Wall Street’s Latest Scheme Is Monetizing Nature Itself

Just in time for the UN’s policy push for “30 x 30” – 30% of the earth to be “conserved” by 2030 – a new Wall Street asset class puts up for sale the processes underpinning all life.

By Ellen Brown

Source: ScheerPost.com

A month before the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (known as COP26) kicked off in Scotland, a new asset class was launched by the New York Stock Exchange that will “open up a new feeding ground for predatory Wall Street banks and financial institutions that will allow them to dominate not just the human economy, but the entire natural world.” So writes Whitney Webb in an article titled “Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class”:

Called a natural asset company, or NAC, the vehicle will allow for the formation of specialized corporations “that hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like carbon sequestration or clean water.” These NACs will then maintain, manage and grow the natural assets they commodify, with the end goal of maximizing the aspects of that natural asset that are deemed by the company to be profitable.

The vehicle is allegedly designed to preserve and restore Nature’s assets; but when Wall Street gets involved, profit and exploitation are not far behind. Webb writes:

[E]ven the creators of NACs admit that the ultimate goal is to extract near-infinite profits from the natural processes they seek to quantify and then monetize….

Framed with the lofty talk of “sustainability” and “conservation”, media reports on the move in outlets like Fortune couldn’t avoid noting that NACs open the doors to “a new form of sustainable investment” which “has enthralled the likes of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink over the past several years even though there remain big, unanswered questions about it.” 

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with nearly $9.5 trillion under management. That is more than the gross domestic product of every country in the world except the U.S. and China. BlackRock also runs a massive technology platform that oversees at least $21.6 trillion in assets. It and two other megalithic asset managers, State Street and Vanguard (BlackRock’s largest shareholder), already effectively own much of the world. Adding “natural asset companies” to their portfolios could make them owners of the foundations of all life. 

A $4 Quadrillion Asset — The Earth Itself

Partnering with the New York Stock Exchange team launching the NAC is the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), major investors in which are the Rockefeller Foundation and the Inter-American Development Bank, notorious for imposing neo-colonialist agendas through debt entrapment. According to IEG’s website:

We are pioneering a new asset class based on natural assets and the mechanism to convert them to financial capital. These assets are essential, making life on Earth possible and enjoyable. They include biological systems that provide clean air, water, foods, medicines, a stable climate, human health and societal potential.

The potential of this asset class is immense. Nature’s economy is larger than our current industrial economy ….

The immense potential of “Nature’s Economy” is estimated by IEG at $4,000 trillion ($4 quadrillion). 

Webb cites researcher and journalist Cory Morningstar, who maintains that one of the aims of creating “Nature’s Economy” and packaging it via NACs is to drastically advance massive land grab efforts made by Wall Street and the oligarch class in recent years, including those made by Wall Street firms and billionaires like Bill Gates during the COVID crisis. The land grabs facilitated through the development of NACs, however, will largely target indigenous communities in the developing world. Morningstar observes:

The public launch of NACs strategically preceded the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the biggest biodiversity conference in a decade. Under the pretext of turning 30% of the globe into “protected areas”, the largest global land grab in history is underway. Built on a foundation of white supremacy, this proposal will displace hundreds of millions, furthering the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples.

The UN’s “30 x 30”

The land grab of which Morningstar speaks is embodied in a draft agreement called the “Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework,” currently being negotiated among the 186 governments that are signatories to the Convention for Biological Diversity. Part I of its 15th meeting (COP15) closed on October 15, just ahead of COP26 (the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties) hosted in Glasgow from October 31 through November 12. COP26 focuses on climate change, while COP 15 focuses on preserving diversity. Part II of COP15 will be held in 2022. The draft text for the COP 15 nature pact includes a core pledge to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030.

In September 2020, 128 environmental and human rights NGOs and experts warned that the 30 x 30 plan could result in severe human rights violations and irreversible social harm for some of the world’s poorest people. Based on figures from a paper published in the academic journal Nature, they argued that the new target could displace or dispossess as many as 300 million people. Stephen Corry of Survival International contended: 

The call to make 30% of the globe into “Protected Areas” is really a colossal land grab as big as Europe’s colonial era, and it’ll bring as much suffering and death. Let’s not be fooled by the hype from the conservation NGOs and their UN and government funders. This has nothing to do with climate change, protecting biodiversity or avoiding pandemics – in fact it’s more likely to make all of them worse. It’s really all about money, land and resource control, and an all out assault on human diversity. This planned dispossession of hundreds of millions of people risks eradicating human diversity and self-sufficiency – the real keys to our being able to slow climate change and protect biodiversity.

30 x 30 in the United States

The 30 x 30 target was incorporated in President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad dated January 27, 2021, which includes at Sec. 219 “the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.” 

How that is to be done is not clearly specified, but proponents insist it is not a “land grab.” Critics, however, contend there is no other way to pull it off. Only about 12% of land and water in the U.S. is now considered to be “in conservation,” including wilderness lands, national parks, national wildlife refuges, state parks, national monuments, and private lands with permanent conservation easements (contracts to surrender a portion of property rights to a land trust or the federal government). According to environmental expert Dr. Bonner Cohen, raising that figure to 30%, adding 600 million acres to the total, “means putting this land and water (mostly land) off limits to any productive use in perpetuity. To accomplish this goal, the federal government will have to buy up – through eminent domain or other pressures on landowners making them ‘willing sellers’ of their property – millions of acres of private land.”

In July 2021, 15 governors wrote to the Administration opposing the plan, led by Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska. Ricketts said in a press release

This requires restricting a land area the size of the State of Nebraska every year, each year, for the next nine years, or in other words a landmass twice the size of Texas by 2030.

This goal is especially radical given that the President has no constitutional authority to take action to conserve 30% of the land and water. 

The Real Threat to Mother Nature

The federal government may have no constitutional authority to take the land, but a megalithic private firm such as BlackRock could do it simply by making farmers and local residents an offer they can’t refuse. This ploy has already been demonstrated in the housing market. 

According to a survey reported in The Guardian on October 12, 2021, nearly 40% of U.S. households are facing serious financial problems, including struggling to afford medical care and food; and 30% of lower income households (those earning under $50,000 per year) said they had lost all their savings during the coronavirus pandemic. In the first quarter of 2021, 15% of U.S. home sales went to large corporate investors including BlackRock, which beat out families in search of homes just by offering substantially more than the asking price. Sometimes whole neighborhoods were bought up at once for conversion into rental properties. 

BlackRock’s chairman Larry Fink is on the board of the World Economic Forum, which until recently featured a controversial promotional video declaring “You will own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

We all want a clean environment, and we want to preserve species biodiversity. But that includes human biodiversity – acknowledging the rights of rural landowners and Indigenous peoples, the land’s natural stewards. The greatest threat to the land is not the people living on it but those well-heeled investors who swoop in to buy up the rights to it, financializing the earth for profit. 

Not just private property but those public lands and infrastructure once known as “the commons” are now under threat. We face an existential moment in our economic history, in which accumulated private wealth is acquiring carte blanche control of the essentials of life. Whether that juggernaut can be stopped remains to be seen, but the first step in any defensive action is to be aware of the threat at our doorsteps.

America’s Bottom 50% Have Nowhere To Go But Down

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

One might anticipate that the bottom 50%’s meager share of the nation’s exploding wealth would have increased as smartly as the wealth of the billionaires, but alas, no.

America’s economy has changed in ways few of the winners seem to notice, as they’re too busy cheerleading their own brilliance and success. In the view of the winners, who just so happen to occupy all the seats at the media-punditry-Federal Reserve, etc. table–the rising tide of stock, bond and real estate bubbles are raising all boats. What’s left unsaid is except for the 50% of boats with gaping holes below the waterline, i.e. stagnant wages and a fast-rising cost of living.

The truth the self-satisfied winners don’t include in their self-congratulatory rah-rah is there’s no place for the bottom 50% of American households to go but down. All the winnings flow to those who already owned assets back when they were affordable– the already-wealthy–whose wealth has soared as assets have shot to the moon while the the burdens of inflation and debt service hit the bottom 50% the hardest.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is whining that inflation isn’t high enough yet for their refined tastes. Boo-hoo, how sad for the Fed–inflation isn’t yet high enough. Oh wait–didn’t they each mint millions by front-running their own policies? No wonder they’re not worried about inflation.

The reality few acknowledge is that globalization and financialization have stripped the American economy of low-skilled jobs that don’t demand much of the employee. The reality is that a great many people don’t have what it takes to learn high-level skills and work at a demanding pace under constant pressure–the description of the average job in America.

There were once millions of low-skill, low-pay jobs for people who for whatever mix of reasons were unable to muster the wherewithal to fulfill the fantasy of working extra hard, going to night school, soaking up high-level skills, moving quickly up the ladder to higher pay, buying the starter home and then moving up the food chain to middle class security from there.

The cost of living was low enough that those working these low-skill, low-pay jobs could still have an independent life. There were still low-cost rentals, often derided by the wealthy, in nooks and crannies of even the costliest cities. (I once lived in a room stuffed with old tax records in a poolside shack in an upscale neighborhood. The room had been cleared for a single bed and a path to the decrepit bathroom. Its most important attribute was that I could afford it on my low earnings.)

Affordable housing has vanished, eliminated by the financialization of America’s economy. Once landlords pay double the price for the property, rents have to double to pay their higher expenses. The apartment didn’t double in size or amenities–the rent doubled without any increase in utility to the renter. You get nothing more for double the price–nice.

Yes, people could make better choices, and some do. The point here is the game is rigged against those in the lower tier of the economy who can no longer afford a house or other stake in the only winning game in town–speculative asset bubbles. Go ahead and work a second job and go to night school–you’ll still be left behind the already-rich.

Globalization opened every job in America to global competition via offshoring or the influx of undocumented workers so desperate to support their families back home that no pay was too low and no working condition too wretched to refuse.

Many overindulged pundits who never worked an honest day in their lives sneer about burger flippers without realizing how hard those burger flippers have to work. I doubt the well-dressed pundits, snobbish about their university degrees and general brilliance, could manage to work a single day in a demanding fast-food job.

As the price of housing and other assets have soared, enriching the already rich, they’re out of reach for the bottom 50% who struggle to pay their bills as wages have stagnated and the costs of essentials have skyrocketed.

The rising cost of parking tickets, junk fees, user fees, utilities and food don’t impact the well-paid top 5% technocrat class, whose stake in the Everything Bubble keeps expanding by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But for the bottom 50%, those incremental increases are, when added to higher rents, absolutely crushing.

As for getting high-quality healthcare that includes mental health support–those are reserved for the rich. But no worries, self-medication is always a “choice.”

Getting a boost in pay from $12 an hour to $15 an hour is welcome, but that doesn’t put the worker any closer to affording a house or equivalent stake in the Everything Bubble.

The new feudalism is masked by the glossy SillyCon Valley PR of a gig economy where (per the PR fantasy) bright, shiny and totally independent workers freely choose to serve the winners in the rigged sweepstakes for low pay and zero benefits.

In the SillyCon Valley PR, serfs freely choose to serve their noble masters for nothing but survival because they love the “freedom” and “choice” of kissing the nobility’s plump derrieres. (After all, there were “choices” even back in the good old days of feudalism–one could join the brigands in the forest, or enlist in a poorly paid mercenary army where the odds of dying were high–you know, “choices” of “gigs.”)

One might anticipate that the bottom 50%’s meager share of the nation’s exploding wealth would have increased as smartly as the wealth of the billionaires, but alas, no–the bottom 50%’s share of stocks (equities) actually plummeted in the the glorious decades of Federal Reserve free money for financiers, stock buy-backs and asset bubbles.

All this suits the billionaires and those collecting the crumbs of the Everything Bubble just fine. So what if the bottom 50% have nowhere to go but down? There’s plenty of room in the homeless encampment for another broken down station wagon or an old camper. There’s lots of “choices.”

And no consequences for the winners, of course, because The Fed has our backs.

The Empire of Lies Breaks Down: Ugly Truths the Deep State Wants to Keep Hidden

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”—Albert Einstein

America is breaking down.

This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, racism, classism, fascism, fear-mongering, political correctness, cultural sanitation, virtue signaling, a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing government corruption and brutality, a growing economic divide that has much of the population struggling to get by, and militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment)—is manifesting itself in madness, mayhem and an utter disregard for the very principles and liberties that have kept us out of the clutches of totalitarianism for so long.

In New York City, for example, a 200-year-old statue of Thomas Jefferson holding the Declaration of Independence will be removed from the City Council’s chambers where it has presided since 1915. Despite Jefferson’s many significant accomplishments, without which we might not have the rights we do today, he will be banished for having been, like many of his day, a slaveowner. Curiously, that same brutal expectation of infallibility has yet to be applied to many other politically correct yet equally imperfect and fallible role models of the day.

In Washington, DC, a tribunal of nine men and women spoke with one voice to affirm that the government and its henchmen can literally get away with murder and not be held accountable for their wrongdoing. The Supreme Court’s latest rulings are yet another painful lesson in compliance, a reminder that in the American police state, “we the people” are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”

All across the country, from California to Connecticut and every point in between, men and women who have worked faithfully and diligently at their jobs for years are being terminated for daring to believe that they have a right to bodily integrity; that they should not be forced, against their conscience or better judgment, to choose between individual liberty and economic survival; and that they—and not the government, or the FDA, or the CDC, or the Corporate State—have dominion over their bodies. Conveniently enough, this COVID-19 pandemic has created yet another double standard in how “we the people” navigate this country: while “we the middling classes” are subjected to vaccine mandates and denied even the right to be skeptical about the origins of the COVID virus, let alone the efficacy of the so-called cure, the government, corporations and pharmaceutical companies have been shielded from liability with blanket immunity laws that ensure we are little more than guinea pigs for their questionable experiments.

And then in Pennsylvania, a man traveling on a commuter train harassed, assaulted and then raped a woman over the course of 40 minutes and more than two dozen train stops while fellow travelers, watching and filming the attack, did nothing. Not a single witness called 911. Not a single bystander intervened to help the woman. Despite the fact that the man was outnumbered and could have been overwhelmed by those on the train, no collective effort was made to ward off the attack. Only when it was too late, when the damage had been done and the train had pulled into its last stop, did police show up to intervene.

There is an allegory here for what is happening to our country and its citizens, who have also been waylaid by a madman (the Deep State), stripped of their safety nets (their rights undermined and eroded), and savaged out in the open by a fiend (the American Police State and its many operatives—the courts, the legislatures and their various armies) that is devoid of humanity while those not in the immediate crosshairs watch safely from a distance without making a move to help.

This is madness, yet there is a method to this madness.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

Remember, authoritarian regimes begin with incremental steps: overcriminalization, surveillance of innocent citizens, imprisonment for nonviolent—victimless—crimes, etc. Bit by bit, the citizenry finds its freedoms being curtailed and undermined for the sake of national security. And slowly the populace begins to submit.

No one speaks up for those being targeted.

No one resists these minor acts of oppression.

No one recognizes the indoctrination into tyranny for what it is.

Historically this failure to speak truth to power has resulted in whole populations being conditioned to tolerate unspoken cruelty toward their fellow human beings, a bystander syndrome in which people remain silent and disengaged—mere onlookers—in the face of abject horrors and injustice.

Time has insulated us from the violence perpetrated by past regimes in their pursuit of power: the crucifixion and slaughter of innocents by the Romans, the torture of the Inquisition, the atrocities of the Nazis, the butchery of the Fascists, the bloodshed by the Communists, and the cold-blooded war machines run by the military industrial complex.

We can disassociate from such violence. We can convince ourselves that we are somehow different from the victims of government abuse. We can continue to spout empty political rhetoric about how great America is, despite the evidence to the contrary.

We can avoid responsibility for holding the government accountable.

We can zip our lips and bind our hands and shut our eyes.

In other words, we can continue to exist in a state of denial. Yet there is no denying the ugly, hard truths that become more evident with every passing day.

  1. The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.”
  2. Our so-called government representatives do not actually represent us, the citizenry. We are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests whose main interest is in perpetuating power and control.
  3. Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies. However, they are not sworn enemies so much as they are partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.
  4. The lesser of two evils is still evil.
  5. Some years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?” The answer, then and now, remains the same: None. There is virtually no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
  6. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us
  7. The government knows exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate the populace and gain the public’s cooperation and compliance.
  8. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.
  9. America’s shadow government—which is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now and operates beyond the reach of the Constitution with no real accountability to the citizenry—is the real reason why “we the people” have no control over our government.
  10. You no longer have to be poor, black or guilty to be treated like a criminal in America. All that is required is that you belong to the suspect class—that is, the citizenry—of the American police state. As a de facto member of this so-called criminal class, every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.
  11. “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.
  12. Private property means nothing if the government can take your home, car or money under the flimsiest of pretexts, whether it be asset forfeiture schemes, eminent domain or overdue property taxes. Likewise, private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family
  13. We now find ourselves caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, and “we the people” are losing.
  14. All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.
  15. If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.
  16. Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
  17. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.
  18. Finally, freedom is never free. There is always a price—always a sacrifice—that must be made in order to safeguard one’s freedoms.

We cannot remain silent in the face of the government’s ongoing overreaches, power grabs, and crimes against humanity.

Evil disguised as bureaucracy is still evil. Indeed, this is what Hannah Arendt referred to as the banality of evil.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, such evil happens when bureaucrats (governmental and corporate) unquestioningly carry out orders that are immoral and inhumane; obey immoral instructions unthinkingly; march in lockstep with tyrants; mindlessly perpetuate acts of terror and inhumanity; and justify it all as just “doing one’s job.”

Such evil prevails when good men and women do nothing.

By doing nothing, by remaining silent, by being bystanders to injustice, hate and wrongdoing, good people become as guilty as the perpetrator.

There’s a term for this phenomenon where people stand by, watch and do nothing—even when there is no risk to their safety—while some horrific act takes place (someone is mugged or raped or bullied or left to die): it’s called the bystander effect.

It works the same whether you’re talking about kids watching bullies torment a fellow student on a playground, bystanders watching someone dying on a sidewalk, passengers on a train filming a fellow traveler be raped without intervening to help, or citizens remaining silent in the face of government atrocities.

We need to stop being silent bystanders.

It’s time to stand up for truth—for justice—for freedom—not just for ourselves but for all humanity. Tomorrow may be too late.

America Is Now a Kleptocrapocracy

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

I’ve coined a new portmanteau word to describe America’s descent: kleptocrapocracy, a union of kleptocracy (a nation ruled by kleptocrats) and crapocracy, a nation drowning in a moral sewer of rampant self-interest in which the focus is cloaking all the skims, scams, rackets and bezzles in some virtuous-sounding garb, a nation choking on low-quality junk ceaselessly hawked by robocalls, spam, phishing and Big Tech manipulation.

It’s little wonder trust has collapsed in America: the only thing we can trust is whatever’s being pitched is deceptively packaged to mask the self-interest and profiteering of the perps.

The stench from the decomposing carcasses of once-trusted institutions is everywhere. Insiders and the marketers they pay to cloak their grifting are banking bennies at the expense of hapless debt-serfs who fell for the scam. You need these three costly medications, and then when the side-effects kick in, you need six more to counteract the first three, and so on. But trust us; your “health” (heh) is our only concern. Uh, sure.

Why do state universities need to market themselves like a roto-rooter service? Maybe because they’re both working the sewers: state universities are exploiting the student loan sewers, desperate to recruit another batch of debt-serfs who fell for the 3-card monte game in which a lifetime of debt is exchanged for a credential of dubious value.

The competition for the remaining pool of debt-serfs is heating up, so like everything else in America, the game is now all about marketing, virtue-signaling, exploiting Big Tech manipulation, and so on.

Doing something useful is now for chumps. The opportunities in America are all about getting rich by doing, well, nothing: skimming 20% “guaranteed” returns in DeFi, mining cryptos, trading stablecoins, selling volatility, etc.–getting rich and then living large on the sweat of the chumps who are still working (poor deluded fools!).

The obvious goal here is for everyone to get in on trading stablecoins, buying rentals with DeFi, churning meme stocks, etc. Why should anyone lower themselves to doing something useful anymore? Why bother?

Labor has been degraded for decades in speculative-frenzy America. Why work when the Fed has our backs and all those newly issued trillions are up for grabs? Doing something useful is for chumps.

Nobody seems to ask what happens when we’re all minting fortunes off speculative churn and there’s nobody filling potholes, stocking shelves or carrying bags of QuikCrete to customers’ trucks.

And while we’re on the subject of sewage: if America’s security services and Big Tech oligarchies track everything and everyone, why are we drowning in robocalls, spam, SMS-spam (smishing), etc.? Couldn’t the NSA/CIA track the spammers and robo-callers down and rendition them (warrantlessly, of course) to a hellhole camp in an unnamed country?

Of course they could. But the ruination of everyday life is of no concern to the kleptocrats (fly with me to the stars!) or our dysfunctional government, which has become nothing more than an invitation-only auction of favors that elevates the relentless pursuit of self-interest and profiteering to new kleptocratic heights.

Please don’t make the mistake of expecting anything to work properly in America. The components are garbage, the parts are on back-order, the people who knew how to make the kludgy mess function just quit in disgust, and we’ll have to get back to you about your request, as our service staff just left to launch an OnlyFans site.

I don’t want to work, I’m minting money speculating, but gol-darn it, I want everyone else to wait on me and meet my needs for low, low quality goods and services at not-so-low prices, and if I’m not treated well enough by everyone earning chump-change, then I’ll freak out, and if that doesn’t pan out, I’ll blame it all on my meds. Accountability is like work–only for chumps.

Trust me, everything’s going great and we’re all going to get wealthier and wealthier until we won’t be able to take it any more, it will be so great. I hope everyone here is hungry because the banquet of consequences is being served.

Planet of the Living Dead (Halloween 2021)

By Mickey Z.

Source: Dissident Voice

The only thing we have to fear…

(the dude who signed Executive Order 9066)

Halloween is an odd holiday. The ostensible concept — as it has evolved to become — is to shock, startle, frighten, petrify, horrify, and/or terrify… all while consuming enough high fructose corn syrup to keep the American Dental Association content for another century or two. Every year, as October 31 nears, loyal consumers squander a small fortune to adorn their soon-to-be-foreclosed-upon abodes with Made-in-China images of tombstones, skulls, ghouls, goblins, monsters, zombies, and even the occasional bloody severed limb or two. But let’s face it, none of these cardboard depictions remotely compare to the real-life horrors we passively accept as normal.

Who needs Dracula when we’ve got ruling class vampires sucking us dry — stealing not only our blood but also our jobs, homes, health, autonomy, sovereignty, and future? Why bother with Michael Myers when legions of Y chromosome ghouls unleash far worse cruelty — every minute of every day — via male pattern violence? Never forget:

  • No zombie is more frightening than those stumbling around in masks and chanting “trust the science.” 
  • Never mind Jason and his hockey mask when you’ve got “Brandon” playing left wing. 
  • Bats, pumpkins, and skeletons vs. pornographers, pimps, and pedophiles? No contest
  • Elm Street’s Freddie ain’t got nothing on corporations transformed into “persons” — set free to pillage the ecosystem and co-opt our minds. 
  • And I’ll take Godzilla’s side over pesticide, genocide, and ecocide. 

Here’s one more 24/7 real-life nightmare far more dreadful than anything the Halloween-Industrial Complex can conjure up: When all those kids come knocking on your door, expecting brightly colored toxins called “candy,” you might wish to remind yourself that across the globe, an estimated 10,000 extra children are dying each month thanks to unnecessary lockdowns and restrictions. 

Cue the ominous music: 10,000 dead. Every single month. From preventable causes. Because most of the world bought into the Covid lies. The next time you’re at a sporting event or a concert (for the vaccinated-only, of course), take a good, slow look around you and get a feel for what 10,000 looks like. It’s a whole lot more terrifying than the whir of a chainsaw echoing down a desolate Texas highway. Remember: “We’re all in this together.”

You Don’t Have To Wait For Halloween To See Monsters, Because They Are Already All Around Us

By Michael Snyder

Source: End of the American Dream

A lot of Americans will dress up like monsters this Halloween, but there is no way that they could ever be as frightening as the actual monsters that walk our halls of power on a daily basis.  Some of the things that I am going to share with you in this article are deeply disturbing, but they need to be revealed because the people that have been doing these things need to be held accountable.  Real life horror movies play out in secret facilities all across America day after day, and much of the time the incredibly sick things that are being done to animals are being funded by our tax dollars.  But because the corporate media keeps very quiet about these “experiments”, most Americans never hear about what is really going on behind closed doors.

The good news is that some brave investigators are starting to pull back the veil and reveal the truth about the horrific animal abuse that is taking place.

Here is one example of what I am talking about…

“Our investigators show that Fauci’s NIH division shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive,” White Coat Waste told Changing America. “They also locked beagles alone in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies.”

How sick do you have to be to do something like that to innocent little puppies?

Dr. Anthony Fauci and the others that were involved in funding this research are monsters.

And it turns out that this wasn’t the first time that they funded this sort of “experimentation”.

Back in 2016, they spent more than 18 million dollars to torture beagles “for 22 months” before finally killing and dissecting them…

Fauci’s team had previously, in 2016, strapped the infectious sand flies to beagles at the NIAID lab in Bethesda, Maryland, allowing them to feed on the dogs for 22 months.

The White Coat Waste Project alleges that the dogs developed infectious legions before researchers killed and dissected them.

This procedure cost $18,430,917.

Fauci and everyone else involved in such “experiments” aren’t just criminals.

They are monsters in the worst sense of the word.

If you are sickened by what you have read already, you may want to stop, because there is more.

What Fauci and his minions did to 44 beagle puppies at a facility in Menlo Park, California has no place in a civilized society

Another procedure – which the NIH funded to the tune of $1.8m – saw 44 beagle puppies undergo a ‘cordectomy,’ which saw their vocal cords cut to stop them barking.

That experiment, which took place in Menlo Park, California, saw the dogs then pumped full of drugs, before being killed and dissected.

What would “justice” look like for crimes of this magnitude?

The next time someone in the corporate media tries to call Fauci a “hero”, it should make you want to vomit.

Of course Fauci and his minions have moved on from just experimenting on animals.

Today, innocent people all over the globe are the guinea pigs.

And it turns out that Fauci’s NIH is now publicly admitting to funding incredibly twisted research on “a bat coronavirus” at the Wuhan Insitute of Virology just before the pandemic hit…

White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins have declared under oath that they did not fund the dangerous gain-of-function virus research in China that now is believed be the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But now the NIH has admitted in a letter to the leading Republican on the House Oversight Committee that the U.S. funded an experiment at the Wuhan Insitute of Virology in which a bat coronavirus was modified, creating a virus that made mice “sicker” than the original virus.

We all know the rest of the story.

But after everything that has transpired, Fauci and his minions are still treated like heroes, and that is because we have a national love affair with evil.

If you doubt this, just consider the “holiday” that is coming up.  It is a festival of evil, darkness and death, and yet Americans will spend more than 1o billion dollars celebrating it this year…

The 2021 Halloween season is breaking the bank this year.

According to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey, Americans are expected to spend $10.14 billion this year on Halloween-related items. The price tag grew by $2 billion in comparison to last year’s numbers.

Unless you are already sold out to evil, why in the world would anyone want to celebrate such a “holiday”?

By now, pretty much everyone understands that our modern “Halloween” comes directly from a very wicked ancient pagan festival known as “Samhain”.

Over the years, many have told me that they just celebrate Halloween for some “innocent fun” and that the holiday doesn’t mean anything evil to them.

But what if you celebrated a Satanic black mass and put a bunch of “positive” labels on all of the various elements of that ritual?

Would that make it okay?

Of course not.

Giving evil an “alternative” name does not transform it into something good.

So stop pretending.

Fauci and his minions call the evil they are committing “scientific research”, and millions upon millions of Americans are willing to go along with their torture of animals “for the greater good”.

Of course “the greater good” is now being used to justify all sorts of nightmarish crimes against humanity.

We live at a time when the level of evil on this planet is reaching a great crescendo, and it is truly sickening to watch.

But when things are at their darkest, that is when light is needed the most, and so let us all endeavor to be the greatest lights to this world that we possibly can.

The Anonymous Executioners of the Corporate State

Imprisoning the David to Chevron’s Goliath is the latest outrage by a US judiciary now engineered to always favor the interests of capital.

by Chris Hedges

By Chris Hedges

Source: Mint Press News

Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.

Preska’s caustic outbursts — she said at the sentencing, “It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instill in him any respect for the law” — capped a judicial farce worthy of the antics of Vasiliy Vasilievich, the presiding judge at the major show trials of the Great Purges in the Soviet Union, and the Nazi judge Roland Freisler who once shouted at a defendant, “You really are a lousy piece of trash!”

Donziger, a graduate of Harvard Law School, has been fighting against polluting American oil companies for nearly three decades on behalf of indigenous communities and peasant farmers in Ecuador. His only “crime” was winning a $9.5 billion judgment in 2011 against Chevron for thousands of plaintiffs. The oil giant had bought Texaco oil company holdings in Ecuador, inheriting a lawsuit alleging it deliberately discharged 16 billion gallons of toxic waste from its oil sites into rivers, groundwater, and farmland. Since the verdict, Chevron has come after him, weaponizing litigation to destroy him economically, professionally, and personally.

The sentencing came a day after Donziger petitioned the court to consider an opinion by the United Nations human rights council that found his house arrest a violation of international human rights law. The U.N human rights council said his house arrest counted as detention under international law and it was therefore illegal for Judge Preska to demand an additional six months in jail. Amnesty International also called for Donziger’s immediate release.

Donziger and his lawyers have two weeks to appeal the judge’s order that Donziger be sent immediately to jail. Preska denied Donziger bail claiming he is a flight risk. If the Federal Court of Appeals turns down Donziger’s appeal he will go to jail for six months. The irony, not lost on Donziger and his lawyers, is that the higher court may overturn Preska’s ruling against him, but by the time that decision is made he will potentially have already spent six months in jail.

“What Judge Preska is trying to do is force me to serve the entirety of my sentence before the appellate court can rule,” Donziger told me by phone on Monday. “If the appellate court rules in my favor, I will still have served my sentence, although I am innocent in the eyes of the law.”

Donziger, his lawyers have pointed out, is the first person under U.S. law charged with a “B” misdemeanor to be placed on home confinement, prior to trial, with an ankle monitor. He is the first person charged with any misdemeanor to be held under home confinement for over two years. He is the first attorney ever to be charged with criminal contempt over a discovery dispute in a civil case where the attorney went into voluntary contempt to pursue an appeal. He is the first person to be prosecuted under Rule 42 (criminal contempt) by a private prosecutor with financial ties to the entity and industry that was a litigant in the underlying civil dispute that gave rise to the orders. He is the first person tried by a private prosecutor who had ex parte communications with the charging judge while that judge remained (and remains) unrecused on the criminal case.

“No lawyer in New York for my level of offense ever has served more than 90 days and that was in home confinement,” Donziger told the court. “I have now been in home confinement eight times that period of time. I have been disbarred without a hearing where I have been unable to present factual evidence; thus, I am unable to earn an income in my profession. I have no passport. I can’t travel; can’t do human rights work the normal way which I believe I am reasonably good at; can’t see my clients in Ecuador; can’t visit the affected communities to hear the latest news of cancer deaths or struggles to maintain life in face of constant exposure to oil pollution. In addition, and this is little known, Judge [Lewis A.] Kaplan has imposed millions and millions of dollars of fines and courts costs on me. [Kaplan is the judge for Chevron’s lawsuit against Donziger; Preska is his handpicked judge for the contempt charges.] He has ordered me to pay millions to Chevron to cover their legal fees in attacking me, and then he let Chevron go into my bank accounts and take all my life’s savings because I did not have the funds to cover these costs. Chevron still has a pending motion to order me to pay them an additional $32 [million] in legal fees. That’s where things stand today. I ask you humbly: might that be enough punishment already for a Class B misdemeanor?”

Judge Preska was unmoved.

“Mr. Donziger has spent the last seven years thumbing his nose at the U.S. judicial system,” Preska said at his sentencing hearing. “Now it’s time to pay the piper.”

The six-month sentence was the maximum the judge was allowed to impose; she ruled that his house arrest cannot be counted as part of his detention. From start to finish, this has been a burlesque. It is emblematic of a court system that has been turned over to lackies of corporate power, who use the veneer of jurisprudence, decorum, and civility to make a mockery of the rule of law.

When the law is neutered, judges become the enforcers of injustice. These corporate judges, who epitomize what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, now routinely make war on workers, civil liberties, unions, and environmental regulations.

Preska sent Jeremy Hammond to prison for a decade for hacking into the computers of a private security firm that works on behalf of the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, and corporations such as Dow Chemical. In 2011, Hammond released to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications some three million emails from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor. The sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking and the maximum Preska could impose under a plea agreement in the case. I sat through the Hammond trial. I watched Preska spew her bile and contempt at Hammond from the bench with the same vitriol she used to attack Donziger.

Preska is also infamous for her long judicial crusade to force New York public schools to provide tax-subsidized free space for evangelical churches based on blatantly illogical readings of the Constitution.

The persecution of Donziger fits a pattern familiar to millions of poor Americans who are coerced into accepting plea deals, many for crimes they did not commit, and sent to prison for decades. It fits the pattern of the judicial lynching and prolonged psychological torture of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. It fits the pattern of those denied habeas corpus and due process at Guantánamo Bay or in CIA black sites. It fits the pattern of those charged under terrorism laws, many held at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan, who cannot see the evidence used to indict them. It fits the pattern of the widespread use of Special Administrative Measures, known as SAMs, imposed to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media, and people outside the jail. It fits the pattern of the extreme sensory deprivation and prolonged isolation used on those in our black sites and prisons, a form of psychological torture, the refinement of torture as science. By the time a “terrorist” is dragged into our secretive courts the bewildered suspect no longer has the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves. If they can do this legally to the demonized they can, and one day will, do it to the rest of us. The Donziger case is an ominous warning that the American legal system is broken.

Ralph Nader, who graduated from Harvard Law School, has long decried the capture of the courts and law schools by corporate power, calling the nation’s attorneys and judges “lucrative cogs in the corporate wheel.” He notes that law school curriculums are “built around corporate law, and corporate power, and corporate perpetration, and corporate defense.”

Victor Klemperer, who was dismissed from his post as a professor of Romance languages at the University of Dresden in 1935 because of his Jewish ancestry, astutely noted how at first the Nazis “changed the values, the frequency of words, [and] made them into common property, words that had previously been used by individuals or tiny troupes. They confiscated words for the party, saturated words and phrases and sentence forms with their poison. They made language serve their terrible system. They conquered words and made them into their strongest advertising tools [Werebemittle], at once the most public and most secret.” And, Klemperer noted, as the redefinition of old concepts took place the public was oblivious.

This redefinition of words and concepts has, as Klemperer witnessed during the rise of fascism, allowed the courts to twist the law into an instrument of injustice, revoking our rights by judicial fiat. It has seen the courts permit unlimited dark money into political campaigns under Citizens United, defending our money-saturated elections as the right to petition the government and a form of free speech. The courts have revoked our right to privacy and legalized wholesale government surveillance in the name of national security. The courts grant corporations the rights of individuals, while rarely holding the individuals who run the corporations accountable for corporate crimes.

Very few of the legal rulings that benefit corporate power have popular support. The corporate disemboweling of the country, therefore, is increasingly given cover by Christian fascists, who energize their base around abortion, prayer in schools, guns and breaking down the separation of church and state. These issues are rarely addressed in cases before federal courts. But they distract the base from the slew of pro-corporate rulings that dominate most court dockets.

Corporations such as Tyson Foods, Purdue, Walmart, and Sam’s Warehouse have poured millions into institutions that indoctrinate these Christian fascists, including Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. They fund the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which campaigned for Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Barrett opposes abortion and belongs to People of Praise, a far-right Catholic cult that practices “speaking in tongues.” She and the other far-right ideologues are hostile to LGBTQ rights. But this is not why she is so beloved by corporations, who are not interested in abortion, LGBTQ equality or gun rights.

Barrett and the Christian fascists embrace an ideology that believes that God will take care of the righteous. Those who are poor, those who are sick, those who go to prison, those who are unemployed, those who cannot succeed in society do so because they have failed to please God. In this worldview there is no need for unions, universal health care, a social safety net or prison reform. Barrett has ruled consistently in favor of corporations to cheat gig workers out of overtime, green-light fossil fuel extraction and pollution and strip consumers of protection from corporate fraud. The watchdog group Accountable.US found that as a circuit court judge, Barrett “faced at least 55 cases in which citizens took on corporate entities in front of her court and 76% of the time she sided with the corporations.”

The Christian fascists, allied with organizations such as the Federalist Society, under the Trump administration gave lifetime appointments to nearly 200 judges, roughly 23 percent of all federal judgeships. That included 53 to the nation’s appellate courts, the court immediately under the Supreme Court. The American Bar Association, the country’s largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers, has rated many of these appointments as unqualified. There are currently six Federalist Society Supreme Court justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, who Nader calls “a corporation masquerading as a human being.” Two Federalist Society Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia, who was an original faculty advisor to the organization founded by conservative law students in 1982, were supported in the nomination process by Joe Biden.

The stacking of the courts with corporate puppets, however, began long before Trump. It was carried out by both Republican and Democratic administrations. Preska was appointed by Republican President G.W. Bush. However, the judge who preceded Preska in the Donziger case, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former lawyer for the tobacco industry who had undisclosed investments in funds with Chevron holdings, according to his public financial disclosure statement, was appointed by Democratic President Clinton.

The targeting of the courts was one of the key goals of Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer later elevated to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. In Powell’s 1971 memo to the Chamber of Commerce, a blueprint for the slow-motion corporate coup that has taken place, he called on business interests to pack the judiciary with corporate-friendly judges.

The courts in all tyrannies are dominated by mediocrities and buffoons. They make up for their intellectual and moral vacuity with a zealous subservience to power. They turn courtroom trials into opera buffa, at least until the victim is shackled and pushed out the door to a prison cell. They fulminate in caustic tirades at the condemned, whose sentence is never in doubt and whose guilt is never in question.

“It started when Texaco went into Ecuador in the Amazon in the 1960s and cut a sweetheart deal with the military government then ruling Ecuador,” Donziger told me for a column I wrote about his case a year ago. “Over the next 25 years, Texaco was the exclusive operator of a very large area of the Amazon that had several oil fields within this area, 1500 square miles. They drilled hundreds of wells. They created thousands of open-air, unlined toxic waste pits where they dumped the heavy metals and toxins that came up from the ground when they drilled. They ran pipes from the pits into rivers and streams that local people relied on for their drinking water, their fishing, and their sustenance. They poisoned this pristine ecosystem, in which lived five indigenous peoples, as well as a lot of other nonindigenous rural communities. There was a mass industrial poisoning.”

“The verdict came down, about $18 billion in favor of the affected communities, which is what it would take at a minimum to clean up the actual damage and compensate the people for some of their injuries,” Donziger told me. “That eventually got reduced on appeal in Ecuador to $9.5 billion, but it was affirmed by three appellate courts, including the highest court of Ecuador. It was affirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court, where the Ecuadorians went to enforce their judgment in a unanimous opinion in 2015.”

Chevron promptly sold its assets and left Ecuador. It refused to pay the fees to clean up its environmental damage. It invested an estimated $2 million to destroy Danziger. Chevron sued him, using a civil courts portion of the federal law famous for breaking the New York Mafia in the 1970s, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO Act. Chevron, which has more than $260 billion in assets, hired an estimated 2,000 lawyers from 60 law firms to carry out its campaign, according to court documents. But the oil giant, which did not want a jury to hear the case, dropped its demand for financial damages, which would have allowed Donziger to request a jury trial. This allowed Judge Kaplan to decide the RICO case against Donziger alone. He found credible a witness named Alberto Guerra, an Ecuadorian judge, relocated to the US by Chevron at a cost of some $2 million, who claimed the verdict in Ecuador was the product of a bribe. Kaplan used Guerra’s testimony as primary evidence for the racketeering charge, although Guerra, a former judge, later admitted to an international tribunal that he had falsified his testimony.

John Keker of San Francisco, one of Donziger’s lawyers on that case, said he was up against 160 lawyers for Chevron and during the trial he felt “like a goat tethered to a stake.” He called the court proceedings under Kaplan “a Dickensian farce” and a “show trial.”

In the end, Kaplan ruled that the judgment in the Ecuadorean court against Chevron was the result of fraud. He also ordered Donziger to turn over decades of all client communication to Chevron, in effect eradicating attorney-client privilege, a backbone of the Anglo-American legal system with roots dating to ancient Rome. Donziger appealed what was, according to legal experts following the case, an unprecedented and illegal order. While Donziger’s appeal was pending, Kaplan charged him with misdemeanor criminal contempt for this principled stance — carrying a maximum sentence of six months — as well as his refusal to turn over his passport, his personal electronics and to refrain from seeking the collection of the original award against Chevron. When the U.S. attorney’s office declined for five years to prosecute his criminal contempt charges against the environmental lawyer, Kaplan, using an exceedingly rare judicial maneuver, appointed the private law firm of Seward & Kissel, to act in the name of the government to prosecute Donziger. Neither the judge nor the law firm disclosed that Chevron has been a client of Seward & Kissel.

Kaplan also violated the established random case assignment protocol to personally assign Preska, who had served on an advisory board of the Federalist Society, a group to which Chevron has been a lavish donor, to hear the case. Kaplan had Preska demand Donziger post an $800,000 bond on the misdemeanor charge. Preska placed him under house arrest and confiscated his passport, which he has used to meet with attorneys around the world attempting to enforce the judgment against Chevron. Kaplan managed to have Donziger disbarred. He allowed Chevron to freeze Donziger’s bank accounts, slapped Donziger with millions in fines without allowing him a jury, forced him to wear an ankle monitor 24 hours a day and effectively shut down his ability to earn a living. Kaplan allowed Chevron to impose a lien on Donziger’s apartment in Manhattan where he lives with his wife and teenage son.

None of this would surprise those targeted by the tyrannies of the past. What would be surprising, perhaps, to many Americans is how advanced our own corporate tyranny has become. Donziger never stood a chance. Neither does Julian Assange. These judges are not, in the end, focused on Donziger or Assange, but on us. The show trials they preside over are meant to be transparently biased. They are designed to send a message. All who defy corporate power and the national security state will be lynched. There will be no reprieve because there is no justice.

Examining the Methods and Means of COVID Propaganda Dissemination

By Gary Weglarz

Source: Global Research

It is useful to identify and examine the many facets and the all encompassing nature of American/Western propaganda systems in our efforts to better understand why so many people have great difficulty in sorting truth from fiction regarding the “covid pandemic” narratives.  The following outline and commentary are an effort to more clearly identify the ubiquitous nature of Western covid propaganda in order to better understand its impacts on the public mind.

One method of propaganda dissemination during the promotion of the covid narratives has been major medical journals printing false covid related disinformation posing as “science.”  Early in the propaganda operation both The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine had to retract fraudulent articles dismissing the efficacy and falsely inflating the danger of using hydroxychloroquine in treatment of covid patients. (1). MSM widely promoted the fraudulent claims, but of course expressed no interest in their subsequent retractions.

That two of the world’s most widely esteemed medical journals were both guilty of publishing what were essentially disinformation pieces rife with conflicts of interest and essentially constituting what MSM calls “fake news” shines a bright light on the corruption of objective science which has now been captured by powerful monied pharmaceutical and commercial interests.

Print and web based legacy media such as the NYT, WAPO, Guardian, BBC, etc. have all been engaged in credulous daily promotion of the “official” covid narratives. They have done so while refusing to publish counter-narratives even by world renowned scientific experts, and while shaming, demeaning, and ridiculing any who question the “official science” of the CDC and WHO.

The official covid narratives are also promoted daily on all mainstream television news outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, FOX, PBS, BBC, etc. as well as on their web-based presence on platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Adding to the seamless nature of public exposure to the official covid propaganda narratives are their constant presence in mainstream print (and web based) specialty and/or alternative media such as  Daily Beast, Politico, TYT, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, National Geographic, Scientific American. (2)

The radio airways provide yet another means for our ingestion of the endless daily repetition of the official covid propaganda narratives.  These include of course all MSM radio affiliates, ubiquitous talk radio, and of course NPR. (3)

As if one has not been subject to enough official covid propaganda by bedtime, the late night comedians continue the daily onslaught often during their monologues.  A standard format in this aspect of propaganda promotion is that one must have properly ingested one’s daily dose of covid propaganda in order to “get the joke” and thus be able to identify with one’s favorite comedian.  Covid propaganda is simply the background “wallpaper” on the shows of the “hip” late night comedians such as Trevor Noah, Steven Colbert, John Oliver, etc.  

However, propaganda as “humor” sometimes moves beyond simple recitation of official narratives and the shaming of the unvaccinated.  In some cases it engages in the more sinister openly proclaimed dehumanization of the unvaccinated as “other” to be shunned, scorned and even denied medical care as evidenced by the recent monologue comments of late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel. (4)

Sports reporting both web and radio based also act as outlets for official covid narratives, including the shaming of those who question such narratives and/or who refuse to be vaccinated.  This is true of sports pundits for a variety of outlets.  Youtube based sports pundit Rich Eisen recently used his platform to confront Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors basketball team because Green dared to defend the right of one of his team-mates Andrew Wiggins to exercise his freedom to make his own decision on rejecting a vaccine.  Wiggins has since succumbed to pressure and accepted the vaccine. (5)  

Escaping the pernicious presence of the official covid narratives is virtually impossible unless one simply swears off all contact with the major forms of Western media. 

Censorship & Demonization of Dissenting Voices 

To insure proper absorption of the official propaganda narratives a regime of outright censorship has become normalized.  This includes the removal of specific  examples of “offending” material from web based platforms like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, etc. This sort of open censorship, of even expert scientific opinion, has become part of the so called “new normal.”  Offenders are often put on notice that further such violations of “community standards” for example, will lead to further sanctions.

Youtube interviews with world renowned scientists have been demonetized and/or  removed due to such scientists simply sharing their own scientific opinion.  This is done should that expert opinion differ from the “official narrative” according to the censors employed by Tech platforms. One of the co-inventors of the mRNA vaccine technology Dr. Robert Malone experienced such censorship several months ago. (6)  Three days after being censored and removed from Youtube for expressing his concerns about the safety of vaccines delivered by technology he helped create, Wikipedia suddenly rewrote Dr. Malone’s biography in the process hiding his contribution to the creation of mRNA technology. (7).  One can be forgiven for wondering if this was done by Wikipedia in a nod to Orwell’s 1984 “Party” maxim – “Ignorance is Strength.”

Complete de-platforming on web based social media of well respected voices is also now becoming normative.  A recent example is the complete removal from Youtube of the site of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s Children’s Health Defense and Dr. Mercola’s medical site, along with others who challenge the official covid narratives. (8).  Similar removal/de-platforming of medical professionals and scientists on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other web based media have also occurred.  

Another area of web based censorship is the removal of user generated Facebook groups created by those wishing to share their negative post-vaccination reactions with others given the silence and lack of support from within the medical community itself for such individuals. (9).  Multiple such user groups have been banned from Facebook for simply providing a forum for users to share their own personal experiences.

The impact of such overt censorship has been to put all who post material and opinions on platforms like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter to consciously engage in self-censorship in order to not risk being de-platformed.  News and analysis sites like Jimmy Dore, Dark Horse Podcast, Joe Rogan, and many others now openly discuss avoiding using or discussing certain words, phrases, or topics related to the official covid narratives that might lead to “warnings” or de-platforming.  Self censorship has become yet another aspect of our new normal.  

An invisible and too seldom discussed stealth method of the censorship of any of us who are questioning the official covid narratives is the Big Tech use of internet search algorithms designed to suppress or completely hide the existence of the material challenging official narratives.  I find my own Google searches for topics such as “covid vaccine adverse reactions” end up providing endless pages of material  simply censoring out and/or debunking the very idea that such adverse events could be anything but “fake news.” 

I have found that the suppression of any articles questioning the official narratives that isn’t presented as “fake news” is almost virtually complete in my own Google searches.  This means one must know before one searches the actual name of the post you are looking for or of the name of an alternative independent media site like Global Research or OffGuardian, because it appears that Google will now routinely use its algorithms to do everything in its power to avoid taking you to anything but articles and sites supporting the official narratives.

We now live in a world in which MSM outlets across all platforms routinely refuse to publish general articles, opinion pieces, video interviews, or even reference peer reviewed scientific journal articles by world renowned scientists if that material diverges from the official CDC/WHO opinion and stated policy.  One cannot help but note the rather seamless nature of this entire propaganda operation.  It is indeed impressive from a prospective of totalitarian narrative control. 

However, even this massive ability to dominate narrative construction and dissemination appears not to be sufficient in the opinion of those at the helm of the oligarch controlled structures of media power.  Thus independent popular media platforms are subject to what appear to be well orchestrated and coordinated attacks from MSM outlets should they report material that questions or in any way challenges MSM covid reporting. 

A recent example of such attacks was the MSM wide disinformation campaign aimed at popular Youtube personality Joe Rogan who self-reported his own positive Ivermectin experience in treating his covid.  His use of Ivermectin was not only widely panned and demeaned across MSM, but was also routinely intentionally and deceitfully distorted to suggest he had used the “animal version” of the drug scornfully referred to in MSM reports as a “horse dewormer.”  This disinformation was widely disseminated even though Rogan had clearly stated he received the Ivermectin prescription from his own doctor. (10).  

Such MSM attacks are designed to intimidate and although they likely did no significant damage to someone with Rogan’s large audience base, they may certainly cause others in independent media who have smaller audiences to hesitate to share their own similar experiences for fear of such negative repercussions. 

Such attacks by MSM, and censorship by Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, are now normative even when reporting the results of peer reviewed scientific journal articles that suggest possible efficacy of Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine in covid treatment.  Clearly it is not “the science” that MSM is protecting with such attacks, but the official propaganda narrative.

Medical professional organizations, medical licensing boards, hospitals and related entities are now literally threatening doctors with loss of hospital privileges and/or license to practice for simply having and sharing a medical opinion that diverges from the official narratives. (11)

Newsweek reported “a joint statement issued by the American Board of Internal Medicine, the American Board of Family Medicine and the American Board of Pediatrics” pointed out quite clearly exactly what type of “medical opinion” by a practicing physician might endanger his/her license to practice.  “The evidence that we have safe, effective and widely available vaccines against COVID-19 is overwhelming. We are particularly concerned about physicians who use their authority to denigrate vaccination at a time when vaccines continue to demonstrate excellent effectiveness against severe illness, hospitalization and death.” (11)

The need for such an overt threat from these higher levels of the medical establishment makes clear that at least some physicians retain both independence of thought and the moral integrity required to form their own opinion.  However, the issuance of such a ham-handed threat based upon clearly unscientific and unsupported reassurances of “vaccine safety” suggests that these higher echelons of the medical establishment in the United States are now captive to monied interests, thus completely undermining the integrity of American medical practice.

My own medical care is through a large southern California university based consortium.  I recently asked my physician if she would prescribe a prophylactic dose of Ivermectin that I could keep on hand should I begin to develop covid symptoms.  She explained she was not allowed to do so, but that she would forward my request to the consortium’s “infectious disease specialist” who promptly responded that my doctor could not in fact prescribe Ivermectin for me because “the reliable evidence available does not support the use of Ivermectin for treatment or prevention of COVID-19.”  My own research into the available information on Ivermectin suggests this contention is clearly not accurate, but there is of course no recourse to challenge this institutional policy.

I cannot help but reflect on the irony that this same medical practice can and does continue to prescribe statin medications for their patients in spite of the now massive scientific research indicating that “the reliable evidence does not support” statin use for a large percentage of those who will continue to be put on statins, in spite of the many known dangerous side-effects.

Although I have great respect for my own primary care physician, she is literally not allowed to practice medicine independently in treating covid, but must instead seek permission to simply prescribe a globally used medication known to be safe that has clearly shown great efficacy around the world in covid treatment.  Instead the official opinion of the higher-ups controlling my physician’s medical practice appears to be “If you get sick enough show up at the ER, but otherwise we refuse to treat you.” Needless to say even while refusing to issue an Ivermectin script, I continue to receive regular email notices from my medical consortium reminding me to “schedule my covid vaccination.” 

Many doctors are now expressly forbidden from publicly discussing or reporting vaccine adverse reactions, and are forbidden to use their professional expertise in order to treat their own patients should that entail prescribing officially “demonized” medications such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.  Why Do So Many Believe the Official COVID Narratives?

Clearly we have never seen such draconian attempts at controlling the treatment options available to physicians and thus to their patients.  Nor have we seen the professional opinions of highly respected front-line acute-care medical providers who actually “treat” covid on a daily basis overtly demeaned in MSM.  Bedside acute-care physicians are thus being thwarted using overt threats to their licensure in order to enforce such “new normal” Orwellian control. 

Meanwhile, the demonization of the unvaccinated in MSM using these widely varied methods of propaganda dissemination is now ubiquitous.  There are now two relatively new categories of “human beings” inhabiting planet earth – the righteous and obedient “vaccinated” and the unclean, unworthy and dangerous “unvaccinated.”  This represent the latest in oligarchy’s endless efforts at “divide and conquer.”   

Clearly much appears to be at stake in the opinion of said global oligarchy.  The uber-wealthy and their public representatives seem to be pushing all of their chips to the center of the table as they place massive bets on this covid propaganda campaign.  Those bets are wagered against the credibility of what now amounts to almost all Western institutions.  Given the completely fatuous nature of the official covid narratives one can assume a significant level of desperation must exist among our global elites.  They appear to be dedicated to finding some means, any means, that might allow them to maintain their own power and control in the world.  A world in which a literal “house of cards” global economy, combined with ever greater ecosystem degradation and dis-regulation, is able less and less to ensure their continued future dominance.

Manipulation of Data and Definitions to Support the Propaganda Narratives 

One cannot help but notice the importance of language in any propaganda operation.  Words have meaning, as do those sets of words we call “definitions.”  What are we to make of the WHO changing the definition of “herd immunity” so that herd immunity is no longer achieved through a population being exposed to a pathogen and developing a protective immune response, but rather is now to be understood in terms of “vaccines?”(12) 

The new WHO definition reads: “herd immunity,’ also known as ‘population immunity,’ is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.” (12)  Since when has this EVER been the definition of herd immunity?  Answer, since the WHO changed the definition during the covid propaganda operation. 

In a public presentation the WHO director general explained this Orwellian decision to change the definition using suitably Orwellian double-speak: “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic.  It is scientifically and ethically problematic.” (12)  

Of course the simple unassailable “reality” here on planet earth is that we have as a species ALWAYS relied historically over endless millennia on the development of herd immunity by surviving whatever pathogen we were collectively exposed to.  It is only at this very moment in time, in the midst of the covid propaganda operation, that it has ever been necessary to “deny” that rather elementary fact of our collective human history.  

Additional examples of changing an official institutionally based definition to support the covid propaganda narratives is the CDC changing its definition of both “immunity” and “vaccine.” (13)

A final example on altering definitions and of data manipulation is the WHO changing how the actual cause of death on death certificates is reported, done clearly in order to inflate covid deaths thus promoting the official “pandemic” narrative. (14) (15). These changes smack of a Three-Stooges level of slapstick absurdity when it comes to simple common sense.  Under the new rules one could have essentially been perfectly healthy one moment, but had just been exposed by proximity to someone with a covid infection the next, or given a false-positive PCR at 45 cycles, and then immediately struck by a bolt of lightening and killed.  Then, by the new definitions, while in defiance of all common sense, the coroner would be given enough wiggle room so that he could still make a case for “death by covid” on one’s death certificate. (16)  “Orwellian” doesn’t quite do justice to this level of unscientific absurdity.

Manipulation of what constitutes a covid ‘case’ has been an essential propaganda tool in creating the “impression” of a pandemic. The pandemic hysteria itself is based more than anything upon fraudulent “false positives” obtained with the PCR test.  MSM quickly shifted early in the propaganda rollout from concern about supposed covid deaths, to focusing more on such false-positive “cases” which they dishonestly portrayed as actual illness. These daily touted “cases” appear to be primarily people registering a false positive on a PCR test given at a grossly inflated and therefore meaningless 35-45 cycles.  

Massive numbers of such false positive or “asymptomatic cases” were thus created out of thin air.  Voila!  Instant proof of a pandemic.  Most of these supposed “cases” were admittedly “asymptomatic,” but not because they had a mild version of the illness. They were most likely asymptomatic because they were not sick at all.  Thus the pandemic narrative has been fueled by simply defining “well people” as “sick people” based upon a known fraudulent testing regime. (17)

How do we know the use of PCR testing at 35-45 cycles was known by authorities to be fraudulent?  Because now that the vaccine program has been rolled out the vaccinated are only given PCR tests at a reasonable 28 cycles, while the unvaccinated continue to be subjected to the fraudulent 35-45 cycle PCR testing. (18). This of course deceptively insures that the unvaccinated continue to generate completely asymptomatic false positives, and can then be made to appear to be driving the spread of the illness.  

Meanwhile the vaccinated are much less likely to test positive given their testing is now, indefensible by any scientific measure, conducted at the lower 28 cycle threshold when compared to the unvaccinated conducted at 35-45 cycles.  The MSM promotion of the “trust the science” phrase has become simply a new addition to Orwellian “double-speak.”  To the Party slogans from Orwell’s book 1984, “War is Peace,” “Love is Hate,” and “Ignorance is Strength,” we can now officially add “Trust The Science.”

Covid death numbers have been even further inflated by the use of false positive PCR tests to label patients who are already terminally ill from other diseases (i.e. cancer, COPD, renal failure, etc) as “covid deaths” in official reporting because they died within 28 days of a meaningless fake ‘false positive’ PCR test.  Even in the complete absence of covid symptoms a hospice patient dying from another illness can be called a “covid” death in official data collection. (19)

Further distortion and manipulation of data in support of the official narratives involves not counting someone as “vaccinated” until 14 days after the “second dose” in two dose vaccines.  Thus someone who dies after the first dose, or within 14 days of the second dose, is “defined” as “unvaccinated” and can be counted fraudulently in that category. (20). This of course further promotes the narrative that it is mainly the “unvaccinated” who are being hospitalized and are dying.  One is hard pressed to imagine a more blatantly corrupt and amoral “public health policy.”  This is a policy which is designed of course to minimize the association between the vaccines and post-vaccination deaths, while simultaneously blaming the unvaccinated as being those who are hospitalized and dying. 

The weekly updated VAERS data from the CDC clearly shows massive numbers of both serious adverse vaccine reactions and deaths though it is known to vastly undercount such events.  However this highly concerning VAERS data is being silently ignored by the CDC itself, the MSM, the political class, and most of the medical establishment. (21). Meanwhile a consistent propaganda theme is one of omission in which the MSM either completely fails to report on such obviously important health data, or dismisses the idea that the VAERS reports themselves justify any further scrutiny.

A party interested in truth rather than in promoting propaganda would surely ask where autopsies are for those who died unexpectedly in close proximity to vaccination.  The MSM in support of the official narrative simply of course never poses such a logical straight forward question, as it would unravel the entire charade.  Clearly if the CDC does not “look for” possible links between vaccinations and unexpected deaths it will certainly be guaranteed “not to find them.”  

One is reminded how NIST proclaimed there were no explosives involved in the demolition of the three World Trade Center buildings, only to have to admit that they NEVER LOOKED for any evidence of explosives.  The CDC is taking the same tack in simply refusing to do autopsies on the many thousands who have died post-vaccination while the MSM pretends any discussion of such deaths is “fake news” by “conspiracy theorists” and “anti-vaxxers.”

Another rather telling mode of propaganda promotion is the complete fabrication out of thin air of “news” that supports the covid narrative. This involves the subsequent spreading of such fabricated stories throughout MSM, and even failing to retract them once they are proven completely false. A recent such fabricated article in the magazine Rolling Stone that was widely repeated throughout MSM is a case in point. (22).  The story was that ERs in Oklahoma were overrun with people over-dosed on the livestock version of Ivermectin, thus denying even gunshot wound victims access to emergency care.  The story was shown to be a complete fabrication.  It was an obvious disinformation piece, yet was credulously repeated throughout MSM.  

This episode in blatant “fake news” propaganda, since it supported the official narratives demonizing Ivermectin, of course aroused no noticeable concern among those who proclaim to find such fake news unacceptable. The MSM pundits and the big tech platforms supposedly devoted to censoring “fake news,” appeared to have no problem with this blatantly fabricated disinformation piece posing as news.  Clearly fake news in support of the propaganda operation is simply standard operating procedure.  Another example of “the new normal.”  

Invisible Psychological Operations 

In a previous article I discussed the implications of Terror Management Theory (TMT) in promoting and assisting the public’s unconscious acceptance of the official covid propaganda. (23)  I continue to think that TMT offers an important window into understanding how the manipulation of our natural fears of death makes us more vulnerable to being propagandized.  It does so by over-riding one’s normal ability to think critically and rationally when such death fears are being repeatedly triggered day after day. 

Reminders of death and our mortality, delivered both consciously and unconsciously, have shown in hundreds of TMT experiments to increase unconscious support for, and greater compliance with, our underlying cultural norms.  This drives the population toward an unconscious position of becoming more trusting of institutional authorities, causing people to engage in more compliant behavior with the dictates of such authorities.

When recalling the initial propaganda images out of China depicting people standing in public places who suddenly simply fell over dead I am reminded of the astute observation made by Daniel Boorstin in his 1962 book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.”  As Boorstin explained, “Strictly speaking, there is no way to unmask an image.  An image, like any other psuedo-event, becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it.”

Are those being propagandized more likely to believe the images they see with their own eyes?  Or to believe those of us who are trying to “unmask” and “debunk” those images?  The power of such covid propaganda images should not be underestimated, in part because they seamlessly trigger the TMT “death fears” that so effectively short-circuit our ability to think clearly and critically.  Images of people falling over dead, images of piles of bodies, images of hospitals over-run, images of the faceless masked, are immensely powerful propaganda tools because of their deep psychological impacts often experienced not only consciously, but also at quite unconscious levels. 

Lastly, and perhaps the most frightening aspect of these psychological propaganda operations comes from large segments of the population being vulnerable to the covert behavioral modification techniques associated with simply “being connected” in our modern web-based world.  Professor Shoshana Zuboff provides a very detailed and chilling examination of the operant/instrumental conditioning techniques now routinely used by what she terms “surveillance capitalism” in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power” (24)  

Professor Zuboff painstakingly outlines the almost unimaginable extent to which big tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are surreptitiously capturing (“rendering” as Zuboff calls it) vast amounts of our personal data from literally all electronic web based devices.  However, it is not the loss of privacy that is of greatest concern in her analysis.  Rather, it is the ever increasing ability of big tech companies to compile, aggregate and with ever more powerful AI tools to utilize that data in order to shape and change our behavior through means that are literally beyond our own conscious awareness.  

Behavioral change is accomplished utilizing these ever more powerful AI tools in conjunction with continuously analyzing the behaviors and responses of billions of people across the globe. It is the ability to analyze personal opinions, then provide a new psychological “reward” or “punishment,” and then again measure those opinions, over and over with ever more powerful tools, in close to real-time, that poses the most dangerous threat to our ability to resist propaganda.  This level of “shaping” and “manipulating” the public mind both for the profit of corporations which Zuboff refers to as surveillance capitalism, and in service to the hidden agendas of the State intelligence apparatus, is not part of some future sci-fi world, but is an invisible aspect of our current reality, whether we are aware of that reality or not.

Already surveillance capitalism has shown the ability to surreptitiously modify and shape human thinking and behavior in marketable ways in pursuit of profit.  These operations are being conducted by the same big tech companies Edward Snowden outed almost a decade ago for their deep cooperation with and connections to the Western intelligence apparatus.  These were intelligence agencies engaged in propaganda operations aimed at Western citizenry. (25)  Much has changed in the world since Snowden shed light on these operations, including the development of ever more powerful AI based programs that capture our personal data, monitor our behavior, AND then shape our behavior beyond our human awareness. 

Zuboff’s book, Snowden’s revelations, and the implications of that convergence deserve a much more thorough detailing and discussion in the future.  However, I will for today end with what I feel is perhaps the most insidious aspect of what is implied through this coalescence of unseen forces.  Which is that we can be both surreptitiously monitored, and our thinking and behavior shaped, in what increasingly approaches close to real-time fashion.  Connected to the ubiquitous “web,” our thoughts and behaviors are no longer our own.  They can be, and are being, manipulated and modified outside of the realm of our conscious awareness.  This is not being done to meet our needs, but rather to meet the agendas of those who comprise a new class of “surveillance capitalists” who work in conjunction with the massive power of the Western intelligence gathering services.

In spite of all the wide-ranging aspects of the covid propaganda promotion I detailed earlier, I don’t think any of them alone or in combination hold as much potential to control and shape public consciousness as the ever more powerful tools of surveillance capitalism combined with the means and methods of the intelligence services.  

It is inconceivable to me that these tools are somehow not in continuous use 24/7, monitoring real-time public responses on web platforms and social media, to our searches, to what we read, to what we share with others, to our comments, spanning everything from new lockdown measures in a particular city, to the loosening of restrictions somewhere else, from responses to various forms of vaccination mandates in one part of the country compared to another, etc. 

No doubt there is consistent monitoring and evaluation examining which AI based interventions are most effective in “tuning, herding, nudging and shaping” (24) our perceptions and behaviors toward the propaganda ends of the oligarchic system of control.   For a very simple unsophisticated example it is child’s play for Facebook using the tools already at its disposal to insure you see nothing but posts from your Facebook “friends” who have gotten the vaccine, and no material from anyone who refused it.  This can be done in an effort to shape your behavior toward the desired end of you “making your own decision” to eventually do what you are being manipulated to do, to get the vaccine.  Why wouldn’t you submit to the vaccine since literally “all of your ‘friends’ are doing so” and since not doing so will put you in the cognitively uncomfortable position of now being in a publicly demonized “out group.”

I fear however that Zuboff’s and Snowden’s revelations portend something much darker and more sinister than my simple and rather obvious example touches upon.  A world in which much of humanity is manipulated, shaped, and controlled in both thought and behavior 24/7 without conscious awareness that this is happening.  Our thoughts someone else’s, but experienced as our own.  We don’t really need more information or another whistleblower like Edward Snowden to know where we stand.  What we do need is a much deeper familiarity and understanding of these hidden tools and processes in order to unmask them, publicize them, and resist their ever growing impacts.

*

Gary Weglarz retired in 2014 from practice as a clinical social worker.  He worked with, and learned from, Alaskan Native peoples who were attempting to heal the damage inflicted by the collective ongoing intergenerational trauma of colonization.  Currently he is engaged in research and writing regarding the relationship between past mass trauma in Western societies, and the subsequent colonial violence that has characterized the behavior of Europe and her colonies. He was actively involved in Central American solidarity efforts throughout the 1990’s, traveling with human rights delegations to Nicaragua, El Salvador and Colombia. 

Notes

(1) https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giuseppe-Calcaterra/publication/343379182_An_expression_of_concern_on_research_misconduct_during_the_corona_virus_disease-2019_pandemic/links/5f7037c492851c14bc9a53e5/An-expression-of-concern-on-research-misconduct-during-the-corona-virus-disease-2019-pandemic.pdf

(2) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/breakthrough-infections-do-not-mean-covid-vaccines-are-failing/

(3) https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/

 (4) https://nypost.com/2021/09/08/jimmy-kimmel-says-unvaxxed-americans-dont-deserve-icu-beds/

(5) https://www.nbcsports.com/video/rich-eisen-warriors-draymond-green-wrong-about-covid-19-comments

(6) https://www.yahoo.com/now/single-most-qualified-mrna-expert-173600060.html

(7) https://thebl.com/us-news/wikipedia-censors-real-inventor-of-mrna-technology-over-vaccine-warnings.html

(8) https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2021/09/29/youtube-is-banning-prominent-anti-vaccine-activists-and-blocking-all-anti-vaccine-content/

(9) https://twitter.com/peterrowen_/status/1376798789097377792?lang=en

(10) https://www.yahoo.com/now/joe-rogan-considers-suing-cnn-190606533.html

(11) https://www.newsweek.com/medical-boards-threaten-doctors-spreading-covid-misinformation-decertification-1629157

(12) https://www.abc10.com/article/news/verify/verify-changes-who-definition-herd-immunity-not-secret/507-f90c0199-c88e-4c66-8313-b4ae6e2a72ad

(13) https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article254111268.html

(14) https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/02/counting-covids-deceptive-deaths/

(15) https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/Guidelines_Cause_of_Death_COVID-19.pdf

(16) https://cbs12.com/news/local/man-who-died-in-motorcycle-crash-counted-as-covid-19-death-in-florida-report

https://www.globalresearch.ca/anyone-any-disease-alberta-counted-covid-case/5757739

(17) https://off-guardian.org/2021/08/03/repeat-after-me-the-pcr-tests-dont-work/

(18) https://off-guardian.org/2020/12/18/who-finally-admits-pcr-tests-create-false-positives/

(19) https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/questions-over-the-accuracy-of-how-the-state-tracks-covid-deaths/283-0b1b7b6c-695e-4313-92cf-a4cfd7510721

(20) https://www.globalresearch.ca/cdc-allows-hospitals-classify-dead-vaxxed-people-unvaccinated/5757502

(21) https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/vaers-cdc-deaths-injuries-covid-vaccines/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=9470f062-0cf2-4251-ae09-99ed0c9dbe0d

(22) https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/rolling-stones-botched-ivermectin-story-raises-questions-about-the-nature-of-misinformation/

(23) https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-do-so-many-believe-official-covid-narratives/5752602

(24) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For A Human Future At The New Frontier Of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019.

(25) https://theintercept.com/collections/snowden-archive/