Engineering Contagion: UPMC, Corona-Thrax And “The Darkest Winter”

Posted on November 2, 2020 by Reid Mukai

This is the UPMC logo on the UPMC Building in downtown Pittsburgh,Monday, Oct. 29, 2018. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

Researchers at a BSL-3 lab tied to the organizers of the 2001 Dark Winter simulation, DARPA, and the post-9/11 biodefense industrial complex are genetically modifying anthrax to express Covid-19 components, according to FOIA documents.

By Whitney Webb

Soon after having been fired from his post as secretary of the treasury in December 2002, after a policy clash with the president, Paul O’Neill became a trustee of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Despite having just worked under and clashed with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, it wasn’t until O’Neill began answering to UPMC CEO Jeffrey Romoff as a member of the Center’s board that he chose to publicly denounce a superior as “evil.”

“He wants to destroy competition. He wants to be the only game in town,” O’Neill would later state of Romoff, adding that “after 18 months I quit [the UPMC board] in disgust” due to Romoff’s “absolute control” over the board’s actions. O’Neill subsequently noted that UPMC “board members who have wealth of hundreds of millions of dollars are not willing to take this guy on.” When pressed by a local reporter, O’Neill further elaborated that he had been told by other board members that they were “afraid” of Romoff because Romoff might “harm them in some way.”

O’Neill’s criticisms of Romoff are hardly an outlier, as local community activists and even a state attorney generalhave noted that UPMC’s board lets Romoff do as he pleases. Jeffrey Romoff has ruled UPMC with an iron fist since his predecessor, Thomas Detre, had a heart attack in 1992. As a result of the Center’s massive wealth accumulation, at first spurred by his magic touch for receiving National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, Detre was able to use the financial power afforded to him to consolidate control over enough of the University of Pittsburgh to create his “own personal fiefdom,” which is now the stand-alone corporation known as UPMC.

Not long after Romoff took over the Center’s reins, he made his intentions clear to faculty and staff, stating at one 1995 UPMC meeting that his “vision” for the future of American health care was “the conversion of health care from social good to a commodity.” Motivated by profit above all else, Romoff aggressively expanded UPMC, gobbling up community hospitals, surgery centers, and private practices to create a “health-care network” that has expanded throughout much of Pennsylvania and even abroad to other countries, including China. Under Romoff, UPMC has also expanded into the health-insurance business, with 40 percent of the medical claims it pays out going straight back into places of care that are owned by UPMC—meaning UPMC is essentially paying itself.

In addition, since UPMC is officially a “charitable nonprofit corporation,” it is exempt from property taxes and has special access to the tax-exempt municipal bond market. UPMC can also solicit tax-deductible grants from private individuals and organizations, as well as governments. These grants totaled over $1 billion dollars between 2005 and 2017.

Despite these perks being officially justified because of UPMC’s “charitable institution” status, the UPMC board, with Romoff at the top, have seen their own multimillion-dollar-per-year salaries continue to climb. Perhaps this perk also comes from UPMC being a nonprofit corporation, as there are no stockholders to whom Romoff and the board must explain their increasingly exorbitant salaries. For instance, Romoff made $8.97 million last year as UPMC’s CEO, a marked increase over the $6.12 million he had raked in the prior year.

UPMC’s financial chicanery is so out of control that even Pennsylvania’s attorney general has taken action against it, suing UPMC in February 2019 for violations of the state’s charity laws based on their “unjust enrichment” and engaging in “unfair, fraudulent or deceptive acts or practices.” Though UPMC decided to settle out of court, the Center and Romoff came out of the affair relatively unscathed.

Now, thanks to the crisis caused by Covid-19, UPMC is once again on the path toward growing even larger and more powerful in pursuit of Romoff’s ultimate goal, which is, in his own words, to make UPMC the “Amazon of health care.”

In this fourth installment of the The Last American Vagabond series“Engineering Contagion: Amerithrax, Coronavirus and the Rise of the Biotech-Industrial Complex”, the “nonprofit” health-care behemoth that is UPMC is squarely placed at the intersection of post-9/11 “biodefense” public-private partnerships; corporate-funded academics who shape public policy on behalf of their private-sector benefactors; and risky research on dangerous pathogens that threatens to unleash the very “bioterror” that these institutions claim to guard against.

The Odd Trajectory of UPMC’s Covid-19 Vaccine Efforts

In January 2020, when much of the world remained blissfully unaware of the coming global pandemic, UPMC was already at work developing a vaccine to protect against the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, known as SARS-CoV-2. That month, before the state of Pennsylvania had a single case of Covid-19, UPMC formed a “coronavirus task force,” which was initially focused on lobbying the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to obtain samples of live SARS-CoV-2 for research purposes. That research was to be conducted at the Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL) housed within UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research. A day after the director of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, W. Paul Duprex, revealed UPMC’s efforts to access the SARS-CoV-2 virus, he announced that the virus samples, containing an estimated 50 to 60 million coronavirus particles, were already en route to the university. At the time, UPMC was one of only a handful of institutions on the CDC’s short list to receive live SARS-CoV-2 samples.

UPMC later stated that they began work on a vaccine for Covid-19 on January 21st, weeks before the February 14th announcement that the virus was on its way to the university. That original vaccine candidate used the published genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, released in early January 2020 by Chinese researchers, to synthetically produceSARS-CoV-2 spike proteins that would be transported into cells by an adenoviral vector, which is commonly used in a variety of vaccines. The vaccine candidate was nicknamed PittCoVacc, short for Pittsburgh Coronavirus Vaccine.

A little over a month after the live SARS-CoV-2 samples were received by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, UPMC received a $5 million grant from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), an international organization founded in 2017 by the governments of Norway and India along with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant was officially awarded to “an international academic-industry partnership” that the Center for Vaccine Research had recently formed with the Institut Pasteur in France and Austrian vaccine manufacturer Themis. Soon after, in May, Themis was acquired by vaccine giant Merck, which began recruiting volunteers for human trials earlier this month on September 11. Merck has incredibly close ties with UPMC, particularly its commercialization arm known as UPMC Enterprises.

The CEPI grant seems to have drastically altered the Center for Vaccine Research’s interest in the original adenovirus-vector vaccine candidate, PittCoVacc, as the CEPI grant was specifically aimed at funding a different vaccine candidate that instead uses the measles virus as a vector. The measles virus and the genetic manipulation of measles for use in the measles vaccine is, notably, the principal research interest and expertise of Center for Vaccine Research director Paul Duprex.

This measles-based vaccine candidate has been described as “a modified [genetically altered] measles virus that delivers bits of the new coronavirus into the body to prevent Covid-19” as well as an “attenuated [genetically modified yet weakened] measles virus as a vector with which to introduce genetic material from SARS-[CoV-]2 to the immune system.” The combination of this weakened measles virus and SARS-CoV-2, per Duprex, will produce a “more benign version of coronavirus [that] will acquaint a person’s immune system” with SARS-CoV-2. No vaccine using this modality has ever been licensed.

On April 2nd, less than a week after the CEPI award had been announced, the UPMC researchers who had developed the original vaccine candidate using the more traditional adenovirus-vector approach published a study in EBioMedicine (a publication of the medical journal Lancet) that reported promising results of their vaccine candidate in animal studies. The news that a US institution was among the first in the world to develop a Covid-19 vaccine candidate with promising results from an animal study was heavily amplified by mainstream US media outlets, with those reports noting that UMPC was requesting government permission to quickly move onto human trials.

This original vaccine candidate, however, was mysteriously dropped from subsequent reports and statements from UPMC regarding its Covid-19 vaccine efforts. Indeed, in recent months, Duprex’s statements on the center’s Covid-19 vaccine candidates no longer mention the once-promising PittCoVacc at all. Instead, new reports, citing Duprex, claim that the only UPMC vaccine candidates are the CEPI-funded measles-vaccine candidate and another, more mysterious vaccine candidate, whose nature has only been recently revealed by documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Equally odd is that recent media reports on the original vaccine candidate have stopped mentioning UPMC at all, instead citing only Themis, its new owner Merck, and France’s Institut Pasteur. There are no reports indicating a break-up of the original “academic-industry partnership” that had received the CEPI grant. It seems that this is what may have come to pass, as Duprex stated that the UPMC measles-vector vaccine candidate had partnered with the Serum Institute of India for mass production, first for trials and then for public use, depending on how the vaccine advances through the regulatory process. In contrast, Themis/Merck have stated that their vaccine is being produced in France. It remains unclear what the relation is between these two, and apparently analogous, vaccine candidates.

Though Duprex has been relatively forthcoming about the nature of the first UPMC vaccine candidate (i. e., the CEPI-funded measles-vector vaccine), he has been much more tight-lipped about its second vaccine candidate. In late August, he told the Pittsburgh Business Times that the second vaccine candidate that UPMC was developing “works by delivering genetic material coding for a viral protein instead of the entire weakened or killed virus as is standard in other vaccines.” Yet Duprex declined to state what vector will be used to deliver the genetic material into human cells. Recent FOIA revelations, nevertheless, have revealed that UPMC’s second vaccine candidate involves genetically engineering a combination of SARS-Cov-2 and anthrax, a substance better known for its potential use as a bioweapon.

Corona-thrax

The recently obtained documents reveal that the BSL-3 lab that is part of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research is conducting eyebrow-raising research involving combining SARS-CoV-2 with Bacillus anthracis, the causative agent of anthrax infection. Per the documents, anthrax is being genetically engineered by a researcher, whose name was redacted in the release, so that it will express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which is the part of the coronavirus that allows it to gain access into human cells. The researcher asserts that “the [genetically engineered anthrax/SARS-CoV-2 hybrid] can [be] used as a host strain to make SARS-CoV-2 recombinant S protein vaccine,” and the creation of said vaccine is the officially stated purpose of the research project. The documents were produced by the University of Pittsburgh’s Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), which held an emergency meeting on June 22nd of this year to “discuss specific protocols involving research with the coronavirus,” which included a vote on the aforementioned proposal.

Edward Hammond, the former director of the Sunshine Project, an organization that opposed chemical and biological weapons and the expansion of “dual use” biodefense/bioweapon research, obtained the documents. Other FOIA documents recently obtained by Hammond have revealed an “explosion” of risky Covid-19-related research at other academic institutions, such as the University of North Carolina, which has already had lab accidents involving genetically engineered variants of SARS-CoV-2.

Hammond told The Last American Vagabond that the experiment, which he dubs “Corona-thrax,” is “emblematic of the pointless research excesses that often characterize the response of scientists to the federal government throwing billions of dollars at health crises.” Hammond added, “While I don’t think that Corona-thrax would be infectious, it falls into the categories of pointless and crazy. The biggest immediate risk of all this activity is that a researcher will deliberately or inadvertently create a modified form of SARS-CoV-2 that is even more difficult to treat, or more deadly, and this virus will escape the lab. It only takes a stray droplet.”

Jonathan Latham, a virologist who previously taught at the University of Wisconsin and who is the current editor of Independent Science News, agreed with Hammond that the Corona-thrax experiment is odd and said that he was “concerned here specifically about the research process and the risks of these specific experiments at Pittsburgh.” In an interview with The Last American Vagabond, Latham asserted that it is “unusual by historical standards . . . the combining of two highly pathogenic organisms in a single experiment.” He did note, however, that such studies for the purposes of vaccine research have become more common in recent years, as is made clear in a 2012 study.

Few experiments have been conducted that specifically utilize anthrax in this way. Since 2000, the studies that have examined the use of genetically modified anthrax as a potential vaccine vector have been affiliated with Harvard University. One of these studies was on the use of anthrax as a vector in a potential HIV vaccine and was jointly conducted in 2000 by Harvard researchers and the vaccine company Avant Immunotherapeutics (now part of Celldex).

Despite reporting positive preliminary results in their experiments, Avant/Celldex did not fund further experiments into a vaccine that used this anthrax-based modality, and it does not currently market or have any such vaccine in its product pipeline. This suggests that, for whatever reason, this company did not see much value in this vaccine, despite the preliminary study with Harvard claiming that the methodology was safe and effective.

The Harvard researchers involved in that 2000 study, however, continued to investigate the possibility of an anthrax-based HIV vaccine in 2003, 2004, and 2005, though without corporate sponsorship. Related yet different research has explored the use of “disarmed” anthrax components as an adjuvant in vaccines and as the basis for enzyme-linked immunospot assays.

The aforementioned Harvard researchers patented their methodology of using anthrax in this way for the production of a vaccine in 2002. This means that the anthrax-based “vaccine” currently being developed by UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research would have to develop a new method that utilizes anthrax in much the same way so as not to infringe on the patent, which is unlikely. The other alternative is that UPMC would pay the patent holders for use of their methodology if they want to commercialize it in a vaccine. Yet, given UPMC’s business model in general, as well as that of UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research specifically, this also seems unlikely.

Also odd is what sort of incentive UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research possesses for the Corona-thrax experiment. There are currently over a hundred vaccine candidates that use existing and tested vaccine platforms in pursuit of a Covid-19 vaccine, a fact Duprex himself has acknowledged. As Hammond told The Last American Vagabond, “It is perfectly obvious that there are numerous existing vaccine platforms for Covid-19 and that some of them will, sooner or more likely later, succeed. There is no serious need for some sort of quite strange bacterial platform, much less one that happens to be anthrax. It’s completely unnecessary and frankly bizarre.”

The Crown Jewel of the Biotech-Industrial Complex

The Corona-thrax experiment is being conducted at the Center for Vaccine Research’s Regional Biocontainment Laboratory (RBL), where the center’s work with pathogenic agents, such as anthrax and SARS-CoV-2, is conducted.

The creation of UPMC’s RBL was first announced in 2003, when the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID, then and currently led by Anthony Fauci) stated it would fund the laboratory’s construction with an $18 million grant. It was originally planned to be mainly “dedicated to research on agents that cause naturally occurring and emerging infections, as well as potential agents of bioterrorism.” The plan to create the lab was part of the US government decision to dramatically ramp up “biodefense” research in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The lab was also intended to work on “developing a vaccine program focusing on basic and translational research” related to viruses of pandemic potential that are at risk of being “weaponized,” including SARS. After the creation of the lab was initially announced, the project expanded, eventually becoming UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, which was launched in 2007. The Center for Vaccine Research was the second such institution to be officially added to the NIAID’s “biodefense” RBL network.

The opening of both this lab and UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research was made reality thanks to the efforts of the main authors of the June 2001 Dark Winter bioterror simulation, a controversial exercise that eerily predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks as well as the initial, yet bogus, narrative that Iraq and Islamic extremist terror groups were responsible for those attacks. However, the anthrax used in the attacks was later revealed to be of US military origin. As noted in Part I of this series, participants in the Dark Winter exercise had foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks and others were involved in the subsequent “investigation,” which many experts and former FBI investigators describe as a cover-up.

Dark Winter was largely written by Tara O’Toole, Thomas Inglesby, and Randall Larsen, all three of whom played integral roles in the founding or operations of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, along with O’Toole’s mentor, D. A. Henderson. UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity was launched in September 2003, just days before the NIAID announced it would fund the RBL lab that would later become the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research.

Notably, just days after the attacks on September 11, 2001, O’Toole, Inglesby, and Larsen personally briefed Vice President Cheney on Dark Winter. Simultaneously, Cheney’s office at the White House began taking the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin to prevent anthrax infection. In the weeks between that briefing and the 2001 anthrax attacks, Dark Winter participants and several associates of Cheney, namely members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) like Donald Kagan and Richard Perle, asserted that a bioterror attack involving anthrax would soon take place.

In the aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, Henderson “was tapped by the federal government to vastly increase the number of [biodefense] labs, both to detect suspected pathogens like anthrax and to conduct bio-defense research, such as developing vaccines,” with the announcement of UPMC’s RBL being part of the launch of the O’Toole-led Center for Biosecurity at UPMC, where Henderson was named senior adviser. In 2003, the Center for Biosecurity was set up at UPMC partially at the request of Jeffrey Romoff to be “the country’s only think tank and research center devoted to the prevention and handling of biological attacks,” with UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research being the hub of a new “biodefense research” lab network Henderson was setting up and managing at the time. That network remains technically managed by the Fauci-led NIAID.

Also noteworthy is that the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, from its opening in 2007 until 2016, was Donald Burke. Burke is a former biodefense researcher for the US military at Fort Detrick and other installations and, immediately prior to heading the UPMC center, was a program director at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he worked closely with O’Toole and Inglesby.

At the time of the 2003 announcement regarding the creation of what would become UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research, Tara O’Toole stated:

“This new laboratory will enable University of Pittsburgh medical researchers to delve further into possible treatments and to develop vaccines against diseases that might result from bioterrorist attack or from natural outbreaks.”

A few years later, after she was nominated to a top post at the Department of Homeland Security, O’Toole was slammed by experts over her excessive lobbying “for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security.” Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright remarked at the time that “she makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.” It was also noted in hearings that O’Toole had worked as a lobbyist for several “life sciences” companies specializing in the sale of biodefense products to the U.S. government, including Emergent Biosolutions – a very controversial company and a key suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The history of the Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL, particularly the network of people who prompted the lab’s creation, raises concerns about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment currently being conducted within the facility. This is especially true because the researcher conducting the experiment appears to be ignorant about key parts of the research he or she is conducting.

For instance, the FOIA-redacted researcher incorrectly states that a recombinant virus proposed for use in the study is incapable of infecting human cells, while the IBC members note that this is not the case. In addition, the unnamed researcher falsely claimed that one of the viral vectors for use in the investigator’s study did not express Cas9 (a protein associated with CRISPR gene editing) and gRNA (“guide RNA,” also used in CRISPR) and was unaware that handling those agents requires an enhanced BSL-2 lab (BSL-2+) as opposed to a typical BSL-2 lab.

Apparently such errors among researchers involved in Covid-19 research at UPMC is not an anomaly. During another UPMC IBC meeting included in the FOIA release, the IBC noted the following about a separate research proposal:

“In the investigator’s notes in responses to changes requested by the IBC pre-reviewers, the investigator indicates that RNA from SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 infected cells will be obtained from BEI resources. Genomic RNA isolated from cells infected with SARS-CoV-1 is regulated as a Select Agent by the Federal Select Agent Program and neither the University nor this investigator are registered for possession and use of these materials [emphasis added] (SARS-CoV-1). The investigator must NOT obtain SARS-CoV-1 genomic RNA without prior consultation with the University’s RO/AROs for Select Agents.”

This part, in particular, caught the attention of Jonathan Latham, who noted that it was odd that “a university researcher is trying to obtain approval for an experiment which no one at the university is allowed to do.” Latham added in an interview that “apparently this applicant is totally ignorant of the regulatory environment and by extension the risks of SARS-CoV, which is a highly infectious virus whose escape from a lab has already led to at least one death.”

While Latham assumed that this was a “university researcher,” it is worth noting that the use of the UPMC Center for Vaccine Research’s RBL is not exclusive to researchers affiliated with the university. Indeed, as noted on the NIH website, “Investigators in academia, not-for-profit organizations, industry, and government studying biodefense and emerging infectious diseases may request the use of biocontainment laboratories,” including the RBL managed by the Center for Vaccine Research.

In addition, the Center for Vaccine Research website notes that “scientists from outside the University of Pittsburgh can work in the RBL through a collaboration or contract. Outside scientists must comply with all University of Pittsburgh training, documentation, regulatory, and medical requirements.” This means that outside scientists using the facility are also subject to IBC review. Both the NIH and Center for Vaccine Research sites note that, for an outside researcher to use the UPMC RBL facility, approval from the center’s director must be obtained.

Since the name of the Corona-thrax researcher is redacted, there is no way of knowing if he or she is affiliated with the university or a separate institution, corporation, or government agency. Regardless of who is conducting this experiment, however, it is possible to examine the history and motivations of the man who ultimately signed off on it—the Center for Vaccine Research’s director, Paul Duprex.

Paul Duprex: DARPA-Funded Researcher and Gain-of-Function Enthusiast

Paul Duprex is a former chief scientist for Johnson & Johnson whose subsequent foray into academia was largely funded with research grants from the NIH and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Much of Duprex’s research has focused on recombinant (i. e., genetically engineered) viruses or viral evolution.

In terms of his research funded by DARPA, Duprex was most closely associated with DARPA’s “Prophecy” program, the creation of which was overseen by Michael Callahan. Callahan’s suspect past and his ties to the origin of the current Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan, China, were the subject of a recent Unlimited Hangout article by Raul Diego.

In that article, Diego notes that the now-defunct Prophecy program had “sought to ‘transform the vaccine and drug development enterprise from observational and reactive to predictive and preemptive’ through algorithmic programming techniques” and that the program further “proposed that ‘viral mutations and outbreaks’ could be predicted in advance to more rapidly counter the unknown disease with preemptive drug and vaccine development.”

By all indications, Prophecy was DARPA’s first major foray into “predictive” AI-powered health care, which has expanded considerably in the years since. It also involved a component, which Duprex was particularly involved in advancing, whereby the “predictive” viral evolutions algorithms would be “validated and tested . . . by using multiple selective pressures on at least three closely related virus strains in an experimental setting.”

Such experiments, like this study by Duprex, involved the genetic engineering of three viral pathogen strains and then seeing which would become most transmissible and virulent in an animal host. Such studies are often referred to as gain-of-function (GOF) research and are incredibly controversial given that they often create pathogens that are more virulent and/or transmissible than they otherwise would be. It is also worth noting that UPMC, before Duprex joined the center, had also received millions in funding from DARPA’s Prophecy program “to develop in vitro and computational models for predicting viral evolution under selection pressure from multiple evolutionary stressors.”

Duprex has also been involved in conducting research for DARPA’s current INTERfering and Co-Evolving Prevention and Therapy (INTERCEPT) program, a successor to Prophecy that “aims to harness viral evolution to create a novel, adaptive form of medical countermeasure—therapeutic interfering particles (TIPs)—that outcompetes viruses in the body to prevent or treat infection.” TIPs are genetically engineered viruses with defective genomes that theoretically compete with real viruses for viral components in the human body but “evolve with” the viruses they are meant to protect the body against and are “susceptible to mutation over time.”

The goal of the INTERCEPT program is to use TIPs as “therapeutics” and have them injected into the human body to “preemptively” protect against the virus from which a particular TIP was developed. It is worth noting that, while DARPA frames much of its gene-editing research (including its “genetic extinction” technology research) as being aimed at promoting either human or environmental health, it has also openly admitted that these same technologies are of interest to DARPA for their ability to “subvert” the genes of human adversaries of the US military via “genetic weapons.”

Duprex led an INTERCEPT study published in February of this year in which he and his coauthors explored how to create a synthetic TIP of the Nipah virus, a deadly virus with a fatality rate of over 70 percent. In that study, they used both wild and genetically engineered strains of Nipah virus. Notably, the Clade X pandemic simulation, which will be discussed in detail in the next installment of this series, involved a genetically engineered combination of the Nipah virus and a parainfluenza disease.

Clade X took place in 2018 and was led by much of the same team that was responsible for the 2001 Dark Winter bioterrorism simulation, including former FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg and Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. Another notable participant at Clade X was Julie Gerberding, former CDC director and current executive vice president at Merck, which has close ties to UPMC as well as the Center for Biosecurity’s failed “21st Century Biodefense” project.

A few months after publishing the study funded by DARPA’s INTERCEPT program, Duprex coauthored another study on the use of synthetic “nanobodies” (i. e., bioengineered synthetic nanoparticles acting as antibodies) that was published in August. This effort mirrors other DARPA “health-focused” projects. That study was funded by the University of Pittsburgh, the NIH, and Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology.

In addition to his ties to DARPA programs involving the genetic engineering of viral pathogens, Duprex is a leading advocate for controversial gain-of-function research and was appointed to direct UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research less than three months after the federal moratorium on GOF research ended.

In October 2014, five days after that moratorium was first imposed, Duprex gave a talk to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity entitled “Gain-of-Function Studies: Their History, Their Utility, and What They Can Tell Us.” In the talk, he asserted that “cross-species infection studies have already helped to improve surveillance in the field, have shed new light on basic influenza virus biology, and could assist in growing vaccine viruses better” and argues against the recently imposed moratorium.

In 2014, Duprex also wrote in a paper published in Nature that “GOF approaches are absolutely essential in infectious disease research; although alternative approaches can be very useful, these can never replace GOF experiments.” He added that, in his view, there were only two reasons for GOF research, the first being to “improve surveillance or to develop therapeutics” and the second being merely to learn “interesting biology.”

In that same paper, he also argued that “genetic engineering that is intended and likely to endow a low-pathogenicity, low-transmissibility agent with either enhanced pathogenicity or enhanced transmissibility may be appropriate if the benefits are substantial.” He also suggested in this 2014 paper that it “might” be necessary “to enhance pathogenicity of coronaviruses in order to develop a valid animal model for coronaviruses.” Years later, during the current coronavirus crisis, Duprex and other officials from the UPMC’s Center for Vaccine Research co-developed a Covid-19 research and development “blueprint” for the UN’s World Health Organization.

In addition, Duprex’s work for DARPA’s Prophecy program involved GOF research, as noted above, and the creator of that program, Michael Callahan – former head of DARPA’s biodefense therapeutics initiatives, is also a proponent of GOF who believes that such risky research is inseparable from “the research and development enterprise in the life sciences and for biotechnology.”

Duprex is also a founding member of Scientists for Science, a group of researchers (most of whom are involved in GOF research) who opposed the GOF moratorium and were “confident that biomedical research on potentially dangerous pathogens can be performed safely and is essential for a comprehensive understanding of microbial disease pathogenesis, prevention and treatment.” Another of the group’s founding members is Yoshihiro Kawaoka, whose controversial GOF experiments that made pathogenic viruses more deadly have garnered considerable media attention.

When the moratorium on GOF was lifted in December 2017, Duprex called it a “sign of progress,” adding that “on a personal level I’m really pleased these NIH funded scientists [conducting GOF research] get some clarity.” As previously mentioned, he became the Center for Vaccine Research’s director less than three months later, in March 2018.

The “Darkest Winter” Looms

After a cursory examination of the background of UPMC, its Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, and the man directing its Center for Vaccine Research, the question about the nature of the Corona-thrax experiment becomes: Is this yet another ill-advised experiment by a lab led by a GOF enthusiast and fueled by a feeding frenzy over the billions of dollars thrown by the government and other entities into Covid-19 research? Or is there perhaps a more nefarious motive to genetically engineering something as bizarre as Corona-thrax?

While the latter question may appear conspiratorial, it is worth pointing out that the institutions most likely to have been the sources for the anthrax used in the 2001 anthrax attacks were conducting GOF research on anthrax funded by the Pentagon and the CIA that was justified as “improving” the controversial anthrax vaccine known as BioThrax.

For instance, Battelle Memorial Institute—a Pentagon and CIA contractor—began genetically engineering a more virulent form of anthrax “to see if the [anthrax] vaccine the United States intends to supply to its armed forces is effective against that strain.” While these experiments were going on, the embattled manufacturer of the anthrax vaccine now known as Emergent Biosolutions, entered into a contract with Battelle that gave Battelle “immediate exposure to the vaccine” it was using in connection with the genetically modified anthrax program.

As noted in Part II of this series, BioPort was set to lose its Pentagon contract for anthrax vaccine entirely in September 2001, and the entirety of its anthrax vaccine business was rescued by the 2001 anthrax attacks, which saw concerns over BioPort’s corruption and its horrendous safety track record replaced with fervent demands for more of its anthrax vaccine. Furthermore, as noted in detail in Part III of this series, Battelle was the most likely source of the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks. The ties between UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, Battelle, and Emergent Biosolutions will be discussed in the next installment in the series.

What is also notable about these Corona-thrax experiments occurring at UPMC are the ties of UPMC’s RBL and Center for Vaccine Research to another key component of the center’s “biodefense” complex, the UPMC Center for Biosecurity. As previously mentioned, the people recruited to head this center at its founding in 2003 were intimately involved in the 2001 bioterror simulation Dark Winter, namely Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby.

While leading the UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, O’Toole and/or her successor Inglesby engaged in other notable bioterror simulations, including one that took place last year— Event 201, which eerily predicted the coronavirus crisis that began this year. Inglesby, who is also the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in addition to his post at UPMC, was the moderator at Event 201.

Though Event 201 has garnered considerable scrutiny in recent months, another but less well-known exercise in 2018 that involved O’Toole and Inglesby, examined how a bioterror attack involving a genetically engineered pathogen could trigger a Continuity of Government (CoG) scenario, a government roadmap for the imposition of martial law in the United States. As other investigative series of mine have noted, there have recently been a myriad of intelligence agency–linked simulations that predict the imminent imposition of martial law in the United States following the 2020 election.

It is also notable that George W. Bush’s controversial and classified update to CoG plans in 2007, known as Executive Directive 51, was directly inspired by Dark Winter, and Barack Obama’s subsequent executive orders on CoG gave near-complete control of American infrastructure to the Department of Homeland Security in a such a situation. At the time Obama issued those executive orders, O’Toole was the DHS undersecretary for science and technology and also influenced those updates to the CoG plans. O’Toole is currently the executive vice president of the CIA’s In-Q-tel.

The simulation known as Clade X will be examined in greater detail in the next installment of this series as will the numerous and recent “predictions” from US government sources, controversial billionaires such as Bill Gates, and a web of individuals tied to UPMC who have warned that a bioterror attack or related public health catastrophe is set to take place in the United States in the latter half of 2020. As one high-ranking government official put it earlier this year, this allegedly imminent event will result in “the darkest winter in modern history.”

Bill Gates’ Global Agenda and How We Can Resist His War on Life

Posted on November 1, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Vandana Shiva

Source: resilience

The following excerpt is from Vandana Shiva’s new book Oneness vs. the 1% (Chelsea Green Publishing, August 31, 2020) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

In March 2015, Bill Gates showed an image of the coronavirus during a TED Talk and told the audience that it was what the greatest catastrophe of our time would look like. The real threat to life, he said, is ‘not missiles, but microbes.’ When the coronavirus pandemic swept over the earth like a tsunami five years later, he revived the war language, describing the pandemic as ‘a world war’.

‘The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus,’ he said.

In fact, the pandemic is not a war. The pandemic is a consequence of war. A war against life. The mechanical mind connected to the money machine of extraction has created the illusion of humans as separate from nature, and nature as dead, inert raw material to be exploited. But, in fact, we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome. The biome and the virome are us. When we wage war on the biodiversity of our forests, our farms, and in our guts, we wage war on ourselves.

The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to—other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual species.

New diseases arise because a globalized, industrialized, inefficient agriculture invades habitats, destroys ecosystems, and manipulates animals, plants, and other organisms with no respect for their integrity or their health. We are linked worldwide through the spread of diseases like the coronavirus because we have invaded the homes of other species, manipulated plants and animals for commercial profits and greed, and cultivated monocultures. As we clear-cut forests, as we turn farms into industrial monocultures that produce toxic, nutritionally empty commodities, as our diets become degraded through industrial processing with synthetic chemicals and genetic engineering, and as we perpetuate the illusion that earth and life are raw materials to be exploited for profits, we are indeed connecting. But instead of connecting on a continuum of health by protecting biodiversity, integrity, and self-organization of all living beings, including humans, we are connected through disease.

According to the International Labour Organization, ‘1.6 billion informal economy workers (representing the most vulnerable in the labour market), out of a worldwide total of two billion and a global workforce of 3.3 billion, have suffered massive damage to their capacity to earn a living. This is due to lockdown measures and/or because they work in the hardest-hit sectors.’ According to the World Food Programme, a quarter of a billion additional people will be pushed to hunger and 300,000 could die every day. These, too, are pandemics that are killing people. Killing cannot be a prescription for saving lives.

Health is about life and living systems. There is no ‘life’ in the paradigm of health that Bill Gates and his ilk are promoting and imposing on the entire world. Gates has created global alliances to impose top-down analysis and prescriptions for health problems. He gives money to define the problems, and then he uses his influence and money to impose the solutions. And in the process, he gets richer. His ‘funding’ results in an erasure of democracy and biodiversity, of nature and culture. His ‘philanthropy’ is not just philanthrocapitalism. It is philanthroimperialism.

The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have revealed even more clearly how we are being reduced to objects to be controlled, with our bodies and minds as the new colonies to be invaded. Empires create colonies, colonies enclose the commons of the indigenous living communities and turn them into sources of raw material to be extracted for profits. This linear, extractive logic is unable to see the intimate relations that sustain life in the natural world. It is blind to diversity, cycles of renewal, values of giving and sharing, and the power and potential of self-organising and mutuality. It is blind to the waste it creates and to the violence it unleashes. The extended coronavirus lockdown has been a lab experiment for a future without humanity.

On March 26, 2020, at a peak of the coronavirus pandemic and in the midst of the lockdown, Microsoft was granted a patent by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Patent WO 060606 declares that ‘Human Body Activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system….’

The ‘body activity’ that Microsoft wants to mine includes radiation emitted from the human body, brain activities, body fluid flow, blood flow, organ activity, body movement such as eye movement, facial movement, and muscle movement, as well as any other activities that can be sensed and represented by images, waves, signals, texts, numbers, degrees, or any other information or data.

The patent is an intellectual property claim over our bodies and minds. In colonialism, colonisers assign themselves the right to take the land and resources of indigenous people, extinguish their cultures and sovereignty, and in extreme cases exterminate them. Patent WO 060606 is a declaration by Microsoft that our bodies and minds are its new colonies. We are mines of ‘raw material’—the data extracted from our bodies. Rather than sovereign, spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings making decisions and choices with wisdom and ethical values about the impacts of our actions on the natural and social world of which we are a part, and to which we are inextricably related, we are ‘users.’ A ‘user’ is a consumer without choice in the digital empire.

But that’s not the totality of Gates’ vision. In fact, it is even more sinister—to colonise the minds, bodies, and spirits of our children before they even have the opportunity to understand what freedom and sovereignty look and feel like, beginning with the most vulnerable.

In May 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to ‘reinvent education.’ Cuomo called Gates a visionary and argued that the pandemic has created ‘a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’] ideas…all these buildings, all these physical classrooms—why with all the technology you have?’

In fact, Gates has been trying to dismantle the public education system of the United States for two decades. For him students are mines for data. That is why the indicators he promotes are attendance, college enrollment, and scores on a math and reading test, because these can be easily quantified and mined. In reimagining education, children will be monitored through surveillance systems to check if they are attentive while they are forced to take classes remotely, alone at home. The dystopia is one where children never return to schools, do not have a chance to play, do not have friends. It is a world without society, without relationships, without love and friendship.

As I look to the future in a world of Gates and Tech Barons, I see a humanity that is further polarized into large numbers of ‘throw away’ people who have no place in the new Empire. Those who are included in the new Empire will be little more than digital slaves.

Or, we can resist. We can seed another future, deepen our democracies, reclaim our commons, regenerate the earth as living members of a One Earth Family, rich in our diversity and freedom, one in our unity and interconnectedness. It is a healthier future. It is one we must fight for. It is one we must claim.

We stand at a precipice of extinction. Will we allow our humanity as living, conscious, intelligent, autonomous beings to be extinguished by a greed machine that does not know limits and is unable to put a break on its colonisation and destruction? Or will we stop the machine and defend our humanity, freedom, and autonomy to protect life on earth?

Why We’re Doomed: Our Delusional Faith in Incremental Change

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Better not to risk any radical evolution that might fail, and so failure is thus assured.

When times are good, modest reforms are all that’s needed to maintain the ship’s course. By “good times,” I mean eras of rising prosperity which generate bigger budgets, profits, tax revenues, paychecks, etc., eras characterized by high levels of stability and predictability.

Since stability has been the norm for 75 years, institutions and conventional thinking have both been optimized for incremental change. This is an analog of natural selection in Nature: when the organism’s environment is stable, there’s little pressure to favor random mutations, as these can be risky.

Why risk big changes when everything’s working fine as is?

Absent any big changes in their environment, organisms’ genetic programming remains stable. Unlike natural selection’s process of generating random mutations and testing their efficacy and advantages over the existing programming, human organizations quickly habituate to stable eras by institutionalizing incremental changes as the only available process for reform / change.

Radical reforms are not just frowned on as 1) unneccesary and 2) needlessly risky, there is no institutionalized process to propose, test and adopt radical changes because there is no need for such a process.

Nature has such a process: punctuated equilibirium. When faced with a rapidly changing environment, organisms face intense evolutionary pressure to adapt or die. Mutations which confer a significant advantage in the new environment become part of the species’ genetic programming as those with the adaptation bear offspring who carry the advantageous adaptation. Those without the advantageous adaptation die and those with the adaptation thrive and multiply.

Once the environment stabilizes in “the new normal,” the evolutionary pressure lets up and the species returns to the stability of relatively few changes in its genetic programming.

Organisms which have lost the ability to adapt to rapid change die off once they encounter instability. Species that constantly face instability and rapid change will selectively favor genetic traits which optimize rapid evolution.

Nature tends to retain a basement closet full of fast-evolution tricks just in case the organism faces novel challenges.

Alas, human organizations and conventional thinking have no such closet of fast-evolution tricks. Rather, human organizations and conventional thinking marshal formidable forces to suppress anything which threatens the status quo, because why risk upsetting the feeding trough unless it’s absolutely necessary?

Therein lies the fatal problem: radical adaptation is never absolutely necessary in human organizations and conventional thinking until it’s too late–and even then, the leadership and conventional thinking will fatalistically accept oblivion rather than opt for a risky strategy of testing every mutation and fast-tracking whatever has promise, even though the odds of failure are high since 1) the challenge is novel and therefore unpredictable and 2) most mutations will fail to provide the radical advantages needed to meet the challenge.

In other words, what’s absolutely necessary to human organizations and conventional thinking is the suppression of potentially dangerous novel ideas because the worst-case scenario is that the novel ideas upset the feeding trough all the insiders have come to depend on.

Unfortunately for human organizations and conventional thinking, novel challenges demand precisely what they’re incapable of: risky rapid evolution. The risks will never seem worth it because some insiders might lose their spot at the feeding trough.

Since this loss is viewed as catastrophic by those at risk, they will fight with everything they have to stymie any radical reforms. Ironically, their resistance to rapid evolution only guarantees the demise of the entire organization / status quo, including the spot at the trough they were so eager to defend at all costs.

As the crisis deepens, the default setting in organizations and conventional thinking is that incremental changes and reforms will be enough, because they’ve been enough for four generations. I call this entirely natural default setting the delusional faith in incremental change because this faith isn’t guided by history or the logic of causality; it’s simply convenient and easy.

Nobody gets fired or demoted for agreeing to do more of what’s failed spectacularly.

I’ve prepared a chart of the delusional faith in incremental change showing how each new crisis is met by incremental institutionalized defaults that are completely inadequate to the novel challenges that have arisen. The blindness to the need for radical adaption has been institutionalized as well: this is what worked in the past, so it will work now. Why risk everything when we have procedures that have worked well?

Each stage of the crisis draws whatever conventional response causes the least pain. First, the “rainy day fund” is drained to keep everyone at the feeding trough. Studies of options are funded, and so on.

The recommendations are either too timid and clearly inadequate or they’re too bold and risky. So incremental policy and budget tweaks are adopted as acceptable institutional defaults.

But rifts open in the leadership as the farsighted few demand rapid, radical adaptations and the conventional risk-averse crowd digs in their heels. The farsighted few are pushed out or quit / retire, eliminating the only people who had the ability and experience to actually pull off a radical change of course.

A reshuffling of leadership evokes hope that the modest reforms will work magic. Alas, incremental tweaks only work in eras of stability. They fail miserably in unstable eras of rapidly-evolving challenges.

As everything runs to failure, the only acceptable path is to do more of what’s failed spectacularly, a default to low-risk incrementalism that only accelerates the final inevitable collapse.

The delusional faith in incremental change guarantees systemic failure. Better not to risk any radical evolution that might fail, and so failure is thus assured.

This is why our status quo is doomed:

New Pentagon-Google Partnership Suggests AI Will Soon Be Used to Diagnose Covid-19

Posted on October 15, 2020 by Reid Mukai

Google recently teamed up with the Pentagon as part of the new, AI-driven “Predictive Health” program. Though only focused on “predictive cancer diagnoses” for now, Google and the military have apparent plans to expand the AI model for automating and predicting Covid-19 diagnoses.

By Whitney Webb

Source: Unlimited Hangout

At the beginning of September, Google Cloud announced that it had won a project from the Pentagon’s relatively new Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to “prototype an AI-enabled digital pathology solution at select DoD [Department of Defense] facilities.” This prototype, per a Google Cloud press release, combines “augmented reality telescopes” with “AI-enabled” cancer detection tools that will allegedly improve the accuracy of “predictive cancer diagnoses.” It is the second DIU contract Google has won this year, with the first being related to combatting “cyber threats.”

The initial implementation of this Pentagon-funded, Google-created “digital pathology solution” will take place “at select Defense Health Agency (DHA) treatment facilities and Veterans Affairs hospitals in the United States,” and the program includes “future plans to expand across the broader U.S. Military Health System,” according to Google.

The initiative is part of a larger DIU-led program called “Predictive Health” that is also partnered with the joint AI effort of the US military and US intelligence community, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, and JAIC’s “Warfighter Health” initiative. The JAIC, which is currently led by a former Silicon Valley executive, is providing much of the funding for Predictive Health, while its related “Warfighter Health” initiative more broadly seeks “to field AI solutions that are aimed at transforming military health care.”

In addition to its stated goal of improving the accuracy of cancer diagnoses, the implementation of this Google-DIU AI-driven medical diagnosis tool aims to show “frontline health practitioners” that such tools “can improve the lives” of US troops, according to Google executives. As Mike Daniels, vice president of Global Public Sector at Google Cloud, noted in a statement, Google is “partnering with DIU to provide our machine learning and artificial intelligence technology to help frontline healthcare practitioners learn about capabilities that can improve the lives of our military men and women and their families.” Google also stated that the use of their tool at military health facilities would also “lower overall healthcare costs.”

The Google-DIU effort to outsource human doctor decision-making to a tailor-made artificial intelligence algorithm is, for now, only focused on the diagnosis of cancers. However, last Thursday, less than two weeks after winning the DIU contract, Google announced that it was donating $8.5 million to several organizations to advance the development and use of AI “for monitoring and forecasting” Covid-19. That money is part of a larger $100 million donation from Google for financing “solutions” to Covid-19 that was announced in May.

Further evidence that Google soon plans to offer AI-driven “predictive diagnoses” for Covid-19 came in August, when Google Cloud partnered with Harvard’s Global Health Institute to provide “Covid-19 Public Forecasts,” which “provide a projection of Covid-19 cases, deaths, and other metrics over the next 14 days for US counties and states.” The announcement of the Google-Harvard collaboration coincided with an announcement from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would begin “harness[ing] AI for COVID-19 diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring.”

Notably, other tech companies that have produced “predictive diagnosis” AI models for Covid-19 also began first by offering AI-created “forecasts” of “likely” Covid-19 outbreaks. For instance, the Israeli intelligence–linked Diagnostic Robotics initially offered AI-driven predictive “forecasts” of cities and districts to guide lockdown policy in Israel and the US state of Rhode Island before then teaming up with the US-based company Salesforce to develop a platform that uses AI to “predict” which individuals are likely to be diagnosed with Covid-19 and then uses AI to monitor and even “treat” those individuals.

Furthermore, in partnership with researchers at Mount Sinai healthcare centers in New York, tech giant Microsoft has already aided the development of an AI algorithm that “rapidly diagnoses” Covid-19. Mount Sinai’s AI model, supported by a recent grant from Microsoft’s “AI for Health” initiative, “was as accurate as an experienced radiologist in diagnosing the disease,” according to one of the lead researchers behind the model’s development. While its development was aided by Microsoft, the core of the Mount Sinai AI model is TensorFlow, which was developed by Google and is Google AI’s second-generation system for machine learning.

In addition, both Google and Microsoft are part of a Europe-based effort aimed at “automating diagnoses” for Covid-19 via an AI algorithm that analyzes CT scans, which is similar in several ways to the Mount Sinai AI model. Thus, it seems highly likely that Google’s efforts to offer AI-powered “predictive diagnoses” will soon expand to include tools that use algorithms to diagnose Covid-19, not just cancer.

The Merging of the Pentagon, the CIA, and Silicon Valley

Established in 2015, the Defense Innovation Unit of the Department of Defense officially exists to transfer “leading-edge commercial capabilities to the military faster and more cost-effectively than traditional defense acquisition methods” and to accelerate “the adoption of commercial technology throughout the military and [grow] the national security innovation base.” As the DIU makes clear on its website, the “national security innovation base” it seeks to “grow” consists of private tech companies, namely those based in Silicon Valley, that provide “advanced commercial solutions” to “national security challenges.” This, of course, includes the tech companies that already double as contractors for the national security state, such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, among numerous others.

The DIU boasts offices in Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, and at the Pentagon itself and is largely led, not by career military men, but by former Silicon Valley executives. For instance, its current director—Michael Brown—is the former CEO of cybersecurity giant Symantec and, prior to that, led the Quantum corporation. In another example, the leader of the DIU’s artificial intelligence portfolio is Jeff Klugman, a former top executive at TiVo, the Quantum corporation, and Hewlett-Packard.

A year after the DIU was created, it was followed by the Defense Innovation Board (DIB), which is composed of “leaders from across the national security innovation base” and provides recommendations that “have been used to inform DoD leadership strategy and action, as well as congressional legislation.” Like the DIU, Silicon Valley is well represented on the DIB, as its members include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman as well as top executives from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.

Notably, just months before the DIU-led Predictive Health program was launched, the DIB noted in March 2020 that the Pentagon “owns the largest repository of disease- and cancer-related medical data in the world,” asserting further that “if the entire repository were leveraged to its fullest potential, it would advance diagnosis and treatment for thousands of illnesses, saving lives across DoD and the global population.” The DIB then specifically suggested that “artificial intelligence and machine learning models may help pathologists sort through this massive dataset more quickly and effectively to provide better care for patients in and out of the military,” adding that these troves of medical data should be used “to support DoD reform and modernization efforts in the field of AI/ML [Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning].”

In other words, the Silicon Valley–dominated DIB called for what is now the Predictive Health program just months before the Silicon Valley–dominated DIU formally announced it. Also noteworthy is that Google—whose former CEO, current vice president, and several other Google-tied researchers and businessmen serve on the DIB—is the very company that won the DIU contract to have its AI models serve as the foundation for the Predictive Health program. This, of course, means that Google’s AI models will benefit immensely from the Pentagon’s “unique” and massive medical datasets, which the DIB previously stated was something that the Pentagon “must treat . . . as a strategic asset.”

It is also important to point out the considerable overlap between the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. The NSCAI is chaired by Eric Schmidt (also on the DIB) and includes representatives from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon as well as the current and former leaders of the CIA’s In-Q-Tel.

The official purpose of the NSCAI is “to consider the methods and means necessary to advance the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and associated technologies to comprehensively address the national security and defense needs of the United States.” As I previously reported for The Last American Vagabond, the vice-chair of NSCAI, Robert Work—former Deputy Secretary of Defense and senior fellow at the hawkish Center for a New American Security (CNAS)—described the commission’s purpose as determining “how the U.S. national security apparatus should approach artificial intelligence, including a focus on how the government can work with industry to compete with China’s ‘civil-military fusion’ concept [my emphasis].”

For this reason, the NSCAI unites the US intelligence community and the military, which is already collaborating on AI initiatives via the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center and Silicon Valley companies. Notably, many of those Silicon Valley companies—like Google, for instance—are not only contractors to US intelligence, the military, or both but were initially created with funding from the CIA’s In-Q-Tel, which also has a considerable presence on the NSCAI. Thus, while the line between Silicon Valley and the US national-security state has always been murky, now that line is essentially nonexistent as entities like the NSCAI, DIB, and DIU, among several others, clearly show. Whereas China, as Robert Work noted, has the “civil-military fusion” model at its disposal, the NSCAI and the US government respond to that model by further fusing the US technology industry with the national-security state.

It is also certainly interesting that, just like the DIB, the NSCAI called for what would become the DIU’s Predictive Health program a few months before it was formally announced. In a NSCAI paper from June 2020 titled “The Role of AI Technology in Pandemic Response and Preparedness: Recommended Investments and Initiatives,” the commission recommends investments and initiatives aimed at using AI for diagnosing illnesses, including Covid-19. This seems to suggest that the Silicon Valley–led but Pentagon-housed DIU is the body that actually creates the government-industry partnerships and initiatives that are first planned out by the DIB and the NSCAI.

It’s All About the Data

While Google has stated that one of their main goals in participating in the Predictive Health program is showing health-care practitioners how AI can “improve lives,” the DIU was decidedly more direct regarding their intent in implementing this “predictive diagnosis” program. For instance, an article on the Google-DIU pilot program at DefenseOne, citing military officials, notes that the “enormous amount of healthcare data, unique to the Department of Defense, also presents a rare opportunity for the Department to train new machine learning tools.” It then adds that “there are 9.6 million beneficiaries in the Defense Health System, which means a lot of data to improve the accuracy of [AI] models.”

DIU’s chief medical officer, Niels Olsen, who created the Predictive Health program, recently stated that massive quantities of data planned to be obtained by the program and used for developing improved AI algorithms was a critical component of the project. In a Pentagon press release, Olsen stated that “the more data a tool has available to it, the more effective it is. That’s kind of what makes DOD unique. We have a larger pool of information [i. e., medical data] to draw from, so that you can select more diverse cases.”

Thus, the implementation of the Predictive Health program is expected to amass troves upon troves of medical data that offer both the DIU and its partners in Silicon Valley the “rare opportunity” for training new, improved AI models that can then be marketed commercially. This may explain part of the interest in partnering this initiative with the Defense Health Agency (DHA), which “owns the largest repository of disease- and cancer-related medical data in the world” through its management of the Joint Pathology Center, which was noted by the DIB in its March 2020 publication. In addition, as previously mentioned, Google will now be able to access that trove of sensitive data to refine its AI “health-focused” algorithms, thanks to it having won the DIU contract earlier this month.

Notably, the relatively new Predictive Health program builds on past DIU initiatives, such as an AI algorithm that predicts illnesses “48 hours before symptoms show.” That algorithm was developed by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the DIU, and the health IT company Royal Phillips. The Phillips team that developed that algorithm is now “refin[ing] the model at military hospitals and clinics managed by the Veterans Affairs Department.” According to the DTRA’s Edward Argenta, the focus of the program is to eventually use the AI algorithm to analyze data from devices that remotely monitor individual health, specifically “a wearable device that might sit on your body—like a watch-based one or a chest strap one.”

While various “innovation-focused” agencies at the Pentagon have been busy developing their own algorithms after harvesting mass amounts of medical data from military members and their families, a web of intelligence-linked tech companies, including those represented on the DIB and NSCAI, have gained access to the jackpot of medical data through partnering with the “Covid-19 Healthcare Coalition.”

According to its website, the Covid-19 Healthcare Coalition was established as “a coordinated public-interest, private-sector response to the Covid-19 pandemic, convening healthcare organizations, technology firms, nonprofits, academia, and startups.” The coalition, which was launched by the intelligence and defense contractor MITRE, also includes tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Palantir, Salesforce, and Amazon and allows its member organizations to “collaborate, collect, analyze, visualize, and share data and insights.” With access to the data from partnered health-care institutions, such as the Mayo Clinic and the Cedars-Sinai Health System, these tech companies are “helping” the coalition “unlock large-scale analytics for Covid-19.” Institutions tied to the US government, and the NSCAI in particular, such as the CIA’s In-Q-Tel, are also members of the Covid-19 Healthcare Coalition.

Notably, the recent advances in US-based efforts to “predict” or “automate” Covid-19 diagnoses are all tied to this very coalition. Indeed, all of the companies and institutions mentioned thus far in this report have engaged in developing these tools, as Diagnostic Robotics, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Mount Sinai Medical Center are all coalition members.

Google, in the press release regarding its recent partnership with the DIU, noted that the prototype of the AI model set to make “predictive cancer diagnoses” had been “developed from [unspecified] public and private datasets,” making it possible—if not likely—that the private datasets were obtained through Google’s membership in this massive, yet relatively unknown, coalition of health-care institutions, tech companies, and US intelligence–linked entities like MITRE and In-Q-Tel.

This apparent obsession with medical data may explain the dramatic uptick in hacks of hospitals in the United States, which have been considerable in recent months and have largely targeted patient data. It is worth pointing out that the increase in these attacks seeking patient data coincides with the DIB-NSCAI policy recommendations regarding training AI algorithms on troves of medical data for automated and predictive diagnoses, among other applications.

Notably, the “solutions” offered to many of the health-care institutions that have been hacked have come from government-promoted yet opaque groups that are deeply tied to US and allied intelligence agencies as well as Silicon Valley. These “volunteer groups,” such as “the CTI League” and “the Cyber Alliance to Defend Our Healthcare,” offer their services for free but, notably, gain access to the patient data they are tasked with guarding. Are such groups, given their deep ties to Silicon Valley and intelligence agencies, helping acquire even more data to satisfy the Silicon Valley and national-security state’s endless hunger for more and more data?

The End of Reality?

Posted on October 11, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

In 1888, the year before he went insane, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in Twilight of the Idols:

We have got rid of the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? … But no! Along with the real world we’ve done away with the apparent world as well.

So, if you feel you also may be going insane in the present climate of digital screen life, where real is unreal but realer than real, the apparent is cryptic, and up is down, true is false, and what you see you don’t, it has a history. One hundred and thirty-two years ago, Nietzsche added that “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.” We know it did, and the bloody butcher’s bench known as the twentieth century was the result. Nihilism stepped onto center stage and has been the star of the show ever since, straight through to 2020. Roberto Calasso puts it this way in Literature and the Gods:

Here we are, announces Nietzsche, and it would be hard not to hear a mocking ring in his voice. We thought we were living in a world where the fog had lifted, a disenchanted, ascertainable, verifiable world. And instead everything has gone back to being a ‘fable’ again. How are we to get our bearings … This is the paralysis, the peculiar uncertainty of modern times, a paralysis that all since have experienced.

Obviously, we haven’t gotten our bearings. We are far more adrift today on a stormy electronic sea where the analogical circle of life has been replaced by the digital, and “truths” like numbers click into place continuously to lead us in wrong, algorithm-controlled directions. The trap is almost closed.

Of course, Nietzsche did not have the Internet, but he lived at the dawn of the electric era, when space-time transformations were occurring at a rapid pace. Inventions such as photography, the phonograph, the telephone, electricity, etc. were contracting space and time and a disembodied “reality” was being born. With today’s Internet and digital screen life, the baby is full-grown and completely disembodied. It does nothing but look at its image that is looking back into a lifeless void, whose lost gaze can’t figure out what it’s seeing.

Take, for example, the phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison in 1878. If you could record a person’s voice, and if that person died, were you then listening to the voice of a living person or one who was dead? If the person whose voice was recorded was alive and was miles away, you had also compressed earthly space. The phonograph suppressed absence, conjured ghosts, and seemed to overcome time and death as it captured the flow of time in sound. It allowed a disembodied human voice to inhabit a machine, an early example of downloading.

“Two ruling ambitions in modern technology,” writes John Durham Peters in his wonderful book, Speaking into the Air, “appear in the phonograph: the creation of artificial life and the conjuring of the dead.”

Many people started to hear voices, and these people were not called deluded. Soon, with the arrival of cinema, they would see ghosts as well. Today, speaking ghosts are everywhere, hiding in hand-held devices. It’s Halloween all year round as we are surrounded by electronic zombies in a screen culture.

This technological annihilation of space and time that was happening at a frenetic pace was the material background to Nietzsche’s thought. His philosophical and epistemological analyses emerged from German intellectual life of his time as well, where theologians and philosophers were discovering that knowledge was relative and had to be understood in situ, i.e., within its historical and social place or context.

Without going into abstruse philosophical issues here, suffice it to say, Nietzsche was suggesting that not only was God dead because people killed him, but that knowledge was a fiction that changed over time and was a human construction. All knowledge, not just science, had to be taken “as if” it were true. This was a consoling mental trick but falsely reassuring, for most people could not accept this, since “knowledge” was a protection racket from pain and insanity. It still is. In other words, not only had people murdered God, but they had slain absolutes as well. This left them in the lurch, not knowing if what they knew and believed were really true, or sort of true – maybe, perhaps. The worm of uncertainty had entered modern thought through modern thought.

While the average person did not delve into these revolutionary ideas, they did, through the inventions that were entering their lives, and the news about Darwin, science, religion, etc., realize, however vaguely, that something very strange and dramatic was under way. Life was passing from substance to shadow because of human ingenuity.

It is similar to what so many feel today: that reality and truth are moving beyond their grasp as technological forces that they voluntarily embrace push everyday life towards some spectral denouement. An inhuman, trans-human, on-line electronic life where everything is a parody of everything that preceded it, like an Andy Warhol copy of a copy of a Campbell’s soup can with a canned mocking laugh track that keeps repeating itself. All this follows from the nineteenth century relativization of knowledge, or what at least was taken as such, for to say all knowledge is relative is an absolute statement. That contradiction goes to the heart of our present dilemma.

This old feeling of lostness is perhaps best summarized in a few lines from Mathew Arnold’s 19^th century poem, “Dover Beach”:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

But that was then. Today, the Joker’s sardonic laughter would suffice.

***

I am sitting outside as I write, sipping a glass of wine before dinner. Although New England fall weather is approaching, a nasty mosquito is buzzing around my head. I hear it. I am in killer mode since these bastards love to bite me. This is real life. If I went into the house and connected to the Internet on the computer screen – news, social media, anything – I would be entering another dimension. Screen life, not real life. The society of the spectacle. No real mosquitoes, no wine, no trees swaying in the evening breeze.

In his novel, The Sun Also Rises, written between Nietzsche’s time and now, Ernest Hemingway, a man who surely lived in the physical world, writes of how Robert Cohn, the boxing champion from Princeton University, wants Jake Barnes, the book’s protagonist, to take a trip with him to South America. As they sit and talk in Paris, Barnes says no, and tells Cohn, “All countries look just like the moving pictures.”

Whether Hemingway was being ironic or not, or simply visionary, I don’t know. For in the 1920s, before passports and widespread tourism, there were many places you could only see if you traveled to them and they would never appear in moving pictures, while today there is almost no place that is not available to view beforehand on the internet or television. So why go anywhere if you’ve already seen it all on a screen? Why travel to nowhere or to where you have already been? Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra put it and everyone laughed. Now the laugh is on us.

***

This is neither an argument nor a story. It’s real. I am trying to get my bearings in a disorienting situation. Call it a compass, a weather-vane, a prayer. You can call me Al or Ishmael. Call me crazy. Perhaps this writing is just an “as if.”

***

About fifteen years ago, I was teaching at a college where most communication was done via email. I was, as they say, out of the loop since I didn’t do email. I was often asked why I didn’t, and I would repeatedly reply, like Melville’s Bartleby, because “I prefer not to.” Finally, in order to keep my job, I succumbed and with the laptop computer they provided me, I went “on-line.” There were 6,954.7 emails in my in-box from the past three years. In those three years, I had performed all my duties scrupulously and hadn’t missed a beat. Someone showed me how to delete the emails, which I did without reading any, but I had entered the labyrinth. I went electronic. My reality changed. I am still searching for Ariadne’s thread.

***

But I am not yet a machine and refuse the invitation to become one. It’s a very insistent invitation, almost an order. Neil Postman (Oh such a rich surname!) sums it up well in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology:

The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines – thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near perfect machine for Technopoly. It subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it ‘thinks’ better than we can…John McCarthy, the inventor of the term ‘artificial intelligence’…claims that ‘even machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs…What is significant about this response is that it has redefined the meaning of the word ‘belief’ … rejects the view that humans have internal states of mind that are the foundation of belief and argues instead that ‘belief’ means only what someone or something does … rejects the idea that the mind is a biological phenomenon … In other words, what we have here is a case of metaphor gone mad.

Postman wrote that in 1992, before the computer and the internet became ubiquitous and longer before on-line living had become de rigueur – before it was being shoved down our throats as it is today under the cover of COVID-19.

There is little doubt that we are being pushed to embrace what Klaus Schwab, the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), calls COVID-19:The Great Reset, that involves a total acceptance of the electronic, on-line life. On-line learning, on-line news, on-line everything – only an idiot (from Greek, idiotes, a private person who pays not attention to public affairs) would fail to see what is being promoted. And who controls the electronic life and internet? Not you, not I, but the powers that be, the intelligence agencies and the power elites. Goodbye body, goodbye blood – “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in support of human estrangement.

Peter Koenig, one of the most astute investigators of this propaganda effort, puts it this way:

The panacea of the future will be crowned by the Pearl of the Fourth Industrialization – Artificial intelligence (AI). It will be made possible by a 5G electromagnetic field, allowing the Internet of Things (IoT). Schwab and Malleret [Schwab’s co-author] won’t say, beware, there is opposition. 5G could still be blocked. The 5G existence and further development is necessary for surveillance and control of humanity, by digitizing everything, including human identity and money.

It will be so simple, no more cash, just electronic, digital money – that is way beyond the control of the owner, the truthful earner of the money, as it can be accessed by the Global Government and withheld and / or used for pressuring misbehaving citizens into obeying the norms imposed from above. You don’t behave according to our norms, no money to buy food, shelter and health services, we let you starve. No more travel. No more attending public events. You’ll be put gradually in your own solitary confinement. The dictatorial and tyrannical global commandeering by digital control of everything is the essence of the 4^th Age of Industrialization – highly promoted by the WEF’s Great Reset.

***

Like everything, of course, this push to place life under the aegis of cyberspace has a history, one that deifies the machine and attempts to convince people that they too are machines without existential freedom. Thus the ongoing meme pumped out for the past three decades has been that we are controlled by our brains and that the brain is a computer and vice versa. Brain research has received massive government funding. Drugs have been offered as the solution to every human problem. So-called diseases and disorders have been created through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and matched to pharmaceutical drugs (or the revers) for scandalous profits. And the mind has been reduced to a figment of deluded imaginations. People are machines; that’s the story, marvelous machines. They have no freedom.

If one wishes an example of techno-fascism, there is one from the art world. Back in the 1920s and 1930s there was an art movement known as Futurism. Its leader proponent was an Italian Fascist, friend of Mussolini, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The futurists claimed that all life revolves around the machine, that the machine was god, that it was beyond human control and had to be obeyed. They extolled war and speed and claimed that humans were no more significant than stones. Patriotism, militarism, strength, method, and the kingdom of experts were their blueprint for a corporate fascist state. The human eye and mind would be re-educated to automatically obey the machine’s dictates.

Now we have cyberspace, digital machines, and the internet, an exponential extension of the machine world of the 1930s and the rise of Mussolini, Fascism, and Hitler. That this online world is being pushed as the new and future normal by trans-national elite forces should not be surprising. If human communication becomes primarily digitally controlled on-line and on screens, those who control the machines will have achieved the most powerful means of mind control ever invented. That will be MKULTRA on a vast scale. Surveillance will be complete.

Yes, there are places on the internet where truth is and will be told, such as this site where you are reading this; but as we can see from today’s growing censorship across the web, those power elites and intelligence forces who control the companies that do their bidding will narrow the options for dissenting voices. Such censorship starts slowly, and then when one looks again, it is a fait accompli. The frog in the pan of slowly heating cold water never realizes it is being killed until it is too late. Free speech is now being strangled. Censorship is widespread.

The purpose of so much internet propaganda is to confuse, obsess, depress, and then repress the population. The overlords accomplish this by the “peculiar linking together of opposites – knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism – [which] is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society,” writes Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “The official ideology abounds with contradictions even where there is no practical reason for them.” One look into one’s life will suffice to see how the overlords have set people against each other. It’s a classic tactic. Divide and conquer. Trump vs. Biden, Democrats vs. Republicans, whites vs. blacks, liberals vs. conservatives. Pure mind games. Contradictions every day to create social disorientation. Orwell describes Doublethink as follows:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt…To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary…If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. [author’s emphasis]

Nietzsche said that along with the real world we have done away with the apparent as well. Digital online life has accomplished that. It has allowed the rulers – through the media who are the magicians who serve them – to create counterfeit news and doctored videos at will, to present diametrically opposed points of view within the same paragraph, and to push breaking news items so fast that no one half-way sane could keep up with their magic shows. Nietzsche obviously didn’t foresee this technology, but he sensed the madness that the relativity of knowledge and the technology of his day would usher in.

***

The popular 1990s term “Information Superhighway,” meaning the internet and all digital telecommunications, was the perfect term to describe this lunacy. Get on that highway and go as fast as you can while trying to catch the meaning of all the information flashing past you as you speed to nowhere. For not only does censorship, propaganda, disinformation, mixed messages, and contradictions line the road you are traveling, but contextless information overload is so heavy that even if you were stopped in a traffic jam, there is too much information to comprehend. And if you think this Superhighway is a freeway, think again, for the cost is high. No one puts out their hand and asks you to pay up; but the more you travel down this road you’ll notice you are missing a bit of flesh here and some blood there. And without a speed pass, you are considered road kill.

To make matters much worse, they say we need 5G to go much faster.

Paul Virilio, who has devoted himself to the study of speed (dromology), puts it this way in Open Sky:

The speed of the new optoelectronic and electroacoustic milieu becomes the final void (the void of the quick), a vacuum that no longer depends on the interval between places or things and so on the world’s very extension, but on the interface of an instantaneous transmission of remote appearances, on a geographic and geometric retention in which all volume, all relief vanishes.

***

And yet I don’t have a simple answer to the internet dilemma. You are reading it on-line and I am posting it there. It is very convenient and quick. And yet…and yet….

Can we just walk away from it? Maybe. Perhaps like those few who, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s excruciating story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” we may decide the price for our conveniences and so-called happiness is too high and that there are hidden victims that this techno-scientific “progress” creates beneath its veneer of efficiency. Others, us, our children, all children, who are reaching out not for speed and machines, but for the human touch that the on-line propagandists hope to destroy. In Le Guin’s story, the price nearly all the citizens of Omelas are willing to pay for their happiness and comfort is the imprisonment of a single child. Perhaps we should consider what we are doing to all the world’s children and their futures.

My friend Gary recently sent me this letter. I believe it sums up what many people feel. There is a vast hunger for reality and truth. The analog life. How to live it – the question hangs in the air as the artificial intelligence/digital controllers try to reduce us to machines.

Although apparently it isn’t clear if Twain ever said this, it’s still a great quote: (“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.”) To which “amen” is the only appropriate response.

I continue to daily stay abreast of events through the web, and these days much of what passed for “progressive media” simply regurgitates the covid madness as if it had been delivered on stone tablets – rather than by the same MSM that lie to us daily about literally ANYTHING of any importance.

There are days I wonder “why” I continue to bother to follow the unfolding madness as if it made some “difference.” I could certainly play guitar more, and I might even get it together to write a few pieces on the nature of our collective madness, for which I have studiously assembled copious notes. I really don’t need any more information or examples – I think I have things covered on that front.

Instead I find myself daily doing the little dance we’re all familiar with – uncomfortable with being “uninformed” – yet at almost every turn finding myself being routinely – “misinformed” – and so having to sift through the endless debris to have any chance at developing any coherent understanding of the world.

So yes, I totally get the draw of just saying to hell with the internet. After years of shifting through the endless propaganda operations our generation has been subject too, I have no doubt you and I see through most the nonsense for what it is before we even have the proof in hand. Once the rose-colored glasses of ‘American exceptionalism’ are off, one can almost sense and see through the lies in real time even as they are being uttered.

Reading Gary’s words reminded me of those of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s definition of the Unspeakable:

It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said, the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience…

Yes, real time, real life – as we do our little dances.

Can we do our little dances and preserve reality? I’m not sure.

Beware the Transhumanists: How ‘Being Human’ is being Re-engineered by the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

“If you tell a lie, tell a big one.”
“If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth.”
“Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.”
— Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, 1933 to 1945

Transhumanism is a set of beliefs based on the premise that human beings can be improved by genetic manipulation and/or implanting technologies into the brain and body to achieve enhanced capacities. Transhumanism has a long history as an idea but since 1990 it has attracted serious attention from an increasing number of technology-lovers and early advocates are readily identified. See ‘What is Transhumanism?’

As part of his research as an investigative reporter throughout his life, which included writing a comprehensive exposé of how the AIDS hoax was perpetrated in the 1980s, in 2001 Jon Rappoport interviewed a Cold War-era propagandist-turned-anonymous-whistleblower who had spent decades working for the medical and other cartels to promote their agendas to gain increasing control over the human population. Here, in part, is what the propagandist told Rappoport:

Look at the medical cartel. Do they ever declare victory? From now until the end of time they’ll be planting stories in the press about the latest medical advance that will make life better for every person in the world. Most of it is a lie, but that doesn’t stop them. Until the planet is depopulated down to under a billion people and every one left is a robot, these cartels [elsewhere identified as energy,  government, intelligence, media,  medical, military,  money] are not going to quit. And even then, with a lobotomized world, they’ll still push their propaganda. This IS 1984, and people better realize it… The medical cartel. They’re planning to take over the mind… after which PR won’t really matter.… [pp.61-62 & 87.]

The  cartels  were  using  and  creating  and  bolstering  the  Cold  War  as  a  means  to  an  end.   Making  what  you  could  call  the  enemy‐game  a  part  of  the  human  psyche  at  such  a  level  that  it  would  maintain itself  as  a  living  myth  that  could  be  tapped  into  at  any  time  with  any  enemies  inserted  into  the  line‐up.   The  enemies‐game  is  as  old  as  time  itself.   But  this  was  the  version  of  the  moment.   To  install  a  rigid  sense  of  national  security  as  the  overriding  fact or  that  would  damn  well justify  the  deflating  of  individual  freedom  on  many  fronts.   Make  national  security  the  thing  you  couldn’t  refuse….  [p.70.]

A:    Once  you  fatigue  people  enough  with  the  strategies  of  1984,  they  are  set  up  for  the  medicalization  of  society.   Which  is  the  brain  stuff.   The  altering  of  the  human  brain  with  drugs  and  other  approaches.   Genes,  perhaps.   A  brain‐machine  linkup.   Creating  a  different  perception  of  reality.   Externally  applied  electromagnetic  fields.   In  which  people  will  feel  happy  even  though  they  are  slaves.   You  see,  in  1984  it’s really  all  about  hysteria.   The  people  are  being  driven  into  the  wall  with  lies  about  wars  and  lies  about  enemies  and  lies  about  political  structure,  and  the  control  over  individuals  is  very  harsh,  and  the  leaders  are  not  looking  to  create  real  happiness,  not  the  fluffy  stuff.   Redemption,  yes.   Forgiveness,  perhaps.   The  people  are  being  fed  pain  and  big  brother  is  commanding  them  like  a  drill  sergeant  through  their  TV  sets. But  after  that,  after  people  sink  into  an  acceptance  of  the  delusions  that  are  being  foisted  on  them,  then  comes  the  science.   The  making  of  some  kind  of  replica  of  happiness.   The  old  order  is  1984.   You  can  call  that  the  Plan  from  the  dawn  of  time  to  about  1945.   After  that  is  the  transition  to  Brave  New  World.

Q:    And  that’s  why  the  medical  cartel  is  the  prince  of  the  cartels.

A:    The  prince,  the  king.

Q:    1984…

A:    Leaves  people  with  no  moral  conviction.   It  runs  over  that  like  a  freight‐train.   1984  is  dark.   Brave  New  World  is  sunny  and  light  and  the  control  is  applied  so  that  the  interior  life  changes.

Q:    So  you  worked  on  medical  stories.

A:    Yes.   Making  the  medical  cartel  look  good,  look  humane,  look  rational,  look  like  excellent  science  that  works.   Especially  psychiatry  and  neurology.   And  pharmacology.   That  became  a  major  job  for  me. Because…they’re  experimenting  on  the  human  race,  and  they  want  their  horrible  mistakes  which  are  legion,  to  look  like  advances  and  good  science  at  every  step  until  they  get  it  right,  until  they  have  your  brain  in  their  hands  from  cradle  to  grave. [p.71.]

As noted earlier, the words above were penned in 2001. If you would like to read the full transcript of the interview, which offers a reasonably accurate explanation of what is happening around the world at the moment, you can do so in ‘The Matrix Revealed Volume 1, Jon Rappoport Interviews Ellis Medavoy (Part 1 of 3)’.

And if you would like to read about the AIDS hoax (‘caused’ by the non-existent HIV) and how it was done, using much of the same formula being used to perpetrate the elite’s Covid-19 hoax (‘caused’ by the non-existent SARS-CoV-2), you can do so in AIDS Inc.: Scandal of the Century.

Unfortunately, the Covid-19 hoax is being played for stakes that are infinitely higher than they were during the AIDS hoax.

After 200,000 years of Homo Sapiens, the species is about to ‘evolve’ rapidly and profoundly. But it won’t be a natural evolution. And it won’t be an improvement unless you don’t like the many qualities that make humans human, biologically and socially.

If the transhumanists have their way, individual human identity will vanish along with human volition. Homo Sapiens will be superseded by ‘Homo Cyborg’.

If this all sounds like science fiction or just plain ridiculous, let me invite you to consider the evidence below.

As ‘warned’ by scientist Andrew Herr in an article – see ‘This Scientist Wants Tomorrow’s Troops to Be Mutant-Powered’ – published in 2012:

Greater strength and endurance. Enhanced thinking. Better teamwork. New classes of genetic weaponry, able to subvert DNA. Not long from now, the technology could exist to routinely enhance – and undermine – people’s minds and bodies using a wide range of chemical, neurological, genetic and behavioral techniques.

It’s warfare waged at the evolutionary level. And it’s coming sooner than many people think.

Well, that time has arrived. The thin edge of the wedge, if we keep allowing it to happen, is the various restrictions and technologies being introduced under cover of Covid-19 which are supposedly being used to tackle the ‘virus’.

However, just as in the ‘AIDS epidemic’ when no (HIV) virus was ever scientifically demonstrated to exist, there is zero science to prove the existence of the ‘virus’ labeled SARS-CoV-2. Instead, this elite coup is designed and being conducted to achieve a profound transformation in the nature of the human individual and human society, including a substantial ‘depopulation’. Moreover, it is proceeding rapidly because it entails a complexity and depth that is not easy to comprehend but also because it seems so preposterous that few people are inclined to contemplate the possibility objectively. Joseph Goebbels knew why. For some of the detail of essential elements of this coup, see ‘Covid-19 Does Not Exist: The Global Elite’s Campaign of Terror Against Humanity’ and ‘Halting our Descent into Tyranny: Defeating the Global Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’.

But for another recent comprehensive history and critique of the coup being conducted by the ‘billionaire’s club’, see Dr. Jacob Nordangård’s insightful article ‘Analysis: Globalists’ reboot of the world and their plans for us’ which opens with the following words:

The Corona crisis is the trigger for a global coup d’état of monumental dimensions. It is the beginning of a new era, with a new international economic order that risks completely destroying human freedoms. Tyrants have now taken over to forcibly steer us into a ‘climate smart’ and ‘healthy’ world through the World Economic Forum’s new techno-totalitarian roadmap – ‘The Great Reset’.

In this article, however, I want to focus on the agenda of the transhumanists under cover of this coup and what this would mean for Homo Sapiens unless it is stopped.

Technotyranny

In one of his videos about the Covid-19 coup – watch ‘This Couldn’t Possibly Happen. Could it?’ the transcript for which can be accessed by clicking the ‘Health’ tab after entering his website – the UK’s Dr Vernon Coleman explains the sinister agenda of the technological control sought by the transhumanists:

If you were a mad doctor and you wanted to control an individual it would be a doddle.
You’d just tell them you were giving them an injection to protect them against the flu or something like that and in the syringe there would be a little receiver. And then you’d stick a transmitter on the roof of the house across the road from where they lived.

And then you could send messages to make them do whatever you wanted them to do. You could make them sad or angry or happy or contented. You could make them run or fight or just spend all day in bed.

Remember, that’s what Dr Delgado was doing over half a century ago. It’s nothing new.

Of course, if you wanted to do the same thing for lots of people you’d need a whole lot of people to help you….

And you’d need something to inject into people. A medicine of some kind for example.

And then you’d need someone good at software to help with all the transmitting and the receiving and you’d need people with access to lots of tall poles or roofs where they could put the transmitter things.

But none of that would be any good unless you had a reason for injecting people. You can’t just go around injecting millions of people for no reason.

Ideally, you’d need them all to be frightened of something so that they were keen to let you inject them. And then you could put your tiny receivers into the stuff that was being injected. Or squirted up their noses or whatever.

Introducing her own careful explanation of the agenda of the transhumanists, in her video Dr. Carrie Madej opens with the following words:

So what do you think about going from human 1.0 to human 2.0?… Transhumanism… is about taking humans, as we know ourselves, and melding with artificial intelligence…. That might seem kinda cool to you, we might have some superhuman abilities… that’s the idea, that’s what you see in sci-fi movies… Thinking about this topic… I [had thought that it was] many years in the future.

However, this question, this idea is now right in this moment. We need to make a decision… because I investigated the proposed Covid-19 vaccine and this is my alarm call to the world. I looked at the pros and cons and it frightens me.

And I want you to know about this, you need to be very well informed because this new vaccine is not like your normal flu vaccine. This is something very different, this is something brand new, something completely experimental on the human race. And it’s not just about being a different vaccine. There are technologies that are being introduced with this vaccine that can change the way we live, who we are and what we are. And very quickly….

Some people… like Elon Musk, who is the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Automotive, as well as Ray Kurzweil, who is one of the bigwigs of Google, … are self-proclaimed ‘transhumanists’. They believe that we should go to human 2.0 and they are very big proponents of this. There’s a lot of other people… involved with this…. I think the easiest way to explain this to you is to go with one of the frontrunners for the vaccine and go into a little bit of the history and tell you how they want to make the vaccine and I think that will speak volumes. So, for instance, Moderna is one of the frontrunners for the Covid-19 vaccine…. Watch ‘Human 2.0 – Transhumanist Vaccine – A Wake Up Call to the World’.

If you doubt the capacity of ‘medicine’ to achieve this level of human transformation, in this video produced in August 2020, transhumanist Elon Musk explains how his Neuralink microchip will be surgically implanted into the human brain, as has already been done with animals. While he specifically mentions the chip’s capacity to monitor certain health parameters and to play you music, he does not mention its intended uses for digitization of your identity, recording of your personal data such as medical and bank records, any of its surveillance functions or its capacity for emotional, thought and behavioural control. Watch ‘This Is How Elon Musk’s Neuralink Microchip Will Be Put In Your Brain’.

As Raul Diego explains in his own article on this subject:

The most significant scientific discovery since gravity has been hiding in plain sight for nearly a decade and its destructive potential to humanity is so enormous that the biggest war machine on the planet immediately deployed its vast resources to possess and control it, financing its research and development through agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).

The revolutionary breakthrough… [involved devising] a way to ‘reprogram’ the molecules that carry the genetic instructions for cell development in the human body, not to mention all biological lifeforms.

These molecules are called ‘messenger ribonucleic acid’ or mRNA and the newfound ability to rewrite those instructions to produce any kind of cell within a biological organism has radically changed the course of Western medicine and science, even if no one has really noticed yet. As [inventor, Professor Derek] Rossi, himself, puts it: ‘The real important discovery here was you could now use mRNA, and if you got it into the cells, then you could get the mRNA to express any protein in the cells, and this was the big thing.’ See ‘A Transhumanist Dream: A DARPA-Funded Implantable Biochip to Detect COVID-19 Could Hit Markets by 2021’.

Moreover, as Patrick Wood, who has intensively studied and reported the efforts of the transhumanists for decades, explains in a recent article – ‘The Siamese Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism’ – and discusses in a related video – ‘Humans 2.0: GMO Vaccinations and Transhumanism’ – that draws out some of the more nuanced elements of their agenda:

Technocracy and Transhumanism have always been joined at the hip. Technocracy uses its ‘science of social engineering’ to merge technology and society. Transhumanism uses its field of NBIC to merge technology directly into humans. To put it another way, Technocracy is to society what Transhumanism is to the humans that live in it….

NBIC stands for Nano (nano-technology), Bio (bio-technology), Info (information technology) and Cogno (cognitive sciences). These four scientific disciplines remained separate avenues of study in Universities around the world until the early 1970s. Today, NBIC has become an established discipline of its own in most major universities with personnel contributed from each separate department….

All together, NBIC offers a scientific cauldron to Transhumans in their quest to create Humans 2.0….

It’s also no wonder that the upcoming vaccine for COVID-19 being produced by Moderna is also using NBIC science to accomplish a merging of the human body with advanced technology. The Trump Administration has contracted with Moderna – see ‘Trump Administration collaborates with Moderna to produce 100 million doses of COVID-19 investigational vaccine’ – to deliver 100 million doses of its investigational vaccine, ostensibly to be kitted and transported to the nation by the U.S. Military….

[Technocracy and Transhumanism are both] extremely dangerous for all of humankind and must be rejected before it is too late to stop them.

And Whitney Webb provides further insight into the elite intention in this regard. In one of her meticulously-researched articles – ‘Coronavirus Gives a Dangerous Boost to DARPA’s Darkest Agenda’ – she outlines the hidden technological agenda behind the Covid-19 coup that might well be delivered as part of any vaccination program by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). After carefully outlining the history and ‘logic’ of what is taking place – such as the development of ‘cyborg “super soldiers”’ and ‘injectable Brain Machine Interfaces (BMIs) with the capability to control one’s thoughts’ – she concludes with the chilling words:

Technology developed by the Pentagon’s controversial research branch is getting a huge boost amid the current coronavirus crisis, with little attention going to the agency’s ulterior motives for developing said technologies, their potential for weaponization or their unintended consequences.…

Those who are fearful and desperate will not care that the vaccine may include nanotechnology or have the potential to genetically modify and re-program their very being, as they will only want the current crisis that has upended the world to stop.

In this context, the current coronavirus crisis appears to be the perfect storm that will allow DARPA’s dystopian vision to take hold and burst forth from the darkest recesses of the Pentagon into full public view. DARPA’s transhumanist vision for the military and for humanity presents an unprecedented threat, not just to human freedom, but an existential threat to human existence and the building blocks of biology itself.

Of course, if you want to read how involved corporations, DARPA and other elite agencies explain it, you can do so. But unless you dig beneath the surface you will only get their sanitized accounts which, just like Elon Musk, focus on seemingly benign elements like ‘digitized identity’ and health reporting while not mentioning the technology’s capacities and intended uses for the invasion of your privacy, the recording of your personal data such as medical and bank records, any of its surveillance functions or its capacity for emotional, thought and behavioural control. See, for example, ‘Moderna’s mRNA Technology’, ‘Profusa is pioneering tissue-integrating biosensors for continuous monitoring of body chemistries’, ‘A Military-Funded Biosensor Could Be the Future of Pandemic Detection’ (which discusses the role of ‘hydrogel’) and DARPA’S ‘Developing novel, safe and efficacious treatments for COVID-19’ following its much earlier ‘In Vivo Nanoplatforms (IVN)’. For two elite presentations of the importance of your ‘digital identity’, see ‘The Need for Good Digital ID is Universal’ and ‘ID2020 and partners launch program to provide digital ID with vaccines’.

What is at Stake?

As discussed above, the technology now available after decades of effort enables receiver nanochips to be sprayed, injected or otherwise implanted into human bodies. With the ongoing deployment of 5G (which includes extensive space and ground-based technologies: see ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?’), just one outcome of these combined technologies is that it will be possible to direct the individual behaviour of each person so implanted. Given that the control technology will be owned by corporate executives, here is a list of examples of how the elite might direct that it be used (more or less as a ‘drone pilot’ sitting in the United States controls a drone flying in the Middle East that fires weapons on local people):

The official chain of command to launch nuclear weapons can be subverted by using remote control to direct the chosen individual in a particular chain of command to order (or execute) the launch of one or more nuclear weapons at the target(s) nominated at the time(s) specified. Subordinates can be directed to follow orders they might otherwise question.
‘Cyborg soldiers’ (either as mercenaries or as members of national military forces) in groups or as individuals can be deployed anywhere to fight as ordered by those in charge of their remote controls.
‘Cyborg workers’ can be directed to work in dangerous conditions for extended periods and simply be replaced as required. Someone else nearby will have been vaccinated too and can be directed to take their place.
‘Cyborg consumers’ can be directed to purchase a particular product, irrespective of its functionality, including health or otherwise, for the person so directed. That is assuming that money is not just taken directly from their bank account, given that it will no longer be under their exclusive control.
‘Cyborg activists’ on any issue can simply to be directed to refrain from further involvement in their campaign. Or to actively take the opposite position to the one they had previously.

What can we do to halt this transhumanist agenda and the elite coup itself?

Fortunately, we can do a great deal.

For a detailed series of options on how to have strategic impact, see the end of the article ‘“Ye are Many, They are Few”: Nonviolent Resistance to the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’.

Importantly, however, if you would like to be part of the campaign to defeat the elite coup and prevent implementation of the transhumanist agenda, see the list of strategic goals necessary to achieve these outcomes here: Coup Strategic Aims.

If you wish to nurture children to be far more able to critique society and elite propaganda, rather than be easily duped, see ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you wish to reduce your vulnerability to elite control, consider joining those who recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance by participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Finally, if you want a better fundamental understanding of how we reached this point, see ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

Conclusion

In the elegant words of South African liberation activist Steve Biko:

The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

When he uttered these words before being tortured to death in an Apartheid prison, Biko presumably did not realize the profound meaning they would acquire in 2020.

The transhuman mind will be owned and controlled by the oppressor.

If we are to avert this fate, we must struggle with clarity and purpose.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Questioning Covid19: Why I Will Never Trust the Medical Establishment about Respiratory Disease. A Case History

Posted on September 2, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Anita McKone

If you are interested in finding out the truth about the Covid19 scare, you can look for information in many areas. Understanding the corporate (profit-driven) and petrochemical-based history of the medical establishment helps. Being aware of the lack of scientific empirical and laboratory evidence for microbes, and microscopic particles such as viruses, causing disease helps. Being aware of other proven or highly probable causes of respiratory disease helps. It also helps to understand the emotionally discomforting truth that terrified people who claim to be both authorities and sane will knowingly or unknowingly lie to you in order to try to get you (and their own terror) under control.

In my case, whenever I am confused or unsure about the details of information I receive from the variety of sources I investigate, I am ‘lucky’ to have a fallback position that is unequivocally clear and trustworthy. This knowledge is based on my own experience of suffering acute and chronic respiratory disease, and the outcomes I experienced while spending the first 25 years of my life following the advice of the medical establishment, and the second 25 years of my life totally rejecting ‘assistance’ from the medical establishment and following a variety of natural healing/health maintenance modalities instead. Without having to understand or argue the merits of any particular detail of the science of corporate medicine or natural biological health and healing, I have seen their results.

In brief: I suffered for the first 25 years of my life from chronic respiratory disease, including being hospitalised twice with pneumonia. My chronic bronchitis was first diagnosed as caused by bacterial infection, and later diagnosed as caused by a virus. When I stopped taking the advice of the medical establishment and my parents, who told me that I would die if I did not take antibiotics and that I could never be genuinely well, and switched to a variety of natural healing modalities, my life transformed radically. These modalities included listening to my physical feelings and emotions, changing my diet, understanding my breathing process, and bodywork to release muscle tension.

26 years later, at the age of 51, I use no pharmaceutical drugs or vaccines and experience the health and fitness that was denied me as a child and young person. I have not had bronchitis for 5 years, and have had only two mild colds in the past 3 years (despite the reported increase in the numbers of people suffering ‘seasonal influenza’ and the increasing severity of their symptoms). Other health problems I had when I was younger, including heart dysfunction related to bronchitis, have also been resolved. My experience has taught me that fear of my illness was the most important element keeping me sick, and that the medical establishment had no capacity to accurately diagnose the causes of my illness, nor treat it effectively.

I cannot say what precise factors have led to the development of acute respiratory disease in each individual who is currently suffering or dying from it. However, my experience leads me to believe that it is likely to be a combination of factors, including fear and emotional suppression from living in unsafe social circumstances, toxicity from airborne pollutants and poisonous substances that have been ingested or injected into the body, and lack of complex nutritional elements that allow the body to function optimally and recover from emotional stress and toxic damage.

I therefore make the following suggestions for you to consider if you are experiencing symptoms of respiratory disease in the current social climate of crisis, panic and control.

If you have a choice:

1) Do not get tested for Covid19 – being categorised as having Covid19 will increase both your fear and the fear of others and may limit your options for taking safe and sensible action to support your healing.

2) Do not allow yourself to be hospitalised – you will be isolated from anyone who personally cares about you, in the presence of scared (if well-meaning) hospital staff, and removed from the possibility of any treatment other than toxic drugs and invasive procedures, which will add to your level of stress and fear, and decrease the likelihood of your survival.

3) Understand that your state of health is not dependant on whether or not you are ‘infected with a virus’. Even if pathogenic viruses existed (and there are a number of critiques showing the logical faults and lack of proper scientific process in virology theory and experiments respectively: see, for example, What Really Makes You Ill? Why everything you thought you knew about disease is wrong. But you can read more in ‘Dismantling the Virus Theory – The “measles virus” as an example’ and watch the video interview ‘The Real Science of Germs: Do Viruses Cause Disease?’ ), my experience shows that it is other elements that determine health. You are therefore not responsible for the health of anyone else – you are not a dangerous plague carrier who should feel guilty for harming others if you do not accept the label ‘infected with Covid19’.

4) Consider the four basic principles of health and healing at the end of this article.

A case history of my acute and chronic respiratory disease and healing

I was born in 1969 in New South Wales, Australia, and grew up in Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory. I was injected with a number of vaccines containing toxic substances as a baby, which may have been a contributing factor in my developing pneumonia at the age of 18 months. I was hospitalised at this time, and again at the age of three years. I was treated with antibiotics in hospital and put in an oxygen tent to help me breathe. I was told by my mother that when I was in the oxygen tent when I was a baby, she climbed in with me against the wishes of the nurses. Far from reassuring me, this would have increased my level of fear, as my mother is an extremely anxious and explosively violent person, and she was only holding me to try to relieve herself of her anxiety, not because she was in a state to calmly relieve mine. My fear of being killed by my mother when she violently exploded and the fear generated by her general state of anxiety (caused by her own extremely violent and emotionally deprived upbringing) was a major factor in the disturbances to my breathing and lung function throughout my younger years.

My memory of the hospital when I was three is traumatic – I remember feeling extremely isolated. Visiting hours were limited and strictly upheld, which meant that my father, who I did find reassuring, could not spend significant time with me. Also (bizarre but true) my teddy bear was stolen by another family with a sick child and as any parent knows, familiar soft toys do provide significant reassurance to children, even if artificially so. I survived both hospitalisations, and was told that I would have died without the antibiotics. The doctors and my parents believed that there was no other way of helping me through these crises – it was ‘hospital and drugs’ or ‘nothing’.

As a result of the pneumonia, one small area in my left lung was permanently damaged (at least, it has not healed up to this point) although I did not discover the damage until I was 26 when a naturopath/homeopath asked me if there was any difference in how my left and right lungs felt. This was the first time anyone had asked me to focus on my lungs in detail in order to learn something about them, and I discovered that my left lung was permanently painful, particularly when I coughed for any reason, while my right lung was not.

As a result of the natural healing I have undertaken since, this pain has reduced to one patch about 2 centimetres in diameter. I have heard the medical establishment’s opinion in recent years that lungs don’t have nerves and therefore it is not possible to feel pain in them. This directly contradicts my actual experience of being able to feel a variety of feelings (e.g. tickling caused by breathing something in accidentally, pressure in my right lung when I cough, pain in my left lung when I cough, and the tightening of my airways when asthmatic). When ‘medical science’ contradicts my experience of reality, obviously I question the validity of the theory, not my experience.

I suffered an extreme asthma attack when I was four, when I couldn’t breathe at all for a short amount of time, but after this I had frequent non-acute asthmatic reactions only, mainly when I tried to exercise or when I had bronchitis, which I suffered 3 or 4 times per year up until I was 19. At that time, I left home and the incidence dropped to twice a year. My bouts of bronchitis would last for about 14 days each time and I would not go to school/university for about 10 days because I felt too sick in my body to do so. Among other symptoms, my throat and lungs would become ‘cold’, tense and aggravated, causing me to swallow repeatedly for about 24 hours (with virtually no sleep), before developing an extremely painful, hacking cough and coughing up heaps of green phlegm. The bronchitis was less extreme than my original pneumonia, but ongoingly debilitating, as if my body had worked out a way of managing my symptoms that didn’t risk killing me but instead put me into a ‘holding pattern’ that was endlessly repeated.

I breathed in a powdered drug when I was ill with bronchitis as a child, and then switched at some point to using Ventolin, until the age of 14 when I accidentally overdosed myself, suffering extreme fear and visual distortion brought on by the drug’s artificial stimulation of adrenalin. I was very angry that I had never been warned of the danger and I refused to use Ventolin after this time.

I also took Brondicon, a cough syrup full of alcohol and sugar. I was given antibiotics every time I was sick and I have a lot of memories of waiting in doctors’ surgeries reading children’s books while waiting for my 10 minute appointment (which generally ran along the lines of ‘I’ve got bronchitis again’… ‘Right, here’s a prescription for antibiotics’.) When I was sick I also went to a physiotherapist who would thump my back and encourage me to cough, even when the phlegm was not in a sufficiently fluid state to be coughed up. The theory behind this treatment was that I was clearing my lungs of ‘harmful bacteria’. I later discovered that this deliberate coughing increased the damage and irritability in my left lung and made it more susceptible to aggravation and illness.

Influenced by my parents’ and the doctors’ fears and their incapacity to listen to how I felt and what I needed, I never expected to be well and being sick became a key part of my identity. I lived in dread of my next bout of illness. Since I had never experienced being well, my general state of ill health was utterly normal to me, and I had no idea just how sick I was. I later discovered that my entire oxygenation system, including my heart, was not functioning properly. I therefore found any aerobic exercise both painful and extremely uncomfortable in my body due to the effort of exerting myself without adequate oxygen reaching my cells. Climbing a steep hill, for example, was very difficult for me.

My posture was off kilter because of constant muscle tension caused by the pain in my lung, and this tension and imbalance eventually led to me suffering cartilage, tendon and ligament injuries. Additional illnesses I suffered that were undetected by doctors were low blood sugar (diet related), chronic constipation (caused by diet and by stress) and extreme cramping and blood loss during menstruation (caused by lack of magnesium).

One factor that I believe was important in remaining sick with respiratory disease was the toxic nature of the cleaning fluids used in my childhood home, particularly furniture polish that was sprayed every week as part of the housecleaning routine.

Most important though, was the constant emotional and physical tension I experienced as a result of living with my anxious and violent mother. Her emotional state and behaviour continually triggered me into fear and anger, but I was not allowed to consciously feel or express these things. These feelings became wrapped up, in complex and contradictory ways, with my experience of being physically ill.

The most obvious connection between my emotional state and the state of my lungs is that when I feel afraid that I am going to be attacked, unreasonably controlled or prevented from telling the truth about how I feel and what I need, I have an immediate, strong asthmatic reaction.

The last time I took antibiotics for bronchitis was when I was about 22 and living in Melbourne. The next time I had bronchitis I visited a different doctor than usual and I was told that my symptoms were caused by a virus (‘influenza’) not a bacterial infection, so antibiotics were not appropriate. I imagine this doctor was moving with the tendency to claim that all sorts of previously ‘non-viral’ diseases were now caused by viruses, as the medical establishment began its push towards inventing and selling greater and greater numbers of vaccines. (Vaccines are, obviously, more profitable for corporations than antibiotics because they are recommended for or forced upon everyone as a preventative measure, rather than being used by only those who are showing symptoms of disease.)

I was annoyed that I couldn’t have my ‘reassuring’ antibiotics, and that I was being told that the same symptoms I had been experiencing my whole life were some other disease (‘flu’, not ‘bronchitis’). I don’t know if I was told I should have a flu vaccine, or whether they were available in the early 1990s, but I certainly had no faith in the ‘new’ diagnosis. I had never been treated as if my bronchitis was infectious, as influenza is supposed to be, and I have no memory of my mother, father, sister or (later) boyfriend being ill with respiratory symptoms at the same time as I was when I lived with them.

Ironically, however, this shift in medical establishment diagnostic fashion led to a good outcome for me: the fear that I had had all my life that I would ‘die’ without antibiotics was proven untrue. Without antibiotics, my bronchitis followed exactly the same pattern that it always had – no better, no worse. Although I didn’t think about it then, this proved that however many bacteria may have been in my lungs, breaking down the dead substances, they were not attacking my lungs and ‘causing’ my disease.

Having had my fill of doctor’s surgeries, I never again bothered to visit one when I was sick with respiratory disease.

So, I had stopped poisoning my system unnecessarily with antibiotics, and I was living at a physical distance from my mother, but at this stage I was not actively healing emotionally or physically from all the damage that had been done and I was still very unfit, got bronchitis twice a year and suffered occasionally from candida, as I had done since my late teens.

That changed when I got together with my husband, Robert, when I was 25. As part of his research, he was aware of critiques of the medical establishment, had changed his diet to improve some of his own health problems, and was using a number of natural health approaches. He also, most importantly, listened to me without fear when I expressed how I felt emotionally and physically, and supported me to follow my own feelings. In other words, he allowed me to exist, without interference and without trying to control me, because fundamentally he trusted me to be guided by my own internal communications towards a more whole state of being. He told me, in effect, that I existed, that I mattered and that he trusted me to be sensible, intelligent and capable of learning from my own experiences, including failures and successes.

I was quite stunned to find that Robert was not afraid of my illness. It seemed illogical to me at first simply because a fearful reaction to illness was the only thing I had ever known. The first time I was sick after we were together, he held me for four hours while I could barely breathe because my lungs were so badly clogged and asthmatic. This was a more extreme event than usual, similar to my original pneumonia, but it was a ‘healing crisis’ that marked the beginning of the change in my symptom patterns which has led to my current healthy state. Being held with love and reassured that I wasn’t going to die, I could allow my body to do what it wanted to rebalance itself. Robert’s trust in me allowed me to trust myself, and that trust made all the difference.

Over the next 26 years, my emotional and physical health improved dramatically as I allowed myself to become consciously aware of and physically feel all of my emotions (mostly fear, sadness and anger) related to my mother and other conflicts in my life, as well as feeling the physical pain and asthmatic reactions associated with the damage in my left lung. I stopped trying to make these emotional and physical reactions ‘go away’ and instead experienced them without fear until they went away of their own accord.

I also changed my diet to one of organic, vegetarian wholefood, with no salt, sugar, white flour, caffeine or alcohol. I stopped cooking food in oil or microwaving it. I had never been a recreational drug user, since smoking was impossible with my damaged lung, and my Ventolin experience put me off trying to artificially stimulate my mind and emotions with chemicals. The diet I chose was based on principles explained by Paavo Airola in his book Hypoglycemia: A Better Approach. I also take care not to use or inhale toxic substances wherever possible, including deodorants and perfumes, as well as cleaning fluids, paint fumes, incense, ‘passive’ cigarette smoke and wood smoke. (For those wishing to avoid lung cancer, I have noticed that my damaged lung reacts far more painfully and asthmatically to fragrances – perfume, deodorant, aftershave and incense – than to cigarette smoke.)

I have investigated and found useful many natural healing modalities, which have assisted with my emotional healing, my nutrition and my muscle tension.

These include:

‘Feelings First’ emotional feeling and integration, developed over 14 years by me and my husband Robert J. Burrowes. See ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and Feelings First.

Gerson Therapy, which involves drinking fresh vegetable juices (for vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and enzymes) and doing coffee enemas (to assist with liver detoxification), among other elements. I have undertaken a scaled-down version of the intensive therapy on a number of occasions and I still drink two juices per day whenever possible and do regular coffee enemas, which are also good for body awareness and ‘meditative’ time. See Healing the Gerson Way: Defeating Cancer and Other Chronic Diseases.

Buteyko breathing method, which explained to me the importance of nose breathing to protect the damaged part of my lung and to maintain the correct balance of CO2 and oxygen in my blood stream to allow effective oxygenation of my cells. It also explained the natural functions of asthmatic reaction in counteracting fear-based hyperventilation and in limiting exposure to toxic substances.

Naturopathy, for a variety of nutritional elements that I have not been able to account for sufficiently in my consumption of fresh food/juices (owing to my living circumstances and the generally decreasing mineral content of even organically grown food). Supplements I take include iron, magnesium and CoQ10 and I am careful to take varieties that my body easily absorbs. Taking CoQ10 fixed my heart dysfunction, iron helps with my energy levels, and magnesium fixed my menstruation cramps and over-bleeding.

Osteopathy, for regular muscle release and manipulations to adjust my spine and limbs.

Rolfing (also known as Structural Integration) to work on the loosening of muscle fascia to allow my muscles to relax and return to balanced positions in my body’s overall structure.

Feldenkrais method (also known as Functional Integration or Awareness Through Movement) to reintegrate the nervous elements of physical movements that have become uncoordinated as a result of injury and fear.

Myotherapy, including dry needling, to release extreme tension in certain muscles and tendons that had not responded to other forms of bodywork.

Deep Recovery massage balls, with the ‘track’ necessary to hold balls in place so that I can regularly do my own muscle/fascia release on any area of my body without having to continually pay for Myotherapy or Rolfing sessions.

Yoga for assistance in stretching, strengthening and coordinating muscles and realigning my spine.

Non-manipulative Chiropractic method for an understanding of subtle whole body communication.

Gym work, to strengthen and reintegrate muscle action around knee and shoulder injuries arising from distorted posture.

I have found all the natural health modalities I have tried to be genuinely complementary (in a way that the medical establishment’s regime is definitely not). That is, there is always something to be learned and integrated from every natural modality into a more complete understanding of the way I function and dysfunction. Obviously, not all practitioners are equally capable, and it is important to find practitioners whose work you trust.

While I recognise that people who are seriously impoverished will have limits on their access to good natural health care, I have done all of the above on an extremely limited budget, having lived below the Australian taxable limit since 1997. I have had no assistance from government Medicare (which does not cover natural healing modalities) or private health insurance.

You may notice that none of the modalities I have mentioned lend themselves to corporate profit. In particular, eating fresh organically grown food works against three corporate industries that are linked by their dependence on the parent industry of artificial chemistry, which developed out of the petrochemical industry. Industrial agriculture relies on artificial fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides; the processed food industry employs chemists to come up with endless varieties of false smells and tastes to cover the fact that processed food that has a long shelf life is tasteless and nutritionless; and the pharmaceutical industry uses artificial chemistry to create toxic drugs, following the age old superstition that by poisoning the body we can control and ‘fix’ it. Many of the products from these industries are easy for corporations to patent, monopolise and sell as long as they can convince people they ‘need’ them. So when the medical establishment screams that natural solutions are not proven to work, are a waste of money, and may be dangerous, one might consider that the threat the establishment is feeling is to its bank balance, rather than to anyone’s actual biological health.

The result of 26 years of taking responsibility for my own health (with the crucial support of people who love me) is that, at the age of 51, I am fit and healthy in a way I never was as a child and teenager or in my early twenties. My oxygenation and posture have dramatically improved and, although I still have some weaknesses in my joints, I am able to work vigorously for some hours at a time in a garden on a steep hillside. I am able to continue working when hungry, showing that my blood sugar levels are significantly improved. I have not had candida since my late 20’s. And, despite the one patch of lung damage which has not yet been resolved (which I protect in the ways mentioned above), I have not had bronchitis in the last 5 years, and indeed have only suffered two colds with mild respiratory and bodily symptoms that lasted 3 days each in the last three years.

Hence, even if I believed that a pathogenic virus labelled Covid19 was genuinely attacking people, I would not be concerned for my own health or theirs on its account. If the four principles of health and healing below are abided by, a physical individual is naturally strong and functional at any age, and does not need the artificial intervention of toxic medicines and vaccines to ‘survive’. The medical establishment’s approach is to ignore and deny all the things that a person needs, biologically and emotionally, and then try to suppress the symptoms of disease that result from this denial. At best, a toxic medicine will shock the body into behaving differently in the short term, while adding to the overall burden of toxicity and ill health of all the body’s systems over time. At worst, your body will not survive the toxic attack and you will be severely incapacitated or killed (as hundreds of thousands of people are by ‘proper’ use of pharmaceuticals each year: see, for example, ‘100,000 deaths per year in the U.S. caused by prescription drugs’ or ‘Table Of Iatrogenic Deaths In The United States’. For an extremely relevant and well researched exposé of the corrupt and toxic nature of the corporate medical industry, read AIDS Inc. by investigative reporter Jon Rappoport.)

If you are currently dependent on pharmaceuticals (for physical or psychological illnesses) you can consult an experienced natural health practitioner to work out how to safely come off the drugs and replace them with the nutrition and other naturally supportive healthcare you really need.

Of course, if at any time the natural healthcare that I need is denied me by forces beyond my control, it is likely that I will suffer further respiratory disease, because of the damage still existing in my lung. However, I will not blame any virus for my illness – the fault will lie with the fear of those humans who cannot see what is needed for genuine health and safety, and whose behaviour is therefore biologically self-destructive.

Four Principles of Health and Healing

Principle 1: Listen to yourself (how you feel emotionally and physically). Remember that you are a complex biological individual in a process of healing and existing, not a simple predictable robot, the same as all the other robots, whose behaviour can (or should) be controlled by a drug.

Principle 2: Give yourself what you need nutritionally to function properly. Keep working on it until you have found a range of things that work for you. Whatever you experiment with and choose (vegan, vegetarian, meat inclusive, supplement inclusive) trust organic/biodynamic, fresh, unrefined foods as the basis for your nutritional health.

Principle 3: Don’t poison yourself (with processed and adulterated ‘food products’ made in factories; with recreational or pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines; with cleaning and personal care products containing toxins; also, limit your exposure to electromagnetic radiation where possible, particularly if you are highly sensitive).

Principle 4: Investigate other healing modalities that encourage you to be aware of how you function physically, and as a whole, integrated organism. (Try anything that sounds reasonable to you, but be honest about whether or not you are experiencing the gains you hoped, and keep experimenting if necessary.)

Finally, although I am aware that as a physical entity I can never be invulnerable, I take responsibility for my own ultimate existence by trusting in myself, despite all attempts to make me afraid that I am undeserving or incapable of full, unified existence, or that existence is not my genuine, true state of being.

Biodata: Anita McKone researches truth and delusion, fearlessness and fear, sanity and insanity, self-awareness and self-destruction, and nonviolence and violence as these exist at the human and universal levels. Her articles can be read on her website.

The Political Value of Psychedelics

Posted on August 30, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Dr. James Cooke

Source: Reality Sandwich

Psychedelics and Politics

Psychedelics are political. Their use in the 1960s had a political impact that is still being felt today, and their widespread banning was driven by political motives. But how can a class of chemicals consistently impact our opinions of how we organize and relate to each other? Psychedelics can affect the brains of individuals in ways that produce consistent insights. These insights have direct relevance for our individual and collective wellbeing, and can point the way towards political change that would benefit us all.

The 1960s

The LSD-fuelled hippie movement was instrumental in the origins of the modern ecological awareness in politics that is so widespread today. It helped birth modern anti-war peace movements and the practice of living in sustainable, eco-friendly communes. What is it about the time we live in and the effects of psychedelic substances that result in their producing this kind of change in political thinking? To understand this, we have to not only consider how psychedelics act in the brain, but we also have to understand both the unusual situation humans have found themselves in since the advent of civilization and the psychology that gave rise to it.

The Human Animal

We live in an unusual time. For approximately 97% of human existence our species lived close to nature in small social groups. Like other animals, evolution programmed us with a survival instinct and fear of death. This fear incentivized us to control the world around us in order to make us feel safe. Unlike other animals, however, we succeeded in dominating nature. Thanks to our capacity for language and our dexterous hands that were freed up by our walking upright, it became possible for us to create culture and technology. The preservation of knowledge from generation to generation that comes with language allowed for greater and greater control of the world around us. Eventually we found ourselves in complex civilizations, a very long way from home.

The Price of Progress

This way of being that led to the relentless growth of civilizations is characterized by a particular kind of psychology, one that is governed by fear. Sacrificing one’s happiness today in order to prepare for tomorrow can often make sense, but being consistently emotionally hijacked by fear without realising it can lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering. This is true for individuals suffering with trauma and it’s true for our species as a whole. In such a situation, there is the loss of the ability to find peace and wellbeing in the present. We desperately look towards the future in the hope that if we just keep pushing forwards we will find a way out of our situation, not realizing that this way of being in itself is the problem. The result is that, while we may no longer be routinely at risk of being eaten by predators, we are suffering from an epidemic of disorders of alienation, such as addiction, anxiety and depression.

The Fear Trap

Why do we continue to do this? One reason is that we are naturally fearful creatures. It makes sense that we would have evolved to sacrifice our wellbeing today in order to ensure our survival tomorrow. Evolution is about staying alive, it’s not about being happy. Another reason is that evolution has endowed us with incredible coping mechanisms. We can be living in agony but, if we see now no other option, our capacity for language allows us to tell ourselves a story about why our situation is actually fine. It is by taking these stories to be more real than our felt conscious experiences that we manage to repress our anguish.

Civilization and Control

Beyond the individual, there are other dynamics that keep us trapped in the game of “progress” at the expense of our wellbeing. Once agriculture had been invented it became possible to generate surplus food, paving the way for a minority of individuals to hoard resources. This made it possible for wealthy individuals to coerce the majority into doing their bidding as they had something that they needed for their very survival. The ability of humans to live in stories has also been crucial in perpetuating this control. Our ability to rationalize and normalize our experiences made it possible for each generation to grow up believing that this situation was correct or right in some way, instead of seeing how they are being exploited.

Deep Ecology

It wasn’t always this way. Prior to the hierarchical arrangements of control that define civilization, humans throughout the world routinely explored their being part of the natural world through religious and spiritual practices. Psychedelic plant medicines were widely used in order to explore our interconnectedness with the natural world. The Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss coined the term “deep ecology” to refer to the non-hierarchical principles of interdependence and interconnectedness that are deeper than a superficial concern for the environment. Ecology in this sense can apply equally to the natural world, to social arrangements or even to the contents of your own mind.

Ecology vs. Hierarchy

While the systems of control that define “civilized” states typically separate and atomize people so they can be used to generate wealth for others, human communities centred around ecological and spiritual principles are based on collaboration and the valuing of individual and collective wellbeing. Psychedelics promote these ecological and spiritual perspectives, making them a threat to dominating systems of control.

Psychedelics and the Wisdom of Ecology

How do psychedelics promote ecological thinking? In the brain of the individual, psychedelics can temporarily topple the hierarchical, control-based modes of thought that usually dominate our minds. As is well attested to in Buddhist philosophy, it is these modes of thought that are responsible for the majority of our suffering. With these structures of control dissolved, what’s revealed is a sense of interconnection and a more harmonious way of being. This experience can produce insight into the wisdom of ecological principles such as openness, collaboration and naturalness as opposed to the controlling, atomizing and artificial arrangements that currently dominate society. As our well-being as social primates depends on the community as a whole, it only follows that their relevance of these insights would extend beyond the individual to those who have an impact on us in society.

Hippies, Peace, Communes and the Environment

LSD use in the 60s pushed the brains of a generation in the direction of ecological thinking. Many young people who might otherwise have unquestioningly fought in the Vietnam war suddenly saw their situation afresh, the propaganda of their home country replaced with a vision of a world of collective collaboration rather than one of conflict and domination. The suicidal logic of ecological destruction was also laid bare, the narrative of progress through the domination of nature seemingly nothing more than an excuse for the powerful to line their pockets, a project that would soon take the earth and all of us with it. A critical mass of young people came to similar conclusions and the hippie movement was born.

Science and Psychedelic Personality Change

Modern science is now mapping how psychedelics change people’s political opinions. A study published in 2017 found that the number of times people use a psychedelic and the strength of their most powerful ego-dissolving experience correlate with increased nature relatedness, openness and reduced authoritarian thinking [1]. These aspects of the personality all reflect this movement towards greater ecological thinking.

The Psychology of Control

Without the benefit of psychedelics to help us travel in the direction of ecological thinking and greater wellbeing, many get trapped in coping mechanisms of control. The traumatic nature of existence pushes some to move in the opposite direction, disowning their capacity for empathy and connection and reaffirming their sense of separation. This process can result in disorders of the ego such as narcissism, sociopathy and psychopathy, all characterized by a lack of empathy and a delusionally high opinion of oneself. We currently live in a system crafted to suit such personality types. The coping mechanisms emerge in response to severe trauma early in life, when the child is learning how to connect with the world around them. Investment in the ego and lack of concern for others is a pathology that can help such people cope with this powerful trauma. It also represents the psychological dynamic that keeps society sick and blocks collective healing through the widespread adoption of the ecological perspective.

The Key Roadblock to Change

Society only consists of individuals interacting. As a result, our political crises largely originate in the internal crises of individuals. The collective trauma carried by the human race is passed on generation after generation. A critical amount of narcissistic behaviour results in a society based around the separation and atomization of individuals, as well as around domination and control, of the environment and each other. The extent to which our fellow humans are unconsciously trapped in narcissistic coping mechanisms is the extent to which our species will be trapped in its current mode of domination, control and suffering.

Psychedelic Medicine and the Healing of Collective Trauma

Psychedelic medicine holds the promise of moving culture in the direction of trauma healing and deep ecological thinking that is necessary to save our species and the planet from ecological destruction. The main challenge will be how we engage with those at the other end of the spectrum, the narcissists and psychopaths so affected by trauma that they will defend their protective systems of domination at all costs. Psychedelic medicine may be able to reach some but perhaps the single greatest impact of psychedelics in years to come will be moving the public conversation toward a greater awareness of how the dynamics of trauma have deranged our world. The creation of a global ecological culture that centers around trauma healing, emotional wellbeing and an awareness of the psychology of narcissism is the only hope our species and planet has for survival, and psychedelics are perhaps the most powerful tool we have in making this culture a reality.

References:

Nour MM, Evans L, Carhart-Harris RL. Psychedelics, Personality and Political Perspectives. J Psychoactive Drugs. 2017;49(3):182-191. doi:10.1080/02791072.2017.1312643

	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: From He…
	lobotero on Saturday Matinee: From He…
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: The Wicker…

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: Science