The Conspiracy Theorists Were Right; It IS a "Poison-Death Shot"

 I reprint this article as food for thought only.

Are all the points true? I don't know. Some are.

But they go one step further and link the dots. This is a dangerous  exercise. 

On the other hand, the propaganda is such that anything is possible at this stage.

And, clearly, it looks more and more like the spike is indeed the most dangerous part of a virus which otherwise is little more than the flue... 

By Mike Whitney
The Unz Review

September 18, 2021

“I’ll do one more mind experiment with you: If everyone on the planet were to get Covid and not get treated, the death-rate globally would be less than half a percent. I’m not advocating for that, because 35 million people would die. However, if we follow the advice of some of the global leaders– like Bill Gates who said last year said “7 billion people need to be vaccinated”– then the death-rate will be over 2 billion people! SO, WAKE UP! THIS IS WORLD WAR 3! We are seeing a level of malevolence that we haven’t seen in the history of humanity!” Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, Author of The Zelenko “Early Treatment” Protocol that saved thousands of Covid-19 patients. (“Zelenko schools the Rabbinic Court”, Rumble; start at 11:45 minutes)

Did the regulators at the FDA know that all previous coronavirus vaccines had failed in animal trials and that the vaccinated animals became either severely ill or died?

Yes, they did.

Did they know that previous coronavirus vaccines had a tendency to “enhance the infection” and “make the disease worse”?

Yes.

Did Dr Anthony Fauci know that coronavirus vaccines had repeatedly failed and increased the severity of the infection?

Yes, he did. (See here: Fauci on ADE)

Did the drug companies conduct any animal trials prior to the FDA’s approval that would have convinced a reasonable person that the vaccines were safe to use on humans?

No, they didn’t.

Did they complete long-term clinical trials to establish whether the vaccines were safe?

No, there were no long-term clinical trials.

Did they conduct any biodistribution studies that showed where the substance in the injection goes in the body?

They did, but the data was not made available to the public.

Do the contents of the vaccine largely collect in various organs and in the lining of the vascular system?

Yes, they do.

Do large amounts of the substance accumulate in the ovaries?

Yes.

Will this effect female fertility and a woman’s ability to safely bring a baby to term?

The drug companies are currently researching this. The results are unknown.

Does the vaccine enter the bloodstream and collect in the lining of the blood vessels forcing the cells to produce the spike protein?

Yes.

Is the spike protein a “biologically active” pathogen?

It is.

Does the spike protein cause blood clots and leaky blood vessels in a large percentage of the people that are vaccinated?

It does, although the blood clots are mostly microscopic and appear in the capillaries. Only a small percentage of vaccinees get strokes or suffer cardiac arrest.

Should people be made aware of these possible bad outcomes before they agree to get vaccinated? (“Informed consent”)

Yes.

Did the FDA know that Pfizer had “identified vaccine-associated enhanced disease, including vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease, as an important potential risk”?

Yes, they did, but they did not demand that Pfizer fix the problem. Here’s more:

“The FDA noted that Pfizer, “identified vaccine-associated enhanced disease, including vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease, as an important potential risk”. The EMA similarly acknowledged that “vaccine associated enhanced respiratory disease” was “an important potential risk… that may be specific to vaccination for COVID- 19”.

Why neither regulator sought to exclude such dangers prior to emergency use authorization is an open
question that all doctors and patients are entitled to ask. Why medical regulators failed to investigate the
finding that large vaccine particles cross blood vessel walls, entering the bloodstream and posing risks of blood clotting and leaky vessels is yet another open question again.” (“Open Letter to the EMA and European Parliament”, Doctors for Covid Ethics)

Did the drug companies vaccinate the people in the placebo group after the clinical trials in order to conceal the difference in the long-term health outcomes between the two groups?

That is the conclusion a rational person would make.

So, they nuked the trials?

Yes.

Did the FDA largely shrug-off its regulatory duties and abandon its normal standards and protocols because

a– It wanted to rush the Covid vaccines into service as rapidly as possible?
b– It knew the Covid-19 vaccine would never meet long-term safety standards?

We don’t know yet, but the adverse events report strongly suggests that the Covid-19 vaccine is hands-down the most dangerous vaccine in history.

Is the FDA rushing the “boosters” without proper testing?.

Yes, it is. Here’s a clip from author Alex Berenson’s latest at Substack:

“Pfizer basically hasn’t bothered to test the booster AT ALL in the people actually at risk – it conducted a single “Phase 1” trial that covered 12 people over 65. The main Phase 2/3 booster trial (beware efforts to cover multiple “phases” of drug research at once, you want it bad you get it bad) included no one over 55.

No one.

As in NONE.” (“Are you kidding me, Pfizer, volume 1 gazillion”, Alex Berenson, Substack)

Have the boosters been modified or improved to meet the changes in Delta variant?

No.

Is there any additional risk in taking a booster-shot after already taking two experimental gene-based vaccines in less than a year?

Considerable risk. Here’s more from the Doctors for Covid Ethics:

“Given that booster shots repeatedly boost the immune response to the spike protein, they will progressively boost self-to-self immune attack, including boosting complement-mediated damage to vessel walls.

Clinically speaking, the greater the vessel leakage and clotting that subsequently occurs, the more likely that organs supplied by the affected blood flow will sustain damage. From stroke to heart attack to brain vein thrombosis, the symptoms can range from death to headaches, nausea and vomiting, all of which heavily populate adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines.

As well as damage from leakage and clotting alone, it is additionally possible that the vaccine itself may leak into surrounding organs and tissues. Should this take place, the cells of those organs will themselves begin to produce spike protein, and will come under attack in the same way as the vessel walls. Damage to major organs such as the lungs, ovaries, placenta and heart can be expected ensue, with increasing severity and frequency as booster shots are rolled out.” (“Open Letter to the EMA and European Parliament“, Doctors for Covid Ethics)

So, it’s the double-whammy. On the one hand, the booster will perform largely like the original vaccine, penetrating cells and forcing them to produce spike protein which, in turn, generates blood clots and leaky blood vessels. And, on the other, the newly-produced S proteins trigger a damaging immune response in which the complement system attacks and destroys the cells that line the inside of the blood vessels. Every additional booster will intensify this process weakening the vascular system and increasing the clotting. If the Doctors are correct in their analysis, then we could see a sharp uptick in all-cause mortality in the heavily-vaccinated countries in less than a year. Cardiac arrests are already rising.

Here’s another question that’s worth mulling over: Was there any reason for the regulators at the FDA to think that these problems would not arise following the launching of the vaccine campaign?

No. They should have known there would be problems as soon as they saw that the vaccine did not stay in the shoulder as it was supposed to. The vaccine wasn’t supposed to enter the bloodstream and spread across the body leaving billions of spike proteins in its wake. (The spike protein is a cytotoxin, a cell killer. It is not an appropriate antigen for stimulating an immune response. It is a potentially-lethal pathogen that poses a threat to one’s health even if it is separated from the virus.) Nor was the vaccine supposed to trigger Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) which is the condition we hinted at above when referring to “vaccine-associated enhanced disease”. Here’s a brief explanation:

“ADE has proven to be a serious challenge with coronavirus vaccines, and this is the primary reason many have failed in early in-vitro or animal trials. For example, rhesus macaques who were vaccinated with the Spike protein of the SARS-CoV virus demonstrated severe acute lung injury when challenged with SARS-CoV, while monkeys who were not vaccinated did not. Similarly, mice who were immunized with one of four different SARS-CoV vaccines showed histopathological changes in the lungs with eosinophil infiltration after being challenged with SARS-CoV virus. This did not occur in the controls that had not been vaccinated. A similar problem occurred in the development of a vaccine for FIPV, which is a feline coronavirus.” (“Is the Coronavirus Vaccine a Ticking-Time Bomb?”, Science with Dr. Doug)

Is this what we are seeing right now? In all the countries that launched mass-vaccination campaigns early (Israel, Iceland, Scotland, Gibraltar and UK) cases, hospitalizations and deaths are rising faster in the vaccinated portion of the population than the unvaccinated. Why?

Are they really experiencing a fourth or fifth wave or have the vaccines generated “inactivity-enhancing” antibodies that make the disease worse? This 2-minute video helps to clarify what’s going on:

“Vaccines are made to a specific variant. And when that variant mutates, the vaccine no longer recognizes it. It’s like you are seeing a completely new virus. And, because that is so, you actually get more severe symptoms when you are vaccinated against one variant and it mutates and then your body sees the other variant. The science shows, that if you get vaccinated in multiple years (for the flu), you are more likely to get severe disease, you are more likely to get viral replication, and you are more likely to be hospitalized…. We are seeing the same thing in Covid with the Delta variant. So we are actually mandating that people get a vaccine when they can actually get more sick when they are exposed to the virus...In fact, this week, a paper came out that showed that–with the Delta variant– when you are vaccinated your body is supposed to make antibodies that neutralize the virus, but they were supposed to neutralize the old variant. When they see this new variant, the antibodies take the virus and help it infect the cells.” (“Expert testimony on mandatory vaccinations”, Dr Christina Parks PhD., Rumble, start at minute 5:05)

Repeat: “If you get vaccinated in multiple years, you are more likely to get severe disease, you are more likely to get viral replication, and you are more likely to be hospitalized…. With the Delta variant– when you are vaccinated …. the antibodies take the virus and help it infect the cells.”

This is ADE, and this is probably why hospitalizations and deaths are rising among the vaccinated in Israel, UK and the rest. True, the Delta variant is less lethal than the Wuhan virus but, unfortunately, that rule does not apply to those who have been vaccinated and whose antibodies promote the uptake of the virus into their cells. This increases the viral replication function that increases the severity of the disease. In short, people are getting sicker because they were vaccinated. Here’s another short video that helps to explain:

“…The vaccine-induced antibodies will stand up against the virus. and once a virus is under pressure; it changes, it becomes a variant, and the variant cannot be stopped by vaccine-induced antibodies. Vaccine-induced antibodies. also shut down your innate immune system… so variants can come straight through and infect those that are vaccinated. That is viral immune escape, and that means that the vaccinated are defenseless against variants. This is no longer a pandemic of Covid-19. It is a pandemic of variants…

And there is something called recombination, and recombination means a vaccinated host can be infected by more than one variant at a time. …If a vaccinated host is co-infected by more than one variant, the variants will mix DNA, and change and camouflage and produce a super variant. And if a super variants are produced, nothing can stop them. And already they are saying that the latest variant to come out is vaccine resistant. And this is just the beginning. Dr Geert Vanden Bosche warns that if we do not immediately stop mass vaccination campaigns around the world, the world will experience an international catastrophe of mass mortality. I didn’t say that, he did. The vaccinated are a threat to us all.” (“Viral Immune Escape Explained”, Dr. Michael McDowell, Rumble)

It’s not the variant that intensifies the disease, it’s the fact that the vaccine targets one narrow endpoint, the spike protein, that gradually adapts to survive. As the virus progressively learns to avoid the vaccine, vaccine-induced immunity wanes. Natural immunity produces broad, robust immunity to the whole virus not merely one part of it. It is strong and enduring.

So how will the vaccinated fight new forms of the virus, after all, the vaccine is not a medicine that overpowers a particular pathogen. It is a subtle (genetic) reprogramming of the immune system that forces one’s cells to produce a particular version of the spike protein. Boosters that stimulate production of the same protein will have only modest impact. In short, boosters are still fighting the last war.

Also, as we mentioned above, coronavirus vaccines tend to create antibodies that “enhance infectivity” when they encounter adapted forms of the virus. That means that millions of inoculated people will now face forms of the virus for which they have almost no protection and for which their compromised immune systems can only provide limited help. Here’s more from the article above:

“Right now, the fatality rate of the virus is estimated to be approximately 0.26%, and this number seems to be dropping as the virus is naturally attenuating itself through the population. It would be a great shame to vaccinate the entire population against a virus with this low of a fatality rate, especially considering the considerable risk presented by ADE. I believe t his risk of developing ADE in a vaccinated individual will be much greater than 0.26%, and, therefore, the vaccine stands to make the problem worse, not better. It would be the biggest blunder of the century to see the fatality rate of this virus increase in the years to come because of our sloppy, haphazard, rushed efforts to develop a vaccine with such a low threshold of safety testing and the prospect of ADE lurking in the shadows.” (“Is the Coronavirus Vaccine a Ticking-Time Bomb?”, Science with Dr. Doug)

“Blunder”, he says?

It wasn’t a blunder. It was deliberate. The Covid-19 vaccine was supposed to fail like all the coronavirus vaccines before it. That’s the point. That’s why the drug companies skipped the animal testing and long-term safety trials. That’s why the FDA rushed it through the regulatory process and suppressed the other life-saving medications, and silenced all critics of the policy, and pushed for universal vaccination regardless of the risks of blood clotting, cardiac arrest, stroke and death. And that’s why the world is on the threshold of an “international catastrophe of mass mortality.” It’s because that’s how the strategy was planned from the very beginning.

The vaccine isn’t supposed to work, it’s supposed to make things worse. And it has! It’s increased the susceptibility of millions of people to severe illness and death. That’s what it’s done. It’s a stealth weapon in an entirely new kind of war; a war aimed at restructuring the global order and establishing absolute social control. Those are the real objectives. It has nothing to do pandemics or viral contagion. It’s about power and politics. That’s all.

Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.

The Vaccine is the Virus

From Vox Popoli 9/15/2021

An in-depth and informative interview with two French vaccine experts, one of whom, Dr. Christian Perrone, was the Vice-President of the European Advisory Group to the World Health Organisation and was in charge of France’s vaccine program from 1994 to 2020:

Mike Robinson: Professor Perronne, I’d like to delve into hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in a little more detail in a minute, but before we get there, you said something in your last comment there that just raises a question. Is there currently a pandemic? What you said suggests there isn’t. Was there ever a pandemic?

But, as well as that, with respect to the “variants”: the mainstream media and the politicians are pushing—on the normal Sunday morning politics programmes—once again very strongly that the “Delta variant” and the “subsequent variants” which are coming along are going to have an extremely negative impact on anyone who’s unvaccinated at the moment. They’re saying that this coming winter, the “vaccinated” are going to be fine generally, but the unvaccinated are going to have a very hard time.

So is there a pandemic, was there ever a pandemic, but as well as that, should the unvaccinated be afraid of the current “variants” that are out there, and the coming “variants”?

Christian Perronne: Exactly the reverse! Vaccinated people are at risk of the new variants. In transmission, it’s been proven now in several countries that vaccinated people should be put in quarantine and isolated from society. Unvaccinated people are not dangerous; vaccinated people are dangerous to others. That’s been proven in Israel now, where I’m in contact with many physicians. They’re having big problems in Israel now: severe cases in hospitals are among vaccinated people. And in the UK also, you had a larger vaccination programme and there are problems [there] also.

But also, the “variants” are not very dangerous. All the “variants” since last year are less and less virulent. That’s always the story in infectious diseases. In my hospital, in March-April 2020, the whole building was full of people with Covid-19: fifty patients. And the so-called “second”, “third”, “fourth waves” were just very small waves, because the hospitals are not full any more. But in the media, they said that all the hospitals were full of patients. That’s not true. Of course, the epidemic was going on, but the “variants” were less and less virulent.

You know, in August 2020, they said, “The ‘Spanish variant’ will kill all of Europe!”—but in the end, there was no real problem.

After that, they said, “The British variant!”, and after that, “The New Zealand variant!”, and “The American variant!”, and “The South African variant!”, and so on. All that is only media stuff. It’s not scientifically-based. The “Delta variant” is of very low virulence. If you look at the official rates of the disease and of death in Brazil and India, which were the two last countries in the world with an active transmission of the disease, all the curves are going down. And now, the epidemic is quite over in many countries worldwide.

Yet now, you have governments obliging their citizens to be inoculated with these so-called “vaccines”—and in the countries where they did that, once the epidemic was [already] finished, the epidemic came back, and deaths started again.

In Vietnam, for example, it was an amazing success, they had only a few dozen deaths over more than a year, [the epidemic] was finished, and then one of the ministers said, “We have to vaccinate the whole population!” It’s now nearly mandatory, and after the start of this vaccination campaign, the epidemic came back and fatal cases occurred again. That’s proof that these inoculations are not a vaccine, but may facilitate the reappearance of the disease and also of deaths.

Read the whole thing. It’s increasingly clear that Russian military intelligence was essentially correct in its analysis of the situation. There was never any pandemic, as the “fear the deadly virus” campaign was a massive psychological operation designed to kill as many as five birds at once, but most importantly, freeze the global economy to prevent the financial crash that was imminent at the time.

-Prevent a financial crash and credit evaporation
Weaken Xi Xinping and punish China for choosing nationalism over globalism

-Prevent the re-election of Donald Trump

-Produce billions in profit for various corporations in the pharmaceutical and medical industries

-Provide a foundation for the human depopulation agenda

Meanwhile,

Pfizer to seek US vaccine approval for children between 6 months and 5 years in November

9/11: The Mother of All Coincidences

 This article on 9/11 is from Eric Margolis, an old school journalist who not only knows what he is talking about in the Middle East but actually went "there", talked to the people and at the time, reported actual information in real newspapers and magazines. Unfortunately, that was last century. All this is gone now replaced by propaganda or useless spin written to obfuscate, not enlighten. All these people without exception have been fired or retired.   

 20 years ago, none of these journalists would have accepted the Covid-19 narrative and all the spin around the virus. They would have interviewed virologists and epidemiologists, asked the right questions and presented their conclusions in mainstream newspapers and magazines. Gone, all gone! 

 "Truth" died with 9/11. 20 years later, it is our freedom which is on the chopping block. A sad but unfortunately predictable evolution. When China told us in 1997 that 50 years later Hong Kong and China would have the same political system, absolutely everyone in the West understood that China would become more democratic, more like us. Little did we know that not only Hong Kong but most Western countries would over time become more "Chinese"!

9/11: The Mother of All Coincidences

By Eric S. Margolis

September 13, 2021

 

NEW YORK – Ever since 9/11, readers keep asking me my views on these attacks. I have been barraged with emails until my head spins with engineering studies about melting steel, controlled explosions, claims about nefarious plots, and wreckage analysis.

One of the most colorful theories comes from Gen. Hamid Gul, former director of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI. He insists that 9/11 was staged by Israel’s Mossad and a cabal of rightwing US Air Force generals.

I inspected the ruins of the New York’s Twin Towers, atop which I often dined, right after the attack. Downtown Manhattan was enveloped by a hideous, stinking miasma from the attack. I have never smelled anything so awful. It took me days to scrub the foul odor off my body. As a native New Yorker, I was shaken to the core by 9/11 – but hardly surprised, as I had predicted a major attack on the US nine days earlier.

While visiting the Pentagon to consult on the Mideast, I also inspected its outside wall hit by the third hijacked aircraft.
I saw photos of the impact site and could not understand what had happened to all the aircraft wreckage. There was almost none.

In 1993, I was hijacked over Germany on a Lufthansa flight bound for Cairo. The Ethiopian hijacker took us all the way back to New York City. The hijacker was threatening to crash our A310 jumbo jet into Wall Street.

Our flight was shadowed by US F-15 fighters that had orders to shoot, if necessary. Where, then, was US air defense on 11 Sept. 2001?

A day after 9/11, I was asked on CNN if Osama bin Laden was behind the attack. `We have yet to see the evidence,’ I replied. I maintain this position today.

Bin Laden denied he or al-Qaida was behind 9/11 and the death’s of nearly 3,000 people. The plot was hatched in Hamburg, Germany and Madrid, Spain, not in Afghanistan. A Pakistani, Khaled Sheik Mohammed, claimed he was the mastermind – after being tortured by near-drowning 183 times by the CIA.

While denying involvement, Osama bin Laden did say he believed the attack on New York was in part motivated by Israel’s destruction of downtown Beirut during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon that inflicted some 18,000 civilian deaths.

Tapes that appeared to confirm bin Laden’s guilt were clumsy fakes. They were supposedly “found” in Afghanistan by the anti-Taliban Afghan Northern Alliance, which was created and funded by Russian intelligence.

I had met Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and told CNN viewers that he was not the man in the tapes.

After 9/11, Secretary of State Colin Powell promised Americans the State Department would issue a White Paper detailing bin Laden’s guilt. Afghanistan’s Taliban government asked for this document before it would extradite bin Laden, as the US was demanding. The White Paper was never produced, and the US ignored proper legal procedure and invaded Afghanistan. We still wait for evidence.

I remain uncertain that Osama bin Laden was really behind the attacks. Much circumstantial evidence points to him and al-Qaida, but conclusive proof still lacks. One thing is certain: the attacks were planned and mounted from Germany, not Afghanistan. Of the 19 hijackers, 15 were Saudis, two from the United Arab Emirates, one an Egyptian and a Lebanese.

By the way, I’ve said ever since 9/11 that the danger and size of al-Qaida has been vastly exaggerated – as an explosive report this week by the London’s esteemed International Institute for Strategic Studies has just confirmed. Al-Qaida, dedicated to fighting the Afghan Communists, never had more than 300 members at its peak.

Today, according to CIA chief Leon Panetta, there are no more than 50 al-Qaida men in Afghanistan. Yet President Barack Obama has tripled the number of US troops in Afghanistan to 120,000 because of what to calls the al-Qaida threat. What is going on?

Many people abroad believe al-Qaida is an American invention used to justify foreign military operations. I do not share this view. Osama bin Laden was never a US agent, though his group indirectly received funds from CIA to fight the Communists.

Back to 9/11. I still cannot understand how amateur pilots could manage to maneuver in low to hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon. As a Pakistani intelligence agent told me, “if they were really amateur Arab pilots, they would have crashed into one another, not the World Trade Center!”

The arrest of Israeli “movers” filming the attack and dancing with joy, and the subsequent arrest of groups of Israeli “students” supposedly tracking the would-be hijackers remains a deep mystery. So does the immobilization of US air defenses.

The US 9/11 Commission was a whitewash, as are all such government commissions. They are designed to obscure, not reveal, the truth.

A 2006, a Scripps Howard/Washington Post poll found that 36% of the 1,000 Americans sampled believed the US government was behind 9/11. Many Americans still do not believe the official version of 9/11.

Neither do many Europeans. The entire Muslim world believes 9/11 was the work of Israel and far right American neocons, led by Dick Cheney.

If the official story about 9/11 is true, the attacks caught the Bush administration asleep on guard duty. Bush’s incompetent national security advisor, Condoleeza Rice, brushed off serious warnings of the impending attack and actually cut spending on anti-terrorism just before 9/11.

The White House and media were quick to blame Muslims who hated America’s lifestyle and values, launching the concept of “Islamic terrorism” – i.e. that the Muslim faith, not political issues, prompted the attacks.

This dangerous canard has infected America, leading to a rising tide of Islamophobia. This week’s continued uproar over a Muslim community center in downtown New York, and a Florida preacher’s threat to burn Korans, are the latest doleful example of cultivated religious hatred.

The suicide team that attacked New York and Washington made clear its aim was: a. to punish the US for backing Israel’s repression of Palestinians; and b. what they called US “occupation” of Saudi Arabia. Though they were all Muslims, religion was not the motivating factor.

As the CIA’s former bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer rightly observed, the Muslim world was furious at the US for what it was doing in their region, not because of America’s values, liberties or religion.

These motives for the 9/11 attack have been largely obscured by the whipping up hysteria over “Islamic terrorism.” The planting of anthrax in New York, Florida and Washington soon after 9/11 was clearly designed to promote further anti-Muslim furor. The perpetrators of this red herring remain unknown. But the anthrax attack hastened passage of the semi-totalitarian Patriot Act that sharply limited the personal freedoms of Americans and imposed draconian new laws.

Faked bin Laden videos and audio tapes. Planted anthrax. An intact Koran implausibly found at ground zero. Evidence in a hijacker’s bag that had somehow failed to make his ill-fated flight. Immediate claims that al-Qaida was behind the attacks. Those amateur kamikaze pilots and collapsing towers.

Perhaps most damning, tapes taken in London of meetings between President George Bush and PM Tony Blair revealed a sinister proposal by the US president to provoke war with Iraq by painting US aircraft in UN colors, then buzzing Iraqi air defenses until they fired on them, thus providing a “casus belli.” Bush also reportedly told Blair that after Iraq, he would “go on” to attack Saudi Arabia, Syria and Pakistan.

In 1939, Nazi Germany dressed up soldiers in Polish uniforms to provoke a border fire-fight to justify Berlin’s ensuing invasion of Poland. Bush’s plan was of the same ilk. A president who would contemplate such a criminal operation might go a lot further to achieve his imperial dreams.

As a veteran journalist, to me, all this smells to high heaven. There are just too many unanswered questions, too many suspicions, and that old Roman legal question, “cui bono” – “to whose benefit?”

On 28 February, 1933, fire, set by a Dutch Jew, ravaged the Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag. While the Reichstag’s ruins were still smoking, Adolf Hitler’s government declared a war against “terrorism.” A “Decree for the Protection of People and State” was promulgated suspending all legal protections of speech, assembly, property, and personal liberties. The Reichstag fire allowed the government to round up “terrorism” suspects without due process of law and made police powers near absolute.

Sound familiar? Here’s another startling coincidence. Two years before 9/11, a series of mysterious apartment building bombings in Russia killed over 200 people. “Islamic terrorists” from Chechnya were blamed.

Panic swept Russia and boosted former KGB agent Vladimir Putin into full power. Russian security agents of FSB were caught red-handed planting explosives in another building, but the story was hushed up. A former FSB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, who tried to reveal this story, was murdered in London by radioactive polonium.

Similarly, the Bush administration’s neocons shamelessly used 9/11 to promote the invasion of Iraq. Just before the attack, polls showed 80% of Americans erroneously believed Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Dr. Goebbels would have been proud.

So what, in the end, can we conclude? 1. We still do not know the real story about 9/11. 2. The official version is not credible. 3. 9/11 was used to justify invading strategic Afghanistan and oil-rich Iraq. 4. The attacks plunged America into wars against the Muslim world and enriched the US arms industry. 5. 9/11 boosted pro-Israel neoconservatives, formerly a fringe group, into power, and with them America’s totalitarian far right. 6. Bush’s unprovoked war against Iraq destroyed one of Israel’s two main enemies. 7. 9/11 put America in what may turn out to be a permanent state of war with the Muslim world – a key goal of the neoconservatives .

But I’ve seen no hard evidence to date that 9/11 was a plot by America’s far right or by Israel or a giant cover-up. Just, perhaps, the Mother of All Coincidences. In the end, it may just have been 19 angry Arabs and a bumbling Bush administration looking for someone else to blame.

99.9% of What you Need Equals ZERO

 The preceding article was about the academic world, this one is about the industrial realm but the subject is the same: Social and economic breakdown on the ground. The author expects things to get better in 2023. Like Covid-19? Any time now!

 Or maybe they will. But in the current environment, what is the chance that "something", anything really will go wrong in-between?

Guest Post by NickelthroweR on the Burning Platform (Link Below)

 https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/09/08/99-9-of-what-you-need-equals-zero/#more-248282

As of the last census, 444,000 Americans owned a small business that was involved with manufacturing. These small businesses employ about 3% of the total workforce. Of course, you’d have a much greater chance of running into a doctor (985,000), lawyer (1,300,000), or real estate agent (1,300,000) than someone the produces things. That means that just 0.0013% of our current US population finds themselves in the same position that I find myself – the owner of a small business that manufactures real-world items.

Manufacturing real-world items require real-world inputs. As for myself, I need steel for the housings, epoxy and dyes for the knobs, aluminum for the face plate, copper for the circuit boards and wire, plastics, diodes, resistors, capacitors, LED’s, relays and on and on and on and on right up to and including various semi-conductors.

Luckily for me, I invested a decade and put in place a system where everything from hand-wound transformers to the cable harnesses materializes within a few days of each other and then the precision tools that I designed can be assembled, tested, and shipped. To make sure this system works, no one that supplies me anything gets paid until the finished product ships and I have the tracking numbers because, well, that is when I get paid.

When working, this just-in-time way of doing business is a wonder to behold. Watching how quickly it all fell apart is also a wonder to behold. 99.9% of what you need is zero.

There is no elasticity in a circuit. Either 100% of the necessary parts are present and in good working order or the circuit simply doesn’t work. People completely ignorant of such things may believe that substitutions exist but that is not how circuit design works. If your Intel chipset fails on your PC, you can’t substitute an AMD or Motorola chipset in its place. It has to be the chipset that the design was built around. A change in any semi-conductor usually means a complete redesign from the ground up.

At the end of the day, my business is not at all unique in the semi-conductors that it uses. After all, it would be foolish to use semi-conductors that are obsolete, out of production, or rare. Frankly, the more I see a semi-conductor in use, the more I find that it will be cheaper and readily available for me to use. That is why I use the same semi-conductors that are used in the automotive production, medical equipment, heavy machinery, etc.

As I sit here and write this, my supply chain is in absolute tatters. It is not possible to produce some of my products even though I have customers that wish to buy. In an attempt to keep my workforce, I’ve employed “sniffers” to go out and search for military surplus electronics and to visit places where electronics are sometimes misplaced and forgotten. By doing this, I’ve been able to continue producing analog products but even that can’t go on for much longer because 99.9% of what you need is zero.

As I write this, I’m now one item away from being completely out of business.

I do not say any of this because I want sympathy, an apology, or a handout. I am saying this because I want you to apply this lesson to everything around you. Pick anything. Pick an outpatient surgical center.

Suppose you run an outpatient surgical center that serves a rural county. Suppose you’ve worked hard and you have the top of the line equipment and tools. Suppose you’ve got everything in place – all the surgeons, nurses, PA’s, HR, administrators, coders, janitors, landscaping, cafeteria, etc. Let’s further suppose that there isn’t so much as a single squeaky door at your fantastic outpatient surgical center. You run a tight ship!

Suppose that the State where this surgical outpatient center resides just issued a mandate that all workers in your outpatient surgical center must be vaccinated against Covid or be fired as New York State has mandated. Now, suppose your Anesthesiologist isn’t vaccinated and you must fire her. Now what? Your outpatient center is now 100% shut down. It doesn’t matter how many HR Karen’s you hire.

It doesn’t matter if you fly a BLM flag from every window. You can teach CRT from sunup to sundown and it won’t make a bit of difference – you are closed for business and closed forever. After all, it takes 14 years to produce an Anesthesiologist and if half of them are fired statewide then your rural outpatient center isn’t going to have one.

Because our leadership class has never had to produce anything of value, they do not understand how any of this works. They believe 99.9% of what you need is the definition of success. They simply do not understand how quickly the $30,000,000 aircraft becomes a lawn ornament when you fire your fuel handlers. Printed money doesn’t fuel your aircraft – a trained specialist does.

They do not understand that the loss of our workhorse semi-conductors (semi-conductors that I’ve been told will be unavailable to me until at least 2023) means that there can not be a Green New Deal because the machinery needed to construct these projects can not be made nor can our current equipment even be serviced. 99.9% of what you need is zero.

Most Americans can’t quite put this together because most are end consumers and not producers. I suspect that they can’t understand the problem because they think of the world in the same way they think about a grocery store. A grocery store that has 99.9% of what is normally stocked looks perfectly fine. To the end consumer, 95% of what they want is nothing more than a transitory inconvenience. It is nothing to worry about.

They are wrong.

Dead wrong.

Useless Ken and Karen politicians flicked the economy on and off like a light switch, paid our workforce to stay home, and are now ordering us to fire people that can take a decade or more to replace.  The only outcome that I can see from these disastrous decisions is a biblical famine.  Get ready to witness the Four Horsemen.

My University Sacrificed Ideas for Ideology. So Today I Quit.

 

 When a cell destroys itself, we call it autophagy. But what about a society digesting itself from the inside? This unfortunately is what we are witnessing currently and I can find no better illustration that this letter from a professor at Portland University. 

What we are seeing with Covid-19 is just the tip of the iceberg of a much broader social and ideological movement questioning the foundation of the science and reason based social construct of the last 200 years. The current is speeding up and in the distance, the roar of a waterfall is already audible...

Op-Ed authored by Peter Boghossian via Common Sense with Bari Weiss,

Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland State University for the past decade. In the letter below, sent this morning to the university’s provost, he explains why he is resigning.

Dear Provost Susan Jeffords,

​​I’m writing to you today to resign as assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University.

Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.

I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds. 

I never once believed —  nor do I now —  that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.

But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.

Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions. This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly. 

I noticed signs of the illiberalism that has now fully swallowed the academy quite early during my time at Portland State. I witnessed students refusing to engage with different points of view.  Questions from faculty at diversity trainings that challenged approved narratives were instantly dismissed. Those who asked for evidence to justify new institutional policies were accused of microaggressions. And professors were accused of bigotry for assigning canonical texts written by philosophers who happened to have been European and male.  

At first, I didn’t realize how systemic this was and I believed I could question this new culture. So I began asking questions. What is the evidence that trigger warnings and safe spaces contribute to student learning? Why should racial consciousness be the lens through which we view our role as educators? How did we decide that “cultural appropriation” is immoral?

Unlike my colleagues, I asked these questions out loud and in public. 

I decided to study the new values that were engulfing Portland State and so many other educational institutions — values that sound wonderful, like diversity, equity, and inclusion, but might actually be just the opposite. The more I read the primary source material produced by critical theorists, the more I suspected that their conclusions reflected the postulates of an ideology, not insights based on evidence.

I began networking with student groups who had similar concerns and brought in speakers to explore these subjects from a critical perspective. And it became increasingly clear to me that the incidents of illiberalism I had witnessed over the years were not just isolated events, but part of an institution-wide problem.

The more I spoke out about these issues, the more retaliation I faced. 

Early in the 2016-17 academic year, a former student complained about me and the university initiated a Title IX investigation.  (Title IX investigations are a part of federal law designed to protect “people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.”) My accuser, a white male, made a slew of baseless accusations against me, which university confidentiality rules unfortunately prohibit me from discussing further. What I can share is that students of mine who were interviewed during the process told me the Title IX investigator asked them if they knew anything about me beating my wife and children. This horrifying accusation soon became a widespread rumor. 

With Title IX investigations there is no due process, so I didn’t have access to the particular accusations, the ability to confront my accuser, and I had no opportunity to defend myself. Finally, the results of the investigation were revealed in December 2017. Here are the last two sentences of the report: “Global Diversity & Inclusion finds there is insufficient evidence that Boghossian violated PSU’s Prohibited Discrimination & Harassment policy. GDI recommends Boghossian receive coaching.”

Not only was there no apology for the false accusations, but the investigator also told me that in the future I was not allowed to render my opinion about “protected classes” or teach in such a way that my opinion about protected classes could be known — a bizarre conclusion to absurd charges. Universities can enforce ideological conformity just through the threat of these investigations.

I eventually became convinced that corrupted bodies of scholarship were responsible for justifying radical departures from the traditional role of liberal arts schools and basic civility on campus. There was an urgent need to demonstrate that morally fashionable papers — no matter how absurd — could be published. I believed then that if I exposed the theoretical flaws of this body of literature, I could help the university community avoid building edifices on such shaky ground.

So, in 2017, I co-published an intentionally garbled peer-reviewed paper that took aim at the new orthodoxy. Its title: “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.” This example of pseudo-scholarship, which was published in Cogent Social Sciences, argued that penises were products of the human mind and responsible for climate change. Immediately thereafter, I revealed the article as a hoax designed to shed light on the flaws of the peer-review and academic publishing systems.

Shortly thereafter, swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department. They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces. Our university remained silent. When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators.

I continued to believe, perhaps naively, that if I exposed the flawed thinking on which Portland State’s new values were based, I could shake the university from its madness. In 2018 I co-published a series of absurd or morally repugnant peer-reviewed articles in journals that focused on issues of race and gender. In one of them we argued that there was an epidemic of dog rape at dog parks and proposed that we leash men the way we leash dogs. Our purpose was to show that certain kinds of “scholarship” are based not on finding truth but on advancing social grievances. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. 

Administrators and faculty were so angered by the papers that they published an anonymous piece in the student paper and Portland State filed formal charges against me. Their accusation? “Research misconduct” based on the absurd premise that the journal editors who accepted our intentionally deranged articles were “human subjects.” I was found guilty of not receiving approval to experiment on human subjects. 

Meanwhile, ideological intolerance continued to grow at Portland State. In March 2018, a tenured professor disrupted a public discussion I was holding with author Christina Hoff Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. In June 2018, someone triggered the fire alarm during my conversation with popular cultural critic Carl Benjamin. In October 2018, an activist pulled out the speaker wires to interrupt a panel with former Google engineer James Damore. The university did nothing to stop or address this behavior. No one was punished or disciplined. 

For me, the years that followed were marked by continued harassment. I’d find flyers around campus of me with a Pinocchio nose. I was spit on and threatened by passersby while walking to class. I was informed by students that my colleagues were telling them to avoid my classes. And, of course, I was subjected to more investigation.

I wish I could say that what I am describing hasn’t taken a personal toll. But it has taken exactly the toll it was intended to: an increasingly intolerable working life and without the protection of tenure.

This isn’t about me. This is about the kind of institutions we want and the values we choose. Every idea that has advanced human freedom has always, and without fail, been initially condemned. As individuals, we often seem incapable of remembering this lesson, but that is exactly what our institutions are for: to remind us that the freedom to question is our fundamental right. Educational institutions should remind us that that right is also our duty.  

Portland State University has failed in fulfilling this duty. In doing so it has failed not only its students but the public that supports it. While I am grateful for the opportunity to have taught at Portland State for over a decade, it has become clear to me that this institution is no place for people who intend to think freely and explore ideas. 

This is not the outcome I wanted. But I feel morally obligated to make this choice. For ten years, I have taught my students the importance of living by your principles. One of mine is to defend our system of liberal education from those who seek to destroy it. Who would I be if I didn’t?

Sincerely,

Peter Boghossian

Is The US Intelligence Community Putting The World At Risk?

 This article very much sounds like a deep state neo-con piece of work. Still, I find it interesting enough to keep here as I agree with most of the points if not necessarily the conclusion.

 The US is obsessed with the rise of China which to my opinion is less important than the oppressive system that China is building based on technology, which slowly at first, but more and more visibly now is spilling over to Western countries. Social Credit, permanent geo-location, absolute control of money with tight limitations, likewise control of movement, activity, the Internet, thought... 

 As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, it is easy to understand in retrospect that the opportunity to tighten control of society ranked much higher that the terrorist risk which from the beginning was almost negligible. We are only in the second year of the Covid pandemic, but it is already obvious that likewise, the crisis is being used to tighten the screw further.  

 Considering that what is now technically possible goes beyond the wet dream of most dictators of the 20th century, the risk that we are currently building a global society based on principles not far removed from those promoted by the Chinese Communist Party should scare everyone stiff. That more than China as such is the real danger we are facing.

Authored by Pete Hoekstra via The Gatestone Institute,

The recent release of an unclassified summary by the Intelligence Community (IC) of its investigation into China's role in the COVID pandemic leaves one feeling that there is nothing there. Like Sergeant Schultz in the old TV series "Hogan's Heroes," the IC seems to be protesting "I know nothing! Nothing!" The report provided no real substantive insights into the origins of the pandemic. Yet the Intelligence Community's COVID Summary is dangerous; infinitely more dangerous than it appears.

Without saying so directly, it encourages us to discount China's significant culpability in this disaster, downplaying its responsibility for the pandemic unleashed on its territory and its role in the deadly spread of COVID around the world.

The summary comes to three relatively strong conclusions about Chinese actions and motivations.

• First of all, the IC states its judgment that China did not develop the virus "as a biological weapon."

• Second, the IC assesses that "China's officials did not have foreknowledge of the virus before the initial outbreak."

• Third, the report ends with a startling conclusion, stated so matter-of-factly that it could almost go unnoticed; it says that China's "actions," its "hindering" of the international investigation, its "resistance" to sharing information and its attempts to blame other countries, "reflect, in part, China's government's own uncertainty about where an investigation could lead as well as its frustration the international community is using the issue to exert political pressure on China."

The first two findings are probably correct. Taken together, they rule out the worst possible scenario: that China's leadership developed a biological weapon and knowingly unleashed it on an unsuspecting world. These findings were never really in debate so nothing new. But we should not take undue comfort in that. As Gordon G. Chang outlined in these pages earlier this week, just because they didn't do it this time, doesn't mean they will not do it in the future. Chang was correct in identifying COVID was the "ultimate proof of concept."

What truly makes the IC summary dangerous is its third conclusion, implying China's unacceptable behavior since the pandemic was unleashed can be explained away and thus ignored.

How can the IC seriously believe that China's active stonewalling of the international community's attempts to get to the bottom of what happened and thus learn better how to combat the virus can be reduced to its "uncertainty about where an investigation might lead" or its "frustration" about outside political pressure? If our IC insists on promoting this rose-colored view of China, if this wishful thinking really reflects what our IC believes, the world is in deep trouble.

Let me build on Chang's exposure of China's behavior and offer some findings that should have been in the Intelligence Community report:

• We can assess with a high degree of confidence that China views the U.S. as its primary global adversary. In the short term China wants to achieve near peer status with the U.S. In the long term it wants to be the dominant world power.

• We can assess with a high degree of confidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been actively involved in advanced virus research via improving genetic targeting capabilities.

• We can assess with a high degree of confidence that the CCP facilitated the global spread of the COVID-19 virus.

• We can assess with a medium degree of confidence that the CCP used its influence with the WHO to spread a major disinformation campaign.

• In sum, we can assess with a high degree of confidence that while the origins and initial awareness of the virus by the Chinese government cannot be clearly ascertained, the Chinese government has been intimately involved in most everything since then. It has used the pandemic to further its global economic and political agenda. Its behavior has been ruthless and malicious.

Americans, our international allies and enemies, and, of course, Chinese and CCP officials themselves, will read this intelligence summary carefully. Thus, the U.S. intelligence community's whitewashing of China's culpability puts us all at risk. In documents such as this report, there are no throwaway lines. Every word is weighed and considered. The implication that China is essentially innocent of any ill will is in the report only because some senior official wanted to include it.

God help us if this signals the beginning of a Biden administration appeasement strategy. Judging from everything we have experienced over the last ten to twenty years, the attempt to placate China by writing off its malicious behavior as lightly as this report does is doomed to failure. It shows weakness. It rewards an aggressive China, and only invites more of the same.

Harvard Epidemiologist Says The Case For COVID Vaccine Passports Was Just Demolished

 

Authored by Jon Miltimore via the Foundation for Economic Educcation (emphasis ours),

A newly published medical study found that infection from COVID-19 confers considerably longer-lasting and stronger protection against the Delta variant of the virus than vaccines.

“The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a ‘Don’t try this at home’ label,” the Scientific American reported Thursday. “The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become hospitalized with serious COVID-19.”

Photo by Thérèse Soukar, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Put another way, vaccinated individuals were 27 times more likely to get a symptomatic COVID infection than those with natural immunity from COVID.

A Death Blow to Vaccine Passports?

The findings come as many governments around the world are demanding citizens acquire “vaccine passports” to travel. New York City, France, and the Canadian provinces of Quebec and British Columbia are among those who have recently embraced vaccine passports.

Meanwhile, Australia has floated the idea of making higher vaccination rates a condition of lifting its lockdown in jurisdictions, while President Joe Biden is considering making interstate travel unlawful for people who have not been vaccinated for COVID-19.

Vaccine passports are morally dubious for many reasons, not the least of which is that freedom of movement is a basic human right. However, vaccine passports become even more senseless in light of the new findings out of Israel and revelations from the CDC, some say.

Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldorff said research showing that natural immunity offers exponentially more protection than vaccines means vaccine passports are both unscientific and discriminatory, since they disproportionately affect working class individuals.

“Prior COVID disease (many working class) provides better immunity than vaccines (many professionals), so vaccine mandates are not only scientific nonsense, they are also discriminatory and unethical,” Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist, observed on Twitter.

Nor is the study out of Israel a one-off. Media reports show that no fewer than 15 academic studies have found that natural immunity offers immense protection from COVID-19.

Moreover, CDC research shows that vaccinated individuals still get infected with COVID-19 and carry just as much of the virus in their throat and nasal passage as unvaccinated individuals

“High viral loads suggest an increased risk of transmission and raised concern that, unlike with other variants, vaccinated people infected with Delta can transmit the virus,” CDC Rochelle Director Walensky noted following a Cape Cod outbreak that included mostly vaccinated individuals.

These data suggest that vaccinated individuals are still spreading the virus much like unvaccinated individuals.

The Bottom Line

Vaccine passports would be immoral and a massive government overreach even in the absence of these findings. There is simply no historical parallel for governments attempting to restrict the movements of healthy people over a respiratory virus in this manner.

Yet the justification for vaccine passports becomes not just wrong but absurd in light of these new revelations.

People who have had COVID already have significantly more protection from the virus than people who’ve been vaccinated. Meanwhile, people who’ve not had COVID and choose to not get vaccinated may or may not be making an unwise decision. But if they are, they are principally putting only themselves at risk.

Control the "narrative"!

 This article is all about Afghanistan, but in reality it isn't. It is about modern politics and how it has become obsessed with "Control of the narrative" to the detriment of reality and how our leaders now believe that how you describe something actually modify that something. In other words: "How they believe their own bullshit!"

 In the case of Afghanistan, clearly, reality was what it was and denying that the Talibans were winning did not delay their victory one Iota. 

 The same, eventually, will happen with Covid-19. For most people in good health, the virus is not dangerous and conversely the rDNA vaccines are of little use and may even be more dangerous than the virus due to the spike which more than anything is the toxic part. But the narrative, for the time being, is that life can only return to normal with the vaccine. It will not. Quite the opposite in fact. It is promoting the emergence of variants. Lambda from Peru and Mu from Columbia. 

 The narrative is that unvaccinated people and spreading the virus and filling hospitals. This is false. But reality will not change the narrative. It will have to crumble under the onslaught of news. At which stage, a new narrative will be created. And so our society is going down, one false truth at a time...

 

Biden Told Afghan President To "Create Perception" Taliban Wasn't Winning "Whether It Is True Or Not"

Despite all evidence to the contrary, President Biden appeared before the American people on Tuesday to try to sell his version of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.

With a straight face, Biden half-shouted to the American people about the "extraordinary success" of the evacuation effort - an assessment that seemed completely at odds with the reality of the situation - before trotting out some equally specious stats: the US had successfully evacuated 90% of Americans who wanted to leave Kabul, and Biden committed to doing everything in his power to help those left behind.

But just as President Biden was delivering his prepared remarks, Reuters was quietly publishing a leaked transcript from the president's final call with Ashraf Ghani, which took place in late July. The call offers a more realistic picture of a Biden Administration obsessed with the optics of the pullout, who was still pushing the Afghans to focus on an irrelevant strategy shift to try and make it look like they were doing something in the face of Taliban defeat.

A few weeks later, the Afghan president fled Kabul with sacks full of plundered cash just before the Taliban surrounded the city. He's now believed to be hiding in the UAE.

Although Biden seemed aware that the situation on the ground appeared grim, Biden demanded that Ghani project "a different picture" to the press and the international community "whether or not it was true".

“I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things are not going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban,” Biden said. “And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture."

Biden told Ghani that if Afghanistan’s prominent political figures were to give a press conference together, backing a new military strategy, "that will change perception, and that will change an awful lot I think."

It's also clear that Biden knew it was only a matter of time before the Taliban completed its takeover of the country. His main goal was making sure Ghani did everything in his power to try and manage the Afghan Army's defeat with as little embarrassment as possible.

Despite probably knowing that details from his final call with Ghani would surface, Biden repeated his claims that nobody could have anticipated the Taliban's rapid advance.

During the call, the Afghan president pleaded with Biden for more air support and a raise for Afghan soldiers who hadn't received one in a decade, Biden offered mostly platitudes.

"We are going to continue to fight hard, diplomatically, politically, economically, to make sure your government not only survives, but is sustained and grows," said Biden.

By the time the two leaders spoke on July 23, roughly 23 days before the fall of Kabul, Taliban insurgents controlled roughly half of Afghanistan's district centers as the situation in the country rapidly deteriorated. Around this time, Biden insisted that the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban wasn't inevitable.

Although the situation in Afghanistan was already dire, and the American forces were withdrawing their air support, Biden continued to push Ghani about holding a press conference to announce a new military "strategy" that was really just window dressing.

"But I really think, I don’t know whether you’re aware, just how much the perception around the world is that this is looking like a losing proposition, which it is not, not that it necessarily is that, but so the conclusion I’m asking you to consider is to bring together everyone from [Former Vice President Abdul Rashid] Dostum, to [Former President Hamid] Karzai and in between," he said.

"If they stand there and say they back the strategy you put together, and put a warrior in charge, you know a military man, Khan in charge of executing that strategy, and that will change perception, and that will change an awful lot I think."

Ghani responded by saying Afghanistan was facing not just the Taliban, but their foreign backers.

"We are facing a full-scale invasion, composed of Taliban, full Pakistani planning and logistical support, and at least 10-15,000 international terrorists, predominantly Pakistanis thrown into this."

In other words, the problem of defeating the Taliban wasn't going to be fixed by a press conference. And the new "strategy" of abandoning rural areas to protect population centers was really the last available course of action, since the Taliban dominated the rural districts.

The bottom line is this: President Biden clearly knew the dissolution of the Afghan government and swift triumph of the Taliban was inevitable, but he was so preoccupied with managing the optics of the pullout, that he neglected to focus on planning for the final stages of the US withdrawal, all while appearing to believe his own BS about changing the strategy on the ground.

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.