Denmark To Scrap All Covid-19 Restrictions on Sep 1st, 2021

 Good news on the Covid front, at last!

 

Denmark will on September 10th stop classifying Covid-19 as an "illness which is a critical threat to society", meaning all remaining special pandemic restrictions will expire, The Local reported. In a press release issued on Friday morning, the country’s health minister Magnus Heunicke said that the high level of vaccination in Denmark, particularly among the vulnerable, had radically altered the risks posed by the virus.

“The epidemic is under control, we have record high vaccination rates,” he said in a statement. “As a result, on September 10th, we can drop some of the special rules we have had to introduce in the fight against Covid-19.”

September 10th marks the expiry date for that the executive order classifying Covid-19 as a “socially critical illness”, which was passed by the Danish parliament’s Epidemic Committee on March 10th last year. 

The parties in the centre-right blue bloc, led by the Liberal Party, have already said that they believe that Covid-19 should no longer be classed as a serious threat to society, and the health ministry’s announcement came less than an hour before the ruling Social Democrats were due to discuss the issue with the other parties in the Epidemic Committee. 

“When it sinks in for the Social Democrat government that they are in a minority, they then come up with better ideas just 45 minutes before the meeting in the Epidemic Committee is starting,” said Sophie Løhde, a member of the committee for the Liberal Party. 

A number of restrictions are set to lapse on September 1st, notably the requirement to show a valid coronapas to sit in restaurants and bars, and the ban on discos and nightclubs.  

Friday’s announcement means that just ten days after nightclubs reopen on September 1st, visitors will no longer have to show a coronapas, and it also means that from September 10th, those going to watch a Superliga football match or attend an outdoor event with more than 2,000 people, will no longer need a coronapas. 

The change in the classification of Covid-19 will not, however, affect rules on travel into Denmark, which are governed by a separate inter-party agreement which is due to expire in October, a spokesperson for the health ministry said.

The All-Seeing "i": Apple Just Declared War On Your Privacy

 What could go wrong with your I-phone reporting its content to the authorities? It's just the usual "pedophiles" for now but isn't it how it starts EVERY single time? Then the Neo-nazies, terrorists, dangerous extremists, Covid deniers...

Almost two years from entering the treacherous waters of the fourth turning, can you hear the roar of the waterfall ahead? Not yet? 

  

Authored by Edward Snowden via Continuing Ed,

By now you've probably heard that Apple plans to push a new and uniquely intrusive surveillance system out to many of the more than one billion iPhones it has sold, which all run the behemoth's proprietary, take-it-or-leave-it software. This new offensive is tentatively slated to begin with the launch of iOS 15⁠—almost certainly in mid-September⁠—with the devices of its US user-base designated as the initial targets. We’re told that other countries will be spared, but not for long.

You might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned which problem it is that Apple is purporting to solve. Why? Because it doesn’t matter.

Having read thousands upon thousands of remarks on this growing scandal, it has become clear to me that many understand it doesn't matter, but few if any have been willing to actually say it. Speaking candidly, if that’s still allowed, that’s the way it always goes when someone of institutional significance launches a campaign to defend an indefensible intrusion into our private spaces. They make a mad dash to the supposed high ground, from which they speak in low, solemn tones about their moral mission before fervently invoking the dread spectre of the Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse, warning that only a dubious amulet—or suspicious software update—can save us from the most threatening members of our species.

Suddenly, everybody with a principled objection is forced to preface their concern with apologetic throat-clearing and the establishment of bonafides: I lost a friend when the towers came down, however... As a parent, I understand this is a real problem, but...

As a parent, I’m here to tell you that sometimes it doesn’t matter why the man in the handsome suit is doing something. What matters are the consequences.

Apple’s new system, regardless of how anyone tries to justify it, will permanently redefine what belongs to you, and what belongs to them.

How?

The task Apple intends its new surveillance system to perform—preventing their cloud systems from being used to store digital contraband, in this case unlawful images uploaded by their customers—is traditionally performed by searching their systems. While it’s still problematic for anybody to search through a billion people’s private files, the fact that they can only see the files you gave them is a crucial limitation.

Now, however, that’s all set to change. Under the new design, your phone will now perform these searches on Apple’s behalf before your photos have even reached their iCloud servers, and—yada, yada, yada—if enough "forbidden content" is discovered, law-enforcement will be notified.

I intentionally wave away the technical and procedural details of Apple’s system here, some of which are quite clever, because they, like our man in the handsome suit, merely distract from the most pressing fact—the fact that, in just a few weeks, Apple plans to erase the boundary dividing which devices work for you, and which devices work for them.

Why is this so important? Once the precedent has been set that it is fit and proper for even a "pro-privacy" company like Apple to make products that betray their users and owners, Apple itself will lose all control over how that precedent is applied. ​​​​​​As soon as the public first came to learn of the “spyPhone” plan, experts began investigating its technical weaknesses, and the many ways it could be abused, primarily within the parameters of Apple’s design. Although these valiant vulnerability-research efforts have produced compelling evidence that the system is seriously flawed, they also seriously miss the point: Apple gets to decide whether or not their phones will monitor their owners’ infractions for the government, but it's the government that gets to decide on what constitutes an infraction... and how to handle it.

For its part, Apple says their system, in its initial, v1.0 design, has a narrow focus: it only scrutinizes photos intended to be uploaded to iCloud (although for 85% of its customers, that means EVERY photo), and it does not scrutinize them beyond a simple comparison against a database of specific examples of previously-identified child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

If you’re an enterprising pedophile with a basement full of CSAM-tainted iPhones, Apple welcomes you to entirely exempt yourself from these scans by simply flipping the “Disable iCloud Photos” switch, a bypass which reveals that this system was never designed to protect children, as they would have you believe, but rather to protect their brand. As long as you keep that material off their servers, and so keep Apple out of the headlines, Apple doesn’t care.

So what happens when, in a few years at the latest, a politician points that out, and—in order to protect the children—bills are passed in the legislature to prohibit this "Disable" bypass, effectively compelling Apple to scan photos that aren’t backed up to iCloud? What happens when a party in India demands they start scanning for memes associated with a separatist movement? What happens when the UK demands they scan for a library of terrorist imagery? How long do we have left before the iPhone in your pocket begins quietly filing reports about encountering “extremist” political material, or about your presence at a "civil disturbance"? Or simply about your iPhone's possession of a video clip that contains, or maybe-or-maybe-not contains, a blurry image of a passer-by who resembles, according to an algorithm, "a person of interest"?

If Apple demonstrates the capability and willingness to continuously, remotely search every phone for evidence of one particular type of crime, these are questions for which they will have no answer. And yet an answer will come—and it will come from the worst lawmakers of the worst governments.

This is not a slippery slope. It’s a cliff.

One particular frustration for me is that I know some people at Apple, and I even like some people at Apple—bright, principled people who should know better. Actually, who do know better. Every security expert in the world is screaming themselves hoarse now, imploring Apple to stop, even those experts who in more normal circumstances reliably argue in favor of censorship. Even some survivors of child exploitation are against it. And yet, as the OG designer Galileo once said, it moves.

Faced with a blistering torrent of global condemnation, Apple has responded not by addressing any concerns or making any changes, or, more sensibly, by just scrapping the plan altogether, but by deploying their man-in-the-handsome-suit software chief, who resembles the well-moisturized villain from a movie about Wall Street, to give quotes to, yes, the Wall Street Journal about how sorry the company is for the "confusion" it has caused, but how the public shouldn't worry: Apple “feel[s] very good about what they’re doing.”

Neither the message nor the messenger was a mistake. Apple dispatched its SVP-for-Software Ken doll to speak with the Journal not to protect the company's users, but to reassure the company's investors. His role was to create the false impression that this is not something that you, or anyone, should be upset about. And, collaterally, his role was to ensure this new "policy" would be associated with the face of an Apple executive other than CEO Tim Cook, just in case the roll-out, or the fall-out, results in a corporate beheading.

Why? Why is Apple risking so much for a CSAM-detection system that has been denounced as “dangerous” and "easily repurposed for surveillance and censorship" by the very computer scientists who've already put it to the test? What could be worth the decisive shattering of the foundational Apple idea that an iPhone belongs to the person who carries it, rather than to the company that made it? 

Apple: "Designed in California, Assembled in China, Purchased by You, Owned by Us."

The one answer to these questions that the optimists keep coming back to is the likelihood that Apple is doing this as a prelude to finally switching over to “end-to-end” encryption for everything its customers store on iCloud—something Apple had previously intended to do before backtracking, in a dismaying display of cowardice, after the FBI secretly complained.

For the unfamiliar, what I’m describing here as end-to-end encryption is a somewhat complex concept, but briefly, it means that only the two endpoints sharing a file—say, two phones on opposite sides of the internet—are able to decrypt it. Even if the file were being stored and served from an iCloud server in Cupertino, as far as Apple (or any other middleman-in-a-handsome-suit) is concerned, that file is just an indecipherable blob of random garbage: the file only becomes a text message, a video, a photo, or whatever it is, when it is paired with a key that’s possessed only by you and by those with whom you choose to share it.

This is the goal of end-to-end encryption: drawing a new and ineradicable line in the digital sand dividing your data and their data. It allows you to trust a service provider to store your data without granting them any ability to understand it. This would mean that even Apple itself could no longer be expected to rummage through your iCloud account with its grabby little raccoon hands—and therefore could not be expected to hand it over to any government that can stamp a sheet of paper, which is precisely why the FBI (again: secretly) complained.

For Apple to realize this original vision would have represented a huge improvement in the privacy of our devices, effectively delivering the final word in a thirty year-long debate over establishing a new industry standard—and, by extension, the new global expectation that parties seeking access to data from a device must obtain it from that device, rather than turning the internet and its ecosystem into a spy machine.

Unfortunately, I am here to report that once again, the optimists are wrong: Apple’s proposal to make their phones inform on and betray their owners marks the dawn of a dark future, one to be written in the blood of the political opposition of a hundred countries that will exploit this system to the hilt. See, the day after this system goes live, it will no longer matter whether or not Apple ever enables end-to-end encryption, because our iPhones will be reporting their contents before our keys are even used. 

I can’t think of any other company that has so proudly, and so publicly, distributed spyware to its own devices—and I can’t think of a threat more dangerous to a product’s security than the mischief of its own maker. There is no fundamental technological limit to how far the precedent Apple is establishing can be pushed, meaning the only restraint is Apple’s all-too-flexible company policy, something governments understand all too well.

I would say there should be a law, but I fear it would only make things worse.

We are bearing witness to the construction of an all-seeing-i—an Eye of Improvidence—under whose aegis every iPhone will search itself for whatever Apple wants, or for whatever Apple is directed to want. They are inventing a world in which every product you purchase owes its highest loyalty to someone other than its owner.

To put it bluntly, this is not an innovation but a tragedy, a disaster-in-the-making.

Or maybe I'm confused—or maybe I just think different.

Vaccine Mandates & The "Great Reset"

Quite a clear understanding...

Authored by Philipp Bagus via The Mises Institute,

Pressure on the unvaccinated grows. While the vaccinated in some countries are getting back some of their freedoms taken away by the covid interventions, the unvaccinated are not so well off. They are being targeted for discrimination. Access to public spaces and traveling is being made more difficult for them. In some countries there is even mandatory vaccination for some professions.

But why is the vaccination campaign so important to governments that they are increasing the pressure to such an extent? And who has an interest in the global vaccination campaign?

To answer these questions, it is necessary to analyze the prevalent vaccination narrative and ask who benefits from it.

In doing so, the alliance of interests between the state, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and supranational institutions must be addressed.

Let us start with the pharmaceutical industry.

It has an obvious economic interest in the vaccination campaign. It makes enormous profits from widespread vaccination.

What about the state?

In the covid-19 crisis, politicians have systematically amplified fear and hysteria. This was no accident and is unsurprising, for the state builds its raison d'être on the argument that it protects the population from internal and external dangers. The state is built upon fear. The narrative is that without the help of the state, the citizen would be defenseless against hunger, poverty, accidents, war, terrorism, disease, natural disasters, and pandemics. It is, therefore, in the state's interest to instill fear of possible dangers, which it then pretends to resolve, expanding its power in the process. A relatively recent example is the restriction of civil liberties in the US in response to the threat of terrorism after the 9-11 attacks and the second Iraq war. Similarly, it was in the interest of governments to purposefully instill fear and portray covid-19 as a unique killer virus in order to expand state power to an extent unknown in peacetime at the expense of citizens' fundamental rights.

When the corona crisis started and not much was known about the virus's potential danger politicians were faced with an asymmetric payoff. If politicians underestimate a danger and do not react, they are held responsible for the underestimation. They lose elections and power. Especially if they can be blamed for deaths. Photos of mass burials aside, the consequences of underestimating danger and failing to act are politically fatal. In contrast, overestimating the danger and taking decisive action are politically much more attractive.

If it really is an unprecedented threat, politicians are celebrated for their tough measures such as lockdowns. And politicians can always argue that without their decisive action, there would indeed have been a disaster. If the measures ultimately turn out to have been exaggerated because the hazard was not so great after all, the possible negative consequences of the measures are not as directly associated with the politicians as the photos of mass burials, because these consequences are more indirect and long term. The indirect and long-term health costs of lockdowns include suicides, depression, alcoholism, stress-related illnesses, earlier deaths from canceled surgeries and screenings, and a generally lower standard of living. However, these costs are not directly associated with the drastic interventions and blamed on the policy. Many of these consequences will occur after the next elections or even later and are not visible. For instance, we cannot observe to what extent a higher standard of living would have increased life expectancy. And if someone dies six years from now from alcoholism or depression developed in the wake of lockdowns, most people probably will not make the lockdown politicians responsible, and if they do, these politicians will possibly already be out of office. Thus, it is in the interest of politicians to overestimate a threat and overreact.

In order to justify and defend the harsh measures such as lockdowns that are so attractive to politicians, it is necessary to stir up fear. When politicians stoked fear and hysteria during the covid-19 crisis, implementing highly restrictive measures such as lockdowns, the damage to the economy and social fabric was immense. Yet a society cannot be cannot be locked down forever, as the costs keep rising. At some point, it must exit lockdown and return to some normality. However, how can one at the same time stir up fear of the threat of a killer virus and return to normalcy?

The way out is vaccination.

With to the vaccination campaign the state can stage itself as the savior from the great danger. The state organizes vaccination for its citizens and gives the vaccinations to the citizens for "free." Without this "vaccination rescue" and in a permanent lockdown, the negative economic and social consequences of the restrictions on civil rights would be so great that resentment among the population would continue to grow and ultimately unrest would threaten. So, sooner or later, the lockdown must be ended. If, however, the state authorities were to back out of the lockdowns and restrictions without further explanation and imply that the danger was not so great after all and that the restrictions were an exaggeration and a mistake, they would lose a great deal of support and trust among the population. Consequently, from a governmental perspective, a good and face-saving "exit scenario" from the most severe restrictions is needed, and the vaccination campaign provides it.

Through state-provided vaccination, the state can continue to hold on to the narrative of the great threat and still get out of the lockdown. At the same time, it can pass itself off as a savior that is making somewhat more normality possibly through vaccination. To do this, it is necessary that as large a proportion of the population as possible also get vaccinated, because if only a fraction of the population gets vaccinated, the vaccination campaign cannot be sold as a necessary step toward opening up. Thus, it is in the state's interest to get a major part of the population vaccinated.

If this strategy works, the state will have set a precedent, expanded its power, and also made citizens more dependent. Citizens will believe that the state has rescued them from a mortal predicament and that they will need its help in the future. In return, they will be willing to give up some of their liberties permanently. The announcement that a state-organized annual vaccination booster is needed will perpetuate the citizens' dependence.

The mass media have fallen in line and actively support the vaccination narrative.

The state and mass media are closely linked. Framing by the leading media and targeting the population have a long tradition. Already in 1928 Edward Bernays advocated the intelligent manipulation of the masses in his classic book Propaganda. In modern states, the mass media help to construct popular approval for political measures such as in the case of covid-19.

The mass media's support of the state is due to several reasons. Some media are directly owned by the state, others are highly regulated or require state licenses. Furthermore, media houses are staffed with graduates from state educational institutions. In addition, especially in times of crisis, a good connection to the government offers advantages and privileged access to information. The willingness to carry the state's fear narrative also comes from the fact that negative news and the exaggeration of dangers bring attention.

In the corona crisis, the one-sided media coverage that proliferated through social media and muted critical voices contributed to fear and panic and created great psychological stress among the population. However, it is not only negative news that is attractive to the media; the narrative of the state rescuing the population from a major crisis also sells well. Thus, the vaccination narrative plays into the hands of the mass media.

In addition to nation-states, the media, and pharmaceutical companies, supranational organizations also have an interest in ensuring that the world's population is vaccinated.

Supranational organizations are actively pursuing an agenda in which global vaccination campaigns play an important role. These organizations include the World Economic Forum (WEF), the United Nations (UN), the EU, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Health Organization (WHO), which are closely interconnected.

Some of these organizations have set as their goal a great reset, or a great transformation. In the areas of pandemic and climate protection, gender, migration, and the financial system, these organizations want to find coordinated answers for the benefit of all people worldwide. They emphasize shared responsibility and global solidarity. The central control of vaccination, climate change, and financial and migration flows bears the hallmarks of a new world order. For example, the theme of the 2019 annual meeting of the WEF was "Globalization 4.0: Shaping a New Global Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution." Another example of supranational planning is the UN's "Global Compact for Migration." At the national level, these radical ideas are supported, as shown by the German Advisory Council on Global Change's Welt im Wandel – Gesellschaftsvertrag für eine Große Transformation (World in transition: Social contract for a great transformation) policy paper.

Raymond Unger (2021, pp. 84–89) sees this drive for supranational planning as part of a culture war envisioned by Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. A global management of opinion and outrage is combined with scenes of fear and horror, especially in the fields of climate change and corona, to establish a new socialist world order. In fact, the WHO, the IMF, and the UN are led by former communists. The WEF is financed by global companies, including the pharmaceutical industry and the big tech companies. The WEF, for its part, significantly finances the UN's 2030 Agenda. The WHO is also significantly funded by pharmaceutical companies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which spearheads global vaccination campaigns. During the covid-19 crisis, the pharmaceutical industry also exerted its influence on the WHO. And the IMF only aided nation-states if they complied with WHO recommendations.

These interconnected supranational organizations see the covid-19 crisis as an opportunity to advance their agendas. The UN policy paper Shared Responsibility, Global Solidarity: Responding to the Socio-economic Impacts of COVID-19 views covid-19 as a turning point for modern society. The intention is to seize the opportunity and act in a globally coordinated manner. The major tech companies support these agendas. They are also members of the WEF and censored disagreeable information related to covid-19 on their platforms (Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook), just like the mass media. Videos critical of vaccination are particularly quickly deleted on YouTube.

The title of a keynote speech by IMF director Kristalina Georgieva, "From Great Lockdown to Great Transformation" also underscores the idea that supranational organizations want to use the corona crisis for their agendas. Klaus Schwab, founder of the WEF, argues that the covid-19 crisis represents a "rare opportunity" to "lay new foundations for our economic and social systems." In COVID-19: The Great Reset, coauthored with Thierry Malleret, Schwab speaks of a defining moment and claims a new world will emerge. According to Schwab, it is time for a fundamental reform of capitalism.

Thus, the globally coordinated vaccination program can be interpreted as a building block in a supranational strategy of a great reset.

Global vaccination structures are being established that can be used for subsequent global vaccination campaigns. From the perspective of advocates of a great reset, globally coordinated covid-19 vaccination underscores the need for global structures and organizations that can then be used for other global purposes, such as effectively combating "climate change" and pushing for a great reset. In short, the state, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and supranational organizations are closely intertwined and have a common interest in the vaccination narrative.

From this perspective, the mounting pressure on the vaccine-free is unsurprising.

A synopsis of the war in Afghanistan

I have always believed in a world of data but what does it mean when every information we get, every news is a lie to distort our perception, radiated from a political prism?  The good thing of such a system is that it cannot last very long: We now see the outcome of all this in Afghanistan.

From Afghan War Diary to Afghanistan Papers, US 'Reconstruction' Long Known to be Farce

Morgan Artyukhina
Sputnik
Mon, 16 Aug 2021

 

© AP Photo / Najim Rahim

The US spent $143 billion on "nation-building" in Afghanistan, a cause US President Joe Biden said Monday was never Washington's goal, despite regular boasting about the progress made toward westernizing the country's political system and values. In the end, little has changed in 20 years, except the deaths of nearly half a million people.

The quick folding of the US-backed Afghan government before a Taliban advance has caught many off-guard after Pentagon leaders claimed little chance of its overthrow. However, almost since the 2001 US invasion, a steady stream of reports showed the "reconstruction" was a rolling disaster.

'So-Called Nation Building'

The US invasion of Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001 - less than a month after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. None of the airplane hijackers were Afghans, but the Islamic terrorist group that claimed responsibility, Al-Qaeda, was based in eastern Afghanistan, where the Taliban had allowed them to build training facilities.

The administration of then-US President George W. Bush demanded the Taliban hand over Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden; they agreed to do so, if the US provided firm evidence of bin Laden's guilt. Washington rejected this and prepared for the first strikes of what would become a "global war on terrorism."

In reality, this was always the goal: Bush's government was dominated by neoconservative figures from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) think tank, which had mused in September 2000 that the US needed "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor" to jump start their grand crusade against what Bush's deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, called "old surrogate Soviet regimes" across the Middle East, including Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan.

However, Bush and his central leadership scarcely believed overthrowing these governments would require extensive work afterward on their part: on October 12, five days after the US invasion began, Bush told reporters "it would be a useful function for the United Nations to take over the so-called nation-building."

Bush pledged $320 million in aid for Afghanistan for the following year, but it wasn't until 2004 that the first elections were organized. The winner was Hamid Karzai, a CIA asset appointed to head the interim government beginning in December 2001.

The US invasion drove the Taliban from power, but it didn't destroy their organization, and after a few months' regrouping, the group launched a new insurgency in early 2002 in the country's east and south, which proved impossible to quash and grew steadily to control half the country by the summer of 2018.

Eight years after the 2001 invasion, as newly elected president Barack Obama announced a surge of 33,000 troops were being sent to Afghanistan to rapidly end the war, he denied the US was interested in "a nation-building project of up to a decade."

By 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the US had authorized some $345 billion spending on the Afghan War, and US troops in-country exceeded 100,000. Karzai's re-election in 2009 was accomplished via ballot-stuffing, demonstrating the country was no closer to democracy than before the war. Meanwhile, civilian deaths grew dramatically, with nearly 14,000 killed by the end of 2010, according to a count by the Watson Institute.

Afghanistan War Diary

In July 2010, WikiLeaks published a massive compendium of 91,000 Pentagon documents from the war, most of them classified as secret, which it dubbed the Afghan War Diary and which were later revealed to have been passed to them by then-US Army specialist Chelsea Manning.

The logs covered the full scope of the war up until that point and revealed a grim side of the war scarcely seen in the corporate media, including the routine cover-up of civilian deaths by soldiers who classify the dead as combatants and the worsening military situation as the Taliban deployed improvised explosive devices (IEDs) with increasing and deadly effectiveness.

Indeed, more recently, National Security Agency intelligence analyst Daniel Hale, who was sentenced last month to 3.75 years in prison for blowing the whistle on the US' drone warfare practices, revealed that simply being a male of a certain age was enough for American servicemembers to classify them as combatants when it came to authorizing a drone strike or counting those killed in one.

The files WikiLeaks published also revealed how dependent the Pentagon had become on private security contractors - mercenary outfits like DynCorp and the infamous Blackwater USA - to buttress its numbers, and how those same mercenaries destroyed any goodwill the US-led occupation might have accumulated through their terrorizing of civilians and routine and wanton violence.

SIGAR Reveals Corruption, Waste

Seven years into the war, in 2008, Congress created the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to keep track of the massive amounts of money being spent on the Central Asian country. SIGAR's quarterly reports, delivered in the frank style of a watchdog, became an important sounding board for the ongoing failures of the "reconstruction." - until that sounding board was muzzled by the Trump White House.

The watchdog issued two damning reports in 2014 called "Lessons Learned" aimed at unveiling what had gone wrong in the US' approach to Afghanistan but which, ironically, had their most damning interviews censored. In 2019, when the Washington Post published thousands of documents in what it called the Afghanistan Papers, the paper revealed what didn't make it into the official reports.

In one interview, Robert Finn, who served as US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003, told SIGAR the Bush administration had refused to form long-term plans for the country, shaping its approach by domestic politics.

"This is a systemic problem of our government," he said. "We can't think beyond the next election. When we went to Afghanistan, everybody was talking about a year or two, and I said to them that we would be lucky if we were out of here in 20 years."

Despite the censorship, SIGAR showed the waste and the failures of the ongoing occupation, such as in 2018 when they revealed that the Afghan government's Anti-Corruption Justice Center, intended to foster a culture of transparency and accountability in the government, was itself run through by corruption.

That same year, SIGAR reported some $15.5 billion in waste, including $4 billion intended for "stabilization programs" and $7.3 billion on fighting the massive opium trade, both of which had been totally ineffective.

Spoko also exposed what he called "ghost" soldiers and police, or men the Afghan security forces had claimed existed in order to collect their paychecks.

After US President Donald Trump took office in 2017, he followed a similar path to Obama, pledging that "we're not nation-building again" as he sent thousands of troops back into Afghanistan and dramatically stepped up the war alongside US military operations in other undeclared war zones such as Yemen and Somalia.

Alongside its financial audits, SIGAR also reported on district control numbers - reports that showed a slow but steady expansion of Taliban control in the countryside, as well as other terrorist groups such as Daesh and the Haqqani Network.

"They do a report on every single thing that's happening, and they release it to the public," Trump lamented in January 2019, at his first cabinet meeting of the year. "We're fighting wars, and they're doing reports and releasing it to the public? Now, the public means the enemy. The enemy reads those reports; they study every line of it. Those reports should be private reports."

"I don't want it to happen anymore," Trump told then-acting US Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan at the meeting.

After that, the war went increasingly dark. SIGAR's next quarterly report, published in April 2019, informed Congress the inspector general was no longer being informed by US commanders of how much of the country the Afghan government in Kabul controlled. The last report, dating to October 2018, reported the Taliban controlled 53.8% of the country - a 2% increase since the summer report.

By the eve of the US' peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, SIGAR chief John Sopko bluntly told Congress "we don't know" many of the basic facts about the reconstruction effort, including how many Afghan police there were, whose salaries the US was ostensibly paying.

The Afghanistan Papers revealed more than just the censoring of SIGAR: the US had systematically lied about basic elements of the reconstruction effort, including the number of children enrolled in schools and life expectancy, which constituted Washington's claims of success amid the continued war.

Others have pointed to shortages in the US narrative as well: Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental organization that often restricts its criticisms to US adversaries, reported in 2017 that 67% of girls and 40% of boys didn't go to school, that 41% of schools had no buildings, and that girls were literate at half the rate boys were.

"All the signs have been there," Sopko told NPR on Sunday. "[W]e've been shining a light on it in multiple reports going back to when I started 2012 about changing metrics, about ghosts, ghost soldiers who didn't exist, about poor logistics, about the fact that the Afghans couldn't sustain what we were giving them."

The Steep Costs of War

Twenty years of war have come at a steep cost in money and human lives. While most American news networks correctly note the incredible waste of money in the Afghan war - some $2.26 trillion according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University - less often mentioned are the US deaths from the war: some 2,442 servicemembers and 3,846 contractors.

However, totally almost unreported is the catastrophe that has befallen the Afghan people. According to data collected by the Costs of War Project, some 3.2 million Afghans have been internally displaced by the two decades of war and 2.1 million have fled abroad. In addition, some 241,000 people have been killed in the war, 71,300 of whom have been identified as civilians.

While estimating is more difficult when it comes to calculating the number of indirect deaths attributed to disruptions caused by the war, such as shortages of medicine, stresses caused by the conflict or being a refugee, or illnesses caused by food and water shortages or spoilage, the Brown academics calculated in 2015 that it had already reached as high as 360,000 people.

Together, the picture shows over half a million Afghans are dead due to the US war fought from 2001 until 2021, the Taliban is back in power again and the country's social, political, and economic structure remains largely what it was before.

Update on Covid-19

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

 https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/08/19/sotrovimab-the-alternative-to-mrna-vaccines/#more-246769

At last, we are starting to get some real research to deal with the biologically manufactured COVID-19 virus that appears to have been engineered and released with either unintended consequences, or it was known that it would mutate into something far worse. Even Germany operates a secret bio-laboratory in Wuhan under high security, which it has not disclosed to the public based on reliable sources. The Delta variant is spreading rapidly and it will impact people’s respiratory ability and make them even a little out of breath after climbing stairs.

The CDC has released data for the past year covering 4.9 million people who were hospitalized between March 2020 and March 2021. Of that number, only 11% tested for COVID. They did not clarify if they were there for other reasons and just happened to test positive for COVID. But they have sorted through the data to try to determine who is dying from COVID. The two main factors are overweight and diabetes. The third most common category was fear-related disorders.

Generally, these conditions alone increased your chance of death by about (1.30) 30% and if you had at least two such conditions it increased by about 50%. There were people with multiple conditions and that increased the chance of death by almost 400%. There is really no risk of death for most people and despite the extreme measures like New Zealand shutting down the entire economy, those at risk have been defined now by the CDC which does not justify terrorizing the entire nation.

Here is what the CDC reported:

Results

Among 4,899,447 hospitalized adults in PHD-SR, 540,667 (11.0%) were patients with COVID-19, of whom 94.9% had at least 1 underlying medical condition. Essential hypertension (50.4%), disorders of lipid metabolism (49.4%), and obesity (33.0%) were the most common. The strongest risk factors for death were obesity (adjusted risk ratio [aRR] = 1.30; 95% CI, 1.27–1.33), anxiety and fear-related disorders (aRR = 1.28; 95% CI, 1.25–1.31), and diabetes with complication (aRR = 1.26; 95% CI, 1.24–1.28), as well as the total number of conditions, with aRRs of death ranging from 1.53 (95% CI, 1.41–1.67) for patients with 1 condition to 3.82 (95% CI, 3.45–4.23) for patients with more than 10 conditions (compared with patients with no conditions).

Conclusion

Certain underlying conditions and the number of conditions were associated with severe COVID-19 illness. Hypertension and disorders of lipid metabolism were the most frequent, whereas obesity, diabetes with complication, and anxiety disorders were the strongest risk factors for severe COVID-19 illness. Careful evaluation and management of underlying conditions among patients with COVID-19 can help stratify risk for severe illness.

This new strain has been infecting children with varying impacts from minor cases to killing about 400. New York City is going off the deep end by imposed mandatory vaccines to simply go out and do anything, which is completely illogical when nearly 50% of the cases of COVID are among those already vaccinated. Canada is banning all travel without vaccines. New Zealand is locking down the entire country because of ONE CASE of COVID. This is the most irresponsible leader of any country. She even beat Biden, hands down.

Now the White House wants everyone who is vaccinated with the two shots to get the third one because the first two do not work. Fauci is out now selling that idea because the vaccines have failed to do what he said they would — eradicate the virus. Then we have some in healthcare going nuts and demanding to test newborns for COVID. Many see this as the demand exclusively for vaccines, rejecting all therapy as diabolical.

In the UK, the government has been forced to now investigate three new side-effects of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which are leading to the skin condition called erythema multiforme that causes round skin lesions. The condition may also affect mucous membranes in internal body cavities. Additionally, there are two kidney disorders reported nephrotic syndrome and glomerulonephritis. The nephrotic syndrome makes the kidneys leak too much protein into the urine.

We are only now starting to scratch the surface. It has been shown that having a common cold helps against COVID. Many of us are hesitant concerning the vaccines, not just because they were developed in 2 days on a computer program, but deep concerns that they may result in altering your DNA and possibly impact fertility. The Israeli government has reported that the Pfizer vaccine is only 39% effective. There is just no data available as to the long-term effects of these new experimental vaccines that mess with your DNA.

Meanwhile, the claims that the whole world had to be vaccinated to terminate COVID were a lie. Biden has been struggling to try to explain that the vaccinated can still contract and spread COVID, for any virus that also infects animals cannot be eradicated as was the case with smallpox. The animal population will always produce new variants naturally (e.g., Bird Flu, Swine Flu). All of this flies in the face of trying to restrict movement with COVID Passports which are really intended for climate change. This is part of the problem — the admixture of health & climate change.

Good Night America! (in picture) 15 August 2021

 If you ever needed to see what decadence looks like:

This is it!

 

An old man, alone, scared by a virus, listening to whoever. Does it even matter?

Clearly not in charge of anything.

While the generals and advisers who should be around him are nowhere close, busy as they are teaching the soldiers about gender identity and Covid vaccines.   

A debacle on the ground but more crucially of the mind and spirit!

 

Doctor Who Did Early Research on COVID Vaccine: This Is Not a Pandemic of the Unvaccinated

Thankfully some doctors and immunologists are speaking! 

Please, follow the link bellow.

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6266738894001

 

COVID Propaganda Roundup: Corporate State Declares All-Out War on the Unvaccinated

 This, in the end, is what Covid was all about: Social control on steroid.

by Ben Bartee via The Daily Bell

The latest updates on the “new normal” – chronicling the lies, distortions, and abuses by the ruling class.

Corporate Media Adopts ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated’ to Dehumanize Skeptics

The corporate media has deluged readers and viewers to its newest “pandemic of the unvaccinated” talking points:

“As the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus fuels outbreaks in the United States, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned on Friday that ‘this is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.'”

CNN talking heads and NY Times op-ed writers have not adopted this talking point by accident; through a carefully engineered rhetorical sleight of hand, they have subtly introduced the concept that the actual unvaccinated people – and not the virus itself – are the source of ongoing suffering.

The heavy implication: what does one do with a harmful pathogen? Eliminate it from society.

Homeland Security Declares Lockdown Skeptics Potential ‘Terrorists’

Via DHS Bulletin, Aug. 13:

“The Homeland continues to face a diverse and challenging threat environment… Such threats are also exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, including grievances over public health safety measures and perceived government restrictions.”

Notice the gaslighting phrase “perceived” government restrictions – not “actual and obvious” ones, which they are.

MSNBC: Unvaccinated NFL Players to Be Treated as ‘Second-Class Citizens’

At the 1:52 mark of this MSNBC clip, — declares NFL players who refuse the shot “will be treated as second-class citizens.”

CNN Leana Wen, in a similar vein, said last month that “it needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated.”

The Atlantic Op-Ed: Time For No-Fly Lists for Unvaccinated

Via The Atlantic:

“While flying, vaccinated people should no longer carry the burden for unvaccinated people… a no-fly list for unvaccinated adults is an obvious step that the federal government should take.”

UK Government: Unvaxxed British Citizens No Longer Allowed to Leave the Country

Via the Daily Mail:

“A [UK government] Minister told the Mail on Sunday the ‘logical’ move will be to make the booster shots a requirement for travel, adding that the most up-to-date Covid certification for travel will become as normal as the need to have a yellow fever jab to enter certain countries.”

Debunking the Illusion of Vaccine ‘Choice’

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

-Benito Mussolini

The federal government has insisted in its rhetoric throughout the pandemic – despite its obvious coercive measures to the contrary — that the decision to get vaxxed, like all medical decisions, is a choice left to the individual and his/her doctor.

Historical Western common law has recognized this obvious, inherent right to self-determination of medical treatment as canonical – if one has no control over what medications are injected into his or her bloodstream, one cannot be said to be free in any fundamental sense whatsoever.

When the Nazis violated this precept, their leaders got routed militarily, captured, prosecuted, and hanged at Nuremberg.

The COVID shots are “voluntary,” the government insists, but if you don’t get them you may soon no longer be allowed to:

• Fly on an airplane
• Eat in a restaurant
• Drink in a bar
• Exercise in a gym
• Watch a movie in a theater
• Attend a concert
• Enroll your kids in school
• Attend university
• Find meaningful employment
• Access emergency medical care
• Shop for food in a grocery store

“Get vaxxed or don’t eat” is not any kind of choice; it’s an ultimatum, a gun to the head.

The elites pass this hideous ultimatum to get jabbed or die isolated in a hole off as “choice” as if threats to sever access to vital resources and the means to participate in the economy are not coercive by definition.

Influential Professor Calls For Hate Crime Legislation to Combat ‘Anti-Science Aggression’

Peter Hotez — a portly, apparently profoundly unhealthy Baylor University professor — issued a clarion call to combat “mounting antiscience aggression in the United States“:

“We should look at expanded protection mechanisms for scientists currently targeted by far-right extremism in the United States. Rep. Paul Tonko (D-NY) has introduced a bill known as the Scientific Integrity Act of 2021 (H.R. 849) to protect US Government scientists from political interference… Still another possibility is to extend federal hate-crime protections.”

Hotez, or some intern in his employ, even put together a pseudoscientific flow chart to lend more credibility to his extremist anti-free speech proposition:

The above suggested remedy for normal people with a healthy skepticism of lying bureaucrats and profit-hungry pharmaceutical firms is so profoundly unethical that even countering it seems absurd, but here is a shot:

When Anthony Fauci is preening in front of Congress, he is functioning as a political operative with a political agenda, not a doctor.

In that role, Fauci has repeatedly, both explicitly and implicitly, told Dr. Rand Paul, a credentialed medical doctor, that he “does not know what he’s talking about” in Senate hearings.

All of which begs the question: Did Fauci science-hate-crime Sen. Rand Paul? Will Fauci be the first one brought up on charges under the Hotez rule?

Medium ‘Trust and Safety’ Team Deletes My Account Over COVID-19 ‘Misinformation’

As I anticipated would eventually occur, in early July, Medium dropped the hammer: a faceless technocrat permanently suspended my account.

I received this email from the Big Brother-style “Trust and Safety Team”:

They linked to their ultra-generic “COVID-19 Content Policy” but never bothered to cite any specific claim I had made that violated it.

Back in 2018, when every big tech social media platform banned Alex Jones overnight, only a fool would have believed such a censorship campaign would be a one-off. That was the appetizer, to set the mass censorship wheel in motion as precedent for later, wider-sweeping crackdowns.

Infowars and Milo Yiannopoulos were merely the lowest-hanging fruit due to their highly-publicized “extremist” reputations, but we’re all hanging on the same tree.

Sooner or later, unless as a society we re-instantiate freedom of speech into practice, the agents of corporate state are going to come for everyone – for Armageddon Prose, for The Daily Bell, for ZeroHedge.

On a long enough timeline, we’re all going to get the Alex Jones treatment.

This is information warfare.

Top Google Engineer Abandons Company, Reveals Big Tech Rewrote Algos To Target Trump

This story goes well beyond Trump!

The danger of totalitarianism from the like of Google and Facebook is not only real but a mortal danger to our society, or is it already too late?

Rhetorically, I would like to ask: Now what? 

But the answer is "nothing!" of course. They control the news!

 

Authored by Kipp Jones via The Western Journal (emphasis ours),

A Big Tech whistleblower said Google altered its algorithm in order to ensure that negative stories from the establishment media about former Present Donald Trump were what people saw when using the highest-trafficked website on the internet.

Zach Vorhies, who previously worked for Google, said in an interview with The Epoch Times that the tech titan specifically tailored its news algorithm to harm the former president.

Vorhies has written a book about his experience working at Google. He said he wanted to “take conspiracy theory and turn it into conspiracy fact” by sharing the practices he saw as a longtime former employee, working on both Google and YouTube projects.

“People kind of suspect this is happening. That certain keywords trigger things within the algorithm … That is actually happening,” he told the Times, noting that newly written stories about Trump were digitally married with older ones to ensure they remained at the top of search results.

“They actually have that. They show like a graph, a tree, and they say actually this forms a super-story that spans eight days,” he said.

“So, with the Trump/[former FBI Director James] Comey thing, they’re able to keep the stories boosted all the way at the top because the algorithm was able to fold a news story into the stories that were preceding it in the last five days,” Vorhies added.

“They allowed the mainstream media to structure their stories so that they could remain at the top of their search index, of their news index,” he continued.

Vorhies’ new book is called “Google Leaks: A Whistleblower’s Exposé of Big Tech Censorship.” The book dropped earlier this month.

“The madness of Big Tech and their attempt to mold our reality into a version compatible with their globalist view of the world has never been portrayed better than in this chilling account by Google whistleblower,” the book’s listing on Amazon states.

“As a senior engineer at Google for many years, Zach was aware of their bias, but watched in horror as the 2016 election of Donald Trump seemed to drive them into dangerous territory. The American ideal of an honest, hard-fought battle of ideas — when the contest is over, shaking hands and working together to solve problems — was replaced by a different, darker ethic alien to this country’s history,” the description adds.

Vorhies said he left Google in 2019 with 950 pages of internal documents and gave them to the Justice Department.

It is unclear what, if anything, the DOJ did with those documents.

Vorhies also made the documents public with the help of Project Veritas in 2019. The former employee previously told Project Veritas and founder James O’Keefe how he was able to get ahold of the documents from his former employer in 2019.

“These documents were available to every single employee within the company that was full time. And so as a full-time employee at the company, I just searched for some keywords, and these documents started to pop up,” he said.

“And so once I started finding one document and started finding keywords for other documents and I would enter that in and continue this cycle until I had a treasure trove and archive of documents that clearly spelled out the system, what they’re attempting to do in very clear language,” he concluded.

Vorhies spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, alongside O’Keefe and Project Veritas.

“Google, Facebook and the Big Tech oligarchs represent the Trojan horse for totalitarianism,” he said.

 

Intelligent comments on China and the West (30' Video)

As we witness the "woke" culture of the US utterly fail in Afghanistan, I find the politically incorrect talk bellow refreshing.  

I do not agree with everything he says about China, but his analysis of the West is very close to the point. Listen carefully.

 Discussed in this interview:
01:28 The rising power in the east
06:34 Democracy is a disaster
12:02 China's Belt & Road Initiative
13:34 All things made in China
18:38 Is China a currency manipulator?
21:50 Is China an expansionary power?
24:08 How soon before China unseats the US?
29:44 What would cause China's fall?

 

Here We Go Again... WHO Announces The "Marburg Virus"

It will never stop. It can't. It has nothing to do with the virus.

Get ready for total nonsense...

 

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

If you’ve been wondering what the next phase of this public health insanity is going to look like, your wait is over.

Introducing… the MARBURG VIRUS.

Earlier this week, as police fanned out across the streets of Paris going table-to-table in cafes to check people’s Covid papers, and as the Australian military deployed to the streets of Sydney to enforce extended lockdowns, the World Health Organization announced a brand new outbreak of the “Marburg Virus” in West Africa.

Marburg is yet another highly infectious virus, and one that the WHO has classified as the highest level biological threat– “Risk Group 4”.

(By comparison, SARS-Cov-2 is a lower, “Risk Group 3” biological agent.)

Marburg comes from the same virus family as Ebola. And, while Covid-1984 has a roughly 1.7% fatality rate according to CDC data, the limited data from the past 20 years of Marburg cases shows a fatality rate of 85%.

One person died from the Marburg virus in Guinea last week, and authorities there estimate that 145 people may have been in contact with him and potentially exposed to the virus.

Here we go again…

Public health policy is starting to look like a never-ending Mobius Strip– where we just go around an endless loop repeating the same things over and over again.

Judging by harsh lockdowns, mask mandates, and police enforcement around the world due to the Delta variant, it looks like it’s April 2020 all over again.

Even places that had some of the most extreme public health protocols, like Australia, have found themselves completely hapless in trying to combat Covid.

Surprise, surprise. It turns out that you can’t wait out a virus. You can’t legislate it away. You can’t make it go away with endless money printing and fiscal stimulus.

Human beings have had to content with influenza for at least eight thousand years. No public health official has ever been able to eradicate it.

In fact the only virus that has ever been officially eradicated (according to the World Health Organization) among the human population is smallpox. But even that’s not actually true because smallpox is still used by terrorists and dictators as a biological weapon.

But that hasn’t stopped public health officials from waging an endless crusade to play whack-a-mole with Covid.

They have seized unconstitutional, dictatorial powers to control nearly every aspect of our lives. Stay home. Wear three masks. Shun human contact. No sex. Take this injection. Face the wall in elevators. Avoid speaking. Don’t ask questions. Obey.

It’s also completely obvious these public health overlords lack any objectivity.

There is almost zero discussion about natural immunity for people who already had Covid. Similarly, there’s very little attention given to the extensive research about treatment options for Covid.

There are mountains of data, for example, across dozens of randomized control trials and peer-reviewed studies involving tens of thousands of patients, demonstrating that the drug Ivermectin is associated with a profoundly superior outcome for Covid-19 patients.

This isn’t some wild conspiracy theory. Here’s one study, for example, on the US government’s National Institutes of Health website.

But that’s never part of the discussion. In fact the Big Tech companies are standing by ready to squash any conversation about treatment.

Twitter, for example, blocked the sharing of a medical study published late last year in the respected European Journal of Medical & Health Sciences because it had positive conclusions about Ivermectin.

Ironically, these public health overlords claim to care so much about people who might potentially fall ill and die.

So wouldn’t it make sense for them to disseminate objective information about medications and treatment options? After all, isn’t it possible that access to information about treatment might have saved some lives?

But talking about medication and treatment doesn’t fit the narrative that these vaccine-brained public health officials are pushing. If you’re not talking about getting an injection, then you’re not allowed to talk. Period.

Delta is now raging, and they’re already talking about the evil new ‘Lambda’ variant. And now, perhaps, the WHO may be starting to prime us for a new round of public health terrorism with the Marburg Virus.

So if you thought the pandemic was over and everything was going back to normal… then I applaud your optimism. But think again.

Given the public health response to the Delta variant, plus these new pathogenic threats that may be coming, it’s possible that there may be a new wave of lockdowns, travel restrictions, school closures, mask mandates, and more.

Obviously I have no crystal ball, and am in no way trying to be alarmist. But it’s worth considering– if governments begin to impose quarantines once again, where would you want to be?

Last year Covid took most people by surprise. But if it happens again, this time around we have the benefit of experience. We know their playbook and how they’re going to react.

So it certainly makes sense to think about lockdowns, quarantines, and overall public health insanity when considering your Plan B options.

Mt. Vernon School Board Meeting - Dr. Dan Stock MD ( 6mn video)

 Why are we having a peak of flu (Covid-19) right in the middle of the Summer when the risk is the lowest? Could it be that, as Dr Dan Stock explains, "we" are doing everything wrong? Actually increasing the number of cases instead of fighting them and that the vaccines are worse than inefficient by making people weaker? 

 Would the video be erased by Google, you will find a copy bellow:

https://www.cryptogon.com/?p=61966

PS: As expected the video was "cancelled" by YouTube. But you can still find it on Rumble.