A Mostly Peaceful Depopulation by Margaret Anna Alice (Includes videos)

 This is a very interesting document about Covid-19 which contains tons of links and information. I have kept only the long initial list of questions in this post to highlight all the current doubts and interrogations about Covid. This by itself is already very informative.

 The rest of the article which you can access below is a long rant about the depopulation agenda of the global elites. I am ambivalent on this subject. Up to a point we can see that some institutions are manipulated but is there really such a conspiracy behind? Profit and Power are enough to motivate people and are being used extensively in the current crisis. Is there anything more sinister going on? I simply do not know and have no information beyond circumstantial to believe it. So these ideas are presented as food for thoughts.

A Mostly Peaceful Depopulation

Notes for My Corona Investigative Committee Interview

 Read the Whole Article

Margaret Anna Alice

Jul 4

I had the great honor of being interviewed by Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, Viviane Fischer, and Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg during Session 111: “Reconstellation” of the Corona Investigative Committee, whose heroic fact-finding discussions with hundreds of physicians, scientists, and other experts since July 2020 have formed a crucial part of my own education. 

They asked me to speak on the depopulation agenda explored in my Anatomy of a Philanthropath series. I regret that I overestimated how much I could cram into fifty-odd minutes so was unable to complete my presentation before the next guest arrived in the studio. I let them know I would be publishing my notes here so people can read the information I skipped over and reference the hyperlinked sources.

---

A Retrospective in Whys

Since the beginning of this manufactured crisis, the Berlin Corona Investigative Committee has been conducting the exploratory work that I would have expected every government and so-called public health organization to have undertaken from the outset.

The fact that this did not occur was one of the first signs that COVID represented a departure from all prior pandemic protocols, but the question I kept asking myself is, Why?

Here are some of the permutations of that question I started asking beginning in early 2020 and continuing through the present-day:

TOTALITARIANISM

• Why are governments, public health agencies, the media, Big Tech, and “experts” stoking fear instead of calmly assessing the data and attempting to dispel panic—like every responsible authority has done for genuine crises in the past?

• Why are all of these entities speaking in unison with a single voice as if everyone has been handed the same script?

• Why are they covering COVID 24/7 on every available outlet, drumming up the death tallies and case counts and behaving as if it were the only newsworthy story on the planet?

• Why are people all suddenly parroting the same phrases like “social distancing,” “New Normal,” “Build Back Better,” and the Orwellian double-think gem “together apart”?

• Why does it seem like everyone has suddenly lost their capacities for critical thinking, reasoning, logic, and scientific analysis?

• Why are they encouraging discrimination against those who refuse to comply with unscientific and nonsensical guidelines?

• Why did they turn the world into an open-air prison?

• Why are governments patterning their policies after Biderman’s Chart of Coercion?

• Why does it feel like we’re being subjected to a permanent Milgram Obedience–Stanford Prison–Asch Conformity experiment?

• Why are Big Tech and Big Media silencing people—especially scientists, physicians, and other knowledgeable individuals who are most qualified to speak about these matters?

• Why are California and the federal government threatening physicians with loss of their licenses for spreading “misinformation,” which happens to be based on scientifically demonstrable evidence and clinical experience?

• Why are such extreme measures being taken for a disease with an infinitesimal fatality rate that primarily only affects those who are already likely to die—namely the elderly and those with serious comorbidities?

• Why are governments rewriting human rights policies and revising statutes to allow the forced quarantining of healthy individuals?

• Why are ordinary, working-class Canadians who are bravely protesting authoritarian policies being vilified by the media and their leaders?

• Why are they pushing for International Health Regulations (IHR) amendments that would grant an unelected bureaucrat and accused genocidal war criminal control over the entire world’s public health policy?

• Why is the WHO drafting a pandemic accord that would give it the ability to set a “OneHealth” policy for all member states and seize supranational powers in times of declared public health “emergencies”?

• Why are Australians and New Zealanders being bullied, abused, arrested, and quarantined like they’re living in a police state?

• Why are so many colluders willingly serving as implements of tyranny?

• Why aren’t people worried that the ten stages of genocide are unfolding before our eyes?

• Why do people think relinquishing their liberties in exchange for “safety” is temporary when it has never been so in the past?

• Why are so many people belligerently bamboozled?

• Why are values such as independent thought, integrity, ethics, freedom, transparency, and individuality being denigrated while groupthink, obedience, complicity, prejudice, collectivism, fear, rage, and hatred are being promoted?

• Why are governments and employers mandating vaccines and pushing for vaxxports when they have been proven both unsafe and ineffective?

• Why does it feel like we’re living in a dystopian fairy tale?

HARMFUL & ILLOGICAL HEALTH POLICIES

• Why aren’t health authorities making dietary, lifestyle, and supplement recommendations that would bolster people’s immunity—like encouraging them to eat healthy; reduce their stress levels; get proper sleep; exercise; enjoy sunshine and fresh air; and practice other habits that help prevent illness?

• Why aren’t they focusing on the conventional practices for preventing respiratory illnesses such as washing your hands and staying home when you have symptoms?

• Why are we being commanded to “Trust the Science” when scientific inquiry is a continually evolving process and requires transparency and diverse viewpoints to progress?

• Why are they suddenly telling us asymptomatic spread exists, when there was no evidence for such transmission and no studies demonstrating that this has occurred with past coronaviruses?

• Why are they pretending like there’s no such thing as natural immunity?

• Why did they previously redefine “pandemic” to exclude “simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness”?

• Why did they change the definition of “herd immunity” to inject the idea that it is acquired through vaccination when it was previously understood by immunologists and virologists to be achieved naturally when a virus spreads throughout a community?

• Why did they change the definitions of “vaccine,” “fully vaccinated,” “cause of death,” and “case,” for that matter?

• Why did they censor Bakersfield doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi when they provided sensible, experience-based, and reassuring textbook information about COVID transmission, treatment, and herd immunity at their April 22, 2020, press conference?

• Why are they using PCR tests to calculate case counts when their Nobel-Prize–winning creator said it “allows you to take a very minuscule amount of anything and make it measurable and then talk about it in meetings and stuff like it is important”?

• Why did Fauci—or as I like to call him, Dr. Mengelfauci—first tell the truth about masks not working, then lie about them working, and then say he lied when he’d originally told the long-established truth that masks are ineffective for respiratory viruses? And why did he lie about so many other things?

• Why are they telling us staying six feet apart will magically protect us?

• Why are they counting deaths with and not just from COVID?

• Why are they putting infected patients in nursing homes, where the population is the most vulnerable?

• Why are nursing home residents being isolated, tortured, neglected, eldercided with midazolam, and deprived of the visiting rights even prisoners enjoy?

• Why are they instituting policies the WHO previously warned against—from lockdowns to masking to disinfection to border closures—because they are known to cause mass-scale harm, poverty, and even death?

• Why are they closing schools (and later, pushing injections on kids) when children are at the least risk of contracting and spreading COVID?

• Why are they requiring children to mask, social-distance, and follow other ineffective rules that impair their development, inflict psychological and emotional damage, and even cause physical harm?

• Why are they continuing to use ventilation for COVID patients when it was found early on to be causing deaths?

• Why is so much data not shared or being hidden from the public?

• Why are they financially incentivizing the administration of a drug found to cause multiple-organ failure and with no clinical efficacy for COVID?

• Why are hospital staff getting away with “bagging” COVID patients with plastic equipment covers to “protect” the workers?

Mary Talley Bowden MD @MdBreathe

Medical Center Hospital in Odessa TX bagged COVID patients to protect their staff. This went on for over year while doctors turned a blind eye. Powerful testimony from Dr Richard Bartlett in front of @Texas_Senate

July 2nd 2022

4,368 Retweets6,765 Likes

THWARTING OF EARLY TREATMENT PROTOCOLS

• Why didn’t they immediately start searching for treatments and researching the effectiveness of repurposed drugs per standard operating procedure?

• Why aren’t they providing recommendations for at-home care and instead telling people to wait until their lips turn blue and then go to the hospital?

• Why are disinformation campaigns being launched against early-treatment protocols?

• Why are the doctors who prescribe these life-saving treatments being smeared and stripped of their licenses?

• Why is scientific fraud being committed to discredit a Nobel-Prize–winning medications?

GLOBAL MASS INJECTION EXPERIMENT

• Why are people okay with skipping long-term clinical trials for a novel gene therapy that has never been deployed on humans?

• Why are they embarking on a coercive global mass injection campaign when such a feat has also never been attempted—let alone with a genetic inoculation lacking long-term clinical safety data?

• Why aren’t people bothered that pharmaceutical companies have zero liability for these products thanks to emergency use authorizations?

• Why aren’t people being told they are experimental subjects and that the Pfizer clinical trials won’t be completed until March 31, 2023?

• Why are they advising pregnant women to get injected with an experimental product when they excluded pregnant and breastfeeding women from clinical trials?

• Why did Pfizer and the FDA ignore the devastating injuries suffered by twelve-year-old Maddie De Garay as a result of their clinical trial for adolescents?

• Why did the FDA want to hide the Pfizer clinical trial data from the public for seventy-five years?

• Why isn’t the media shouting from the rooftops about the 1,223 deaths, 158,000 adverse events, and 1,291 side effects reported in the first ninety days of Pfizer’s clinical trial and only recently disclosed to the public due to the FOIA request resulting in their release at a rate of 55,000 pages per month?

• Why, for that matter, aren’t the media, government, or regulatory agencies concerned about the 1,314,592 adverse event reports received by the CDC through June 24, 2022—including 29,031 deaths and 50,400 child reports?

• Why has the CDC never monitored its own adverse events reporting system for COVID injection safety signals—only discovered recently thanks to another FOIA request?

• Why isn’t anyone concerned that they keep moving the goalposts for the injection—first promising that it would set us free, then saying it’s not working because of the evil unvaxxed, then saying it loses efficacy after a few months and you need a booster shot, then saying you need second booster, then saying you need it every four months?

• Why are there so many breakthrough infections?

• Why are the boosted contracting COVID more than the uninjected?

• Why does the immune system appear to suffer progressive destruction with each additional shot?

• Why are cancers exploding in the injected?

• Why are birth rates dropping around the world?

• Why are there so many miscarriages, stillbirths, fertility problems, and disabilities in the babies of injected mothers?

• Why are so many people developing myocarditis and having heart attacks after injection?

• Why do they make it so difficult for medical staff to report adverse events?

• Why are children, millennials, athletes, and other healthy people suddenly dying and becoming disabled?

• Why are pathologists finding that 93 percent of people who died after injection were killed by it?

• Why are embalmers discovering mysterious wormlike strings in the corpses of the vaxxed?

• Why did such a cosmically unprecedented mass fatality rate start in 2021—so bad that they’ve had to make up SADS (Sudden Adult Death Syndrome) to cover for the reality that massive numbers of people are unexpectedly dropping dead?

• Why did life insurance companies pay out as much as 163 percent more for 18–64-year-olds and 258 percent more overall in 2021 over 2020?

• Why did a German insurance executive get fired for reporting alarming numbers of vaxx injuries?

• Why aren’t people being given informed consent about the risks of Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE), blood clots, Bell’s Palsy, Guillain-Barré syndrome, cardiac diseases, and the innumerable other debilitating and fatal side effects?

• Why aren’t the vaccine manufacturers making any efforts to improve their products to reduce mortality and adverse reactions?

• Why is it okay to keep pharmaceutical products in circulation despite historically unprecedented rates of deaths and injuries when, before 2020, such drugs would have been recalled as soon as a tiny handful of serious reactions had been reported?

• Why aren’t the vaxxed more curious about what they’ve been injected with?

Finally, why are so few people asking these questions, and why are they censoring us for asking them?

After assessing and meticulously assembling thousands of pieces of evidence over the past two years, I have concluded the only logical answers to the above questions are:

1. PROFIT: accomplishing the largest wealth transfer from the middle class to the super-wealthy/super-rich in history;

2. POWER: setting the stage for The Great Reset and a global technocratic one-world tyranny; and

3. DEMOCIDE: reducing the population to “save the planet.”

Letter to the U.K. Gov from 76 Doctors (about Covid Vaccination for children)

  Doctors are becoming concerned about the Covid vaccine and its consequences. The lack of protection and therefore negative risk/benefit balance for children is most obvious but it applies likewise to healthy adults. Vaccination should have been limited to older and sick people on a voluntary basis. But in 2020 we crossed the Rubicon...

We are writing to you urgently concerning the announcement that the FDA has granted an Emergency Use Authorization for both Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines in preschool children.

We would urge you to consider very carefully the move to vaccinate ever younger children against SARS-CoV-2, despite the gradual but significant reducing virulence of successive variants, the increasing evidence of rapidly waning vaccine efficacy, the increasing concerns over long-term vaccine harms, and the knowledge that the vast majority of this young age group have already been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 repeatedly and have demonstrably effective immunity. Thus, the balance of benefit and risk which supported the rollout of mRNA vaccines to the elderly and vulnerable in 2021 is totally inappropriate for small children in 2022. 

We also strongly challenge the addition of COVID-19 vaccination into the routine child immunization program despite no demonstrated clinical need, known and unknown risks (see below) and the fact that these vaccines still have only conditional marketing authorization.

It is noteworthy that the Pfizer documentation presented to the FDA has huge gaps in the evidence provided: 

• The protocol was changed mid-trial. The original two-dose schedule exhibited poor immunogenicity with efficacy far below the required standard. A third dose was added by which time many of the original placebo recipients had been vaccinated.  

• There was no statistically significant difference between the placebo and vaccinated groups in either the 6–23-month age group or the 2-4-year-olds, even after the third dose. Astonishingly, the results were based on just three participants in the younger age group (one vaccinated and two placebo) and just seven participants in the older 2–4-year-olds (two vaccinated and five placebo). Indeed, for the younger age group the confidence intervals ranged from minus-367% to plus-99%. The manufacturer stated that the numbers were too low to draw any confident conclusions. Moreover, these limited numbers come only from children infected more than seven days after the third dose.

• Over the whole time period from the first dose onwards (see page 39 Tables 19 and 20), there were a total of 225 infected children in the vaccinated arm and 150 in the placebo arm, giving a calculated vaccine efficacy of only 25% (14% for the 6-23 months, and 33% for 2-4s).  

• The additional immunogenicity studies against Omicron, requested by the FDA, only involved a total of 66 children tested one month after the third dose (see page 35).   

It is incomprehensible that the FDA considered that this represents sufficient evidence on which to base a decision to vaccinate healthy children. When it comes to safety, the data are even thinner: only 1,057 children, some already unblinded, were followed for just two months. It is noteworthy that Sweden and Norway are not recommending the vaccine for 5-11s and Holland is not recommending it for children who have already had COVID-19. The director of the Danish Health and Medicines Authority stated recently that with what is now known, the decision to vaccinate children was a mistake.

We summarize below the overwhelming arguments against this vaccination.

A.  Extremely low risk from COVID-19 to young children

• In the whole of 2020 and 2021, not a single child aged 1-9 died where COVID-19 was the sole diagnosis on the death certificate, according to ONS data.

• A detailed study in England from March 1st 2020 to March 1st 2021 found only six children under 18 years died with no co-morbidities. There were no deaths aged 1-4 years.

• Children clear the virus more easily than adults.

• Children mount effective, robust, and sustained immune responses.

• Since the arrival of the Omicron variant, infections have been generally much milder. That is also true for unvaccinated under-5s.

• By June 2022 it is now estimated that 89% of 1-4-year-olds had already had SARS-CoV-2 infection.

• Recent data from Israel show excellent long-lasting immunity following infection in children, especially in 5-11s.

B.  Poor vaccine efficacy 

• In adults, it has become apparent that vaccine efficacy wanes steadily over time, necessitating boosters at regular intervals. Specifically, vaccine efficacy has waned more rapidly against the latest Omicron variants. 

• In children, vaccine efficacy has waned more rapidly in 5-11s than in 12-17s, possibly related to the lower dose used in the pediatric formulation. One study from New York showed efficacy against Omicron falling to only 12% by 4-5 weeks and to negative values by 5-6 weeks post second dose.

• In the Pfizer 0-4s trial, the efficacy after two doses fell to negative values, necessitating a change to the trial protocol. After a third dose there was a suggestion of efficacy from 7-30 days but there is no data beyond 30 days to see how quickly this will wane. 

C. Potential harms of COVID-19 vaccines for children

• There has been great concern about myocarditis in adolescents and young adults, especially in males after the second dose, estimated at one per 2,600 in active post-marketing surveillance in Hong Kong. The emerging evidence of persistent cardiac abnormalities in adolescents with post-mRNA vaccine myopericarditis, as demonstrated by cardiac MRI at 3-8 months follow up, suggests this is far from ‘mild and short-lived’. The potential for longer term effects requires further study and calls for the strictest application of the precautionary principle in respect of the youngest and most vulnerable children.

• Although post-vaccination myocarditis appears to be less common in 5-11-year-olds than older children, it is, nonetheless, increased over baseline.

• In the Pfizer study, 50% of vaccinated children had systemic adverse events, including irritability and fever. Diagnosis of myocarditis is much more difficult in younger children. No troponin levels or ECG studies were documented. Even a vaccinated child in the trial, hospitalized with fever, calf pain and a raised CPK, had no report of D-dimers, anti-platelet antibodies or troponin levels.

• In Pfizer’s 5-11s post-authorization conditions, it is required to conduct studies looking for myocarditis and is not due to report results until 2027.

• Of equal concern are, as yet unknown, negative effects on the immune system. In the 0-4s trial, only seven children were described as having “severe” COVID-19 – six vaccinated and one given placebo. Similarly, for the 12 children with recurrent episodes of infection, 10 were vaccinated against only two who received placebo. These are all tiny figures and much too small to rule out any adverse impact such as antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) and other impacts on the immune system.

• Also unanswered is the question of Original Antigenic Sin. It is of note that in a large Israeli study, those infected after vaccination had poorer cover than those vaccinated after infection. In the Moderna trial, N-antibodies were seen in only 40% of those infected after vaccination, compared with 93% of those infected after placebo.

• There is evidence of vaccine-induced disruption of both innate and adaptive immune responses. The possibility of developing an impaired immune function would be disastrous for children, who have the most competent innate immunity, which by now has been effectively trained by the circulating virus.

• Totally unknown is whether there will be any adverse effect on T-cell function leading to an increase in cancers.

• Also, in terms of reproductive function, limited animal bio-distribution studies showed lipid nanoparticles concentrate in ovaries and testes. Adult sperm donors have showed a reduction in sperm counts particularly of motile sperm, falling by three months post-vaccination and remaining depressed at four to five months.

• Even for adults, concerns are rising that serious adverse events are in excess of hospitalizations from COVID-19.

D. Informed consent

• For 5-11s, the JCVI, in recommending a “non-urgent offer” of vaccination, specifically noted the importance of fully informed consent with no coercion.

• With the low uptake in this age group, the presence of ‘therapy dogs’, advertisements including superhero images and information about child vaccination protecting friends and family all clearly run contrary to the concept of consent, fully informed and freely given.

• The complete omission of information explaining to the public the different and novel technology used in COVID-19 vaccines compared to standard vaccines, and the failure to inform of the lack of any long-term safety data, borders on misinformation.

E. Effect on public confidence 

• Vaccines against much more serious diseases, such as polio and measles, need to be prioritized. Pushing an unnecessary and novel, gene-based vaccine on to young children risks seriously undermining parental confidence in the whole immunization program.

• The poor quality of the data presented by Pfizer risks bringing the pharmaceutical industry into disrepute and the regulators if this product is authorized.

In summary, young healthy children are at minimal risk from COVID-19, especially since the arrival of the Omicron variant. Most have been repeatedly exposed to SARS-CoV-2 virus, yet have remained well, or have had short, mild illness. As detailed above, the vaccines are of brief efficacy, have known short- to medium-term risks and unknown long-term safety. Data for clinically useful efficacy in small children are scant or absent. In older children, for whom the vaccines are already licensed, they have been promoted via ethically dubious schemes to the potential detriment of other, and vital, parts of the childhood vaccination program.

For a tiny minority of children for whom the potential for benefit clearly and unequivocally outweighed the potential for harm, vaccination could have been facilitated by restrictive licenses. Whether following the precautionary principle or the instruction to First Do No Harm, such vaccines have no place in a routine childhood immunization program.  

(Signed):

Professor Angus Dalgleish, MD, FRCP, FRACP, FRCPath, FMed Sci, Principal, Institute for Cancer Vaccines & Immunotherapy (ICVI)
Professor Anthony Fryer, PhD, FRCPath, Professor of Clinical Biochemistry, Keele University
Professor David Livermore, BSc, PhD, Retired Professor of Medical Microbiology, UEA
Professor John Fairclough FRCS FFSEM retired Honorary Consultant Surgeon 
Lord Moonie,  MBChB, MRCPsych, MFCM, MSc, House of Lords, former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State 2001-2003, formerCconsultant in Public Health Medicine
Dr Abby Astle, MA(Cantab), MBBChir, GP Principal, GP Trainer, GP Examiner
Dr Michael D Bell, MBChB, MRCGP, retired General Practitioner
Dr Alan Black, MBBS, MSc, DipPharmMed, Retired Pharmaceutical Physician
Dr David Bramble, MBChB, MRCPsych, MD, Consultant Psychiatrist
Dr Emma Brierly, MBBS, MRCGP, General Practitioner
Dr David Cartland, MBChB, BMedSci, General practitioner
Dr Peter Chan, BM, MRCS, MRCGP, NLP, General Practitioner, Functional medicine practitioner 
Michael Cockayne, MSc, PGDip, SCPHNOH, BA, RN, Occupational Health Practitioner
Julie Coffey, MBChB, General Practitioner 
John Collis, RN, Specialist Nurse Practitioner, retired
Mr Ian F Comaish, MA, BM BCh, FRCOphth, FRANZCO, Consultant Ophthalmologist
James Cook, NHS Registered Nurse, Bachelor of Nursing (Hons), Master of Public Health
Dr Clare Craig, BMBCh, FRCPath, Pathologist
Dr David Critchley, BSc, PhD in Pharmacology, 32 years’ experience in Pharmaceutical R&D
Dr Jonathan Engler, MBChB, LlB (hons), DipPharmMedDr Elizabeth Evans, MA (Cantab), MBBS, DRCOG, Retired Doctor
Dr John Flack, BPharm, PhD, retired Director of Safety Evaluation at Beecham Pharmaceuticals and retired Senior Vice-president for Drug Discovery SmithKline Beecham
Dr Simon Fox, BSc, BMBCh, FRCP, Consultant in Infectious Diseases and Internal Medicine
Dr Ali Haggett, Mental health community work, 3rd sector, former lecturer in the history of medicine
David Halpin, MB BS FRCS, Orthopaedic and trauma surgeon (retired)     
Dr Renée Hoenderkampf, General Practitioner
Dr Andrew Isaac, MB BCh, Physician, retired
Dr Steve James, Consultant Intensive Care
Dr Keith Johnson, BA, DPhil (Oxon), IP Consultant for Diagnostic Testing
Dr Rosamond Jones, MBBS, MD, FRCPCH, retired consultant paediatrician
Dr Tanya Klymenko, PhD, FHEA, FIBMS, Senior Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences
Dr Charles Lane, MA, DPhil, Molecular Biologist
Dr Branko Latinkic, BSc, PhD, Molecular Biologist
Dr Felicity Lillingstone, IMD DHS PhD ANP, Doctor, Urgent Care, Research Fellow 
Dr Theresa Lawrie, MBBCh, PhD, Director, Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd, Bath
Katherine MacGilchrist, BSc (Hons), MSc, CEO/Systematic Review Director, Epidemica Ltd.
Dr Geoffrey Maidment, MBBS, MD, FRCP, Consultant physician, retired
Ahmad K Malik FRCS (Tr & Orth) Dip Med Sport, Consultant Trauma & Orthopaedic Surgeon
Dr Kulvinder Singh Manik, MBBS, General Practitioner
Dr Fiona Martindale, MBChB, MRCGP, General Practitioner
Dr S McBride, BSc (Hons) Medical Microbiology & Immunobiology, MBBCh BAO, MSc in Clinical Gerontology, MRCP(UK), FRCEM, FRCP (Edinburgh). NHS Emergency Medicine & Geriatrics
Mr Ian McDermott, MBBS, MS, FRCS(Tr&Orth), FFSEM(UK), Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon
Dr Franziska Meuschel, MD, ND, PhD, LFHom, BSEM, Nutritional, Environmental and Integrated Medicine
Dr Scott Mitchell, MBChB, MRCS, Emergency Medicine Physician
Dr Alan Mordue, MBChB, FFPH. Retired Consultant in Public Health Medicine & Epidemiology
Dr David Morris, MBChB, MRCP(UK), General Practitioner
Margaret Moss, MA (Cantab), CBiol, MRSB, Director, The Nutrition and Allergy Clinic, Cheshire
Dr Alice Murkies, MD FRACGP MBBS, General Practitioner
Dr Greta Mushet, MBChB, MRCPsych, retired Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy
Dr Sarah Myhill, MBBS, retired GP and Naturopathic Physician
Dr Rachel Nicholl, PhD, Medical researcher
Dr Christina Peers, MBBS, DRCOG, DFSRH, FFSRH, Menopause specialist 
Rev Dr William J U Philip MB ChB, MRCP, BD, Senior Minister The Tron Church, Glasgow, formerly physician specialising in cardiology
Dr Angharad Powell, MBChB, BSc (hons), DFRSH, DCP (Ireland), DRCOG, DipOccMed, MRCGP, General Practitioner
Dr Gerry Quinn, PhD. Postdoctoral researcher in microbiology and immunology
Dr Johanna Reilly, MBBS, General Practitioner
Jessica Righart, MSc, MIBMS, Senior Critical Care Scientist
Mr Angus Robertson, BSc, MB ChB, FRCSEd (Tr & Orth), Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon
Dr Jessica Robinson, BSc(Hons), MBBS, MRCPsych, MFHom, Psychiatrist and Integrative Medicine Doctor
Dr Jon Rogers, MB ChB (Bristol), Retired General Practitioner
Mr James Royle, MBChB, FRCS, MMedEd, Colorectal surgeon
Dr Roland Salmon, MB BS, MRCGP, FFPH, Former Director, Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre Wales
Sorrel Scott, Grad Dip Phys, Specialist Physiotherapist in Neurology, 30 years in NHS
Dr Rohaan Seth, BSc (hons), MBChB (hons), MRCGP, Retired General Practitioner
Dr Gary Sidley, retired NHS Consultant Clinical Psychologist
Dr Annabel Smart, MBBS, retired General Practitioner
Natalie Stephenson, BSc (Hons) Paediatric Audiologist
Dr Zenobia Storah,MA (Oxon), Dip Psych, DClinPsy, Senior Clinical Psychologist (Child and Adolescent)
Dr Julian Tompkinson, MBChB MRCGP, General Practitioner GP trainer PCME
Dr Noel Thomas, MA, MBChB, DCH, DObsRCOG, DTM&H, MFHom, retired doctor
Dr Stephen Ting, MB CHB, MRCP, PhD, Consultant Physician
Dr Livia Tossici-Bolt, PhD, Clinical Scientist
Dr Carmen Wheatley, DPhil, Orthomolecular Oncology
Dr Helen Westwood MBChB MRCGP DCH DRCOG, General Practitioner
Mr Lasantha Wijesinghe, FRCS, Consultant Vascular Surgeon
Dr Damian Wilde, PhD, (Chartered) Specialist Clinical Psychologist
Dr Ruth Wilde, MB BCh, MRCEM, AFMCP, Integrative & Functional Medicine Doctor

Why are birth rates falling and excess deaths rising? - Jamie Jenkins (Video - 7')

 Births down - deaths up! And in almost every countries. What could it be?

 

The Woke Inquisitors Have Come For The Freethinking Heretics

  The evolution toward less freedom has been gradual but relentless all over the Western World, mostly since 9/11. Remember, at the time 1,500 architects claimed that the fall of the towers had been "unnatural" and asked for an investigation? As for building 7, there was a 99% certainty that it was "pulled down". So if one was taken down, what about the two others? You most certainly would have been ridiculed at the time just for asking the question but nobody was silenced, deplatformed or punished for this. We were in a state of emergency but still living in a democratic system. 

 That was then, 20 years ago...

Authored by J.B.Shurk via The Gatestone Institute,

Attacks on free speech are on the rise.

A British college recently expelled a student for expressing support for the government's official policy of deporting illegal immigrants. A Wisconsin school district charged three middle-schoolers with sexual harassment last month for refusing to use the plural pronoun "they" when referring to a single classmate. US President Joe Biden's National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy recently encouraged social media companies to censor from their online platforms any opinions that contradict Biden's climate change narrative.

In its continued commitment to preserve the government's monopoly over COVID-19 information, Twitter actually suspended a medical doctor for merely sharing a scientific study that suggests the Pfizer vaccine affects male fertility. And the NFL's Washington Commanders fined defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio $100,000 and forced him to apologize only weeks ago for having expressed his opinion that 2020's summer of riots across the United States after George Floyd's death was more destructive than the few hours of mayhem at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In contrast, it has become newsworthy that entertainment powerhouse Paramount has chosen not to censor old movies and television shows containing content that today's "woke" scolds might find "offensive." In a "cancel culture" world where censorship and trigger warnings have become the norm, preserving the artistic integrity of a film is now considered outright daring. In fact, even publishers of old literary classics have begun rewriting content to conform with "politically correct" sensibilities.

Examples such as these, where personal speech is either censored or punished, are becoming much more frequent, and anybody who minimizes the threat this increased intolerance for free expression poses to a democratic society is either gullibly or willfully blind. As any defender of liberty knows, nothing more quickly transforms a free society into a totalitarian prison than crackdowns on speech. Of all the tools of coercion available to a government, preventing individuals from freely expressing their thoughts is most dangerous. Denying citizens that most basic societal release valve for pent-up anger and disagreement only heightens the risk for outright violence down the line. Either silenced citizens become so enraged that conflict becomes inevitable, or the iron fist of government force descends on the public more broadly to preemptively curtail that possibility. Either way, the result is a disaster for any free society.

For Americans who cherish free speech, this undeniable war on language and expression is jolting but not shocking. Whenever censorship slithers back into polite society, it is always draped in the mantle of "good intentions."

Fifteenth-century Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola's "bonfire of the vanities" destroyed anything that could be seen to invite or reflect sin.

The notorious 1933 Nazi book burning at the Bebelplatz in Berlin torched some 20,000 books deemed subversive or "un-German".

During Communist China's decade-long Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and '70s, the vast majority of China's traditional scrolls, literature and religious antiquities went up in smoke.

All three atrocities were celebrated as achievements for the "greater good" of society, and people inebriated with "good intentions" set their cultural achievements aflame with fervor and triumph. Much like today's new censors who claim to "fight hate" because "that's not who we are," the arsonists of the past saw themselves as moral paragons, too. They purged anything "obscene" or "traditional" or "old," so that theocracy, Nazism, or communism could take root and grow. And if Western institutions today are purging ideas once again, then it is past time for people to start asking just what those institutions plan to harvest next.

We in the West are running — not walking — toward another "bonfire of the vanities" in which normal people, egged on by their leaders, will eagerly destroy their own culture while claiming to save it. This time around the "vanities" will be condemned for their racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-science or climate-denying ways, but when they are thrown into the fire, it is dissent and free expression that will burn.

There will one day be much disagreement as to how the same Western Civilization that produced the Enlightenment and its hallowed regard for free expression could once again surrender itself to the petty tyranny of censorship.

Many will wonder how the West's much-vaunted "liberal" traditions could meekly fold to the specter of state-controlled speech.

The answer is that the West has fallen into the same trap that always catches unsuspecting citizens by surprise: the steady encroachment on free speech has been sold as a "virtue" that all good people should applaud.

First, certain thoughts became "aggravating factors" that turned traditional crimes into new "hate crimes" deserving of additional punishment.

Then the definition of what is "hateful" grew until politicians could comfortably decree anything at odds with their agendas to be examples of "hate."

Who would be for "hate," after all? Surely no-one of good sense or good manners.

Now "hate" has transformed into an elusive description for any speech that can be alleged to cause the slightest of harms.

From there, it was easy for the state to decree that "disinformation," or rather anything that can be seen to contradict the state's own official narratives, causes "harm," too.

Those who despise free speech told society, "If you do not punish hate, then you're a bigot." And today, if you oppose the government's COVID-19, climate change, immigration, or other contentious policies, your harmful "disinformation" must be punished, too.

It is a slippery slope, is it not? Once governments normalize censorship and the punishment of points of view, free expression is firmly stamped with an expiration date.

After the Nazis went down this poisonous path, repentant Germans built a public memorial to remember the book burning at the Bebelplatz and ensure its tragic lesson was never forgotten. On a plaque in the square is a commemorative engraving, paraphrasing the 19th century German writer Heinrich Heine:

"That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people."

That warning comes with no expiration date.

Doug Casey on Crashing Markets, Commodities, and What Happens Next

 The international elites had this wet dream of a "Global Reset" but clearly Russia and especially China won't let it happen. And now India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia are telling the US that they are on their own in this adventure.

 And consequently the implosion of ALL asset classes will happen over the coming months without a safety net.

Soon the "virus" will come handy to justify the recession which will quickly turn into a depression and the rationing necessary. It will be especially savage in Europe and Japan. 

International Man

International Man: In addition to stocks, it seems that almost every asset class is also crashing.

What’s your take on the markets, and where do you think it’s headed?

Doug Casey: Let’s take them in order of size and importance.

The biggest market is bonds. It’s especially dangerous because it’s the most overpriced. Bonds are a triple threat to your capital. First, because of the inflation risk, which is huge and growing. Second, is the interest rate risk; I expect rates to double, triple, or quadruple from here, going back to or above the levels of the early 80s. The third is the default risk, which applies to everything except US Government debt. AAA corporate debt hardly exists anymore.

Interest rates have skyrocketed in the last year, with mortgage rates going from under 3% to over 6%. 30-year treasury bonds still only yield 3.25%. But with inflation running 10, 12, or 15% and going higher, long-term Treasuries have a lot further to fall. I remain short T-bonds.

Everybody’s paying attention to the stock market because they’re fully invested. The meme stocks, SPACs, and tech stocks have all collapsed. The big ones are down 25%, and many are down 80 or 90%. It’s not over yet. People still feel that they can buy the dips. They’re hurting, but they’ve been paper-trained over a couple of generations to believe the Fed will kiss everything and make it better.

At major bottoms, however, people forget stocks even exist and get angry when someone even mentions them. Examples? In 1933 the DJIA yielded 12%, even after huge dividend cuts. In the mid-’80s, major markets like Hong Kong, Belgium, and Spain were all yielding 12-15% and selling for 4 or 5 times earnings. When I wrote “Strategic Investing” I had a chapter on buying US utilities, with average yields of around 15%.

There are loads of examples of how cheap stocks can get. Since we’re still early in the Greater Depression and are just coming off perhaps the greatest mania in world history, I expect stocks have a lot further to fall.

Look at the crypto markets. They’ve been devastated. Bitcoin down from over $60,000 to under $20,000. Some cryptos have already gone to zero, wiping out tens of billions. Before it’s over, the losses will be in the hundreds of billions. A lot of people who thought they were centimillionaires have already lost most of their money. Some could wind up back in their parent’s basements.

The hypermania in cryptos peaked with something like 20,000 cryptos out there. Many, or most, have absolutely no use value, like the ridiculous Dogecoin, NFTs of apes, and god-knows-what. Things of that nature will go to zero.

On the other hand, blockchain technology is a real breakthrough, and people like my friend Marco Wutzer make compelling arguments why some tokens could go 100x or 1000x from here. That’s why I’m in his crypto fund—he may be right. But it’s a specialist’s game, and I don’t have the time, expertise, or frankly the interest to try to sort them out. I am, however, optimistic about Bitcoin at these levels. It really is an alternative to gold and should go to new highs as governments everywhere destroy their fiat currencies.

Speaking of gold, I’ve said for several years that it’s in an equilibrium zone here. But the gold stocks, on the other hand, are very cheap. They’re low risk and high reward—which is rarely true of this small crappy 19th-century choo-choo train industry.

Real estate is a very troubled asset class. It floats on a sea of debt, which has enabled the middle class to live above its means since the end of WW2. When the bubble in real estate pops definitively due to higher interest rates, it will hurt the middle class even worse than stocks and bonds.

At that point, the public will reflexively demand that the government—the root cause of all these problems— “do something.” They will. And that’s when things will really go bad.

International Man: Commodities, gold, and oil are about the only assets that are not falling precipitously.

We’ve discussed these commodities extensively in the past. Given recent events, how have your views changed, if at all?

Doug Casey: The costs of fertilizer and pesticide have tripled, and diesel has doubled. They’re not coming down anytime soon.

That’s put a lot of pressure on farmers. Natural gas, for instance, is critical not just for energy and plastics but for fertilizer. We’ve discussed it in the past. Even though US natural gas has tripled, it’s still only about a quarter of the average world price. And with the US having recently become the largest exporter of liquid natural gas, prices here in the US are going to world levels.

The absurd but ongoing green revolution has made hedge funds, brokers, banks, and mutual funds very loath to buy fossil fuels. Large oil companies, like Shell and BP, in particular, are run by spineless suits; they’re actually trying to get out of the oil business. Meanwhile, the efforts of producers are hugely hampered by the ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) meme. Unknowledgeable and purposely destructive greens have infested corporate boards everywhere. I see no reason to believe energy costs are going down or production is going up.

Of course, the war between Russia and the Ukraine has had an effect on oil, natural gas, grains, and fertilizer. But it hasn’t affected production so much as complicated the lives of the 50 countries embargoing Russia. Here’s a Fun Fact. Unbeknownst to Boobus americanus, there are 150 countries who aren’t embargoing Russia.

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This border war between those two countries was fomented by the US, starting with the so-called Maidan Revolution in 2014. I don’t think the problem with Russia is going to go away, at least until there’s regime change in Washington. It’s important to remember that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is not itself causing inflation. Inflation is purely a monetary phenomenon. The restriction of supply from Russia is, however, causing a lower standard of living. That’s associated with inflation but is not itself a cause of inflation.

Meanwhile, the prices of wheat, corn, and soybeans have only about doubled, and cattle are only up 50%. That is rough on consumers, but farmers aren’t getting rich because of much higher costs. Remember that farmers also have to pay for their fuel, fertilizer, and other costs upfront and then wait months for the harvest to come in.

International Man: The Federal Reserve will likely continue its tightening schedule and plans to raise interest rates.

But with real inflation reaching into the double digits, what difference will token rate hikes make?

Doug Casey: Not much, except to scare people that are in the stock and bond markets. To offer real after-inflation returns, rates need to go up to the 12% level—close to 4 x current levels. An increase of 75 basis points is just making them think, quite correctly, that the Fed doesn’t have their back anymore. The Fed has totally been painted into a corner. There’s really nothing they can do because, in the real world, cause has effect, and actions have consequences. Decades of printing money to finance politicians’ wet dreams is having consequences: higher rates, depreciated money, and economic depression among them.

The important thing to remember is that raising rates has, in itself, only an indirect effect on the level of inflation. That’s because when bank rates go higher, people borrow less. Commercial banks then create fewer loans out of thin air via the fractional reserve. Less money is then redeposited by the borrower to be re-loaned again. In brief, higher rates typically cause the amount of borrowing from commercial banks to drop, and that affects the money supply and its inflation.

But the biggest influence on inflation is the US government’s borrowing of a trillion dollars or more every year. They can’t sell all that debt to the public, or the Chinese, or the Arabs. At this point, they can only sell their debt to the Fed, who buy it by creating new currency units.

International Man: With inflation at 40-year highs and a crashing stock market, what options does the Fed really have at this point? Could they pull a rabbit out of a hat?

Doug Casey: As I said, they’ve painted themselves into a corner. In effect, they jumped off the top of a hundred-story building when the Fed was formed in 1913. Now we’ve fallen 95 floors, with only a couple to go, and have reached terminal velocity. Meanwhile, idiots like Yellen and Powell are saying, “So far, so good.” We haven’t hit the ground yet, but we’re quite close. The chances of a soft landing are zero.

Of course, some people are saying, “Well, we need Paul Volcker back again. Somebody like that would magically solve things.”

What Volcker did 40 years ago was good, necessary, and courageous. But I don’t think they will dare a repeat performance now because the house of cards has been built much, much higher than it was in Volcker’s day. If somebody steps into Volcker’s shoes, they’ll be pilloried for causing the collapse of the financial world and the economy with it.

That’s what they should do—let it collapse and abolish the Fed. Most of the real wealth will still be here. But they won’t. For one thing, the USG needs the Fed to finance its gigantic deficits. In Volker’s day, they said “we owed it to ourselves” or could peddle their debt to foreigners. No more. Plus, the USG, with about $32 trillion of debt, can’t afford high rates. If rates simply equaled the level of inflation, their interest payments would exceed 100% of their tax income—about $4 trillion. This seals the fate of the US dollar. I’d hate to be the chairman of the Fed at this point. There’s really nothing that they can do—even if they were competent.

International Man: In addition, the federal government is spending at unprecedented levels. Biden recently announced another $1 billion in aid to Ukraine. Undoubtedly, the federal government will be spending a lot more on foreign and domestic boondoggles.

Put it all together, and it seems like the makings of a perfect monetary storm.

What do you think will happen next, and what should people do?

Doug Casey: Well, another billion in aid to the Ukraine is just a rounding error, with the 40 or 50-some billion dollars that they’ve already thrown at it. There’s really no accounting. Ukraine is a giant money laundering scheme as much as a war…

That money has just kind of floated off into a bottomless cesspool. It can’t be monitored or accounted for.

The insane waste of capital and artificial suppression of interest rates started way before Trump. But he made it worse. Remember his saying he was “a low-interest rate guy”? Then it got totally out of control with Biden and his multi-billion dollar anti-COVID scam to “Build Back Better.” It’s now close to game over.

What’s going to happen next, and what should people do?

This is not “transitory”—a word those fools no longer use. It’s going to get much worse; we’re at the edge of a precipice. We’re headed for real chaos, with a possibility of WW3.

People should batten down the hatches—cut their expenses and standard of living now before the market does it for them.

Try to earn more and put assets in places that we’ve been recommending because we’re just at the beginning of this gigantic monetary storm, not the end of it.

Pessimism about Covid: UK Imperial Professor of Immunology says "there's no herd immunity and Covid is still wreaking havoc"

 As expected, this will never end until people revolt. (But they won't!)

 Two years of Covid have proved that they will accept the most authoritarian measures if well marketed with some coercion and restrictions on free speech. And our governments have become skilled in this endeavor, so no hope on this side.

 But a crashing economy may do the trick. The Global Reset cannot be implemented as long as Russia and China exist in their current state which is the reason why the economic war must and will be total. But the economic pain will be commensurate. 

 We are already in a recession. All the advance indicators are telling us this is the case.

 By the end of the year the pain will be acute in Europe and unbearable in some developing countries. Hyperinflation moving from Sri Lanka to Pakistan and Chaos from Lebanon to Egypt. This is a factor 10 amplification!   

 By then, the restrictions of the 8th? wave of Covid will be in full swing but it won't matter much anymore. Chaos will break out sporadically in countries disrupting further what will already be dysfunctional. 

 The most knowledgeable experts predict anarchy in 2023 and war in 2024. It is very difficult to see how this can be avoided at this stage if you understand that our whole society is fully dependent on energy. The "green" agenda is pipe dreams pushed on us by people who have no clues how crucial energy is.

 By then of course, the "pandemics" will be over. Not because the virus will be gone but because people and governments will have other emergencies to attend to. No culpability, no reckoning, just a smooth fading from the top of the agenda... 

Pessimism: UK Imperial Professor of Immunology says "there's no herd immunity and Covid is still wreaking havoc"

from Will Jones at the: Daily Sceptic

Danny Altmann, Professor of Immunology at Imperial College London

In a piece in the Guardian this weekend headed "Where's the herd immunity? Our research shows why Covid is still wreaking havoc", Danny Altmann, Professor of Immunology at Imperial College London, writes that "contrary to the myth that we are sliding into a comfortable evolutionary relationship with a common-cold-like, friendly virus, this is more like being trapped on a rollercoaster in a horror film". I will quote it at length so you get a full sense of the pessimistic vision he is setting out.

We are all so very tired of COVID-19, and there are many other crises to wrestle with. This pandemic has been going on since the beginning of 2020, and a state of hypervigilance can only be maintained for so long. And yet, 'just live with it' looks self-evidently too thin a recipe and, currently, not very workable or successful with the emergence of BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants.

According to the latest numbers, released today, the U.K. added more than half a million new Covid infections in the past week, and the estimated number of people with Covid in total was somewhere between 3% and 4% of the population.

Many have been rather unwell and off work or school, with the associated disruptions to education, healthcare and other vital services. These infections will also inevitably add to the toll of long Covid cases. According to ONS data, the supposedly 'mild' waves of Omicron during 2022 have brought more than 619,000 new long Covid cases into the clinical caseload, promising an enduring and miserable legacy from this latest phase.

Rather than a wall of immunity arising from vaccinations and previous infections, we are seeing wave after wave of new cases and a rapidly growing burden of long-term disease. What's going on? The latest scientific research has some answers.

During May and June two new variants, BA.4 and BA.5, progressively displaced the previous Omicron subvariant, BA.2. They are even more transmissible and more immune-evasive. Last week a group of collaborators, including me and a professor of immunology and respiratory medicine, Rosemary Boyton, published a paper in Science, looking comprehensively at immunity to the Omicron family, both in triple-vaccinated people and also in those who then suffered breakthrough infections during the Omicron wave. This lets us examine whether Omicron was, as some hoped, a benign natural booster of our Covid immunity. It turns out that isn't the case.

We considered many facets of immunity, including the antibodies most implicated in protection ('neutralising antibodies'), as well as protective 'immune memory' in white blood cells. The results tell us it is unsurprising that breakthrough infections were so common. Most people - even when triple-vaccinated - had 20 times less neutralising antibody response against Omicron than against the initial 'Wuhan' strain. Importantly, Omicron infection was a poor booster of immunity to further Omicron infections. It is a kind of stealth virus that gets in under the radar without doing too much to alert immune defences. Even having had Omicron, we're not well protected from further infections.

Also, to be added to the now complex mix is 'immune imprinting'. This is the finding that our immune response to Covid is shaped very differently, depending on our prior exposures - infection in one wave relative to another, plus vaccination. In our study, those who'd been infected in the first wave and then again with Omicron had particularly poor T-cell responses and no boosting of antibodies. That is, some combinations of exposures may leave us poorly protected relative to others.

Contrary to the myth that we are sliding into a comfortable evolutionary relationship with a common-cold-like, friendly virus, this is more like being trapped on a rollercoaster in a horror film. There's nothing cold-like or friendly about a large part of the workforce needing significant absences from work, feeling awful and sometimes getting reinfected over and over again, just weeks apart. And that's before the risk of long Covid. While we now know that the risk of long Covid is somewhat reduced in those who become infected after vaccination, and also less in those from the Omicron than the Delta wave, the absolute numbers are nevertheless worrying.

Meanwhile, Australia is mulling bringing back mask mandates as it faces a resurgent flu during its winter alongside an Omicron BA.4-5 wave, which despite vaccination and the mildness of Omicron is causing a relatively high number of deaths.

In fact, though, contrary to Prof. Altmann's claim, the Imperial study he refers to did show an immune response from infection against Omicron - though not one from the vaccines - and real-world evidence from Qatar suggests that natural immunity provides protection of about 50% against Omicron for at least a year (whereas the vaccines seem to increase the risk of infection within a few months). There's also no evidence that vaccines prevent Long Covid, with one recent large U.S. study finding "no significant difference in the risk of... any long-Covid feature".

Prof. Altmann himself sees little value in further boosters, writing:

Even if we had good vaccination coverage, we have entered a period of diminishing returns. A study reported in the BMJ last week showed us that the protection gained from a fourth booster dose likely wanes even faster than previous boosters. This leaves us between a rock and a hard place: continue to offer suboptimal boosters to a population who seem to have lost faith or interest in taking them up, or do nothing and cross our fingers that residual immunity might somehow keep a lid on hospitalisations (as happened in South Africa and Portugal).

It doesn't seem to occur to him that Portugal and South Africa's experience shows why his pessimism is misplaced, and that we actually are developing immunity against the virus.

The U.K. has had very few excess deaths from Covid since Omicron arrived, though plenty from other causes. Nonetheless, some it seems have no intention of letting this go.

Did Google's LaMDA chatbot just become sentient? (Video 22')

 Another very good analysis of Lamda. Probably not sentient yet but how do you tell? This machine most probably can pass the Turing test. So do we need another test, and then another test? Aren't we, in the end, proving to ourselves what we want to believe: That a machine cannot be human? 

 Again, I do not believe that Lamda is sentient. It is just for now an incredibly advanced chatbot but how can we tell? And once we can tell, what do we do about it? 

 

Blake Lemoine, Google Engineer on His Sentient AI Claim (Video 10')

 A great interview on a very important subject that most people misunderstand. The real subject is not to discuss if AI is already sentient or not as Blake Lemoine explains superbly below. The issue is to understand what it means and how we will deal with it, not as individuals but as a society. We are not ready. Worse, we are not preparing ourselves. Lamda may or may not be sentient, it most probably isn't, but eventually, we will succeed, maybe sooner than later. Then what?

 

The Great Reset In Action: Ending Freedom Of The Press, Speech, & Expression

  We never thought it would come so fast but here we are: a mere 20 years after 9/11, and only 2 after "Covid", the Western world is loosing its "democracy" faster than anyone could imagine. "First they arrested the Jews downstairs, then they arrested my leftist neighbors, finally they came for me!" Not there yet? Wait and see...

Authored by Birsen Filip via The Mises Institute,

Governments, corporations, and elites have always been fearful of the power of a free press, because it is capable of exposing their lies, destroying their carefully crafted images, and undermining their authority. In recent years, alternative journalism has been growing and more people are relying on social media platforms as sources of news and information. In response, the corporate state, digital conglomerates, and the mainstream media have been increasingly supportive of the silencing and censoring of alternative media outlets and voices that challenge the official narrative on most issues.

At the recent World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, "Australian eSafety commissioner" Julie Inman Grant stated that "freedom of speech is not the same thing as a free for all," and that "we are going to need a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online—from freedom of speech … to be free from online violence." Meanwhile, the Canadian government is seeking to restrict independent media and the freedom of expression via the implementation of Bill C-11, which would allow it to regulate all online audiovisual platforms on the internet, including content on Spotify, Tik Tok, YouTube, and podcast clients.

Similarly, the UK is seeking to introduce an Online Safety Bill, the US "paused" the establishment of a Disinformation Governance Board following backlash, and the European Union approved its own Digital Services Act, all of which aim to limit the freedom of speech. Attempts by elites and politicians to silence dissenters and critical thinkers is not something new. In fact, history is full of examples of "the persecution of men of science, the burning of scientific books, and the systematic eradication of the intelligentsia of the subjected people."

However, these current efforts to curtail freedom of speech and press by supposedly liberal governments are still somewhat ironic, given that even "the most intolerant of churches, the Roman Catholic Church, even at the canonization of a saint, admits, and listens patiently to, a 'devil's advocate.' The holiest of men, it appears, cannot be admitted to posthumous honors, until all that the devil could say against him is known and weighed."

The corporate state, digital conglomerates, and the mainstream media want to ensure that they have the exclusive authority to dictate people's opinions, wants, and choices through their sophisticated propaganda techniques. To do so, they have even resorted to transforming falsehoods into truth. In fact, the word truth has already had its original meaning altered, as those who speak the truth on certain subjects are now regularly accused of spreading hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation.

Presently, truth is no "longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort, and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organised effort require it."

However, modifying the definition of truth comes with the potential for great peril, as truth-seeking often contributes to human progress in that it leads to discoveries that ultimately benefit society at large. It should be noted that truth is by no means the only word whose meaning has been changed recently in order for it to serve as an instrument of propaganda; others include freedom, justice, law, right, equality, diversity, woman, pandemic, vaccine, etc. This is highly concerning, because such attempts at the "perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals" of the ruling class are expressed is a consistent feature of totalitarian regimes.

As a number of liberal-democratic governments increasingly move toward totalitarianism, they want people to forget that there is "the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation." According to them, "public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken public support."

In fact, they believe that all views and opinions that might cast doubt or create hesitation need to be restricted in all disciplines and on all platforms. This is because "the disinterested search for truth cannot be allowed" when "the vindication of the official views becomes the sole object" of the ruling class. In other words, the control of information is practiced and the uniformity of views is enforced in all fields under totalitarian rule.

The suppression of freedom of the press, speech, expression, and thought means that current and future generations will be "deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error." They are also at risk of becoming ignorant of the fact that the only way in which a person can know "the whole of a subject" is by "hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind." That is to say, current and future generations will be unaware that "the steady habit of correcting and completing" one's own "opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it."

At present, it is likely that the masses do not regard freedom of the press, speech, expression, and thought as being particularly important, because "the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another." Nevertheless, no one should have the power and authority to "select those to whom" freedom of thought, enlightenment and expression is to be "reserved."

In fact, John Stuart Mill went so far as to claim that "if all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." He further added that silencing the expression of an opinion is essentially an act of "robbing the human race," which applies to both current and future generations. Even though the suppressors can deny the truth to people at a particular point in time, "history shows that every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present."

If current efforts to suppress freedom of the press, speech, expression, and thought succeed, then the search for truth will eventually be abandoned and totalitarian authorities will decide what "doctrines ought to be taught and published." There will be no limits to who can be silenced, as the control of opinions will be extended to all people in all fields. Accordingly, contemporary authoritarian policy makers need to be reminded about the crucial importance of freedom of speech, expression, and thought, which the US Supreme Court recognized in the 1957 case Sweezy v. New Hampshire when it ruled that

to impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made…. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die…. Our form of government is built on the premise that every citizen shall have the right to engage in political expression and association. This right was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Exercise of these basic freedoms in America has traditionally been through the media of political associations…. History has amply proved the virtue of political activity by minority, dissident groups, who innumerable times have been in the vanguard of democratic thought and whose programs were ultimately accepted. Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness in our society.