Saturday Matinee: Kowloon Walled City

By South Sider

Source: YouTube

Credits go to cameraman Hamdani Milas. Christina Wesemann for creation and direction of the film and also to Hugo Portisch for production.

Milas was one of the people that helped filmed this 1989 documentary about the city. I spoke with him recently and he said that he is interested in a follow up video of some sort so we may expect something new on the way.

He mentioned how it was an incredibly tough shoot. They were a five person crew; himself as cinematographer, a camera assistant, focus-puller, sound recordist, a researcher, production assistant and the director, and a very nice Austrian lady who was most willing to collaborate and listen to crew suggestions.

They shot for 6 days continuously, 10-12 hours a day, at the height of the summer of 1987. He mentioned how it smelled very bad inside from the open drainage, the heat was stifling at plus 32ºC with little to no air circulation, also not knowing whether it was sewage or clean water dripping on their heads occasionally, they regularly had to wipe the camera and lens dry.

The claustrophobia- you could hardly turn around in some places with a 7kg Betacam SP camcorder on your shoulder. They had a tripod with them but hardly used it inside because there was nowhere to position it without blocking the narrow passageways.

They also frequently got lost and had to ask the locals for directions. Lunch was much-anticipated each day when they could take a break outside in the fresh air. After a day’s shoot they were absolutely dripping with sweat and the first thing they’d do after getting home was to put all their clothes straight in the wash and have a long shower. Working in those conditions was an immense challenge technically and physically but, as is often the case, none of that shows in the resulting footage.

Here we have a very interesting first hand account of what Hamdani Milas experienced in the walled city itself when he was filming this video. So by what he’s told me we can understand just how much of an incredible risk it was to film inside this city, even though it was near to when the city was demolished and the place was seen as safer it was still a high risk no go area.

I took it upon myself to re-sub the video as best as possible, the 4 part version is hard-subbed on a version of this film with very poor quality, the subs are also worded incorrectly in some places. So all I’ve done is re-subbed the whole thing and put it onto a better quality video clip.

Note: about the section of this video where Jackie Pullinger is speaking, I’m sure anyone can see the subtitles are a transcript of Jackie Pullingers actual words in English and not the narrators. I’ve noticed a comment mentioning how the subs are way off in that part. While subbing this video I realised the narrator wasn’t giving an exact translation so took it upon myself to decipher what she was actually saying over his voice. Sorry I just couldn’t help it but it was out of boredom 😉

On the Future of Manufactured Pandemics: Origins of Covid-19, the U.S. Military’s Bioweapons Program, and the Global Resistance

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

On August 2nd, 2019, a local newspaper based in Frederick, Maryland called The Frederick News-Post published a report ‘Fort Detrick lab shut down after failed safety inspection; all research halted indefinitely’ on the sudden closure of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases lab located at Ft. Dietrick, Maryland:    

All research at a Fort Detrick laboratory that handles high-level disease-causing material, such as Ebola, is on hold indefinitely after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the organization failed to meet biosafety standards.

No infectious pathogens, or disease-causing material, have been found outside authorized areas at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases

The reasons for the shut down is questionable: 

According to the Code of Federal Regulations, which also lists required training, records and biosafety plans, Federal Select Agents Program registration can be suspended to protect public health and safety. It is not clear if this is why the USAMRIID registration was suspended

However, the reasons they shut down the lab ranged from workers not getting recertified to the wastewater decontamination system that failed to meet the required safety standards:

The suspension was due to multiple causes, including failure to follow local procedures and a lack of periodic recertification training for workers in the biocontainment laboratories, according to Vander Linden. The wastewater decontamination system also failed to meet standards set by the Federal Select Agent Program

Shortly after, on January 30th, 2020, the coronavirus pandemic was announced.  I am not saying that Covid-19 began in Ft. Dietrick, but it is worth reexamining what really happened that compelled CDC officials to order the shutdown of the lab over employees not getting recertified or problems with managing the wastewater decontamination system.     

On March 13th, 2020, The New York Times headlined with ‘China Spins Tale That the U.S. Army Started the Coronavirus Epidemic’ which was based on China’s “conspiracy theories”, and that it was the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) based in Fort Detrick, Maryland who released Covid-19, “After criticizing American officials for politicizing the pandemic, Chinese officials and news outlets have floated unfounded theories that the United States was the source of the virus.” 

Chinese authorities were referring to an article published from The New York Times on August 5th, 2019 ‘Deadly Germ Research Is Shut Down at Army Lab Over Safety Concerns’ that claimed why the US military lab was shut down and had cancelled all research concerning lethal microbes “Safety concerns at a prominent military germ lab have led the government to shut down research involving dangerous microbes like the Ebola virus.”  The spokesperson from the US Army, Ms. Vander Linden declared that “Research is currently on hold.”  However, The NY Times had some positive news I suppose, “But there has been no threat to public health, no injuries to employees and no leaks of dangerous material outside the laboratory” But no more information from that point on, “In the statement, the C.D.C. cited “national security reasons” as the rationale for not releasing information about its decision.”  Very strange in my opinion. 

Cui Bono: Russia Exposes Who Benefits from the US Military’s Bioweapons Program

However, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the Chief of Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Protection Troops of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation recently conducted an important briefing on the U.S. military biological activities and present danger it imposes to all of us.  In fact, it is a warning to what the U.S. government is capable of and that is releasing another biological weapon, whether dangerous or not for its geopolitical agendas including the long-stated goals of depopulating the earth.  As for the globalists, less people on the planet will be much easier to control.  Release a bioweapon, discover a vaccine as the cure, and then scare or force people to take the so-called “vaccine” or what I like to call “experimental shots.”  Besides the goals of depopulation, the political and corporate establishment and their Big Pharma cartels have created long-term patients from the injuries caused by the Covid-19 experimental shots which in their perspective, is good for business.     

The next pandemic is the second phase of a long-term war against humanity as Kirillov laid out the US government’s stated goals which “are primarily aimed at studying potential agents of biological weapons — anthrax, tularemia, coronavirus, as well as pathogens of economically significant infections — pathogenic avian influenza and African swine fever” he continued “there is a clear trend: pathogens that fall within the Pentagon’s area of interest, such as COVID-19, avian influenza, African swine fever, subsequently become pandemic, and American pharmaceutical companies become the beneficiaries.”  Kirillov also mentioned Event 201, an exercise conducted before the Covid-19 pandemic on October 18th, 2019, that “simulated the epidemic of a previously unknown coronavirus that, according to the scenario, was transmitted from bats to humans via a porcine organism, the intermediary virus carrier.”  For Russian authorities “the development of the pandemic under this scenario, as well as the implementation of EcoHealth Alliance projects, raises questions about the possible intentional nature of COVID-19 and U.S. involvement in the incident.” 

So, the US Military Creates a Problem, Big Pharma Creates the Solution

The question remains, was the US government behind the Covid-19 outbreak?  It’s hard to say at this point, but one thing is for sure, Big Pharma executives from Pfizer, Moderna, Astra Zeneca and other biotech companies were licking their lips for the future profits that they were about to make on the vaccines they produced.  The propaganda campaign to scare humanity into taking these so-called vaccines worked to an extent despite those who fell into the trap of getting the Covid-19 experimental shot.  However, it was estimated that more than 2 billion people did not take the Covid-19 experimental shot, and that should give us hope to be more optimistic about any future virus currently being created by Western funded biolabs around the world including those in the Ukraine and elsewhere. 

A platform created by the Center for Global Development and the United Nations Development Programme called Pandem-ic.com published an updated report on August 6, 2023, ‘Mapping our unvaccinated world’ and said that Globally, 2.2 billion people are completely unvaccinated. This is the global tally as of today based on the latest information available. It represents the total number of people who have yet to receive their first shot.”  And Thank God!  Make no mistake, this was and still is biological warfare and many people around the world fought back and resisted Western authorities and their institutions such as Big Pharma, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). 

There is hope and optimism regarding the next ‘planned-demic’ because the people have awakened to the fact that there is a cult of death and destruction called the ‘globalists’ who want to depopulate our planet.  But a new resistance will rise once again and face the same enemies of humanity. 

The worldwide resistance against the Covid-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, facemasks, and social distancing at the height of the pandemic was and still is, inspiring for us all.  Although they were many people who resisted the medical establishment worldwide, I want to mention several countries, resistance groups, organizations and the people who have resisted the lies and they all should be recognized for it. 

Big Pharma’s Major Problem: The Global Resistance

Kirillov said that when the US military works with dangerous pathogens “American pharmaceutical companies become the beneficiaries” which is a factual statement.  Whatever the US government and Big Pharma are planning behind closed doors, they will fail.  It’s just like that old saying, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”.  The good news is that there is no trust in Big Pharma around the world, especially in most African countries.  On March 9th, 2021, Afrobarometer, a pan-African, nonpartisan survey research network published ‘Who wants COVID-19 vaccination? In 5 West African countries, hesitancy is high, trust low’ based on a survey on five countries in Africa where they conducted face to face interviews on their views about Covid-19 vaccines:  

This dispatch is based on data collected during the period October 2020-January 2021 in five West African countries: Benin, Liberia, Niger, Senegal, and Togo. In each country, Afrobarometer conducted face-to-face interviews in the language of the respondent’s choice with a nationally representative sample of 1,200 adult citizens that yields country-level results with a margin of error of +/-3 percentage points at a 95% confidence level

Here are the most important findings to consider in the Survey: 

*In the five surveyed countries in West Africa, most citizens – 92% on average – say they are “somewhat well informed” or “very well informed” about the COVID-19 pandemic and efforts to combat it

*Only three in 10 respondents (31%) say they trust their government “somewhat” or “a lot” to ensure that any vaccine is safe before it is offered to citizens. Mistrust is particularly high in Senegal (83%) and Liberia (78%)

Six in 10 citizens (60%), on average, say they are unlikely to try to get vaccinated, including 44% who consider it “highly unlikely.” Senegalese (79%) and Liberians (66%) are most likely to express a reluctance to take the vaccine

* Vaccine hesitancy/resistance skyrockets alongside doubts about the government’s ability to ensure that vaccines are safe. Those who fully trust their government on this score are five to 10 times as likely to want the vaccine as those who don’t trust it

*Large majorities in Niger (89%), Liberia (86%), and Senegal (71%) believe that prayer is more effective than a vaccine in preventing coronavirus infection. Views are more divided in Benin (41%) and Togo (40%)

*Poor respondents express a greater reluctance to get vaccinated than their better off counterparts.

Except in Liberia, citizens with more formal education are not significantly more likely to want the vaccine than their less educated counterparts

Vaccine hesitancy is significantly stronger in cities than in rural areas in Benin, Togo, and Niger

In another report published on November 24th, 2022, this time by the BBC ‘The vaccine hesitancy in North Africa’s Covid ‘black hole’ reported on Morocco’s population and their high-rate of vaccinations as to those in the Western Sahara who were not, “according to one international survey published in 2019 before the pandemic began, 80% of Moroccans trusted vaccines to be safe, among the highest rates in the world.”  However, in the Western Sahara, it is a different story:   

But that high level of trust may be far lower among the 600,000 people living in Western Sahara – a non-self-governing territory that is administered by Morocco. When it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic, Western Sahara is a black hole: no information exists. The area is a blank spot on the World Health Organization’s global map of Covid-19 cases and vaccines because Morocco refuses to publish data about how many Sahrawis have been vaccinated in this politically sensitive region

In the Western Sahara, the BBC interviewed a truck driver by the name of Hanzali who knows people who bought a vaccine certificate to avoid taking the vaccine, “even the people who took the vaccine took it not because they wanted to but because they were told to or had to” Hanzali continued “I’m not against the vaccine – I’m against the people who try to force me to get the vaccine.”  There were unvaccinated Sahrawis who do not trust their politicians, they were the ones that pushed these vaccines on the Sahrawis, “several unvaccinated Sahrawis told the BBC that their hesitancy stems from the fact that Morocco’s politicians – not its doctors – have been at the forefront of the country’s vaccination campaign.”  An unnamed student of media and technology in Laayoune told BBC “In my opinion the government used ‘corona’ for political purposes” he continued “In Casablanca and Rabat, there were lots of protests against the government – and here too [in Laayoune]. It’s because it comes from the government that people don’t agree.”  The highlight of the story is that the unnamed student still refuses the vaccine, “three years into the pandemic, he says he still refuses to take the vaccine. His view is shared by others the BBC spoke to in the region.” 

Africa: The Continent of Resistance

In a article by World Bank Blogs written by several authors including Neia Prata Muloongo Simuzingili, Zelalem Yilma Debebe, Fedja Pivodic and Ernest Massiah titled What is driving COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Sub-Saharan Africa?’ on the reasons why so many Africans are rejecting Covid-19 vaccines:

In Africa, there are multiple drivers of vaccine hesitancy . Concerns about safety, side effects, and effectiveness are widespread—and observed among health workers in ZimbabweGhanaSouth AfricaKenyaSudan, and Ethiopia. The Africa CDC survey noted that respondents  viewed COVID-19 vaccines as less safe and effective than other vaccines, similar findings have been observed in Uganda, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Mozambique, Burkina Faso,  Cameroon and South AfricaThe suspension of AstraZeneca’s roll out in some European countries, the South African data on its effectiveness and the temporary suspension of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the United States to evaluate reports of  blood clotting, affected confidence in COVID-19 vaccination. Ultimately, AstraZeneca’s vaccine was refused by several African countries

So why Africans reject Big Pharma’s experimental shots?  Authorities blame the internet and social media for the “conspiracy theories” that spreads medical misinformation:   

Access to social media has facilitated the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories. In the Africa CDC study, people with high levels of hesitancy were more likely to use social media and be exposed to disinformation. Half of those surveyed in South Africa believed the virus was linked to 5G technology. In another South African study,  approximately a third of those who would refuse the vaccine trusted social media as a primary source of information. A small study in Addis Ababa showed that hesitancy was 3.6 times higher among those who received their information from social media compared to those who relied on television and radio  

The African people are awake to the fact that they don’t want to be guinea pigs in any form:

Mistrust of vaccines developed in Western countries is not new in Africa . It is rooted in the history of unethical Western medical practices on the continent where early efforts to address disease diminished trust in Western medicine and led to underutilization of health services. Approximately 43% of those surveyed by the Africa CDC 15-country study believed that Africans were being used as guinea pigs in vaccine trials. Similar findings were noted in DRC; and, a 2021 survey in Addis Ababa  hesitancy was associated with the belief that the vaccine was a biological weapon from developed countries to control population growth 

Remembering Tanzania’s President, John Magufuli, a Fighter Against Big Pharma’s Covid-19 Vaccine Propaganda

Tanzania’s President John Magufuli who passed away on March 17th, 2021, rejected the dictates of Western governments, their institutions and corporations including the WHO and Big Pharma.  Magufuli once said that “The ministry of health should be careful, they should not hurry to try these vaccines without doing research, not every vaccine is important to us, we should be careful.” He staunchly said, “We should not be used as ‘guinea pigs.”  Magufuli exposed the mass hysteria of the Covid-19 virus as an over-exaggeration right from the start. 

Now Tanzania has changed its attitude towards Covid-19 vaccines since the passing of Magufuli, in fact, there is a propaganda campaign.  In what we can call a propaganda article by Health Policy Watch, ‘Tanzania Mobilises Musicians and Influencers to Shed the Legacy of its COVID-denying Ex-president’ based on the increase of vaccinations from 10% of the population to 50%:  

However, Tanzania has repeatedly struggled to counter misinformation and people’s reluctance to be vaccinated.  To quell growing scepticism against COVID-19 vaccines, Tanzania’s Ministry of Health embarked on community mobilisation campaigns that included community influencers.

Community health workers, musicians and others have become part of the government-led communication strategy to share reliable information about the pandemic, dispel the tide of misinformation and boost the vaccine numbers

If the statistics are correct, with a population of 62 million, only half has been vaccinated, so over 30 million people did not.  Many in Tanzania are not falling for the propaganda that Covid-19 experimental shots are safe and effective. 

The legacy of John Magafuli will be that he opposed the dictates of Western institutions and Big Pharma.  History will remember him as a hero for the Tanzanian people because since the Covid pandemic was announced, he warned the people about the dangers of Big Pharma and their Western institutions.  John Magafuli will be remembered as a hero not only to the Tanzanian people and to continent of Africa, but to all of us around the world who oppose the globalist operators and their agenda of vaccinating the planet to either create a sick population that will benefit Big Pharma or just eliminate the “useless eaters” that are in their way of achieving their goals.              

Forget Opposing an Illegal Occupation, the Palestinians are now Anti-Vaxx Conspiracy Theorists!  

If any of us were Palestinian living in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, or other areas in and around Palestine, I would absolutely reject the Covid-19 vaccine for several reasons.  First, would you take a vaccine from Western countries who have been supporting Israel unconditionally since 1948? How would you know if they are safe? Second, would you trust Western biotech corporations who produced a vaccine in under several months while most vaccines had acquired many years of studies and tests before they were approved? 

Bottom line, Palestinians don’t want to be test subjects like the Israelis.  “The CEO of Pfizer said he chose Israel to be the “one country” to demonstrate his company’s anti-COVID vaccine because he was “impressed, frankly, with the obsession of your prime minister” according to allisraelnews.com.  “He called me 30 times. He would call me at 3 o’clock in the morning and he would ask me about the (coronavirus) variants, what data we have,” Bourla continued “and I would say, ‘Prime Minister, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning,’ and he would say, ‘No, no, don’t worry, just tell me.’ Or he would call me to ask about children, ‘I need to vaccinate the schools.’ Or about pregnant women.”  Bourla said “he convinced me, frankly, that he would be on top of things” and that “we placed our bet with Israel and we are so happy because of the way that you executed the vaccination. And a year from the declaration of the pandemic by the WHO (World Health Organization) we were able today to issue a press release together with the Ministry of Health of your country about the results.”  In a scientific report from 2022 based on the results from Big Pharma’s experimental shots on the 16–39-year-old population in Israel with factors associated between Covid-19 infection rates and those who received the Covid-19 vaccine are as follows:

Using a unique dataset from Israel National Emergency Medical Services (EMS) from 2019 to 2021, the study aims to evaluate the association between the volume of cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome EMS calls in the 16–39-year-old population with potential factors including COVID-19 infection and vaccination ratesAn increase of over 25%  was detected in both call types during January–May 2021

The report admits that there are legitimate concerns, “While not establishing causal relationships, the findings raise concerns regarding vaccine-induced undetected severe cardiovascular side-effects and underscore the already established causal relationship between vaccines and myocarditis, a frequent cause of unexpected cardiac arrest in young individuals.”

On July 23rd, 2021, Al Jazeera ‘Reluctance and distrust define vaccine attitudes in Gaza’ reported on the mistrust of Covid-19 vaccines among Palestinians.  “Suhair Zakkout, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the Gaza Strip, said its health sector has long faced major systemic issues” but concerns remain because a third of people in the Gaza Strip and West Bank refuse to get vaccinated with Covid-19 experimental shots:

The reluctance of people to get vaccinated, however, has raised concerns and prompted the ICRC – alongside the health ministry and the ministry of endowment and religious affairs – to launch a campaign aimed at increasing awareness about the positive effects of the shots

On June 15th, 2021, The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) found that “35% (37% in the West Bank and 32% in the Gaza Strip) say they and their families are not willing to take the vaccine when it becomes available to them.”  One third of the Palestinian people will not take any Covid-19 experimental shot and that is a good thing. 

Yemen’s Houthi Movement and the Resistance against Covid-19 Vaccines

Daraj, a so-called independent media outlet sponsored by the Soros foundation published a report on February 23rd, 2021‘Yemen: “We Don’t Want Vaccines. There is No Corona Here. We Are Fine” clearly calls those who reject Covid-19 vaccines conspiracy theorists: 

Opinions on the coronavirus in Yemen are as divided as the country itself. While the south is awaiting the first vaccines, the north claims to have no need for immunization. What the two sides have in common is a health sector in shambles and a striking love for conspiracy theories

They say Yemen is divided between the Yemeni government in the south who are eagerly waiting for their first vaccines while the north which is controlled by the Houthi movement who has been fighting the Saudi coalition since March 26th, 2015, had declared, they don’t want them:

While countries across the world are racing to provide their citizens with the coronavirus vaccine, the Yemeni authorities remain confused and divided. The internationally recognized Yemeni government on the one hand is trying to gradually obtain the vaccine for free, while the Houthi movement (Ansar Allah) on the other hand categorically rejects the vaccine

Daraj mentioned the war and storage issues are some factors on why the Yemeni population has not been vaccinated, but residents who live in the north such as 31-year-old Ahmed Al-Washali who said that “We do not want vaccines, there is no corona in Yemen, we are fine” and that “It has not affected us. While other countries were imprisoned in their homes, and could not work, we lived normally and nothing happened.”  Daraj reporters asked 52 people who live in Houthi territory about the Covid vaccine and here is the result:

Our team met with 53 people in areas under control of the Houthi movement, most of whom hold a university degree, are employed in the public or private sector and have an average age of 27 to 35.

We found that 42 out of 53 people refuse to receive the vaccine if it were available. Because they did not need it, most said, while 17 claimed the vaccine may be a “conspiracy” posing a threat to their health. Of the 9 people willing to receive the vaccine, 7 stipulated it should be free of charge. Two people said to have never heard about a vaccine against the virus

The results are inspiring to say the least.  Western-backed organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) are not trusted at all:

Some people found the lack of a complete outbreak of the epidemic a reason to reject the vaccine and denounce the integrity of the WHO. A doctor in Taiz, who requested anonymity, said he supported the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement signed by thousands of scholars in the field of medicine and public health calling for an alternative approach to the Covid pandemic based on “focused protection” of those most at risk.

Despite the low rate of illiteracy compared to other governorates, in Taiz too resistance to vaccination remained high. And here too it was not just limited to religious people but included holders of university degrees and secular people. For 49-year-old teacher Jamil, for example, corona was “just an illusion”

In the city of Aden, the results were similar:

Things were not too different in Aden, as fear for the vaccine prevailed. In a poll conducted by our team among 121 residents in the city of Aden, over 84% refused to have the vaccine. The main reason was a lack of confidence in the authorities responsible for importing the vaccine and a fear for the conditions in which the vaccine would be cooled and stored. Even some health workers feared the vaccine in terms of safety and potential side effects

The Houthi movement and the people who support them are clearly awake to the fact that Western nations and their Big Pharma corporations are promoting dangerous Covid-19 experimental shots. They see the dangers. 

The Houthi movement knows that these Covid-19 experimental shots are used as another weapon of war, a bioweapon that can used to depopulate their society.  At least we know that in the next manufactured pandemic, the Houthi movement will continue to resist Western countries and Big Pharma just like they been resisting the Western-backed Yemeni government led by Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi and a coalition of military forces led by Saudi Arabia since 2014. 

Vaccine Hesitancy in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean

A Brazilian study on vaccine hesitancy by Cardenos De Saude Publica (CSP), English translation ‘Reports in Public Health’ called ‘COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in Latin America and Africa: a scoping review’ said that several countries had a percentage of people who refused Covid-19 experimental shots for various reasons:

In the case of vaccination against COVID-19, studies conducted in African and Latin American countries showed that hesitancy was linked with religious beliefs, association between vaccination and surveillance of government authorities, lack of information about adverse events, vaccine safety and efficacy, and dissemination of fake news

Who were the main Latin American countries with high rates of hesitancy?

In Latin American countries, the highest vaccine hesitancy rate of 26.1% and the lowest 8.4% were reported in Brazil. In Ecuador, hesitancy ranged from 73% to 9%, depending on the vaccine efficacy. In Chile, 28% were hesitant and 23% refused the vaccine. Peru had 10.1% refusal and 19.5% hesitancy. In Venezuela, vaccine hesitancy was 28.75%

One point that the Brazilian study reflected on was the history of the Global North (Western Nations) which was the legacy of colonialism and the violence (military invasions, regime change and their depopulation schemes) which the people in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean remember from their histories with Western Imperial powers:

Underdeveloped countries were repeatedly used for tests with human beings, which today resulted in vaccine refusal due to the fear of being laboratory subjects. The power relationship between the Global North and the Global South, expressed in a past of coloniality and violence still alive in the memory of colonized countries, is reflected in the rejection of practices that supposedly come from the North. Then vaccines are seen by different groups as population control strategies in underdeveloped countries, as “western malevolence”, or as a method to extinguish undesirable groups

The people who refused Covid-19 vaccines in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean during the last pandemic will continue to resist Western nations and their Big Pharma scams because they know that there is an agenda in the next manufactured pandemic.

Vaccine Resistance in Western nations

Forbes magazine reported on March 8th, 2021, ‘Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Is Worse In E.U. Than U.S.’ claimed that the “but getting shots into the arms of European Union (E.U.) residents has proven to be much trickier. The U.S. is vaccinating at a faster pace than any member of the E.U., and three times the E.U. average” and that is in a way the good news.  Polls suggest that the Europeans don’t trust Big Pharma as well since “only 36% of the surveyed Europeans strongly agree with the statement that vaccines are safe.”  In fact, Europe has a history of resistance against Big Pharma’s AstraZeneca vaccine:

In Europe, even approved products that don’t necessarily have supply issues have faced stiff resistance. In France and Germany, for example, the approved AstraZeneca vaccine has an image problem, which means many are reluctant to take it, including healthcare workers on the front lines. Poor, inconsistent messaging has fueled the public’s confusion over the safety and efficacy of AstraZeneca’s vaccine. President Macron’s claim last month that the vaccine was “quasi-ineffective” for the elderly didn’t help matters. He has since reversed himself and is now pleading that people get vaccinated with whatever vaccine is available to them. But the damage was already done

The Europeans of both political movements, whether far-left or far-right, are usually anti-establishment so obviously, they don’t trust Big Pharma’s Covid-19 experimental shots as well:

Europe’s degree of Covid-19 vaccine aversion is perhaps surprising, but not if one views it in the context of fiercely anti-establishment politics on the far-left and far-right, and a particularly virulent anti-science sentiment that existed long before Covid-19 hit. To illustrate, the far-right Lega and leftist Five Star Movement in Italy have both incited fearmongering about vaccines. Likewise, far-right and far-left political leaders in France, such as Le Pen and Mélenchon, have stoked anti-vaccine attitudes

From Africa, the Middle East, Latin America to Europe and even in the United States where one-third of the population did not take the Covid-19 experimental shots for whatever reason, there will be another popular resistance against Big Pharma’s experimental shots and a possible future lockdown. 

For the next manufactured pandemic, the globalists, and the Pentagon, including all their institutions including the elephant in the room, Big Pharma will face a resistance by people from all walks of life and they will fail because the 2 billion people around the world will continue to oppose Big Pharma’s Covid-19 experimental shots and that is something the globalists are not looking forward to.    

Neocons and Other Malignancies in the American Body Politic

They will never give up until we’re all dead

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

It is interesting to observe how, over the past twenty-five years, the United States has become not only a participant in wars in various places on the planet but has also evolved into being the prime initiator of most of the armed conflict. Going back to the Balkans in the nineteen-nineties and moving forward in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon and Somalia there is almost always an American leading role where there is bombing and killing. And where there is no actual war, there are threats and sanctions intended to make other nations come to heel, be they in Latin America like Venezuela, or Iran in the Middle East, or North Korea in Asia. And then there is the completely senseless act of turning major competitors like Russia and China, as we are now seeing, into enemies, with a proxy war raging in Ukraine, threats over Taiwan, and the world moving one step closer to a nuclear disaster.

It seems to me that the transition from an America bumbling its way into war and the current situation where wars are pursued as a matter of course coincides with a certain political development in the United States, which is the rise of neoconservatives as the foreign and national security policy makers in both major parties. This has developed together with the evolution of the view that the United States can do no wrong by definition, indeed, that it has a unique and God-given right to establish and police the globe through something that it invented, exploits and has dubbed the “rules based international order.”

Who would have thought that a bunch of Jewish student-activists, mostly leftists, originally conspiring in a corner of the cafeteria in the City College of New York would create a cult type following that now aspires to rule the world? The neocons became politically most active in the 1960s and eventually some of them attached themselves to the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, declaring their evolution had come about because they were “liberals mugged by reality.” The neoconservative label was first used to describe their political philosophy in 1973. Since that time, they have diversified and succeeded in selling their view to a bipartisan audience that the US should embrace an aggressive interventionist foreign policy and must be the world hegemon. To be sure their desire for overwhelming military power has been strongly shaped by their tribal cohesion which has fed a compulsion to have Washington serve as the eternal protector of Israel, but the hegemonistic approach has inevitably led to expanding conflict all over the world and a willingness to challenge, confront and defeat other existing great powers. Hence the support for a needless and pointless war in Ukraine to “weaken Russia” and a growing conflict with China over Taiwan to do the same in Asia. To make sure that the Republicans do not waver on that mission, leading neocon Bill Kristol has recently raised $2 million to do some heavy lobbying to make sure that they stay on track to confront the Kremlin in Europe.

One of the leading neocon families is the Kagans, who have successfully penetrated and come to dominate the establishment foreign policy centers in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Victoria Nuland nee Nudelman, the wife of Robert Kagan, is entrenched at the State Department where she is now the Deputy Secretary, the number two position. Up until recently, she was one of the top three officials at State, all of whom were and are Jewish Zionists. Indeed, under Joe Biden Zionist Jews dominate the national security structure, to include the top level of the State Department, the head of Homeland Security, the Attorney General, the National Security Adviser, the Director of National Intelligence, the President’s Chief of Staff, and the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Nuland’s hawkish appeal is apparently bipartisan as she has served in senior positions under Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and now Joe Biden. As adviser to Cheney, she was a leading advocate of war with Iraq, working with other Jewish neocons Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz at Defense and also Scooter Libby in the Vice President’s office. As there was no actual threat to the US from Saddam Hussein she and her colleagues invented one, the WMD that they sold to the media and to idiots like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Nuland is also considered to be close to Hillary Clinton and the recently deceased ghastly former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. All of her government assignments have included either invading or severely sanctioning some country considered by her and her colleagues to be unfriendly. She particularly hates the Russians and anyone who is hostile to Israel.

Apparently, Nuland’s record of being seriously wrong in the policies she promoted has only served to improve her resume in Washington’s hawkish foreign policy establishment and when Biden came into the presidency she found herself appointed to the number three position at the State Department as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Her return to power with the Democrats might also be due in part to the activism of her husband Robert, currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, who was one of the first neocons to get on the NeverTrump band wagon back in 2016 when he endorsed Hillary Clinton for president and spoke at a Washington fundraiser for her, complaining about the “isolationist” tendency in the Republican Party exemplified by Trump. Robert famously has never seen a war he disapproved of and, while urging Europe to do more defense spending, commented that “When it comes to use of military force “Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus.” Robert’s brother Frederick, a Senior Fellow at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, and Frederick’s wife Kimberly, who heads the bizarrely named Institute for the Study of War, are also regarded as neocon royalty.

Nuland is particularly well known for her being the driving force behind the regime change in Ukraine in 2014 that replaced the fairly-elected but friendly-to-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych with a selected candidate more accommodating to the US and Western Europe. Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe, has been unstable ever since and the current war, also initiated by interference from the US and UK, has brought about the deaths and wounding of an estimated half million Ukrainians and Russians.

Nuland was recently in Africa, stirring up developments in Niger, which has experienced a recent military coup that removed a president who was corrupt but also a friend of the US and France, both of which have troops stationed in the country. As I write this, a number of African nations (ECOWAS) friendly to US and French interests in the region are gathering together their own military force to reverse the coup, but there is little enthusiasm for the project. We will see how that turns out, but predictably Nuland is advertising a possible intervention as a “restoration of democracy.”

And there is more over the horizon with neocons like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Nuland in charge of US foreign policy and supported by most of congress and a Jewish dominated media and entertainment industry. Joe Biden is too weak and too much under the thumb of the Israel Lobby to pursue any policies that would be beneficial to the American people in general, so the course will be set by the current crop of zealots, just as Donald Trump was guided by his Christian Zionist advisers.

If you want to understand just how what remains of our republic is in a bus being driven over the cliff by a group that has no regard for most of the citizens of the country that they reside in, one only has to read some of what passes for neocon analysis of what must be done to make America “safe.” Not surprisingly, it also involves Israel and a war on behalf of the Jewish state.

One astonishingly audacious article that appeared on August 13th in The Hill entitled “If Israel strikes Iran over its nuclear program, the US must have its back,” gives Israel the option of starting a war for any or no reason with the United States compelled to join in in support. It was written Michael Makovsky, a well-known Jewish neocon, and Chuck Wald. Makovsky is President and CEO of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) while Wald is a former general who also is affiliated with that group as a “distinguished fellow,” which means he is getting paid generously to serve as a mouthpiece providing credibility for the group. For those unfamiliar with The Hill, it is an inside the beltway defense contractor funded online magazine that pretends to be serious but which is actually an integral part of the status quo Zionist and war-on-demand network. That the Jewish Institute for National Security is “of America” is, of course, a characteristically clever euphemism.

The article begins with “The Biden administration should learn from its unpreparedness for the Russia-Ukraine war and begin to prepare for a major Israel-Iran conflict. The administration needs to set aside its differences with the Israeli government, overcome its aversion to conflict with Iran, and begin to work closely with Jerusalem to prepare for the growing likelihood that Israel will feel it has no choice but to initiate a military campaign against Iran’s nuclear program. In ‘No Daylight,’ a new report from the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)…retired senior military officers and national security experts explain that whatever differences the US might now have with Israel over Iran policy, our two countries’ interests will be aligned after an Israeli strike. Consequently, in preparing its response, the U.S. guiding principle should be ‘no daylight with Israel,’ to ensure Israeli military success, mitigate Iranian retaliation and limit the scope of the conflict — vital interests for both countries.”

That war with Iran is a “vital interest” for the United States is, of course, not really explained as the point is to let Israel to decide on the issue of war and peace for the United States. The article then trots out the old “credibility” argument, i.e. that if we don’t go to war no one will ever trust our security guarantees: “A US betrayal of its close Israeli ally, at a time of great peril for the Jewish state, would be ‘one of the greatest catastrophes ever,’ an Arab leader told us privately recently. Because Israel is widely perceived as a close American ally, the US stance as Israel risks thousands of casualties in defense of its very existence, will resound broadly. Strong American support will reassure allies from Warsaw to Abu Dhabi and Taipei; American equivocation will shred Washington’s credibility and embolden adversaries from Tehran to Moscow and Beijing.”

One would love to know who the anonymous Arab leader so concerned about Israel is and, of course, the Jewish state is not in fact an American ally apart from in the fertile imaginations of congressmen, the media and the White House. And Israel will, of course, need more weapons and money from the US taxpayer to include “expediting delivery to Israel of KC-46A tankers, precision-guided munitions, F-15 and F-35 aircraft, and air and missile defenses…. Washington should accelerate building integrated regional air, missile and maritime defenses against persistent Iranian threats.” And America must be prepared to expand the war: “Privately, Iranian and Hezbollah leadership should be warned that heavy retaliation against Israel…will prompt severe Israeli and/or American responses that could threaten their very grasp on power. Upon commencement of an Israeli strike, the United States should promptly resupply Israel with Iron Dome interceptors, precision-guided munitions, ammunition and spare parts, and deploy Patriot air defenses to Israel…”

So the United States must be prepared to turn over its national security to Israel in exchange for what gain for Americans? In part it would apparently involve “finding a permanent solution to Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons program” which is based on a lie even if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeating for over 20 years that Iran is only six months away from a weapon. Both the CIA and Mossad have confirmed that Iran has no such program while Israel does have a secret illegal nuclear arsenal built using enriched uranium and nuclear triggers stolen from the US. The article concludes with another reference to the non-existing program, claiming “the most effective way to address Iran’s nuclear program already has been articulated by President Biden and communicated by America’s ambassador in Jerusalem: ‘Israel can and should do whatever they need to deal with it, and we’ve got their back.’”

Supporting Israeli war crimes is not the way to go. As Chris Hedges puts it correctly, there is no compelling American interest in damaging itself by supporting Israel blindly, quite the contrary: “The long nightmare of oppression of Palestinians is not a tangential issue. It is a black and white issue of a settler-colonial state imposing a military occupation, horrific violence and apartheidbacked by billions of US dollars, on the indigenous population of Palestine. It is the all powerful against the all powerless. Israel uses its modern weaponry against a captive population that has no army, no navy, no air force, no mechanized military units, no command and control and no heavy artillery, while pretending intermittent acts of wholesale slaughter are wars.”

And, of course, while Israel engages in slaughter and torture it always portrays itself as the victim only engaged in fighting against “terrorists.” I have a better idea for where we should go with all of this. President Joe Biden should be impeached for ignoring war powers legislation and indicating that he is willing to sacrifice US interests and kill American soldiers, few or plausibly none of whom will actually be Jewish since it is not an occupation that attracts them, to please and support a manifestly evil foreign government. And Donald Trump should also be punished for having done much the same type of pandering to a foreign country while in office. Meanwhile, haul Makovsky and Wald together with their buddies at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) down to the Justice Department and put them in jail for violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) in that they are willfully acting as agents of a foreign government and are operating corruptly to serve the interests of that government. The criminals at AIPAC are already using their associated PACs to oust targeted members of Congress up for re-election in 2024 who have in any way been critical of Israel or pro-Palestinian. And while you’re at it Mr. Attorney General Merrick Garland nee Garfinkel, please have Mr. Blinken and Ms. Nuland pop by for a chat just for starters and see how far you can make the laws apply to those in power. There is some confusion evident here as Israel is not part of the United States, no matter how politically dominant and wealthy its lobby might be. Time to put an end to this nonsense and call it out for what it is – it is treason.

Disinformation, 1984-2023

By Peter Van Buren

Source: We Meant Well

Orwell, again. 1984 was prescient on so many concepts that it seems it was written for the Biden era. Underlying it all is the concept of disinformation, the root of propaganda and mind control. So it is in 2023. Just ask FBI Director Chris Wray. Or Facebook.

George Orwell’s novel explores the concept of disinformation and its role in controlling and manipulating society. Orwell presents a dystopian future where a totalitarian regime, led by the Party and its figurehead Big Brother, exerts complete control over its citizens’ lives, including their thinking. The Party employs a variety of techniques to disseminate disinformation and maintain its power. One of the most prominent examples is the concept of “Newspeak,” a language designed to restrict and manipulate thought by reducing the range of expressible ideas. Newspeak aims to replace words and concepts that could challenge or criticize the Party’s ideology, effectively controlling the way people think and communicate (unhomed, misspoke, LGBQTIAXYZ+, nati0nalist, terrorist.)

Orwell also introduces the concept of doublethink, which refers to the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept them both as true. This psychological manipulation technique allows the Party to control the minds of its citizens and make them believe in false information or embrace contradictory ideas without questioning (masks which do not prevent disease transmission are still mandatory.) The Party in 1984 alters historical records and disseminates false information through the Ministry of Truth. This manipulation of historical events and facts aims to control the collective memory of the society in a post-truth era, ensuring that the Party’s version of reality remains unquestioned (war in Ukraine, Iraq, El Salvador, Vietnam, all to protect our freedom at home.)

Through these portrayals, Orwell highlights the dangers of disinformation and its potential to distort truth, manipulate public opinion, and maintain oppressive systems of power. The novel serves as a warning about the importance of critical thinking, independent thought, and the preservation of objective truth in the face of disinformation and propaganda.

Disinformation is bad. But replacing disinformation with censorship and/or replacement with other disinformation is worse. 1984 closed down the marketplace of ideas. So for 2023.

In 2023 America the medium is social media and the Ministry of Truth is the Executive Branch, primarily the FBI. Topics the FBI at one point labeled disinformation and sought to censor in the name of protecting Americans from disinformation include but are not limited to the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the Covid lab leak theory, the efficiency and value to society of masks, lockdowns, and vaccines, speech about election integrity and the 2020 presidential election, the security of voting by mail, even parody accounts mocking the president (about Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter.)

When asked before Congress to define disinformation, FBI Director Christopher Wray could not do it, even though it is the basis for the FBI’s campaign to censor Americans. It’s a made up term with no fixed meaning. That gives it its power, like “terrorism” was used a decade or so earlier. Remember “domestic terrorism”? That stretched to cover everything from white power advocates to J6 marchers to BLM protestors to Moms for Liberty. It just can’t be all those things all the time but it can be all those things at different times, as needed. The term “hate speech” is another flexible tool of enforcement and is why efforts to codify banning hate speech under the First Amendment must be resisted so strongly. Same for QAnon. We’ve heard about QAnon for years now but still can’t figure out if it even exists. To read the MSM, you would think it is the most powerful and sinister thing one can imagine yet seems to be imaginary, another Cthulhu. Do they have an office, an email address, a lair somewhere?

In simple words: the government is using social media companies as proxies to censor the contrary thoughts of Americans, all under the guise of correcting misinformation and in direct contrivance of the First Amendment.

How bad does it get? As part of its 2023 investigation into the federal government’s role in censoring lawful speech on social media platforms, the House Committee on the Judiciary issued a subpoena to Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Alphabet, the parent of Google and YouTube. Documents obtained revealed the FBI, on behalf of a compromised Ukrainian intelligence service, requested and, in some cases, directed, the world’s largest social media platforms to censor Americans engaging in constitutionally protected speech online about the war in Ukraine.

Another tool of thought control is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was supposed to be used to spy on foreigners but has been improperly used against thousands of Americans. Over 100,000 Americans were spied on in 2022, down from three million in 2021.

Does it sound familiar? An amorphous threat is pounded into the heads of Americans (Communism and Red Scares, Covid, terrorism, disinformation) and in its name nearly anything is justified, including in the most recent battle for freedom, censorship. The wrapper is that it is all for our own protection (Biden himself accused social-media companies of “killing people,” the more modern version of the terrorism-era’s “blood on their hands”) with the government assuming the role of knowing what is right and correct for Americans to know. The target in name is always some Ruskie-type foreigner, but in reality morphs to be censorship of our citizens ourselves (stained as “pro-Putin.”) Yet Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted the government asked Facebook to suppress true information. He said during the Covid era the scientific establishment within the government asked “for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”

Under President Joe Biden, the government has undertaken “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” That was the extraordinary conclusion reached by a federal judge in Missouri v. Biden. The case exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and its federal agencies have gone to bully social-media platforms into removing political views they dislike. The White House is appealing and attained a stay, hoping to retain this powerful tool of thought control right out of 1984. A victory for censorship of Americans and their thoughts could be the greatest threat to free speech in American history.

Once again, the FDA admits it lied to us. And once more, we yawn

By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

On critical matters, our medical authorities have no interest in settling the science. Instead, battles are won in the arena of smear and insinuation

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.

Horse dewormer

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. It might make us a little angrier, a little 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.

And not just that. It is now the FDA – not Rogan – 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 amd insinuation, in misleading social media soundbites like the FDA’s horse drug one.

That isn’t science, it’s propaganda.

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.

Fooled by What We Measure, Enlightened by What We Don’t Measure

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Economists and pundits are falling all over themselves to declare the US is chugging along splendidly, and to express their frustration with the public for their curmudgeonly lack of enthusiasm. For example: If this is a bad economy, please tell me what a good economy would look likeWe should acknowledge that things are going well, even as we continue to look for problems to solve and How the Recession Doomers Got the U.S. Economy So Wrong.

My intention is not to slam Noah Smith or Derek Thompson. I follow their work and gain value from their analysis.

The point I want to make is we only manage what we measure, and the reliance on statistics that are overly broad and easily distorted/gamed leads to generalizations that ignore consequential cause and effect: we are fooled by overly broad and easily distorted/gamed statistics and enlightened by looking at what is not measured or measured inadequately.

The consensus holds that inflation is declining rapidly and unemployment remains low, so the economy is doing great. Please glance at Chart #1 below to see what enthuses the mainstream: the unemployment rate is near historic lows.

But this measure leaves out a great deal of consequential factors. It’s well-known that the unemployment rate is distorted / gamed by leaving out everyone who is in the workforce but not “actively seeking work.” So what does this official unemployment rate actually measure? Not the percentage of the workforce that has a job.

Nor does it measure underemployment–those working far below their potential–or job insecurity or the percentage of workers being pushed into burnout–all consequential reflections of the real economy. All of these are potentially causal factors in why US productivity has fallen so dramatically.

And speaking of productivity, that’s the ultimate source of prosperity–not speculative bubbles or debt-binging. If productivity is tanking, eventually there are negative economic consequences that will be distributed to some segments of the populace, very likely asymmetrically.

Such a broad-brush measure also ignores the consequences of demographics. Please glance at chart #2 below, of the 55 and over population and workforce. Note that virtually all the 20+ million jobs the US economy added in the past two decades are in this older workforce, which is of course steaming steadily into retirement, even as the percentage of this cohort who continues working has soared.

In other words, virtually all the job growth is the result of older workers working longer. Yes, 70 is the new 50, but try doing the same work at 70 that you did when you were 50. Sure, some people forego retirement because they love their work so much, but we don’t measure how many are still working because they have to for pressing financial reasons.

Have you observed the age of service workers and skilled workers recently? Do you reckon they really love working at Burger King so much that they’re doing it for enjoyment?

What if we measured financial pressures and job insecurity rather than risibly bogus “unemployment”? Would the economy still look so wonderful and resilient?

Chart #3 shows that virtually all the population growth ahead is in the cohort of older workers 65+ years old heading into retirement. So the workforce is rapidly aging and the unspoken / unexamined assumption is tens of millions of new workers will enter the workforce with the same skills, motivation, dedication and values as the tens of millions retiring.

But the demographics simply don’t support this breezy assumption.

Now glance at chart #4 which depicts the extraordinary rise in the number of workers who are now disabled. The causes of this are being debated (the pandemic obviously plays a role), but 2.5 million workers leaving the workforce in a few years is something that could be consequential if the trend continues. An assumption that this is a one-off is baseless until proven otherwise.

Once again, demographics, productivity and factors such as disability and burnout are not part of the unemployment, GDP and inflation measures currently being touted as proof of economic nirvana.

Item #1 of what’s not even measured is the crapification of goods and services. I addressed this in The “Crapification” of the U.S. Economy Is Now Complete (February 9, 2022) and Stainless Steal (February 26, 2023).

How do we measure the “inflation”–i.e. a loss of purchasing power–when appliances that lasted 20 years a generation ago now break down in 5 years? Where does that 75% decline in utility and durability show up in the official inflation data? How about the tools that once lasted a lifetime now breaking after a few years?

It’s been estimated that America’s food has lost 30% of its nutritive value in the past few decades. Protein per gram has dropped, trace nutrients have dropped, and so on. Rather than pursue sustainably nutrient-rich soil, Big Ag has maximized profits by dumping natural-gas-derived chemical fertilizers on depleted soil to boost production of nutrient-poor, tasteless “product.” A product deemed “organic” offers no guarantee that the soil isn’t depleted of nutrients.

Could this decline have anything to do with the American populace’s increasingly poor health? Nobody knows because these massive declines in quality and value aren’t measured and are certainly not part of the risibly bogus measures of unemployment, GDP and inflation.

The official inflation rate ignores the multi-decade decline in the purchasing power of wages. Rents have soared 25% in a few years, and economists are looking at 5% increases in wages and worrying about the potential inflationary impact of workers’ wages not keeping up with real-world inflation.

Cheerleading economists and pundits never mention the $50 trillion siphoned from labor by capital over the past 45 years. They also don’t mention the rising trend of loading more work on employees rather than hire more employees, or as a response to not being able to find qualified new hires.

Funny how rosy the picture can be tinted when all the consequential forces are ignored. But this studied ignorance characterizes the American elite, who delight in whining about airfares and travel delays, and finding someone to fix their pool pump. I address our Terminally Stratified Society here:

The Wealthy Are Not Like You and Me–Our Terminally Stratified Society (August 3, 2023)

This protected elite don’t have to put up with the crapified goods and services which generate their capital gains and income. Their wealth and income enable their detachment from the crapified economy the bottom 90% experience. Their experience of the bottom 90% is as service workers, delivery people, etc. who serve their entitled tastes.

Correspondent Tomasz G. provided a telling excerpt from Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island:

“… the rich certainly like the company of the rich, no doubt it calms them, it’s nice for them to meet beings subject to the same torments as they are, and who seem to form a relationship with them that is not totally about money; it’s nice for them to convince themselves that the human species is not uniquely made up of predators and parasites… “

As correspondent Ryan R. observed, America’s privileged elites“were born on third, stole home (via asset inflation) and still think they hit that home run.”

We know who the parasites are, but economists and pundits are safely blind to America’s neofeudal aristocracy. After all, who butters the bread of economists and pundits?

Is it unsurprising there are no measures of neofeudalism or elite privilege? As for the incredible concentration of wealth in the top tiers and the resulting decline in the bottom 90%’s share of the nation’s wealth–nothing to see here, just globalization and financialization doing their thing. What matters is booking my next flight to yet another conference of economists and pundits where we nod our heads and dare not admit all the conferences are nothing but echo chambers of the privileged elites.

Cheerleading economists and pundits completely ignore the consequences of the system being rigged to favor capital and the already-wealthy who were given the means to buy assets back when they were cheap and affordable to the middle-class. Now that the system generates speculative credit-asset bubbles to create “the wealth effect,” assets such as homes in desirable regions are out of reach of the bottom 90%.

Please study the six charts below of wealth inequality. Try not to laugh out loud when you see that the top 1% reckon that “coming from a wealthy family” has near-zero impact on “getting ahead in America.”

Also note the steady decline in the middle class percentage of national wealth, and how the middle class’s share only rises when the credit-asset bubbles that have enriched the top 10% deflate, a bubble-pop that never lasts longer than a few months thanks to the policies that favor the already-rich at the expense of those who don’t own stocks, rental properties, municipal bonds, etc.

Economists and pundits steer well clear of the eventual social and political consequences of America’s entrenched neofeudal wealth-income inequality. That this neofeudal configuration is inherently destabilizing–never mind, we don’t measure that, look at the wunnerful unemployment and inflation charts!

Lastly, consider the skyrocketing federal debt in terms of how many jobs are created in the era of soaring federal spending and debt. (Charts courtesy of CH / Economica) Debt doesn’t matter to economists and pundits, and neither does its diminishing effect on GDP and employment. The same can be said of total debt (public and private), which is skyrocketing (last chart): diminishing returns writ large as higher interest rates are embedded in the policy excesses and neofeudal structure of the past 45 years.

In essence, nothing that is consequential is properly quantified, so the pundit class keeps insisting everything is wunnerful and is mystified why people are so foolishly dissatisfied with our wunnerful economy. The reason why people are not buying the fantasyland story is they have to live and work in the crapified real economy, as serfs serving the economist-punditry-elite aristocracy.

If we want to avoid being led astray by misleading measures, we must seek enlightenment in what isn’t being measured or is cast aside as inconvenient to the “economy is wunnerful” party line.

From Press Room Raids to Indictments, Anything Goes When the Government Piles On

By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“When players are piled on top of each other after a mad scramble for a loose ball, it’s a free-for-all. There are no rules. Anything goes. That’s because there’s nobody in the pile to monitor what’s going on.”—Mike Thomas, sports editor

What is playing out before our eyes right now should be familiar to any fan of football: it’s called the pile on, a brutal, frenzied, desperate play to seize control and gain power while crushing the opposition.

In this particular analogy, “we the people” are trapped at the bottom of that pile, buried under a mountain of bread-and-circus distractions, economic worries, environmental disasters, power plays, power grabs, police raidsindictments and circus politics.

The Maui wildfires. The Trump indictments. Hunter Biden’s legal troubles. The looming 2024 presidential election. The Ukraine-Russia conflict.

In the midst of this pile on of woes, worries and semi-manufactured crises falling with sledgehammer-like frequency, monopolizing the media narrative and eclipsing all other news, it’s difficult to stay focused on what’s really going on, and yet something is brewing.

Pay attention.

Caught up in the partisan boxing match that is politics today, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s real.

The indictments against Trump, the investigation of Hunter Biden, and the chatter of the political classes aren’t real; they are more sound and fury, signifying nothing in the end.

As Aldous Huxley observed in Brave New World Revisited:

“Non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation… Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.”

So what is real?

What’s real is the $5,000 fine and five-year jail sentence that could be levied against anyone found driving an illegal immigrant in their car in the state of Florida.

What’s real are the hi-tech policing tools such as robotic dogs equipped with all manner of weaponry and surveillance technology that are rewriting the ground rules when it comes to privacy and security.

What’s real is the North Carolina pastor who was fined $60,000 for ministering to the homeless on church property without a permit.

What’s real is the revelation that Boston officials created and sent police a watch list of the mayor’s most vocal critics, not unlike the government’s own growing databases for anti-government dissidents.

What’s real is what happened in Marion, Kansas, on Fri., Aug. 11, 2023, when police raided the office of the Marion County Record, blowing past the constitutional safeguards intended to safeguard the freedom of the press.

Are you starting to get the picture yet?

The manufactured media spectacles, piled on one after another, have a very real purpose, which is to distract us from the government’s constant encroachments on our freedoms.

In the larger scheme of things, these individual incidents—the police raid of a small-town newspaper, a state ban on who gets to be inside your car, an outrageous fine for feeding the destitute, a politician’s use of an enemies list to silence critics—might easily go unremarked, yet they are all part of the police state’s tendency to pile on: pile on the distractions, pile on the retribution, pile on the show of force in order to completely eviscerate anything that even remotely resembles opposition.

The police state has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on anyone who even questions its authority, let alone challenges its chokehold on power.

“We the people”—the proverbial nails to the police state’s heavy-handed tactics—will be hammered into compliance, intimidated into subservience, and terrorized into silence.

It doesn’t matter which party dominates in Congress or the White House: all of us are in danger from these fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics.

In this way, anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.

Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the prison walls holding the American people captive become ever more inescapable.

The upcoming election and its aftermath will undoubtedly keep the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats, so busy fighting each other that they never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.

Yet the winner has already been decided.

As American satirist H.L. Mencken predicted almost a century ago:

“All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, nothing will change.

You cannot have a republican form of government—nor a democratic one, for that matter—when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.

The Only ‘National Defense’ Needed in this Country, Is Defense Against the Real Enemy: The Ruling Class and the U.S. Government

By Gary D. Barnett

Source: GaryDBarnett.com

“I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.”

H.L. Mencken

Throughout our history, and today, little, if any defense of this country or its people, has been necessary or warranted. The true enemy of the people of America is, and has always been, its own government. The real enemies are most all the politicians, regardless of party, the courts, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the IRS, the entire military industrial complex, and in general, the federal and state police forces. In other words, all the ruling class and it pawns in government, its enforcers, and all their institutions and bureaucracies, are the real threat to this populace and its natural freedoms. The ludicrous notion of national defense, and that government forces actually “defend the country,” is an outright lie; propagandized by the State and its mouthpieces in media, simply as a way to gain great power in order to own and control society.

Many will take offence to these statements, mostly due to the fact that since birth, they have been inundated and indoctrinated by false ‘authority’ figures, to believe that they cannot survive and prosper without restrictive laws and rule, and worthless government schooling, all kept in check by severe coercive State prosecution. They are taught (schooled) to abandon their individuality in favor of the so-called ‘greater good’ of a collective society, to depend on and trust others in power to protect and sustain them and their families throughout their lives. This breeds only ignorance and passivity in the face of State terror. Independence, a supposed hallmark of this nation-state and its residents, is literally vilified, and even prohibited in many instances, causing personal sovereignty to be discarded in the name of unified slavery.

We live in a country that has warred aggressively against fictitious enemies, meaning without cause or necessity, more than any other country on earth. It is stated, and supported, that the United States has been at war for at least 93% of its entire existence. I firmly believe this number to be much higher, and with proper consideration, it is likely closer to 100%. If one is to determine the actual damage done, the actual harm due to direct war, proxy war, what is insanely considered ‘collateral damage,’ what is the horrid long term cost to human life in the aftermath of this terror, the total number of causalities, including the dead, would be tens if not hundreds of millions of innocent people. But what is sold to the wrongly named ‘public, is that this country is and has been the savior of ‘democracy,’ a completely evil and failed ideology, which is a gross lie beyond the imagination of any sane and thinking human being.

Yes, the truth hurts, but without acceptance of truth, what is left is a deceitful lie; a manufactured myth so atrocious as to have caused an entire nation’s abhorrent and hostile policies to be supported by the masses to such an extent, as to have caused the most broad-based, aggressive, and egregious destruction of humanity in history. This should be the epitaph upon the death of this empire.

At this time in our lives, aggressive war by this government and all who support its heinous deeds, has graduated from its main objective of slaughtering innocent men, women, and children, in addition to the other devastation, in other countries most everywhere on earth, to include the entirety of this country’s population as well. The major war currently is against all of us who live and work in the U.S. by those who continue to claim to be our protectors. This contradiction is absurd, but is still little understood by the average American, as can be evidenced by the terroristic treatment inflicted, and with little if any resistance, on this society these past few years.

At a time when this country and the world are steeped in madness and hate, more and more atrocities continue to take place, with almost zero empathy evident by the political class. The last evil ‘ruler,’ just one among all, ‘chosen’ by the ‘people,’ was Biden, and this was his response to the State’s complicit murder of those in Lahaina just recently, after a very suspicious and devastating fire had destroyed an entire town and its residents. He had the audacity to offer these poor people who lost everything, including many family members, a one-time $700 payment per household. This was in the midst of giving over $200 million more to Ukraine’s political criminals recently, with plans to give many more billions; this after more than $113 billion has already been paid to enrich the newly rich politicians in Ukraine. (Apparently, blackmail garners payment more than actual need of Americans) This alone should be enough for everyone in this country to grasp how little this government cares about its own, and how worthless all in the governing system have become. To depend on, or trust this scum to defend you from harm, is asinine beyond explanation.

Who will defend you from harm? Who will defend you from foreign invasion, although that has never once happened in this country’s history, not even including the pre-planned setup called the Pearl Harbor attack? Who will defend you from hyper-inflation and the resulting extreme prices for goods? Who will defend you from mass censorship and constant surveillance? Who will defend you from food shortages, energy shutdowns, and extensive restrictions on all transactions and travel? Who will defend your children from the consuming perversion being forced on them at every opportunity with this government’s blessing? Who will defend you from aggression and tyranny? Who will defend you from yourself?

It will never be the evil State that defends you, nor will it be its ‘national defense systems,’ its enforcers in the military and police, the politicians, the banking cartels, the large corporate monsters, or any government at any level. There is only one legitimate defense, and that is self-defense. Only you, each of you, has the ability and desire to defend himself. No other and no State entity can or will ever be your savior.  Until that is accepted, expect total serfdom to become your voluntarily accepted way of life.

Much more tyranny is coming. Lockdowns, fake ‘viruses,’ bioweapons, threats and totalitarian measures based on bogus ‘climate change, central bank digital currency, social credit restrictions, more inflation, destruction of money, health mandates, curfews, travel shutdowns, food shortages, transhuman promotion, among many other atrocities, including perpetual war.

National defense is an outright lie, and can never protect you, it can only harm you. There is but one enemy, and that enemy is the State! There is but one defense against this demon called government, and that is when individuals, or individuals working together en masse, abolish all rule. The responsibility for you is you, and any dependence on government whatsoever can only lead to despair, hopelessness, disaster, and enslavement. Defend yourself from this evil State, and break the chains that bind you.

“Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.”

~ I.F. Stone

Reference links:

America’s perpetual wars of aggression

What the media won’t tell you about the Maui fires