Category: Vaccines

  • April 10 will mark one year since President Joe Biden signed a congressional resolution that officially ended the COVID-19 “public health emergency.” The week before, over a thousand people in the U.S. died of the virus. Declarations like Biden’s aren’t just rhetorically frustrating, they have concrete negative effects. Formally ending the “public health emergency” meant that many of the health…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • A new Angus Reid poll suggests the number of parents opposed to vaccinating their children has grown over the last five yearsin Canada.

    The post Waking People up first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • With a brief memo, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo has subverted a public health standard that’s long kept measles outbreaks under control. On Feb. 20, as measles spread through Manatee Bay Elementary in South Florida, Ladapo sent parents a letter granting them permission to send unvaccinated children to school amid the outbreak. The Department of Health “is deferring to parents or guardians…

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  • A recent X post from Tucker Carlson featured biologist and podcaster Bret Weinstein (DarkHorse) to talk about the US immigration crisis after a visit to the Darién Gap. The gap is a jungle in the Panamanian isthmus where the Pan American Highway is interrupted on its way to South America. There, at the incitement of weblogger and US Special Forces officer Michael Yon, Weinstein went to see the immigration camps and learn how people from all over the world are trekking to the Rio Bravo border to enter the US.

    His detailed description was rational and cautious, yet it raised a specter which was clearly alarming. Weinstein described the conditions and the character of two camps that he saw. One fit the description of a classic refugee camp. It was visibly managed by a number of NGOs as well as US government agencies. The other appeared to be full of Chinese. He was able to talk to numerous migrants in the first camp but was unable to enter the one which appeared to be Chinese.

    The “Chinese” camp seemed to be full of military age young men who when addressed outside the camp were reluctant to talk.

    After discussing the discrepancies, Carlson asked if he had any explanation. Weinstein was exceptionally cautious and only uttered hypotheses. However, the direction implied the possibility that China was sending men to the US behind the migrant screen.

    Then Weinstein shifted to the possible relation between a Chinese contingent and Covid with the mRNA injections that the US government (along with nearly all Western governments) forced on much of the population. Although Weinstein was very explicit that his hypotheses were not facts and that he did not know if there was any relationship to verify, the discussion proceeded to cover possible motives and objectives of both policies supported by the US regime.

    The speculation is provocative and not to be easily dismissed. Nonetheless, it also revealed how little many people seem to understand about how covert operations can work. Michael Yon can be recognized as a special operations professional. While popular imagination continues to portray these men as mere super soldiers, the reality is that Special Forces are the armed cadres of the CIA and other covert action (state terrorism) agencies. A quick look at Yon’s website shows him as a super-soldier or soldier of fortune who has been a dedicated operator in all the CIA managed wars of the past three decades. That alone ought to raise suspicions about his coverage and why he was so interested to show a biologist and popular podcaster the frontier of what are undoubtedly covert operations. Weinstein was taken into Yon’s confidence much like the journalist character in John Wayne’s notorious The Green Berets film, promoting the war against Vietnam.

    Allowing that Weinstein reported what he honestly saw, the question remains whether he saw what he was supposed to see. That returns us to the question “why Chinese?” The ensuing discussion raised legitimate questions about connections between US immigration policy and the Covid War. However before considering them it is necessary to return to the first camp. Weinstein named several organisations supporting the migrant camp. He identified USG agencies and the UN agency IOM. What he either did not know or did not recognise is that the International Organization for Migration is run by the US national security bureaucrat Amy Pope.1There is general confusion about how the UN and its specialized agencies are run. The WHO is essentially an arm of the Gates Foundation and the international pharmaceuticals (pharmaments) cartel. It would not be unreasonable to suppose Ms Pope assures that the IOM complies with the policies set by those who rule the US. Weinstein’s conclusion is that such policies as those articulated by the Biden administration reflect corruption on a global scale. However that does not answer the question who benefits from those policies and how?

    To return to the compulsory mass injection, especially of the military and other health and safety services, Weinstein and Carlson both expressed their bewilderment and shock that the compulsion was so rigorous in what might be called the public services sector. Then more speculation returned to COVID and mRNA injections and what these were doing to people in the US. Consensus prevailed that this was biological weaponry deployed. While there is no reason to doubt that assertion, the next step was to repeat the half truth that China was the source of the raw material both for the pathogen and for the injections since the latter were based on the former. Neither Weinstein nor Carlson could recall that the actual origin was Eco-Health Alliance, a cutout for US bioweapons development and Ralph Baric at UNC-Chapel Hill, the principal investigator commissioned for the DoD gain of function (weapons) development. Weinstein is probably not savvy enough to understand how cut-outs work or the details of false flag operations. Carlson probably does know but rarely if ever discusses such details. The accuracy of the media depictions of COVID in China were accepted as debunked. Yet the sources of that “information” were not examined. Thus, Chinese authorship was implied.

    While discussing the implications of the migration crisis + “Chinese”, the hypothesis was aired that both the managed “uncontrolled” migration and the covid/mRNA weapons aimed to weaken the US from within. This might serve the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by mass infiltration of potentially militarized immigrants who would then create the conditions most favorable to alleged Chinese expansionism. This it was suggested might be due to China having essentially bought the US government. This hypothesis has been peppered by regular reports of bribes paid to inter alia the Biden family by Chinese interests.

    Striking in the discussion is the absence of two considerations: a) the complex of US anti-China war propaganda which naturally compromises any reporting about China in the West as a whole and b) the interests of the Western oligarchy in redesigning the West as a neo-feudal regime. Leave that eyesore, the CIA-founded WEF, aside for a moment. There are purely national phenomena which provide a far more efficient explanation.

    As a matter of record Mr Gates is now the largest private owner of farm land in the US. There is no indication that he has stopped buying. Since the 2008 mortgage crisis, the hedge funds like Black Rock have become the largest owners of rental property (residential and commercial). This feat was accomplished by the massive derivatives fraud that forced millions of mortgagees to forfeit their real property. The economic devastation continued this process. Sane economists, of which Michael Hudson is one of the few, have charted this conversion of home ownership to rental tenancy and its acceleration. The Anglo-American finance oligarchy is aggressively pursuing through the banking, tax and monetary system an unparalleled expropriation of rank and file Americans.

    During the mass incarceration, I wrote several times that COVID was political-economic warfare using biological agents and financial terror. My argument, then and now, was that this is atomic grade social engineering. In the worst case — for the oligarchy — this neutralization of the country’s majority was a clearing of the decks for open world war. Masses who might, under pressure of extermination — especially in the military and armed citizenry — actually rebel and mutiny leading to an October scenario. However, there is another scenario compatible with the history of North American conquest. In the 19th century, the tiny oligarchy was incapable of fulfilling its manifest destiny by stealing the whole continent. So bonded labor and massive immigration were used to take and hold everything between the Allegheny and the Pacific. Poor immigrants were granted the freedom to fight and die in battle against the indigenous population. Afterwards the land won was handed to railroads, finance, miners and ranchers. Successive economic crises bankrupted smallholders regularly. They abandoned their homes and moved westward. “Indians” and Chinese-bonded labor kept those settlers busy while the usual suspects seized all the land and loot, selling it back to successive suckers. Forced displacement was fundamental to the business model that “won the West”. Even to this day, the oligarchy represented in Washington understates the use of biological agents to eradicate the indigenous peoples. Few 19th century immigrants admit how they were used to enrich East Coast elites. Perhaps that is the policy followed today, the one at home which bears examination. The immigrants are driven by plane and on foot from the South. Meanwhile, mRNA injections provided the same comfort as smallpox-treated blankets.

    ENDNOTE

    It is after all just a hypothesis, but with tradition.

    The post Darién Gaps and Injun Country first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    IOM mission statement
    Harnessing the Power of Migration

    Comprehensive solutions to the world’s biggest challenges – from poverty and inequality to climate change, and conflict – are all inextricably linked to migration. IOM knows that migration has the power to transform the lives of individuals, their families, their communities and societies for the better. It is clear that the Sustainable Development Goals cannot be reached without safe, orderly and regular migration. For this reason, our vision is: to deliver on the promise of migration, while supporting the world’s most vulnerable.

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  • The former Die Linke politician’s new party embraces a model that has found purchase among sections of the left across the Global North: left-wing economics paired with a variety of political positions pulled from the right.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

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  • Safe & Effective? – NOT ACCORDING TO THE PFIZER CONTRACT

    South Africa – Pfizer contract

    “…considering the relevant risks, uncertainties, limitations and challenges of the development, manufacture, commercialization and distribution of a novel COVID19 vaccine product, taking into account the following factors: actual and potential issues of safety and efficacy,…” (p 3)

    “Purchaser acknowledges and agrees that (i) Pfizer’s efforts to develop and manufacture the Product are aspirational in nature and subject to significant risks and uncertainties,…” (p 8)

    Albania Contract – (use “purchaser” as a search term you will find similar warnings.)

    The post The Biggest Vaccine Lie Exposed first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists.  Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:

    Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

    When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.”

    He never said he had evidence, because he didn’t.

    Rumsfeld, who enjoyed his verbal games, was the quintessential bullshitter and liar for the warfare state.  This encounter took place when Rumsfeld and his coconspirators were promoting lie after lie about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and conflating false stories about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to build a case to wage another war against Iraq, in order to supplement the one in Afghanistan and the war on “terror” that they launched post September 11 and the subsequently linked anthrax attacks.

    A year later on February 5, 2003, U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U. N. Security Council and in a command performance assured the world that the U.S. had solid evidence that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” repeating that phrase seventeen times as he held up a stage prop vial of anthrax to make his point.  He said, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”  He was lying, but to this very day his defenders falsely claim he was the victim of an “intelligence failure,” a typical deceitful excuse along with “it was a mistake.”  Of course, Iraq did not have “weapons of mass destruction” and the savage war waged on Iraq was not a mistake.

    Scott Ritter, the former Marine U.N. weapons inspector,  made it very clear back then that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but his expertise was dismissed, just as his current analysis of the war in Ukraine is.  See his recent tweet about Senator Diane Feinstein in this regard:

    Thirteen months after Rumsfeld’s exchange in the news conference, the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, knowing it had no justification.  It was a war of aggression.  Millions died as a result.  And none of the killers have been prosecuted for their massive war crimes.  The war was not launched on mistaken evidence; it was premeditated and based on lies easy to see.  Very, very easy to see.

    On January 28, 2003, eleven days before Powell performance, I, an independent writer, wrote a newspaper Op Ed, “The War Hoax,” saying:

    The Bush administration has a problem: How to start a war without having a justifiable reason for one.  No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem.  If they can’t find a justification, they may have to create one.  Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. . . . Yet once again, the American people are being played for fools, by the government and the media.  The open secret, the insider’s fact, is that the United States plans to attack Iraq in the near future.  The administration knows this, the media knows it, but the Bush scenario, written many months ago, is to act as if it weren’t so, to act as if a peaceful solution were being seriously considered. . . . Don’t buy it.

    Only one very small regional Massachusetts newspaper, the North Adams Transcript, was willing to publish the piece.

    I mention this because I think it has been very obvious for a very long time that the evidence for United States’ crimes of all sorts has been available to anyone who wished to face the truth.  It does not take great expertise, just an eye for the obvious and the willingness to do a little homework.  Despite this, I have noticed that journalists and writers on the left have continued to admit that they were beguiled by people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden, con men all.  I do not mean writers for the mainstream press, but those considered oppositional.  Many have, for reasons only they can answer, put hope in these obvious charlatans, and some prominent ones have refused to analyze such matters as the JFK assassination, September 11th, or Covid-19, to name a few issues.  Was it because they considered these politicians and matters known unknowns, even when the writing was on the wall?

    Those on the right have rolled with Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump in a similar manner, albeit for different reasons.  It causes me to shake my head in amazement.  When will people learn?  How long does it take to realize that all these people are part of a vast criminal enterprise that has been continuously waging wars and lying while raking in vast spoils for the military-industrial complex.  There is one party in the U.S. – the War Party.

    If you have lived long enough, as have I, you reach a point when you have, through study and the accumulation of evidence, arrived at a long list of known knowns.  So with a backhand slap to Donald Rumsfeld, that long serving servant of the U.S. war machine, I will list a very partial number of my known knowns in chronological order.  Each could be greatly expanded. There is an abundance of easily available evidence for all of them – nothing secret – but one needs to have the will for truth and do one’s homework.  All of these known knowns are the result of U.S. deep state conspiracies and lies, aided and abetted by the lies of mass corporate media.

    My Known Knowns:

    • The U.S. national security state led by the CIA assassinated President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This is The foundational event for everything that has followed.  It set the tone and sent the message that deep state forces will do anything to wage their wars at home and abroad.  They killed JFK because he was ending the war against Vietnam, the Cold War, and the nuclear arms race.
    • Those same forces assassinated Malcolm X fourteen months later on February 21, 1965 because he too had become a champion of peace, human rights, and racial justice with his budding alliance with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Such an alliance of these two black leaders posed too great a threat to the racist warfare state.  This conspiracy was carried out by the Nation of Islam, the New York Police Department, and U.S. intelligence agencies.
    • The Indonesian government’s slaughter of more than one million mainly poor rice farmers in 1965-6 was the result of a scheme planned by ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired. It was connected to Dulles’s role in the assassination of JFK, the CIA-engineered coup against Indonesian President Sukarno, his replacement by the dictator Suharto, and his mass slaughter ten years later, starting in December 1975.  The American-installed Indonesian dictator Suharto, after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American-supplied weapons in a repeat of the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians in 1965.
    • In June of 1967, Israel, a purported ally of the U.S., attacked and destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian armies, claiming falsely that Egypt was about to attack Israel. This was a lie that was later admitted by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a speech he gave in 1982 in Washington, D.C.  Israel annexed the West Bank and Gaza and still occupies the Golan Heights as well.  In June 1967, Israel also attacked and tried to sink the U.S. intelligence gathering ship the U.S. Liberty, killing 34 U.S. sailors and wounding 170 others.  Washington covered up these intentional murders to protect Israel.
    • On April 4, 1968, these same intelligence forces led by the FBI, assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. He was not shot by James Earl Ray, the officially alleged assassin, but by a hit man who was part of another intricate government conspiracy.  King was killed because of his work for racial and human rights and justice, his opposition to the Vietnam War, and his push for economic justice with the Poor People’s Campaign.
    • Two months later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, on his way to the presidency, was also assassinated by deep state intelligence forces in another vastly intricate conspiracy. He was not killed by Sirhan Sirhan, who was a hypnotized patsy standing in front of RFK. He was assassinated by a CIA hit man who was standing behind him and shot him from close range.  RFK, also, was assassinated because he was intent on ending the war against Vietnam, bringing racial and economic justice to the country, and pursuing the assassins of his brother John.
    • The escalation of the war against Vietnam by Pres. Lyndon Johnson was based on the Tonkin Gulf lies. Its savage waging by Richard Nixon for eight years was based on endless lies.  These men were war criminals of the highest order.  Nixon’s 1968 election was facilitated by the “October Surprise” when South Vietnam withdrew from peace negotiations to end the war.  This was secretly arranged by Nixon and his intermediaries.
    • The well-known Watergate scandal story, as told by Woodward and Bernstein of The Washington Post, that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, is an entertaining fiction concealing intelligence operations.
    • Another October Surprise was arranged for the 1980 presidential election. It was linked to the subsequent Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, led by future CIA Director under Reagan, William Casey, and former CIA Director and Vice-President under Reagan, George H. W. Bush.  As in 1968, a secret deal was made to secure the Republican’s election by making a deal with Iran to withhold releasing the American hostages they held until after the election.  They were released minutes after Reagan was sworn in on January 20, 1981.  American presidential elections have been fraught with scandals, as in 2000 when George W. Bush and team stole the election from Democrat Al Gore, and Russia-gate was conjured up by the Democrats in 2016 to try to prevent Trump’s election.
    • The Reagan administration, together with the CIA, armed the so-called “Contras” to wage war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua that had overthrown the vicious U.S. supported dictator Anastasio Somoza. The Contras were Somoza supporters and part of a long line of terrorists that the U.S. had used throughout Latin America where they supported dictators and death squads to squelch democratic movements. Such state terrorism was of a piece with the September 11, 1973 U.S. engineered coup against the democratic government of President Salvatore Allende in Chile and his replacement with the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
    • The Persian Gulf War waged by George H.W. Bush in 1991 – the first made for TV war – was based on lie upon lie promoted by the administration and their public relations firm. It was a war of aggression celebrated by CNN and other media as a joyous July 4th fireworks display.
    • Then the neoliberal phony William Clinton spent eight years bombing Iraq, dismantling the social safety net, deregulating the banks, attacking and dismantling Yugoslavia, savagely bombing Serbia, etc. In a span of four months in 1999 he bombed four countries: Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia.  He maintained the U.S. sanctions placed on Iraq following the Gulf War that resulted in the death of 500,00 Iraqi children.  When his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes if the price was worth it, Albright said, “We think the price is worth it.”
    • The attacks of September 11, 2001, referred to as 9/11 in an act of linguistic mind control in order to create an ongoing sense of national emergency, and the anthrax attacks that followed, were a joint inside operation – a false flag – carried out by elements within the U.S. deep state.  Together with the CIA assassination of JFK, these acts of state terrorism mark a second fundamental turning point in efforts to extinguish any sense of democratic control in the United States.  Thus The Patriot Act, government spying, censorship, and ongoing attacks on individual rights.
    • The George W. Bush-led U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. and its “war on terror” were efforts to terrorize and control the Middle East, Southwest Asia, as well as the people of the U.S. The aforementioned Mr. Rumsfeld, along with his partner in crime Dick Cheney, carried out Bush’s known known war crimes justified by the crimes of Sept 11 as they simultaneously created a vast Homeland Security spying network while eliminating Americans basic freedoms.
    • Barack Obama was one of the most effective imperialist presidents in U.S. history. Although this is factually true, he was able to provide a smiling veneer to his work at institutionalizing the permanent warfare state.  When first entering office, he finished George W. Bush’s unfinished task of bailing out the finance capitalist class of Wall St.  Having hoodwinked liberals of his bona fides, he then spent eight years presiding over extrajudicial murders, drone attacks, the destruction of Libya, a coup in Ukraine bringing neo-Nazis to power, etc.  In 2016 alone he bombed seven countries Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Iraq.  He expanded U.S. military bases throughout the world and sent special forces throughout Africa and Latin America.  He supported the new Cold War with sanctions on Russia.  He was a fitting successor to Bush junior.
    • Donald Trump, a New York City reality TV star and real estate tycoon, the surprise winner of the 2016 U.S. presidential election despite the Democratic Party’s false Russia-gate propaganda, attacked Syria from sea and air in the first two years of his presidency, claiming falsely that these strikes were for Syria’s use of chemical weapons at Douma and for producing chemical weapons. In doing so, he warned Russia not to be associated with Syrian President Assad, a “mass murderer of men, women, and children.”  He did not criticize Israel that to the present day continues to bomb Syria, but he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He ordered the assassination by drone of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport while on a visit to meet with Iraq’s prime minister.  As an insider contrary to all portrayals, he presided over Operation Warp Speed Covid vaccination development and deployment, which was a military-pharmaceutical-CIA program, whose key player was Robert Kadlec (former colleague of Donal Rumsfeld with deep ties to spy agencies), Trump’s Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response and an ally of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates.  On December 8, 2020 Trump joyously declared: “Before Operation Warp Speed, the typical time-frame for development and approval [for vaccines], as you know, could be infinity. And we were very, very happy that we were able to get things done at a level that nobody has ever seen before. The gold standard vaccine has been done in less than nine months.”  And he announced they he will quickly distribute such a “verifiably safe and effective vaccine” as soon as the FDA approved it because “We are the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. Today, we’re on the verge of another American medical miracle.”  The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was approves three days later. Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine received FDA emergency use authorization a week later.
    • This Covid-19 medical miracle was a con-job from the start. The official Covid operation launched in March 11, 2020 with worldwide lockdowns that destroyed economies while enriching the super-rich and devastating regular people, was a propaganda achievement carried out by intelligence and military apparatuses in conjunction with Big Pharma, the WHO, the World Economic Forum, etc. and promulgated by a vast around-the-clock corporate media disinformation campaign.  It was the third fundamental turning point – following the JFK assassination and the attacks of September 11, 2001 and anthrax – in destabilizing the economic, social and political life of all nations while undermining their sovereignty.  It was based on false science in the interests of further establishing a biosecurity state.  The intelligence agency planners who had conducted many germ war game simulations leading up to Covid -19 referred to a future arising out of such “attacks,” as the “New Normal.”  A close study of these  precedents, game-planning, and players makes this evident.  The aim was to militarize medicine and produce a centralized authoritarian state.  Its use of the PCR “test” to detect the virus was a lie from the start.  The Nobel Award winning scientist who developed the test, Kary Mullis, made it clear that “the PCR is a process. It does not tell you that you are sick.”  It is a processto make a whole lot of something out of nothing,” but it can not detect a specific virus.  That it was used to detect all these Covid “cases” is all one needs to know about the fraud.
    • Joseph Biden, who was Obama’s point man for Ukraine while vice-president and the U.S. engineered the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine, came into office intent on promoting the New Cold War with Russia and refused all Russian efforts to peacefully settle the Ukrainian crisis. He pushed NATO to further provoke Russia by moving farther to the east, surrounding Russia’s borders.  He supported the neo-Nazi Ukrainian elements and its government’s continuous attacks on the Russian speaking Donbass region in eastern Ukraine.  In doing so, he clearly provoked Russian into sending troops into Ukraine on 24 February 2022.  He has fueled this war relentlessly and has pushed the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.  He supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.  He currently presides over an aggressive provocation of China.  And like his predecessor Trump, he promotes the Covid disinformation campaign and the use of “vaccines,” urging people to get their jabs.
    • Throughout all these decades and the matters touched upon here – some of my known knowns – there is another dominant theme that recurs again and again.  It is the support for Israel and its evil apartheid regime’s repeated slaughters and persecution of the Palestinian people after having dispossessed them of their ancestral land. This has been a constant fact throughout all U.S. administrations since the JFK assassination and Israel’s subsequent acquisition of nuclear weapons that Kennedy opposed.  It is been aided and abetted by the rise of the neocon elements within the U.S. government and the 1997 formation of The Project for the New American Century, founded by William Kristol and Donald Kagan, whose signees included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., and their claim for the need “for a new Pearl Harbor.”  Many of these people, who held dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship, became members of the Bush administration.  Once the attacks of September 11th occurred and a summer of moviegoers watching the new film Pearl Harbor had passed, George W. Bush and the corporate media immediately and repeatedly proclaimed the attacks a new Pearl Harbor.  Once again, the Palestinian’s and Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that is widely and falsely reported as unprovoked, as is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has been referred to as “a Pearl Harbor Moment.”  By today, Monday 9 Oct. 2023, President Biden has already given full U.S. support to Israel as it savagely attacks Gaza and has said that additional assistance for the Israeli Defense Forces is now on its way to Israel with more to follow over the coming days. Rather than acting as an instrument for peace, the U.S. government continues its  support for Israel’s crimes as if it were the same country. The Israel Lobby and the government of Israel has for decades exerted a powerful control over U.S. Middle East policies and much more as well.  The Mossad has often worked closely under the aegis of the CIA together with Britain’s M16 to assassinate opponents and provoke war after war.

    Donald Rumsfeld, as a key long time insider to U.S. deep state operations, was surely aware of my list of known knowns.  He was just one of many such slick talkers involved in demonic U.S. operations that have always been justified, denied, or kept secret by him and his ilk.

    One does not have to be a criminologist to realize these things.  It is easy to imagine that Rumsfeld’s forlorn ghost is wandering since he went to his grave with his false “unknown unknowns” tucked away.

    When he said, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice-versa,” he did say it, of course.  Despite double-talkers like him, evidence of decades of U.S. propaganda is easy to see through if one is compelled by the will-to-truth.

    “Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again.  All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.”  – Norman O. Brown

    Note:  If you think I too have no evidence, look at this for many of them.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The latest COVID-19 booster shot is now available to the public. But this time, access is a bit more challenging. Sanho Tree, a drug policy expert in Washington, D.C., has found getting previous vaccine doses to be “very orderly,” but has made five attempts to get the vaccine. After making his first appointment at a CVS on the other side of the city, the closest place it was available…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ever since he was a medical student, Dr. Neil Martinson has confronted the horrors of tuberculosis, the world’s oldest and deadliest pandemic. For more than 30 years, patients have streamed into the South African clinics where he has worked — migrant workers, malnourished children and pregnant women with HIV — coughing up blood. Some were so emaciated, he could see their ribs. They’d breathed in…

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  • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • It’s been well over a year now since the health scare dubbed the Covid-19 pandemic has had any widespread impact upon the lives of the vast majority of humanity. Since the “fog of war” has lifted, so to speak, there has been very little introspection regarding the knee-jerk authoritarianism imposed upon humanity in the liberal press or mainstream academia. Eerie parallels connect the panic stirred up during the health crisis with the reaction to 9/11. There is also plenty of circumstantial evidence of prior knowledge and pre-planning for both of these events. In their wake, mass hysteria, government propaganda, tyranny, censorship, and irrational belief systems spawned out of each, supported by ruling class interests and mass media mouthpieces.

    Although many policies related to the global war on terror and the pandemic certainly have fascistic and totalitarian impulses, there are key differences. Whereas the fascist and totalitarian rely on a single despot, and the marginalization of minority groups, postmodern tyranny operates according to the flows of late capitalism: diversity and inclusion are encouraged; power is spread through a corporate oligarchy, as well as political, military, and now medical hierarchies; and devastating economic and social effects are engendered by “absent causes”; i.e., abstract engines of capital: stock fluctuations, algorithms, financial instruments and various Finance/Insurance/Real Estate (FIRE) sector bubbles and scams. The public is predictably bewildered by a revolving cast of bureaucrats and elites with varying amounts of sociopathic and narcissistic traits; however, the personal attributes of the cast members are extraneous to capital accumulation, imperialism, and the liquidation of nature. It is fine to use phrases like fascist or totalitarian in response to government policies for rhetorical effect; however, most Americans do not feel that way or use that terminology, which harkens back to a simpler era of boot stamping. We are rather enmeshed in a dictatorship of capital.

    A related aspect of what we may call postmodern tyranny is the absence of metanarratives. The establishment props up whatever narrative suits their interest in the moment, but is able to cast them off at the first serious grumblings from the public. From about 2001-2011, the global war on terror dominated; from 2011-2016, it was “regime change” in Syria and Libya with a little ISIS and feigned horror at Russia taking Crimea sprinkled in; from 2016-2020, the overblown Russiagate connection; from 2020-2022, Covid-19; and now the Ukraine-Russia war, in which we are told NATO and the US are completely innocent allies who did not start, provoke, and manipulate the geopolitical chessboard going back decades, and who only want to assist the helpless Ukrainians.

    Yet after two years of being subjected to the tyrannical orders of an authoritarian medical panic orchestrated by the ruling classes, transnational political puppets, as well as the establishment medical “experts” who espoused fraudulent and laughable claims over and over, people worldwide are waking up to the health scare as well as the US proxy war in Ukraine. There are many striking similarities between the 9/11 false flag attack and the Covid-19 global health freak-out. Both events led to mass hysteria and a globalized form of ostrich syndrome, where denial and collective hallucination became the norm, paving the way for deeper imperial tyranny and mass obedience. Recently, many who supported government policies and narratives including lockdowns, travel bans, vaccine mandates, and health passports are asking for “Pandemic Amnesty” regarding their panic-inducing and tyrannical behavior; and admitting they were dead wrong, even as they championed ridiculous and deadly policies and demonized anyone who tried to stand in their way.

    Revisiting the “Catalyst”

    The parallels between government reactions to 9/11 and the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic are uncanny. Prior to 9/11, a sizable chunk of US citizens would not have put up with domestic mass surveillance. Similarly, prior to the health crisis of 2020, populations would have been very skeptical of mandatory lockdowns, absurd masking rules, and coercive vaccine mandates and propaganda; as well as blocking off access to travel, public spaces, and businesses with vaccine passports. Most interpret this as government exploiting a crisis, rather than governments’ prior knowledge and pre-planning of the events. However, from the start, the ready-made, manufactured hysteria and propaganda suggests a collusion of military-intelligence, industrial, financial, and medical forces of industry and government.

    The economic indicators had been blinking red for months before even January of 2020, going back to the repo crisis of September 2019. Quoting an investor in CNBC from March 2020:

    The virus was the catalyst but it’s not the cause,’ said Christopher Whalen, founder of Whalen Global Advisors. ‘Both bonds and equities were inflated rather dramatically by our friends at the Fed. You’re seeing the end game for monetary policy here, which is at a certain point you have to stop. Otherwise you get grotesque asset bubbles like we saw, and the engine just runs out of fuel.’ [Emphasis mine]

    Reuters concurs, with a major figure at the Fed blurting the quiet part out loud: “Pandemic aid was also ‘banking bailout‘”. The liberal/left site The Intercept sums up the game quite well, explaining that the CARES Act of March 2020 allows for:

    Direct purchases of corporate debt — the first nongovernment bond-buying in the Fed’s history — would now be allowed. Companies have swelled their borrowing in recent years, and experts have identified this as a source of serious economic risk. A sudden shock like the pandemic that wiped out revenues would not only cause bankruptcies, but also accelerate bond defaults, broadening stress throughout the financial system.

    Further on in the piece, the author notes how the CARES Act calls for an “Exchange Stabilization Fund”. Worth 454 billion, the money is leveraged just like a major bank, allowing for:

    A $4.5 trillion slush fund would be created, equity markets ballooned. The total value of the stock market cratered to 103 percent of GDP, about $21.8 trillion, on March 23. By April 30 it was back to 136.3 percent of GDP, or $28.9 trillion. By that metric, $7.1 trillion in stock market wealth has been created in that period.

    In other words, the US saw the writing on the wall coming from China: the economic slowdown and shuttering of factories which began in January 2020 was finally affecting the US stock market, which had cratered by mid-March 2020. Only the exaggeration of a pandemic, a sloughing off of millions of jobs, and new spigots opening for the banking sector, would allow for corporations to maintain profitability. Debt restructuring was inevitable and the only way to accomplish this was to railroad legislation through Congress, not a difficult task considering our lawmakers are essentially lobbyists for major multinational corporations. Large companies got billions in aid while workers and small businesses fell into ruin.

    Once the medical agenda was set, panic set in, and it turns out overcrowding nursing homes, firing one million medical workers and 40 million total US workers, blaring apocalyptic propaganda non-stop, censoring any talk of vitamin and supplement use, imposing stressful lockdowns, and turning patients away from doctors can have an effect on worldwide mortality. Hardly anyone in the medical community was willing to confront those inconvenient truths, and those that did were censored further.

    It was known very soon after March 2020 what the infection fatality rate would be: a very low percentage, perhaps twice the rate from seasonal influenza. World elites did not care- they had an agenda in hand.  Regardless of the seriousness, capitalist elites wouldn’t have put 40 million Americans out of work and imploded the economy without a plan. And they had one ready-made: a 5 trillion dollar plan. Later on, US elites would not have advocated for coercive vaccine mandates – get the shot or lose your job – unless the word came down from the very highest echelons of the elite, and although many, if not most, of the establishment bought it wholesale, it’s clear that the federal government was not going to leave states to make decisions based off the inputs of local county and state health officials. The word came down from on high; there certainly was obvious collusion to centralize and organize the Covid dogma, yes, a “conspiracy”, because asking the public to “trust the science” only takes you so far when conflicting and contradictory data about the danger of the virus is staring them right in the face.

    Given the unreliability of the initial tests for Sars-CoV-2, the deliberate use of too many PCR cycles per test, and the simple fact that it’s quite probable that multiple benign strains and variants of coronaviruses resulted in positive tests, it’s easy to see how a global pandemic was manufactured at the outset. From the very beginning, government propaganda emanating from the medical, military, and intelligence establishments were obviously coordinated, centralized, and directed to coerce and cow citizens into submission to a globalized, medical cult. Local and national news all parroted the same line, and a global groupthink biosecurity agenda was pushed to the forefront of society. It’s important to remember that before the declared emergency, to “quarantine” involved restricting access to the sick, not the whole of society.

    The language was not only Orwellian, but was written from scripts in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community. We were told to “shelter in place”, and doctors and nurses were on the “frontlines” of the fight. These were certainly designed to conjure images of war and create an impassioned atmosphere where dissent was marginalized, repeating the lockstep ideological conformity that occurred after 9/11. Phrases like social distancing and contact tracing entered the lexicon with barely a grumble. Hilariously, after more than a year of putting up with absurd and ever-changing laws, Britain toyed with the idea of offering its citizens “Freedom Passes” for those compliant enough to test frequently, their reward being the “freedom” to leave their own home.

    Canadian and British reporting confirms the unethical propaganda to coerce, scare, and guilt-trip civilian populations. One UK psychologist dubbed their government program “totalitarian”. Every mainstream news outlet in the US from March 2020 to February 2022 resembled a liberal version of the Sinclair broadcasting scandal from 2018, where the media conglomerate, which has a known right-wing bias, made 193 local news anchors repeat the same minute-long script, word-for-word, warning of “false news” and “fake stories” proliferating on social media and mainstream news, echoing Trump’s rhetoric at the time.

    Natural immunity was scoffed at, gathering in public was outlawed, visitors to households were forbidden, a vaccine was deemed to be the only response to the threat, and even health advocates who gave common-sense reminders to take vitamins and supplements were derided as unserious crackpots.

    A pertinent question to think about is this: given the uptick in supposed deaths from Sars-CoV-2 around March 2020, was a global upheaval of lockdowns, travel restrictions, limited movement outside one’s home, and caps on gatherings justified? With hindsight, many if not the majority of Americans now say no. However, the fact remains that many astute observers were calling the bluff of the World Health Organization, the CDC, and the medical and national security establishments from the beginning. Those voices were censored and silenced by a corporatist oligarchy bent on imposing pain on small business and the average citizen. Millions lost their livelihoods and small businesses never recovered.

    Another related question: how and why was the medical establishment so driven to combat an acute health threat caused by the virus Sars-CoV-2, but lies dormant when global poverty is clearly the number one cause of death in the world, followed by cancer and heart disease? We were led to believe the world could be turned upside down to fight a virus, yet nothing can be done to alleviate the leading causes of death, poverty: structural, chronic health issues are off the table, as they are caused by capitalism’s inexorable drive to profit, pollute, and impoverish the majority of the Earth’s inhabitants.

    Even the WHO admits that ¼ of total deaths today are attributable to “unhealthy environments”; i.e., conditions of extreme poverty, preventable disease, starvation, and malnutrition. In 2012 that was 12.6 million deaths per year, but the total is undoubtedly higher today, probably about 20 million.  The WHO also concedes about 2 million people in China alone die from air pollution every year, with about 6.7 million deaths per year worldwide. Where is the outcry and global mobilization to stop these much deadlier problems?

    Could there have been a more rational path, where people over the age of say, 60 or 65, the most likely to be affected, could have been shielded with voluntary plans to restrict interpersonal contact, as well as given access to the best care and medicine, while the rest of the world would be allowed to carry on without draconian measures? Surely medical professionals in the US could have developed a plan in conjunction with governments which allowed for freedom of movement, as in Sweden and Japan. The path, however, was blocked by the national security state in conjunction with unelected health authorities, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and global capitalists eager to institute repressive measures and rake in trillions from a restructuring of the world economy. The global economy needed a “Great Reset” to centralize and buy-up small businesses for pennies on the dollar, and the financial system was reeling going back to September of 2019. Disturbingly, this sequence of events is reminiscent of the last time the national security state remade the world, after 9/11.

    The Mask Comes Off

    Many leftists pointed out that the work stoppage from the lockdowns would allow us time to reflect on the inhumanity, overproduction, alienation, and exploitation inherent to capitalism. No doubt this was true. What most overlooked, however, was the ridiculousness of having the poor and working classes keep on working while the remote-working, white-collar privileged classes were offered a respite from the grind of work culture. There was, and is, an inherent inequality and power imbalance in having restaurants and drivers deliver packages and food to one’s doorstep while chastising those same people who refused to mask (even outdoors, absurdly).

    The middle and upper class guilty pleasures of living in a consumerist society cocooned at home with streaming TV and take-out overwhelmed the need for solidarity with the poor and working classes, who were in many cases unable and unwilling to shelter or get an experimental injection from a government that has treated the poor and minorities as human guinea pigs or worse for the entirety of its history.

    The felt need for security against an acute contagion, while resisting to grapple with the complexities and culpability of being part of a global-imperial-capitalist death machine, epitomized the Western Left position. Other than the obvious responses: “This is why we need universal health care!” etc., there was barely anyone talking about the number one cause of real pandemics: our proximity to inhumane and unsanitary animal agriculture. The collective, fear-based knee-jerk response was to inhumanely slaughter tens of millions of animals: estimates suggest more than 10 million hens, perhaps 5-10 million pigs, and 17 million mink were killed due to “overproduction”, and in the case of mink, to the possibility of the spread of Sars-CoV-2.

    A Brief Recap of our 21st Century Dystopia

    Twenty three years ago, many people around the world had high hopes as a new millennium dawned. The year 2000 was ushered in, and to untrained eyes, the global outlook looked rosy. The Fukuyaman “end of history” narrative still dominated after nearly a decade of unopposed US dominance in world financial markets and military and political hegemony. There were no major wars among world powers and the global economy provided new avenues of wealth for the middle classes around the world.

    The party didn’t last long. It turned out that globalization, that catch-all term trotted out over and over by both liberal internationalists and conservative realists to defend the seemingly interminable reign of capitalists, had plenty of cracks in the foundation. The notion that Western states were “democratic republics” caring for citizens’ interests began to crumble. The diminishing returns of capitalism as well as brazen corporate and government corruption began to disrupt the confidence of the global middle classes. The consent of the governed could no longer be assured; and as the façade of democratic legitimacy collapsed, Western governments, headed by the US, began to look for a new ideological force to justify neoliberal capitalism.

    World events took a swift turn for the worse starting from the very first months of the new millennium. In March 2000 the dot-com bubble burst, with losses eventually reaching 1.75 trillion in the US alone; this rippled through the world economy. The total loss in market capitalization was estimated to be 5 trillion by the end of the recession in 2002. Over 2.2 million jobs were lost in the US and unemployment continued to climb into mid-2003.

    In November of 2000 the contested Bush-Gore election ran into a stalemate. A judicial coup in the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush 5-4, effectively stopping the recount. There was relatively little public push-back, and the lack of any real resistance from the Democratic party machine solidified the coup, and the “Bush-Cheney junta”, as the late Gore Vidal called it, steamrolled into power.

    The true events of September 11th, 2001 may always remain partially shrouded in mystery, yet some tell-tale signs point to the obvious: a conspiracy in which the US government played an active role in orchestrating the sequence of events we call 9/11. Any cursory look at the “conspiracy theories” and the 9/11 truth movements’ findings shows the glaring holes in the official story. Examining and absorbing all the evidence leads to the inevitable conclusion- the events of 9/11 was a false flag, orchestrated by our own government, and the perpetrators are still at large, much like the JFK assassination.

    Most everyone over thirty remembers what came next, even though most are loath to recall. The Bush regime blamed Al Qaeda before the end of the night, news broadcasts showed the towers falling non-stop, and color coded terror alerts became our “new normal” (we’ll get to the next iteration shortly). An axis of evil was rolled out; any country who vaguely opposed US imperialism was put on the naughty list, and a new “crusade” was decreed, with explicit threats “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Shortly after, the mysterious anthrax attacks swept the nation, and captivated the US, even as it became crystal clear that the type of anthrax used was a highly weaponized version coming from a US biolab, which could only mean it was deliberately stolen and released by high elements within our own government.

    The state of emergency became normalized immediately. A new surveillance state was constructed, the Patriot Act and AUMF allowed for extra-judicial assassination, torture, and spy programs began to expand globally. Officially war was declared against Iraq and Afghanistan; unofficially, Special Forces and black ops spread to approximately 130 nations. The empire was expanding and on the move- especially in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa, where control over access to fossil fuels alongside the continuing supremacy of the petrodollar is paramount in maintaining global hegemony today.

    The Permanent State of Emergency/Exception

    Power loves catastrophe: the running theme here being that when non-natural disasters occur, Western governments quickly rally and conspire in order to procure quick profits, maintain control, and flex power over weaker nations.

    In our era, authoritarian regimes have argued for the permanent suspension of the rights of their own citizens, as well as human rights and international law. This concept was popularized by Giorgio Agamben in his 2005 book, State of Exception. Agamben uses the example of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty: the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception. By abrogating the rights of their own citizens in response to an emergency, both nominally democratic and dictatorial regimes can use the threat of future catastrophes to install permanent police states, declare martial law, and normalize what used to be considered extralegal into the framework of law in the name of national security.

    The imperial core settled on a tried and true model: programming the public to accept that every catastrophe caused by the capitalist global system is an emergency that must be responded to with an increasingly authoritarian society. Police state tactics, lifted from Nazi Germany, became normalized as the economic, political, and ideological forces backing the War on Terror saw little resistance from a mystified and fearful citizenry. This process is known as a state of exception, originally codified in law by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. A succinct definition can be found here:

    [The state of exception] defines a special condition in which the juridical order is actually suspended due to an emergency or a serious crisis threatening the state. In such a situation, the sovereign, i.e. the executive power, prevails over the others and the basic laws and norms can be violated by the state while facing the crisis.

    Nearly every major significant political flash point of the last twenty two years was used as an excuse to broaden and deepen the national security state and corporate rule. This process has effectively disempowered the western masses to such a degree that the majority of Western populations, including many in the middle classes, have effectively neo-feudal, debtor relationships to state and market forces.

    The author Naomi Klein described the new, globalized, neoliberal model quite well in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, where disaster capitalism becomes a force for “creative destruction”, leading entire continents into debt spirals with World Bank and IMF loans while at the same time militarizing and financializing Western economies to serve the interests of Wall Street and the Pentagon while destroying small businesses and parasitizing off the working classes.  Soon after, President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, said the quiet part out loud discussing the financial crisis, when he referred to the trillions in public money used to prop up our unregulated banking system. He blurted out:

    You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

    How can we define our time? Again, the phrase postmodern tyranny fits better than describing the present moment as totalitarian or fascist. Those two words have become so overused, interchanged, that they’ve lost much meaning and luster for people today. Although many of the various government responses to 9/11 and Covid certainly have elements of totalitarian, fascist, and dictatorial regimes, the terminology is outdated in a sense. It no longer fits the historical moment and hardly anyone really sees Joe Biden or Emmanuel Macron as totalitarian leaders. No single despot is necessary for the system to continue. We are facing is a dictatorship of money, an oligarchy dedicated to ensuring the smooth movement of capital. We live in a pyramid scheme, economically and socially: a system of petty tyrants consisting of your boss, your mayor, your landlord, your HOA president, etc. In fact, added together there are millions of petty tyrants in the US alone; the bourgeoisie and their millions of enforcers: judges, the police and military, politicians, lawyers, all who serve private property, an unjust hierarchy of labor, and, as we’ve seen, most doctors who were eager to impose and rubber-stamp the petty diktats we’ve enshrined into law.

    2019: Global Protests Mushroom

    Besides well-documented evidence such as US funding of coronavirus research, Event 201, and many other suspicious activities, there is one other piece of circumstantial evidence that ties into prior knowledge and pre-planning the pandemic. In 2019, global protests reached a height unsurpassed in modern history, with one commentator dubbing that year “The Age of Mass Protests”. On December 30, 2019, Robin Wright published a column in The New Yorker entitled: “The Story of 2019: Protests in Every Corner of the Globe”. One highlight from the piece claims:

    “‘People in more countries are using people power than any time in recorded history. Nonviolent mass movements are the primary challenges to governments today,’ Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, told me. ‘This represents a pronounced shift in the global landscape of dissent.’”

    The Washington Post dubbed 2019 “The year of the global street protest”. Bloomberg proclaimed that “A Year of Protests Sparked Change Around the Globe“. Massive disruptions to governments occurred in Iraq, Iran, Hong Kong, Sudan, Algeria, Chile, and many other nations. Ordinary people were becoming a nuisance to the smooth movement of capital. Governments were forced to face challenges they’d been ignoring for decades, as rising food, housing, heating, and materials costs skyrocketed globally. All of a sudden, in January 2020, the looming specter of a “global pandemic” put a stop to all of it, instantaneously.

    The positives for governments were obvious. No more protests. No public gatherings. No more pesky citizens demanding lower prices on goods, for more social programs, and protesting unjust taxes and authoritarian rulers. Without any in-person organizing, the momentum of people power from 2019 quickly died out.

    Shifting the Goalposts: From “Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve” to Biosecurity State

    Similar to 9/11, the justification for and continued adherence to official government propaganda rested on total obedience and social conformity: peer pressure at the familial, community, workplace, and public levels all contributed to an atmosphere of hysteria, panic, and paranoia. Shortly after 9/11, the US government shifted priorities from an invasion of Afghanistan and ousting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, to an invasion of Iraq in 2003 which cost perhaps 1 million Iraqi lives, then to a global war on terror (remember US General Wesley Clark’s admission that the Pentagon’s intention was to invade nation’s dubbed as the “axis of evil” and take out “seven countries in five years”). Torture and mass surveillance was sanctioned and cheered, the Patriot Act and AUMF rammed through Congress.

    As soon as the pandemic was announced in March 2020, the goalposts kept moving, from a period where we were told two weeks of isolation would be enough to flatten the curve of infection to nearly two years of absurd rules for masking, lockdowns, public gatherings, household gatherings, vaccines, and passports. The hokum kept piling up, as increasingly illogical “expert opinions” were rolled out to “protect” us, or so we were told. It soon became clear that the lockdowns themselves were killing plenty of people. Many credible “medical experts” who believed in the seriousness of the pandemic were blunt about the lockdowns: they were a form of democide”, with many estimating that approximately one-third of the excessive deaths were caused by the lockdowns. Routine checkups were avoided, nursing homes were overcrowded, the elderly were being neglected, and unnecessary, and over a million healthcare workers were laid off precisely when they would have been most useful, at least according to the official narrative.

    The irrational masking mandates were completely unscientific, especially the outdoor masking requirements in major cities, and, ludicrously, beaches as well as various outdoor recreation areas. Regardless, it wasn’t until December 2021 that a major mainstream medical figure admitted the obvious: “cloth masks are useless” and little more than facial decorations. The mask was the signifier of the good citizen for two years; anyone who disagreed was tarred and feathered without regard for the actual science. Many analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were done with previous viruses. Not to mention the basic fact that the infection and fatality rates were basically the same for the 39 US states that imposed mask mandates versus the 11 that did not.

    The conflation of case fatality rate (CFR) with infection fatality rate (IFR) in the mainstream media made the disease appear far more deadly than it actually was. The actual chance of young and healthy adults dying from Covid-19 was minuscule.

    Social distancing became de rigueur among the ruling classes, as well as the upper-middle chattering class effete liberals (and sadly, many leftists) even as the chance of moderate to severe illness in health young or even middle-aged people was almost nil. The specter of the postmodern alienated, affluent Western subject, with all their bundles of anxieties and neuroses, began to unspool, implode; a process of involution nurturing the solipsistic narcissism inherent in late capitalism.

    The sociopathic tendencies of our elites, heightened and distilled through centuries of class war in Western culture, spilled out into the open. The upper-middle professional classes, alert to the tendencies of their overlords’ desires to distance themselves from the rabble, were eager to parrot the diktats of their rulers. The upper-class winners condemned themselves to a path of neo-Victorian purity politics. The clean must be segregated from the dirty. The educated believers in “science” are clearly rational; the anti-vax hordes certainly must be acting out of pure self-interest and resentment.  Needless to say, little to no self-examination was made of the panicked overreaction of the well-to-do liberal authoritarians, which frankly fell within a spectrum of agoraphobic and hypochondriac behavior.

    The death rates were complete junk science, overestimated for the sake of juicing up the atmosphere of pandemonium, not to mention the monetary rewards for hospitals and healthcare corporations. As many know by now, “dying with” Covid became conflated with “dying from” the virus, with doctors pressured to include Sars-CoV-2 on death certificates.

    Pushing the experimental vaccine onto healthy children and young adults was completely unnecessary, and harmful. The risks of heart problems outweighed the negligible benefits of the vaccine for the young. This was obvious from the beginning and the medical establishment continued its role as a propaganda arm of Big Pharma rather than objectively viewing the facts. One study showed a laughable, embarrassing efficacy of 12% for 5-11 year olds.

    UN Estimate of Extreme Hunger, Food Insecurity, and Starvation

    Shortly after the lockdowns began in March 2020, the UN World Food Program put out a warning:

    The number of people facing acute food insecurity (IPC/CH 3 or worse) stands to rise to 265 million in 2020, up by 130 million from the 135 million in 2019, as a result of the economic impact of COVID-19, according to a WFP projection. The estimate was announced alongside the release of the Global Report on Food Crises, produced by WFP and 15 other humanitarian and development partners.

    In effect, the government and private architects of lockdowns were fully prepared to sacrifice hundreds of millions of younger, poorer minorities in less-developed countries to shield older, richer, whiter populations in developed nations from the very low potential of sickness, and yes, possible death. While many leftists are quick to point out economic “sacrifice zones” where labor violations are the norm and economic exploitation is rampant, they were mainly silent regarding the potential of mass death, starvation, and the explosion of extreme poverty due to lockdown policies. In fact, many leftists gleefully supported lockdowns and restrictions against the unvaccinated; and were either completely unaware or feigned ignorance of the economic devastation they unleashed.

    The Africa  Paradox

    The obvious data sets to look at regarding the efficacy of the experimental vaccines would be the West, with very high levels of vaccination, versus Africa, which had extremely low percentages. While obviously many countries had incomplete information due to lack of resources, it becomes obvious that the vaccines had zero effect on transmission or reduction in deaths. In fact, the mortality rates in African nations are so low that experts simply shrug them off. A holistic view would put the excess deaths from “Covid-19” squarely on the unhealthy lifestyles, toxic food supply, the unregulated chemical industries, and stressful conditions endemic to Western living.

    Agamben’s Laments

    Right off the bat, Giorgio Agamben questioned the motives behind the lockdowns, rightly pointing out that the fear of death and the elevation of science as the new religion had reduced communities and governments to quantifying basic survival – “bare life” – as more valuable than tangible human freedoms. As he put it in a March 2020 blog post:

    Fear is a bad advisor, but it brings up many things you pretended not to see. The first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country clearly shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. It is clear that Italians are willing to sacrifice practically everything, normal living conditions, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections and religious and political convictions at the risk of falling ill. Bare life – and the fear of losing it – is not something that unites men, but blinds and separates them.

    In May 2020, Agamben expands on the notion of medicine as a modern cult- and its many parallels with Christian dogmas.

    It is immediately evident that we are dealing here with a cultic practice and not with a rational scientific requirement. By far the most frequent cause of mortality in our country is cardio-vascular disease and it is known that these could decrease if a healthier lifestyle were practiced and if one adhered to a particular diet. But it had never occurred to any doctor that this form of life and diet, which they recommended to patients, would become the subject of legal legislation, which decreed ex lege [as a matter of law] what one must eat and how one must live, transforming the whole existence into a health obligation. Precisely this has been done and, at least for now, people have accepted as if it were obvious to give up their freedom of movement, work, friendships, love, social relationships, their religious and political convictions.

    Even the mealy-mouthed World Health Organization was forced to admit in October 2020 that lockdowns were extremely detrimental to poor and minority communities globally and should be used as a “very, very last resort”. This did not stop governments and medical advisors from clamoring for more restrictions and shutdowns for seventeen more months, even as Agamben and many others, including many experts who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, were speaking out against political overreach.

    Latour’s Dress Rehearsal: Right for the Wrong Reasons

    In a widely cited article from March 2020, French sociologist Bruno Latour asked an interesting question regarding the lockdowns: “Is This a Dress Rehearsal?” The problem in his formulation, of course, is that he believes governments innocently imposed the lockdown protocols in response to a clear and present danger; as well as his belief that governments will, in the future, impose lockdowns in response to climate change with reductions in carbon emissions in mind. Rather, we should realize that governments, colluding with the mega rich and multinational corporations, imposed lockdowns in order to profit off the collapse and resurgence of the stock markets, discipline the public in order to accept draconian “new normal” policies, and accelerate the process of biometric IDs, all-encompassing surveillance, a drop in living standards, and advance a social credit system based on rewards and punishments.

    The old panem et circenses method of distracting the masses can no longer hold together an increasingly polarized society breaking into “post-truth” enclaves where distrust and paranoia spawn out of late-capitalist alienation and exploitation. A society in which two of the biggest overarching political narratives are as ridiculous as Q-Anon and Russiagate has no business dismissing the obvious conspiracy and collusion involved in promulgating an exaggerated and manufactured pandemic.

    Latour is correct in claiming that this is a sort of dress rehearsal. Sadly, like many a typical liberal, he assumes governments had our best interest at heart, and are reacting to objective facts and medical realities. In the near future, governments will probably enact travel restrictions and lockdowns not only to reduce carbon emissions, but rather to train citizens to accept food rations, lack of fossil fuels due to high prices and supply issues, lower living standards, and lack of goods and provisions. In this process of disciplining and punishing masses, many will be forced to accept whatever government edicts are enacted, at the risk of job loss, social isolation, or worse, just as we witnessed during the pandemic. The next lockdown could be designed and pre-planned precisely to stave off protests, rebellions, and revolutions which will spring up as the rot in capitalism deepens.

    Medical Tyranny? WHO’s asking?

    A recent report shows that a private foundation set up to finance the World Health Organization, called the WHO Foundation, explains that 40% of donations came from anonymous donors. The potential for conflicts of interest is inevitable, as obviously only individuals and groups connected to Big Pharma would want to anonymize where their slush funds go to.

    A global Pandemic Treaty is being formulated by the WHO in order to force nations to accept the next pandemic, if global elites are so foolish as to try and institute another round of medical authoritarianism.

    Much like 9/11, the lead-up to the Covid-19 “event” as well as its early stages remain clouded in secrecy, misinformation, and a web of lies. We were all shown images of dead Chinese citizens lying in the streets, although it’s unclear if this was from the virus, or even from the city of Wuhan or Hubei province in some cases. We were told the virus originated in a wet market in the city center, although now we know that link has never been proven, and was most likely thrown out as a hypothesis to satisfy public opinion, but more likely was a cynical intelligence ploy, a classic case of misdirection, especially since we know now that a secretive US medical intelligence unit admitted to tracking Covid in November 2019, and possibly much earlier.

    When a global pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, there were around 118,000 global cases and under 5,000 declared deaths. Relatively speaking those numbers were quite low and there was no reason to declare Sars-CoV-2 a public health emergency based on the figures. The estimated death rates were pulled completely out of thin air by a complete fraud, Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College of London, who broke lockdown rules which he helped to implement.

    PCR tests were declared the gold standard even though Kary Mullis, one of its inventors, declared publicly that the tests were not made to prove the existence of active infections. Further, the cycling for the tests was deliberately set too high, which resulted in untold amounts of false positive cases. Death rates miraculously shot up for “Covid-19” because doctors and coroners were pressured to list the disease as a cause of death even without a positive test; any “suspected case” could be listed. Flu, pneumonia, and every other respiratory disease magically disappeared and Covid filled in the gap, boosting the figures.

    Not to mention, the effect of declaring a global pandemic necessarily induced a stress response from the global population, which, along with the late-winter (March-April) time frame in the northern hemisphere, definitely contributed to the excess deaths. In fact, many established medical organizations freely admit that the lockdowns were responsible for a significant percentage (many say up to one third) of excess deaths, yet somehow have managed to absolve themselves of responsibility for clamoring for the lockdowns like trained seals. Along with the loss of jobs, home confinement, and lack of community, it should be noted that just as yelling fire in a crowded movie theater is almost certain to cause some sort of violent event, screaming “pandemic” through a 24/7 news cycle will do the same.

    Much like the daily reporting in the aftermath of 9/11, with nightly news explaining the nation’s risk of terror attacks as red, orange, or yellow, the daily cases, hospitalizations, and deaths; we all remember the 24/7 circus designed to frighten the population and maintain obedience. In this deliberately instilled, panic-stricken environment, the ruling class fundamentally altered the landscape: following a short downturn in the stock market, the digital economy and tech firms quickly rebounded and boomed- the tech sector, Big Pharma, web services companies, and basically all major corporations tangentially related to providing services on the internet struck gold.

    Within weeks, the need for a vaccine was trotted out. Many seasonal viruses come and go within months, yet somehow the medical establishment was able to figure out that only a vaccine would be able to stop this disease. The pharmaceutical companies were simply trying to profit off a new media-hyped and establishment-protected exaggerated pandemic. The fact that so many corners were cut, with no long-term studies, all to market unproven mRNA technology did not seem to faze at least half of the public, who openly clamored for lockdowns, vaccines, passports, and authoritarian measures which would be unthinkable a few years prior.

    Ridiculous masking mandates came into effect- masking outdoors was mandatory in many cities globally. No scientific basis was ever presented. Vaccine passports were likewise implemented even though natural immunity was found to be 27 times greater in some instances. Were health authorities simply trying to be overly cautious, or were there more sinister agendas at play? Were institutional medical practices imposed simply to make profits for pharmaceutical corporations?

    The simple fact that an unproven, dangerous vaccine was pushed and mandated at various levels- and that it was swallowed so comfortably by so many- simply shows how effective modern propaganda can be. No guns were needed- but you could lose your job, standing in the community, your friends, family, and social relations. A vast social experiment was conducted and anyone who dared to question “the science”, instead of blindly placing trust in a capitalist health system where profits have always taken precedence over people’s interests, was demonized.

    The frenzy around Covid-19 may indeed have had a bit of luck, at least here in the US. It was, of course, President Trump that downplayed the virus at the start. Therefore, anyone else aligning with his views on Covid was seen as a repugnant narcissist, an uncaring dullard willing to put corporate profits over human life. Imagine an alternate universe where Trump or a right-wing, authoritarian, US presidential figure like him took the virus extremely seriously, with Chinese-style lockdowns. Would people still have clamored for mandatory shots, and for friends, family, and co-workers to be excommunicated from society? Probably not, but we’ll never know.

    Vaccine passports threatened to segregate society based on a frankly fascist vision of the clean versus unclean. Anti-vaccine activists and regular people who refused to take an experimental injection were wrongly vilified. As many pointed out, the lack of reduction of transmission in the vaccinated made the whole prospect of compulsory vaccination pointless, unscientific, counterproductive, and just plain wrong.

    In November 2021, the conflict came to a head as Biden, speaking to the unvaccinated, remarked: “We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” He proposed a plan for weekly testing or vaccination of all workers in every US company with over 100 employees, as well as a mandate for around 17 million health care workers.

    The Postmodern Subject: Manufacturing the Hyperreal

    The parallels between 9/11 and Covid-19 go far beyond their initial propaganda campaigns. Ultimately, part of the reason contemporary propaganda is so effective lies in the psychological structure of postmodern consciousness. Safety, stability, and security are seen as the final end products of mass civilization. Even one of the great charlatans of the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama, was astute enough to note the parallels between the postmodern subject and Nietzsche’s notion of the “last man”.

    Today, the veneer of idealistic concepts such as freedom, democracy, and equality which were supposed to undergird and inspire the collective to greater heights is wearing off in the face of massive global inequality, environmental disasters, climate catastrophe, and vicious media propaganda campaigns. As material living standards stagnate and crumble even in the developed world, increasing numbers of people are forced to compete for the same resources, perpetuating a scarcity-based mindset in the populace. Nearly all socioeconomic questions are framed as zero-sum, binary, black-and-white contests between good and evil where little nuance or questions of morality are allowed into the public arena.

    In this fragile social environment, it’s not surprising that citizens flock to ready-made narratives and propaganda campaigns. Ruling class propaganda is swallowed uncritically, precisely because it obfuscates, masks, and numbs the pain of living in late-stage capitalist collapse. One of the reasons Western liberals and even most of the “Left” fell for the farce that was the over-hyped, medical global Psy-op we call the Covid-19 pandemic is because the postmodern subject has now delved so far into the hyperreal; where symbols, social relations, and even science become cheap imitations of themselves. This is precisely why so many people, at the beginning of the lockdowns in March 2020, remarked that they “felt like they were living in a movie.” Media-induced pseudo-events can no longer be distinguished from severe medical emergencies today, just as twenty two years ago the mass panic after 9/11 produced the same fog of war and irrational hatred of the other.

    Imbued with meaning and purpose, the mask-wearing, jab-taking, “papers-please”, vaccine passport-bearing citizen could now feel a common cause with others in the community; artificially induced feelings of well-being conjured up through media organs and distilled into catchy slogans like “trust the science”. The sign-value of “doing the right thing” became a potent force; and this was weaponized by the establishment to suit various agendas.

    Many of these agendas were, in fact, actual conspiracies to: establish a permanent biosecurity state; set up a soft version of martial law where people’s movements are restricted and tracked; manufacture a false narrative of safe vaccines to bankroll a new industry for mRNA technologies, create a pathway to health passports, digital IDs, central bank digital currencies, and social credit systems; destroy the working class and middle class small businesses, and psychically prepare the global populace for a fall in living standards, a fall in access to goods, services, and resources, as well as rationing; provide an excuse to ban protests; continue the broad militarization of society, as well as the implementation of a global regime of ideological compliance and obedience.

    Big Pharma, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the military and intelligence communities were colluding to fleece the poor and working classes- the fact that one can’t find a smoking gun for each of these interlocking and moving parts of the economy and government doesn’t refute this basic fact. All the while, corporate America continued enriching the one percent who gained trillions during the pandemic. Medical-authoritarian edicts were issued without any actual science behind them. Surveillance and population control have always been at the forefront of elite agendas for managing 21st century life. Global flows of people, information, goods, and revolutionary thought can no longer be stage-managed by tyrannical capitalist elites as conditions deteriorate around the planet. A show must be put on every ten to twenty years.

    The many faces and branding strategies of the global elite come into full view: the “new normal”, “own nothing and be happy”, “mask up”, “follow the science”, and the “lockstep” scenario for implementing planetary tyranny are seen by the ruling class as necessary steps to secure profits and control in increasingly unstable economic and political landscapes. Their techno-feudal dreams are our nightmares as the drudgery of capitalist labor and the vagaries of imperial war continue on. Our masters offer little respite for the masses of humanity, as they’ve imposed a totalizing spectacle. Cult-like behavior dominated after 9/11; overblown fears of terrorism and anti-Muslim racism permeated the country, just as a year or two ago, overblown fears of the virus and authoritarian-based dislike and instant dismissal of anyone skeptical of Big Pharma and the government continued to dominate.

    Even as the narrative has shifted, and the farce that was the reaction to a relatively mild virus receded, the potential for propaganda and fear campaigns against the global collective remains. It is precisely the qualities of postmodernity, such as the end of meta-narratives, de-realization of the subject, hyperreality, the nature of the spectacle, and pseudo-events, guided by ruling class interests, and imposed on us by capitalism, which allow for the recurrence of these paradigm-shifting forces to dominate social life. The parallels of two of the biggest geopolitical events of the 21st century, 9/11 and the Covid-19 health scare, reveal the foundations of global regimes of cruelty, domination, and oppression. And there certainly isn’t much “new” or “normal” about any of it.

  • The reality is that most of us are not ready for the truth. We want reassurance. We cling to our comfort blankets because the idea that we live in a world in which our and our families’ interests are not paramount is too disturbing.

    The idea that our fates are entirely dependent on a giant Ponzi scheme that might come crashing down at any moment from any one of multiple design flaws – an ecological crisis, a nuclear catastrophe, a pandemic or a hubristic mis-step with Artificial Intelligence – is simply too terrifying.

    So, even as we mock a figurehead like Donald Trump, Joe Biden or Boris Johnson, we remain deeply invested in the system that keeps producing them. We need to believe – and just as desperately as a child refusing, a little longer, to give in to suspicions that Father Christmas might not exist. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, our societies, we insist, are on a continuous upwards trajectory named progress.

    Few are willing to consider that we might actually be in a death spiral. So instead of doing something to change the world, we bury our heads. We ignore every sign, however blatant, of the system’s inherent dysfunction and corruption.

    These dark thoughts are prompted in part by the very belated concession from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – whispered by government lawyers in a court hearing – that for two years it has been peddling disinformation about both Ivermectin and the fact that doctors were not authorised to prescribe it in the treatment of Covid.

    Ok, let’s pause right there. Because already I sense you reaching for the remote to change channels. Isn’t Ivermectin a horse drug that only anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers ever talk about?

    Before I lose you entirely, let me hurriedly issue a disclaimer. This piece isn’t really about Ivermectin – least of all its efficacy in the treatment of Covid. I’m not a doctor and I’m not qualified to judge. I talk about things I am familiar with, that I have some insight on.

    I’m not interested in medical debates about Ivermectin. I’m interested in deconstructing the political debates around it – and what they tell us about the way medical matters, and much else besides, have been entirely captured by political and commercial interests.

    I can assure you I have no shares in Ivermectin and won’t profit either way, whether its use increases or declines. Unlike Big Pharma, that’s not the reason I’m taking an interest.

    It just so happens that Ivermectin is a particularly fascinating case study – both of the corruption of our governance and regulatory systems, and of our own unwillingness to recognise that corruption out of fear of what it might signify.

    Ivermectin provides one more data point that might help drag each of us out of our carefully constructed cocoon of ideological comfort.

    This article can be seen as a follow-up to my recent piece on the refusal by precisely the same actors – Big Pharma, medical regulators, the corporate media – to investigate why over the past two years far higher numbers of people than was to be expected have been dying across the Western world of unexplained causes not related to Covid.

    Both of these post-pandemic issues ought to make us angry, and more willing to fight for our species’ survival.

    ‘Merely quips’

    After all, the general assumption that Ivermectin is a horse dewormer didn’t come from nowhere. It was a view cultivated in us by the FDA and the corporate media. Here is the tweet the agency sent out exactly two years ago to persuade us that only dangerous nutjobs talk about Ivermectin:

    I am guessing that those 108,000 likes make it one of the most influential tweets ever by the FDA. There is a reason why it went so viral.

    The corporate media worked overtime to promote exactly the same messaging: that Ivermectin was only good for horses and cows. The media echoed the FDA in implying very strongly that the drug’s use in humans was not safe. There was not a late-night show host who did not mock Ivermectin as a horse drug and ridicule its supporters, even leading doctors.

    Super-star podcaster Joe Rogan’s admission that he had been prescribed Ivermectin by his doctor when he fell ill with Covid were enough to foment demands for his banning from social media for spreading misinformation.

    Social media giants like Youtube played their own part, treating any reference to Ivermectin, in pretty much any positive context, even by doctors, as “misinformation”. The algorithms were adjusted accordingly, which is why I will have to avoid mentioning Ivermectin when I post this story on social media.

    And yet now, two years on, the FDA is quietly admitting that it, not Rogan, outright lied. Ivermectin isn’t a medicine used only by vets. It’s a human drug that’s been prescribed billions of times – and so successfully that it won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2015. A leading science journal called it a “wonder drug” in 2017 – before the pandemic changed what could be said publicly – highlighting “its unexpected potential as an antibacterial, antiviral and anti-cancer agent”.

    It is the FDA – not Rogan – now admitting that Ivermectin is safe and that doctors, including Rogan’s, do indeed have the authority to prescribe the drug, not just to treat parasites but to treat Covid too.

    It was tweets like the one above that instigated a witch-hunt by US state medical boards against doctors who prescribed Ivermectin, the matter at the heart of the case currently before the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals.

    With the FDA’s statements about Ivermectin now being harshly criticised by the judges hearing the case, the US government has fallen back on the barely credible argument that its comments were meant as “merely quips”.

    So why would the FDA lie about Ivermectin – and maintain that lie for at least two years until forced to come clean under cross-examination by the courts?

    And why did all those expert medical correspondents working for Big Media, journalists who knew only too well that Ivermectin was a human drug, conspire with the FDA in promoting a blatant lie?

    Here, for example, is Dr Sunjay Gupta of CNN being put on the spot by Rogan when he appeared on his show. He is forced to admit, uncomfortably, that the media were not telling the truth about Ivermectin.

    Emergency use

    Which brings us to the politics surrounding Ivermectin – which is far more revelatory than any medical debate about it.

    Remember, the FDA’s drug division receives three-quarters of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry. That doesn’t just mean the continuing salaries of many thousands of government officials depend on keeping Big Pharma happy. It also ensures wider political pressures. Washington prefers not to alienate Big Pharma and then have to foot the FDA’s budget through higher taxes. And, as we shall see, leading politicians have every incentive to avoid picking a fight with a corporate America.

    The reality is that Ivermectin and other drugs that might have been repurposed for Covid posed an enormous threat in principle to the FDA and its funders in Big Pharma – completely aside from the practical question of whether those drugs actually work against Covid.

    The new, experimental mRNA vaccines could only be rushed out for use in humans on the basis of an emergency authorisation so long as no other drug could be shown to be an effective treatment for Covid.

    Well, that was a good thing, I hear you say. Those vaccines reduced the severest symptoms, even if sadly they didn’t actually stop transmission.

    Let’s pull back a second and try to see the bigger picture for a moment. Let’s do precisely what the FDA and Pfizer don’t want us to do: engage our critical faculties.

    Ivermectin has been off-patent for years. No one can make any serious money from it, and certainly not giant pharmaceuticals based in the United States. Any Indian factory with the right approvals can knock out the tablets for a few cents.

    So in short, Big Pharma, which was poised to become fabulously enriched by its new vaccines, had every financial incentive imaginable to make sure there were no rivals in the stakes for a Covid miracle cure. The focus had to be entirely and exclusively on the vaccines.

    Endless profiteering

    The corporate media had exactly the same priorities. Why?

    A superficial, if truthful analysis is that companies like Pfizer subsidise the corporate media as heavily as they do the FDA. Just watch this short compilation video to get a sense of quite how complete Big Pharma’s stranglehold of sponsorship is on the main TV networks:

    But a deeper analysis is that Big Pharma and Big Media are just separate wings of the same Big Business empire headquartered in the US. What’s good for Big Pharma is good for Big Weapons is good for Big Farming is good for Big Food is good for Big Media, and so on.

    What is important for all of them is the maintenance of a political and economic climate that allows for Big Everything’s permanent profiteering. What is good for one of them is good for all.

    So Ivermectin was never going to be allowed a look-in, irrespective of whether it worked.

    But that doesn’t really matter, I hear you interject, because Ivermectin doesn’t work against Covid.

    And how do we know that? The anwer is we don’t. Our assumption that Ivermectin is useless against Covid is nothing more than that. It is an assumption. Some studies suggest it doesn’t help, while others suggest possible effectiveness.

    Medicine has an established way to deal with such uncertainties. It settles them with an expensive, large-scale, randomised, controlled study.

    In a time of profound crisis such as a pandemic, politics has an additional way to settle such questions: move heaven and earth to carry out emergency trials of drugs that look like they may be suitable for repurposing against the threat. Shift into a war footing.

    Which is exactly what would have happened – not just for Ivermectin but for other promising potential treatments like the mis-named sunshine hormone Vitamin D – if we lived in a world in which scientific principles, not profiteering by a tiny wealth-elite, guided our societies’ decisions.

    Instead, all of us – even children who were under no threat from Covid – were forced to worship exclusively at the altar of the novel vaccines.

    That should make your blood boil.

    Many millions of people died. Some of them might have been helped through the use of safe, potentially beneficial treatments before the vaccines were rolled out.

    Some of those who refused to take the vaccines – the heretics – might have had their lives saved through the approval of other treatments.

    Everyone, even the vaccinated and multi-boosted, might have had even better outcomes with the help of treatments to complement the vaccines.

    Instead, the response to the pandemic prioritised one thing only: not saving lives, but maximising to the greatest extent possible the profits of Big Pharma.

    I don’t know whether Ivermectin would have helped. You don’t know whether it would have helped. But what’s important – what is scandalous – is that the FDA doesn’t know either, and still doesn’t care to know whether lives would have been saved through the use of treatments in place of, or in addition to, the vaccines.

    That is a violation both of fundamental medical ethics and of the social contract. I can barely believe I need to spell it out – and even less that I will be called irresponsible for doing so by the vaccine cultists.

    Smears and insinuation

    The issue isn’t whether Ivermectin works against Covid. That narrow issue is the one Big Pharma, Big Media and the FDA want you focusing on. Because they have made sure the question will only ever be settled in the arena of official smear and insinuation, in misleading social media soundbites like the FDA’s horse drug one.

    That isn’t science, it’s propaganda.

    If the FDA has good arguments against Ivermectin, it needs to use them, not play mind games with us – games that can have only one possible outcome: further eroding public trust in our compromised, financially captured medical authorities. Revealingly, those most worried about the “Trump misinformation threat” are also the ones, it seems, least concerned about the FDA’s record of promoting falsehoods.

    To run a controlled trial of Ivermectin for treating Covid – even now, three years too late – costs a small fortune. One that can be afforded only by Big Pharma or governments. And in the circumstances, neither has any interest to find out.

    Why does this matter? It shouldn’t need stating. But from reactions on social media, I see that it very much does.

    It matters because it shows that we live in a world where “facts” are of no interest, where science is not followed, unless it can be monetised. Science is no longer for the benefit of all. It has become private property – the property of powerful, unaccountable corporations – like everything else in our societies. Science has been weaponised to further enrich a corrupt wealth-elite.

    It matters because, if we continue to resign ourselves so passively to these constant mind-games and manipulations, we must also accept that the profiteering they conceal should take priority over our health, over saving lives.

    Ivermectin isn’t the issue. It’s a waymark: to the depths of corruption to which our supposedly Enlightened, rational civilisation has been sunk by money and its worship.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What did Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau repeat ad nauseam about COVID-19 and imposing mandates? That the “government has been focused every step of the way on following the best science”? And did he ever provide any scientific evidence to follow? Critical thinking demands that people demand evidence for questionable claims, and that is a sine qua non of science.

  • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black cancer patient whose cells were taken by Johns Hopkins University Hospital without her consent in 1951, has reached a deal over the unethical use of her cells with pharmaceutical company Thermo Fisher Scientific. Henrietta Lacks’s family has denounced the racist medical system that allowed the biotech company to make billions in profit from the “HeLa” cell…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • [S]ettlers in thrall to colonial ideology saw every unfenced meadow as waste land free for the taking, especially the most fertile land supporting native self-sufficiency.

    — Tom Swanky, The Smallpox War against the Haida (p 67).

    July 1, was recently celebrated in “Canada” as Canada Day by “Canadians.” The Dominion of Canada was formed by the joining of three British North American colonies in 1867. It would serve as an Anglo bulwark against the French presence, and a bulwark against the American presence to the south. Over subsequent years, settler-colonialists spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Arctic coasts in what was deemed Canada. When the first European natives, the Norsemen, appeared in 1000 CE, Indigenous peoples had already inhabited the land for millennia, or as they often phrase it, since time immemorial.1

    The Original Peoples in Canada were dispossessed, largely decultured, proselytized, assimilated, disappeared. The founding peoples of Canada, as depicted on Canada’s colonialist coat-of-arms, are the English and French. Not the Indigenous peoples. The official languages of Canada are English and French. Indigenous languages are not recognized federally as official; moreover, linguicide of Indigenous languages was an outcome of the Residential School programs. This all amounts, unquestioningly, to cultural genocide.

    But the genocide is more than just the annihilation of a group’s culture and language.

    In The Smallpox War Against the Haida, author Tom Swanky (with contributions from Shawn Swanky) amplifies the oral history of the knowledge keepers among The Peoples that hold the administration of James Douglas, first governor of “British Columbia” (1858–1864) and second governor of “Vancouver Island” (1851–1864) culpable for a genocide via the spreading of the smallpox virus in 1862-63. The Original Peoples would suffer a horrific number of fatalities and would be rendered unable to withstand seizure of their land nor the implementation of colonial government and the meting out of colonial law.

    Swanky humbly presents himself as conduit for the history of the knowledge keepers. He writes, “My only contribution is a search of the documentary record for evidence that may reflect on the native narrative, one way or another. I am not writing history. I am reporting how knowledge keepers tell of the history of BC’s founding and considering to what extent that teaching is justified.”

    Why mention this? Because while discussing the smallpox genocide with a learned gentleman, he asked who the source of the information was. I replied, Tom Swanky. I was informed that some academics consider Swanky’s thesis as disputed. This was nothing new, and it is to be expected that there would be a pushback.2 However, while the book’s authorship is by Tom Swanky, the narrative is the oral history of the Original Peoples. The oral history of First Nations was recognized in 1997 as admissible in court by Delgamuukw v British Columbia. However, Alexandra Potamianos, while a third-year JD student at Osgoode Hall Law School concluded that the Supreme Court of Canada’s Mitchell v Minister of National Revenue (2001) “has made it more difficult for Indigenous claimants to use oral history to counter dominant understandings of Indigenous presence and relationships to land.”3

    Granting further credence to Swanky was his reporting of the Tsilhqot’in’s oral history about a grievous wrong in which chiefs were abducted by provincial officials in violation of the sacred peace pipe ceremony. Six chiefs were subsequently hanged in Quesnel, BC. This is detailed in his book The Great Darkening: The True Story of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific plus The Tsilhqot’in and other First Nations Resistance (2012).4 In 2014, then BC premier Christy Clark stated, “[We] confirm without reservation that these six Tsilhqot’in chiefs are fully exonerated for any crime or wrongdoing.”

    Nonetheless, while the source of information is somewhat pertinent, what is unequivocally primary is the factuality of the information and the evidence and logic brought to bear on that information. Swanky listened to the oral history, assessed it and the historical record for verisimilitude, and applied logic to make sense of a narrative. Swanky, who holds a Doctor of Jurisprudence degree (among other academic credentials) connects the dots and builds a compelling case.

    The Opening Scene of the Crime

    It was common during that time period for First Nation peoples, the Tlingit, Haida, Ts’msyen (Tsimshian), Nuxalk, Tahltan, Heiltsuk, and others, to canoe down the water highway from the north to Fort Victoria and set up camps.

    Fort Victoria was established by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1843 as a trading post at the location the Lekwungen People called Camosack meaning “rush of water.” It is not always easy to nail down the proper Indigenous designation as another moniker has it that the Lekwungen people called it Kuo-Sing-el-as, which means “place of strong fibre,” specifically the Pacific Willow. The WSÁNEĆ, Coast Salish neighbors of the Lekwungen, called Victoria METULIYE. The Haida called it Micdolly. (p ix)

    The colonialist designation eponymous for an imperialist queen still persists, but probably one day moral sentiment and a semblance of honest intent toward reconciliation will result in a re-designation of the city that would honor First Nations.

    The Genocidaires

    Swanky has named the perpetrators of the genocide, many of who have their names applied to various geographic or manmade structures. James Douglas, who allegedly used his position of governor to plan the smallpox epidemic, had his name applied to a mountain (actually a tall hill, since renamed by the WSÁNEĆ as PKOLS while the park around the “mountain” still honors an alleged genocidaire), schools, main street, etc. Francis Poole, a bizarre prevaricator, played a major role in his peregrinations throughout the province, often connected to where smallpox outbreaks had occurred. In Haida Gwaii, his name was elided and replaced by Haida designations. Racist MLA Robert Burnaby is a capitalist whose name was bestowed on a city in the centre of Metro Vancouver, a mountain, a lake, etc. The same applies to other questionable characters in the smallpox war such as Alfred Waddington who was behind the ill-fated Waddington’s Road at Bute Inlet, MLA dr John Helmcken, AG George Cary, HBC insider Ranald McDonald, colonel Richard Moody, and others.

    Indigenous characters are portrayed as well: Haida hyas tyee (roughly translates as “chief”) captain John, hyas tyee Gitkun, hyas tyee Albert Edenshaw, great Haida hyas tyee Geesh, Ts’msyen diarist Arthur Wellington Clah, etc.

    Solving the “Indian Question”

    Pre-1862-63, the settler-colonialists were vastly outnumbered by the Indigenous peoples and presented Douglas with the quandary of how to solve the “Indian Question.” Douglas was fervently against launching costly Indian wars. As a last resort, Douglas decided upon inflicting “cruelty and injustice” on the Indigenous peoples in the case that their suffering “could be given less regard than the ‘evils’ colonists associated with autonomous communities operating freely in colonizing zones…” (p 123-124) About this Douglas had no compunction since “natives who would not compromise their sovereign dignity should expect collective punishments. Otherwise in Douglas’ words, “the country will become intolerable as a residence for white-settlers.” (p 128)

    “Cruelty and injustice” included starvation, ethnic cleansing (clearing The Peoples out of Victoria), and genocide via smallpox.

    Smallpox-afflicted persons traveled by ship from San Francisco. Dubious inoculations were given to some of The Peoples. Dubious because, as Swanky relates, multiple eye-witness reported, and the timing of numerous outbreaks tends to corroborate, that Indigenes who were told that they were being vaccinated with harmless cowpox where instead inoculated with smallpox and, in that way, instead of contributing to controlling the disease, they were made into conduits for spreading the disease. Understanding inoculation as a tool of spreading the disease under the guise of vaccination is critical to understanding the “intent” required to prove genocide. The British Parliament’s Vaccination Act of 1840 had outlawed inoculation precisely because of the ease with which the procedure produced epidemics. (p 139)

    Quarantining is also a tool for controlling the spread of contagions. The Songhees (a Lekwungen people) would ride out smallpox on a nearby island. Tellingly, the Douglas administration would violate British law by forcibly expelling the Northerners, forcing sick and healthy Indigenes into close contact and then putting them on the move to carry the disease up the coast and into their home territories. The administration implied that decreasing the risk of infection for Victoria’s resident colonists — most of whom had been vaccinated — justified actions that were certain to increase the First Nation death toll.

    Swanky, furthermore, furnishes evidence showing that the pliable Poole, who was employed and coached throughout by MLA Robert Burnaby, set out and created his own “trail of blood” (chapters 10-13), thereby magnifying the smallpox epidemic.

    Why Resort to Biological Warfare?

    The settler-colonialists wanted the land. Land is regarded with deep reverence by most First Nations.5 For colonialists, land is money, and private property is a key cornerstone of capitalism. If a people are disappeared, then the empty land is for the taking. Smallpox was a means to weakening the ability of the First Nations to resist dispossession.

    Swanky had as his starting point the oral history of The Peoples. Swanky found that the oral history is supported by the written record. That history, according to knowledge keepers as reported by Swanky, reveals that, starting in 1862, the colonialist administration of James Douglas engaged in biological warfare by spreading smallpox throughout First Nation territories. That measures such as inoculations/vaccinations and quarantines were obviated or ineffective suggests the criminality of the colonial administrations.

    Thus today, the once numerous Indigenous peoples constitute 5.9% (2016 census) of the BC population. Where smallpox has not ended the existence of First Nations sovereignty in their unceded territories, colonial governments still resort to militarized RCMP and colonial courts to maintain colonial law. And when it suits the authorities, colonial court decisions anathema to politicians and corporations will be ignored. Thus today, the Wet’suwet’en are resisting an assault on their unsurrendered territory which is being scarred for a pipeline.

    When the Indigenous peoples and the land they exist on is disregarded and hence disrespected, then reconciliation is diminished to a mere buzzword. It feels good to talk about it, but where is the action to back up the rhetoric?

    That is why Swanky’s The Smallpox War Against the Haida is important. It is an extraordinary historically based opus resulting from detective work that combs the historical record, names the criminals, and points out legal redress to the grave crimes committed against the Haida by settler-colonialists.

    If the admonition against forgetting history is a precautionary wisdom, then The Smallpox War Against the Haida ought to be promulgated in media; be taught in educational institutions, including in public schools; and should set in motion appropriate steps at atonement, beginning with a sincere apology. Indirectly, the book also provides a template for some steps for settler-colonialist society to achieve genuine reconciliation with The Peoples who were appallingly wronged, such as:

    1. listening to the Original Peoples,
    2. taking into account the evidence supporting the oral history,
    3. listening to one’s conscience and what one’s sense of morality dictates,
    4. publicly exposing history’s dissemblers and their disinformation and recasting the information and the dissemblers in an honest light,
    5. educating people about the racism/supremacism that underlies the crimes of colonization,
    6. recognizing the sovereignty of Original Peoples on their unceded territory,
    7. recognizing the inherent humanity of all human beings, and
    8. living according to the golden rule.6

    ENDNOTES

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pre-1776, Americans sought independence from the British. Nowadays, there is a call for independence from the corporate globalists/vaccinators.

  • David Ignatius, a long-time Washington Post columnist on military intelligence topics, probably never dreamed his newspaper would fill over three full pages serializing his latest work of thrilling fiction, “The Tao of Deception.” On June 28, 2023, the “Breaking news and latest headlines” in the A section of the paper featured the first installment. Part II appeared today, Friday, June 30th.

    What’s occurring at the Washington Post, the New York Times and big regional daily newspapers is a flight toward stupefying their material in a desperate plunge to retain readers – print and online. Maybe surveys show a tsunami of aliteracy from the rising iPhone generations.

    To adjust to digital age readers, the New York Times has replaced much of its content with gigantic photographs, graphics and other visuals, not just in its regular sections on style/arts, sports and food, but also in the daily news departments as well as the Sunday Business and Opinion sections.

    The influential New York Times Editorial Page – once featuring some fifteen or more editorials a week – is now down to three editorials a week. Moreover, this space is now largely taken up by a handful of regular opinion columnists, many predictably redundant and tired. Imagine a historic newspaper intentionally diminishing its editorial advice to this country. There is no precedent.

    It gets worse. Various forms of its daily features – entertainment, sports and style/arts – are given enormous space, while coverage of daily local and national civic activity is severely restricted. What used to be reported about the findings, litigation, lobbying and regulatory advocacy of national citizen groups in the nineteen sixties and seventies – leading to major betterment of consumer, worker and environmental health and safety – now is sharply curtailed. As a result, good members of Congress, seeing virtually no news coverage of vital citizen concerns, become indifferent to necessary public hearings and legislation essential to addressing the needs of the public.

    Right-wing politicians have learned to game the vulnerable-to-sensationalism New York Times and Washington Post. Trump led the way in 2015-2016 with his presidential run. Most of his outrageous lies, deceptions and defamations were showcased by these two august newspapers. The Times would even reprint his tweets with their CAPITAL LETTERS verbatim without giving the falsely accused any right of reply. (Belated corrections by columnists could not keep up.)

    This chronic tragedy has gotten worse in the last year. The Times can hardly resist making crazy politicians into Big Acts. The antics of switcheroo J.D. Vance was a regular news story, with huge photographs, while his Democratic opponent in prime position for the pivotal Ohio Senate race last year, Rep. Tim Ryan, was of little interest to the Times.

    In 2021, the Times devoted eleven pages over three days to a mini-biography of Fox’s Tucker Carlson. As well, the Times seems strangely drawn to the profane and violent rhetoric of the ignorant junior Representative from rural Georgia, putting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on the cover of its Sunday New York Times Magazine, in addition to more frequent daily coverage of her outrages.

    What’s wrong with this journalism? First, it does not give space to serious political opponents whose positions, by the way, are closer to the editorial stances of the Times. Second, these “in-depth” profiles, as well as regular columns, do not lay a glove on the featured miscreants who rush to use these articles in their publicity and fundraising. Third, the trivial crowds out more important, serious subjects with material that is mostly vacuous since it is about vacuous people that the Times grants greater celebrity status. (TV and radio pick up such coverage from the Times).

    I remember years ago when members of Congress, working with civic leaders on important legislation, would drop their more expressive denunciations for fear that the Times and the Post would not cover them because they might appear too extreme. It is exactly the opposite today with crazed right-wing, political corporatists bellowing themselves into prime time.

    The Washington Post Live podcasts long ago crossed the barrier between news and advertisers. The tilt toward corporatism, away from the liberal civic community, is pronounced. One example of many is Grover Norquist, the avatar of no-tax super-rich and corporations, who gets a big photo alongside the announcement of his interview by the Washington Post Live’s podcast while the paper ignores inviting civic leaders like Robert Weissman of Public Citizen, Jordan Davis or Marilyn Carpinteyro of Common Cause or Karen Friedman of the Pension Rights Center. Why? Because corporate advertisers do not find these people congenial to their sponsored topics. Sponsors get to approve or veto the participants, as with the participants in the recent Post podcast “Chasing Cancer: Equity and Disparities,” brought to us by the giant drug company AstraZeneca. You can be assured the discussion will not cover outsourcing cancer drugs to a single troubled corporation in India, now causing serious shortages in our country and risking people’s lives.

    Both the Post and the Times reporters did report about the cancer drug crisis in their news pages, but didn’t deal with the question of why U.S. drug companies outsource such categories of drugs, which includes outsourcing virtually all antibiotic production to China and India. This is a national security risk if there ever was one. The Washington Post did, however, run an op-ed by Ezekiel J. Emanuel on this topic.

    Business ads in newspapers have been around forever, but until recent years, such ads did not openly and brazenly sponsor, engage and shape the content of the “news side” of the papers.

    Unfortunately, journalistic critics of these concessions are few, whether in the publications at journalism schools or in liberal magazines. Certainly, the media critics for NPR and PBS do not see this as part of their beat, with very few exceptions. In-house critics or an ombudsman are long gone from the Times and the Post.

    Would that their editors have a greater estimate of their own significance to the unrepresented peoples of the United States. People deserve the empowering right to know about what the foundational civil society struggles daily to accomplish, at the local, national and international levels. (See, Reporters Alert).

    Coverage of active citizenry from the neighborhoods on up might even increase circulation.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.