these therapies.” “This is impractical because it is likely that no such hospital in the United States, or certainly in this region, agrees with Plaintiff,” Cunningham wrote. “Moreover, her husband’s medical circumstances may make such a transfer unjustifiably risky. Interestingly, initially, Circuit Court Judge Judith McDonald-Burkman did order the hospital to treat Underwood with IVM “if medically indicated and ordered by an appropriate physician,” and that judge granted “emergency injunction to administer intravenous Vitamin C.” But Cunningham stepped in as judge at some point.
Ohio case
An Ohio judge ruled that a local hospital cannot be compelled to give IVM to a COVID patient. Common Pleas Court Judge Michael Oster Jr. issued the ruling as a 14-day temporary injunction granted by a different judge expired. Julie Smith asked for an emergency order for the use of IVM for her husband Jeffrey Smith, 51. He was in the intensive care unit of a Butler County hospital for weeks. Initially, Judge Gregory Howard gave the go-ahead to Dr. Fred Wagshul’s prescription of 30 milligrams of IVM daily for three weeks, as requested by his wife.
The second judge wrote that Smith and her lawyers did not overcome the high burden needed to maintain the injunction. Oster said there was no clear evidence that IVM is effective against COVID-presented in court and that he must also consider the rights of the hospital and the impact that forcing a hospital to give a drug could have. “The FDA, CDC, AMA and APhAA and the doctors of West Chester Hospital do not believe that ivermectin should be used to treat COVID-19,” Oster wrote. He said that Jeffrey Smith could be moved to another hospital where the drug could be administered. Kelly Martin, spokeswoman for UC Health which operates West Chester Hospital, said “We do not believe that hospitals or clinicians should be ordered to administer medications and/or therapies, especially unproven medications and/or therapies, against medical advice.”
Conclusions
There is no consistency among all these cases. With one exception. Hospitals invariably fight all attempts by families, attorneys and courts to get IVM to seriously ill COVID patients. They are totally on the side of the government and refuse to acknowledge benefits from IVM use in late stage COVID disease. Like government agencies, hospitals are unwilling to follow medical science, even in the face of failure of government approved protocols for such patients.
While there has been some success with patients recovering because of IVM, in many cases patients die because they get IVM too late or not at an effective dose.
Most judges seem unwilling to see the near certainty of death being outweighed by the possibility that IVM can save a life. They are stubbornly wed to the idea that hospitals and their doctors know what works best, despite the very high death rate for late stage COVID patients put on the normal protocol.
Emergency preparation
More people should think about taking these actions:
1. Have a stock of IVM in your household.
2. Line up an independent physician who does not work for any hospital or health care corporation; even if only available through telemedicine.
3. If a love one gets stricken with late stage COVID, is seriously ill and gets hospitalized and is given the standard care protocol, be prepared to take that person out of the hospital (without hospital approval), to your home where IVM can be administered, preferably with guidance on dosage from a physician that is pro-IVM. This should be considered after just a week or so in an ICU and preferably before being put on a ventilator.
4. This sounds drastic, but staying in the hospital on a ventilator for weeks in an ICU is in almost all cases a death sentence.
Sixty years ago in the late fall and early winter, a seventeen-year-old blue-eyed Bronx boy went by himself to see an afternoon showing of West Side Story on Fordham Road in the north Bronx.
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He took the bus to the theater but walked the few miles home in a romantic daze, in love with Maria and yearning for a girl like that for himself.
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The movie had mesmerized him, and though he knew about gang fights and the enmity between different ethnic groups, especially white prejudice against Puerto Ricans and blacks, he had never been involved in such violence.
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It was real and not-real for him, and he was smart enough to realize that a movie was not real life and that great music had the anodyne power to enchant, and together with colorful moving pictures it could put one into a dream state that could be very powerful.
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West Side Story (1961)
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There was a reason why Hollywood was called the “Dream Factory.”
But he liked to dream and went to the movies to lose himself in fantasy like so many others. But West Side Story had hit him especially hard, and as he walked home through the winding streets, he felt unreal, as though the spell the movie cast on him was everlasting. He wanted to be Tony, not dead but alive, and Tony taking Maria away from the violent streets to a somewhere place where love and happiness were possible.
His fascination, however, was tinged with foreboding, a sense that despite what felt like a window of optimism and hope in 1961 with the new young president John Kennedy in the White House, something bad was coming round the corner or whistling down the sky since shortly before the U.S. and the Soviet Union had faced off with tanks at the recently erected Berlin Wall, and weird things were happening around the world such as the Bay of Pigs invasion earlier in the year and the recent death of the Secretary General of the UN Dag Hammarskjöld, one of the boy’s heroes. (image right)
In those years before cynicism swept the country, people had heroes, as did the boy: his father, JFK, Hammarskjöld, Paul Newman, and the basketball star Bob Cousy, obviously different in kind and stature.
For the boy was a romantic at heart but his head thought dark thoughts. He didn’t know why, but he felt an odd mixture of hope and dread, and he kept thinking of Tony and Maria and how they fell in love at first sight. He wondered if this was just a movie thing. Was it fate that Tony got shot?
He kept thinking back to seven years earlier when his seven-year-old cousin accidentally shot and killed his nine-year-old brother and the weirdness of accidents and horrible evil and love and sex and death and how his blue-eyed red-haired sister had married her Puerto Rican boyfriend despite the sick norms of the time – his mind was a merry-go-round of inchoate thoughts and impressions going in circles till the music stopped when he got home without a partner to share his deepest thoughts with, and no hand to hold – and so he went twice more by himself to see the movie, hoping to discover some secret embedded in its tale, thinking that perhaps the beautiful music hid a revelation and so he would have to listen again and again.
He kept all this to himself, not daring to share his heart’s desires and fears with anyone, since he was an athlete and the only boy with seven sisters and his role was to be strong and brave and stoic and swallow his loneliness.
The previous month he had come out of high school basketball practice on East 85th St. in Manhattan in the early evening only to ask a stranger for the time. The stranger in the tan cap and coat was his hero Paul Newman, the star of the recently released movie The Hustler in which he played Fast Eddie Felson, the pool hustler.
The boy, who loved movies and went dreaming in them, had identified with Newman and his character’s desire to win, and when Newman, who introduced himself as Paul, very nicely took a few minutes to ask his name and talk to the boy about his school and basketball, the boy was thrilled, and the thrill was compounded when Newman called after him as the boy was leaving, “See you later, Fast Eddie.”
They shared blue eyes and for some reason blue now seemed to color so much of what the boy saw and felt, the blue of the open sky’s freedom and the blueness of Tony’s eyes and his death and the Virgin Mary blueness of the aptly names Maria of the dark eyes, just like the talismanic miraculous medal of Blessed Mary that hung around the boy’s neck, kept there to protect and guide him to something that felt just out of reach and that perhaps he needed a miracle to reach. Who knows? He didn’t, but he felt that something was coming if he could only wait in hope, something very hard to do with his impetuous and passionate nature.
He had just gotten into a stupid fight at a basketball practice with Louis Alcindor, who later became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which left him feeling weird and wondering about young men and fighting and now he had just seen Tony get killed in a tragic twist of fate in a game run by forces bigger than the Sharks and the Jets could imagine. What did it mean to win? And even though Tony wasn’t real, only an actor playing a part, his death resounded in the boy’s mind, just as did Maria’s anguish as she held her dying lover.
Somewhere someday, he thought, love might conquer all this madness and we’ll find a new way of living and I’ll find my Maria and it will be love at first sight.
The next year the boy went with a friend to The Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village. It was around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world teetered on the edge of nuclear war.
The unknown blue-eyed Bob Dylan was performing there that fall and it was when he first sang
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
The boy kept hearing his words: “And what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
And what’ll you do now, my darling young one?”
And a hard rain did fall, although nuclear war was avoided, Kennedy was soon shot dead for seeking peace between two gangs far more deadly than the Sharks and the Jets.
And the boy had to decide what he would do, for the music played on but nobody was listening and there were guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children and napalm and rifles in the hands of young men in distant jungles.
He wondered if there really was a place for us somewhere, a place to find a new way of living, for it didn’t seem like this was the time for it with blood everywhere, bad blood, good blood, puddles of blood, streams of blood, blood in the songs and songs in the blood, Dallas, New York, Memphis, the city of Angels, Saigon, San Juan, Hanoi down through the years as he wandered in tears and wondered where it was all going, all this blood.
Blue entered his soul, a blueness of the deepest deep that was not a technicolor blue but a Billie Holiday blue, the Bronx buried Billie near the boy’s dead young cousin Jimmy, dead with a bullet to the heart because of an adult’s carelessness, the adults who made the wars in the ghettos and the jungles and caused the deaths of so many all across the world, those unfeeling ones who killed Billie and Bobby and Jimmy and Tony and Johnny and Bernardo, and did their best to try to extinguish blue skies in the hearts of young people everywhere, to drug them and wipe their minds clean of hope and idealism and the feeling that miracles could happen and the world is full of light with suns and moons all over the place, wild and bright going mad, shooting sparks into space because love is found and love abides.
For the boy, as he walked through the years and became a man, the blueness in his soul always also harbored a certain blue that counteracted the blues, a blue like singing the blues defeats the darkness. For him it was this inner image of Maria, Mary, Marie, the lady in blue, the Blessed one, the mother of all sorrows and hope that kept him company all along his journeys and sang to him as she held his hand.
Who can explain it, who can tell you why? He wasn’t foolish enough to try. One day, the boy who became the man, now a reluctant young professor, walked into a room to teach a course on death and meaning, and there was his beautiful Maria looking at him, she of the long dark hair and dark eyes, resurrected, and he saw her and the world went away, death departed, they stared at each other spell-bound, and he knew this wasn’t a movie but was real love at first sight. Time flew away and yet a hard rain kept falling and it’s falling still.
The sky still weeps and the blood keeps a-flowing. The boy learned to tell it and “speak it and think it and breathe it and reflect from the mountain so all souls can see it,” and is still doing his best. He and Maria, no longer young, just went to the movies together to see the remake of West Side Story.
The theater was nearly empty. He was expecting to find much to criticize. Instead, he found Tony and Maria again and the same old story, the fight for love and glory for a new time and place but with new faces in the same race to defeat the old hate that never seems to die. It was only a movie. But as he took Maria’s hand he knew that love abides, and he whispered to himself: “Always you, every thought I’ll ever know/Everywhere I go you’ll be, you and me.” It was a miracle, not a dream.
Edward Curtin, prominent author, researcher and sociologist, Western Massachusetts, U.S.
Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin spent an hour and 14 minutes in a video conversation on Wednesday. Geopolitically, paving the way for 2022, this is the one that really matters – much more than Putin-Biden a week ago.
Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov, who generally carefully measures his words, had previously hinted that this exchange would be “extremely important.”
It was obvious the two leaders would not only exchange information about the natural gas pipeline Power of Siberia 2. But Peskov was referring to prime time geopolitics: how Russia-China would be coordinating their countercoups against the hybrid war/Cold War 2.0 combo deployed by the US and its allies.
While no substantial leaks were expected from the 37th meeting between Xi and Putin since 2013 (they will meet again in person in February 2022, at the start of the Beijing Winter Olympics), Assistant to the President for Foreign Policy Yuri Ushakov did manage to succinctly deliver at least two serious bits of information.
These are the highlights of the call:
Moscow will inform Beijing about the progress, or lack thereof, in negotiations with the US/NATO on security guarantees for Russia. Beijing supports Moscow’s demands on US/NATO for these Putin and Xi agreed to create an “independent financial structure for trade operations that could not be influenced by other countries.” Diplomatic sources, off the record, say the structure may be announced by a joint summit in late 2022.
They discussed the Biden-hosted “Summit for Democracy,” concluding it was counterproductive and imposed new dividing lines.
Of all of the above, the third point is the real game-changer – already in the works for a few years now, and gaining definitive momentum after Washington hawks of the Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland kind recently floated the idea of expelling Russia from SWIFT – the vast messaging network used by banks and other financial institutions to make money transfer instructions – as the ultimate sanctions package for the non-invasion of Ukraine.
Putin and Xi once again discussed one of their key themes in bilaterals and BRICS meetings: the need to keep increasing the share of the yuan and ruble in mutual settlements – bypassing the US dollar – and opening new stock market avenues for Russian and Chinese investors.
Bypassing a SWIFT mechanism “influenced by third counties” then becomes a must. Ushakov diplomatically put it as “the need to intensify efforts to form an independent financial infrastructure to service trade operations between Russia and China.”
Russian energy businesses, from Gazprom to Rosneft, know all there is to know not only about US threats but also about the negative effects of the tsunami of US dollars flooding the global economy via the Fed’s quantitative easing.
This Russia-China drive is yet another dimension of geoeconomic, geostrategic and demographic power rapidly shifting towards Eurasia and possibly foreshadowing the advent of a new world system related to other matters Putin-Xi certainly discussed: the interconnection of Belt and Road with the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the expanded reach of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the coming Chinese presidency of BRICS in 2022.
The US – with US$30 trillion in debt, 236% of its militarized GDP – is virtually bankrupt. Russia-China have already experimented with their alternative payment systems, which will inevitably integrate.
The most important banks in both countries will adopt the system – as well as banks across Eurasia doing business with them, and then vast swaths of the Global South. SWIFT, in the long run, will be used only in exceptional cases if China and Russia have their way.
Maidan redux
Now to the heart of the geopolitical puzzle.
Ushakov confirmed that the Russian Federation has submitted proposals on security guarantees to the US. As Putin himself had confirmed even before talking to Xi, it’s all about “indivisible security”: a mechanism that has been enshrined all across the territory of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe since a 1975 summit in Helsinki.
Predictably, under orders of the powers that be, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg already rejected it.
Both Xi and Putin clearly identify how Team Biden is deploying a strategic polarization gambit under good old divide-and-rule. The wishful thinking at play is to build a pro-American bloc – with participants ranging from the UK and Australia to Israel and Saudi Arabia – to “isolate” Russia-China.
That’s what’s behind the narrative thunderously splashed non-stop all across the West – to which Biden’s Summit for Democracy was also tied. Taiwan is being manipulated against Beijing while Ukraine is being literally weaponized against Russia. “China aggression” meets “Russian aggression.”
Beijing has not fallen into the trap but has asserted at different levels that Taiwan will eventually be integrated into the mainland motherland, without any ludicrous “invasion.” And the wishful thinking that massive American pressure will lead to cracks inside the Chinese Communist Party is also likely generating zero traction.
Ukraine is a much more volatile proposition: a dysfunctional nightmare of systemic instability, widespread corruption, shady oligarchic entanglements and poverty.
Washington still follows the Zbigniew Brzezinski-concocted Maidan plan laid out for cookie distributor Nuland in 2014. Yet seven years later, no American “strategist” managed to understand why Russia would fail to invade Ukraine, which has been part of Russia for centuries.
For these “strategists”, it’s imperative that Russia faces a second Vietnam, after Afghanistan in the 1980s. Well, it’s not going to happen because Moscow has no interest whatsoever in “invading” Ukraine.
It does get more complicated. The ultimate fear dictating all US foreign policy since the early 20th century is the possibility of Germany clinching a new version of Bismarck’s 1887 Reinsurance Treaty with Russia.
Add China to the combination and these three actors are able to control just about the entire Eurasian landmass. Updating Mackinder, the US would then be turned into a geopolitically irrelevant island.
Putin-Xi may have examined not only how the imperial hybrid war tactics against them are floundering against them, as well as how the tactics are dragging Europe further into the abyss of irrelevance.
“The EU has virtually ruptured its relations with both Russia and China – at the same time. Washington’s hawks wanted it. A ‘European Brzezinski’ certainly would have advised the EU differently: never lose both in tandem – you are never that powerful.”
No wonder the leadership in Moscow-Beijing can’t take anyone in Brussels seriously – be it assorted NATO chihuahuas or the spectacularly incompetent Ursula von der Leyen at the European Commission.
A faint ray of light is that Paris and Berlin, unlike the Russophobic Poland and the Baltic fringe, at least prefer having some sort of negotiation with Moscow over Ukraine as opposed to slapping on extra sanctions.
Now imagine Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explaining the ABCs of foreign policy to a clueless Annalena “Grune” Baerbock, now posing as German foreign minister while displaying a fresh mix of incompetence and aggressiveness. She actually placed the phone call.
Lavrov had to meticulously explain the consequences of NATO expansion; the Minsk agreement; and how Berlin should exercise its right to pressure Kiev to respect Minsk.
No leaks about it should be expected from Ushakov. But it’s fair to imagine that with “partners” like the US, NATO and the EU, Xi and Putin should conclude that China and Russia don’t even need enemies.
“Raymond Kurzweil is described in Wikipedia as “an American inventor and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments”
***
Ray Kurzweil doesn’t have a God to honour. He has a machine, and he wants us all to shift to this digital version of the divine. He wants us to become super-computers in all but name. He calls it ‘the singularity’, a name with a quasi-religious ring to it. The singularity stands for ‘the fusion of the real with the synthetic’.
Kurzweil sees this as a supreme act that will end the need for human evolution by transferring the meaning and purpose of life into a ‘real-time’ electro-digital encyclopedia composed of trillions of soulless electrical circuits that ape what we call ‘knowledge’.
He’s not alone in this way of thinking, there’s Zuckerberg, Schwab, Musk and who knows who else.And then there’s a whole trail of followers stretching out behind, all travelling the same way. Tens of millions, if not billions of them. They don’t describe themselves as believers in ‘the singularity’, they simply worship the same digital totem and allow it to gradually take-over their lives – megabyte by megabyte, gigabyte by gigabyte – until they can no longer be described as human.
When you see people constantly looking downwards, you realise that they are metamorphosing into something less than human. Aspiration – the desire to grow, learn and be more than one is – is an upward moving action. The impulse of aspiration to a state of higher consciousness, is an upwardly rising movement. As a tree or flower reaches for the light, so do we humans.
But those seduced by their cell phones, I pods, tabs et al. always look down. Down into a place where the only light is the LED powered glow on the face of their appliance.
Slowly but surely humans are being transformed into that which they are addicted to. They are losing their ability to see and respond to the actual Light, their guiding angel and innate link with universal cosmic consciousness. They are loosing their humanity. Their soul is being overridden, short-circuited, deleted.
Whenever one sits in front of a glowing screen one is the subject of hypnosis. One is subconsciously becoming reliant upon that which is the gateway technology into another world of being and perceiving: ‘a virtual world’.
Kurzweil and those billions who adopt his fascination with a virtual existence, are placing a great burden on the rest of life. They are dead weight imposed upon living matter. They are the receivers and transmitters of distorted energy fields – and these fields pollute the natural vibratory fields responsible for the health and well being of all living matter.
People who only look down ‘shed’ their negative vibrations on others in their vicinity. This is a vibratory reality. And when coupled with the actual EMF radiation emanating from that to which they are addicted, the circadian rhythms of the biosphere are drowned-out by a pervasive electro smog.
The Schumann Resonance (7.86 Hertz) which maintains balance of the natural environment, including humans, wildlife and plant life, is pushed into the background, while the synthetic radiation frequencies beamed out from 3,4,5G towers and transmitters, become the predominant energy field.
A voltage field that is dispersed and accentuated by the little pocket time bombs that some 95% of those living and working in Western societies cannot bear to part company with.
But when your best friend is a machine you easily fall victim to its powers.
Man’s love-affair with technology has intensified with each passing decade. There has always been a fascination with that which appears to make daily life more navigable and more ‘convenient’.
But the price to be paid for the ever more high-tech and ‘unrepairable’ digitalised props of the modern age, is far too high. They cannot simply be dismissed as something ‘one can’t do without’.
Food, water, clothes, shelter and medicine belong in that category, but not convenience technologies that kill.
We humans are not machines. We have sensitive physical bodies, astoundingly brilliant brains and exquisite powers of perception and spirituality. The role of the machine is to support this condition, not to override it. To accentuate a creative ‘human scale’ sense of proportion and responsiveness in daily life.
Today’s multifarious tech toys have been weaponised. They were born out of military research and development. They were conceived and designed as intentional weapons and surveillance tools, combined into one.
They come with no health warning, aside from some precautionary small print, less obvious than that associated with plastic toys. Children are urged to enter into long-term relationships with these toxic electro magnetic play things, and with the virtual worlds they draw their owners into – like moths to the flame. They are military accessories, sweetened and domesticated into tools of ‘friendly’ torture. Silent weapons seductively distorting the divine human condition.
Now we begin to see the dire results of having adopted such a blind degree of faith in the fake one-eyed god called ‘progress’, with its Faustian promise of taking us ever closer to the promised land of technological perfection. The transmutation of warm, spontaneous, creative human beings into sterile, soulless cyborgs.
That is the Kurzweil, Zuckerberg, Gates and Schwab agenda for the future of humanity; “genocide of the human soul”.
So guard your precious, responsive souls with your very life. Never let them be technologically enslaved. Give them the true breathing space they need to make themselves known to you.
For your soul alone knows the true direction to the Promised Land.
Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher. He is co-founder of HARE The Hardwick Alliance for Real Ecology see https://hardwickalliance.org/ Julian’s acclaimed book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is particularly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info