Was the Pandemic Orchestrated as a Trial Run for Responding to a Biological Attack?

 Why did the Corona Virus became Covid and how? Beyond the lab leak accident, there was timing and an opportunity. Once launched, the reaction to the virus was unstoppable although the virus quickly proved far less dangerous than expected. 

 Here's the inside story.

Guest Post from the Burning Platform by Will Jones

The evidence that the coronavirus originated in a lab is now compelling, as is the evidence that the virus was spreading undetected all over the world by autumn 2019, with one blood sample from Lombardy on September 12th 2019 found to be positive for both viral RNA and antibodies.

One crucial outstanding question is who knew what and when. In particular, what did the U.S. know about the virus before January 2020 and what did the Chinese Government know?

Here I will argue that both the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knew that an engineered virus was circulating from mid-November 2019, and that while the CCP was initially not worried about the virus, the U.S. biodefence network was much more concerned. The pandemic emergency was therefore largely created by the U.S. biodefence network, which used it as an opportunity to put into practice all the emergency protocols it had been preparing for two decades to respond to a biological attack or pandemic. While the virus quickly turned out to be mild, the emergency response continued largely because the train had already started running and the opportunity was too good to miss.

If the U.S. and its allies did know anything covertly before 2020, the most likely people who would know it are members of the intelligence and security networks. What can we surmise about what they knew from what they were saying and doing in autumn and winter 2019-20 and from later reports?

Consider Dr. Michael Callahan, an ex-CIA agent who now runs the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was the U.S. Government’s only confirmed point of contact in Wuhan in January 2020. Out of the blue, Dr. Callahan contacted mRNA vaccine expert Dr. Robert Malone on January 4th 2020 to tell him that (to quote Dr. Malone): “There was a novel coronavirus circulating in the Wuhan region, it was looking like a significant biothreat, and I should get ‘my team’ engaged in seeking ways to mitigate the risk of this new agent.”

Bear in mind that at this point nobody else was spreading alarm about the new virus, which according to the public record had only been sequenced and confirmed to be a novel SARS-like virus by the private Chinese company Vision Medicals on December 27th. Certainly the CCP was not spreading alarm. Prior to the Wuhan lockdown on January 23rd 2020 it was playing down the threat from the virus, suppressing news of it and not making any concerted response.

The videos supposedly showing people collapsing in the streets with the virus that went round social media at the time were promoted not by the CCP but by organisations opposed to the CCP and aiming to expose its cover-up of the virus. Most people in the West, too, were not treating the virus as a significant threat and it was barely registering on government agendas. Recall that in early January there were officially just a few people in hospital in Wuhan and no recorded deaths, so any notion that this virus was a major threat to global public health was purely hypothetical – or based on information not in the public domain.

However, Dr. Callahan was not alone in his early alarmism. Others from the U.S. biodefence network were conspicuously alarmist and actively trying to raise alarm in those around them right from the start of January.

In the White House, Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger was stoking up the terror from the beginning of January. As Michael Senger notes: “Throughout January 2020, Pottinger unilaterally called White House meetings unbeknownst to those in attendance and breached protocol to ratchet up alarm about the new coronavirus based on information from his own sources in China, despite having no official intelligence to back up his alarmism.”

It was Pottinger who brought in fellow alarmist Deborah Birx as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator at the end of February 2020; Birx was instrumental in pushing the alarmist agenda and bringing lockdowns to America.

The leaked ‘Red Dawn’ emails among U.S. Government officials and others in early 2020 show long-time lockdown proponent Dr. Carter Mecher of the Department of Veterans Affairs also pushing for strong responses from very early on.

Dr. Mecher is an associate of Dr. Richard Hatchett, formerly of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) and now CEO of the Gates-funded pandemic vaccine organisation CEPI, with whom he wrote a paper in 2007 purporting to use the lessons of the 1918 pandemic to promote social distancing. A sister paper, also funded by the NIH, was produced at the same time by Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director (then and now) Dr. Anthony Fauci commented in 2007 that the two studies underline that “a primary lesson of the 1918 influenza pandemic is that it is critical to intervene early… Nonpharmaceutical interventions may buy valuable time at the beginning of a pandemic while a targeted vaccine is being produced”.

Richard Hatchett was attending the World Economic Forum when China locked down Wuhan on January 23rd. The following day he gave a press conference with Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust and a board member of CEPI, and Moderna’s CEO Stephane Bancel, backing China’s draconian response and making clear it was straight out of his own playbook.

One thing that is important to understand, is that when you don’t have treatments and you don’t have vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions are literally the only thing that you have, and it’s a combination of isolation, containment, infection prevention and control and then these social distancing interventions.

There is historical precedent for their use. We looked intensively and did an historical analysis of the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions in U.S. cities in 1918 and what we found was that cities that introduced multiple interventions, early in an epidemic, had much better outcomes.

The ‘we’ of course refers to Neil Ferguson and Carter Mecher, as per the above.

Further possible evidence of the involvement of the U.S. intelligence community and biodefence network is that the messages of the ‘whistleblower’ doctor Li Wenliang in Wuhan were initially promoted in English by an organisation funded by the U.S. Government. The flooding of social media with messages promoting lockdown in 2020 was also seen in 2014 with Ebola in Sierra Leone, where it was clearly the work of outside agents. It is also of significance that the same New York Times reporter, Donald McNeil, wrote almost identical articles praising the extreme interventions in both 2014 and 2020.

Anywhere you look in early 2020, amidst the sea of general calm, any source of alarm will invariably be found connected with someone associated with the biodefence network of the U.S. and its allies – people such as Michael Callahan, Matt Pottinger, Deborah Birx, Richard Hatchett, Carter Mecher and Neil Ferguson.

It comes as no surprise then to learn that in the U.S. the virus was treated, not as a matter of public health but of national security. This approach, already evident in the high level of activity from the biodefence network, was made official in March 2020 when the responsibility for policy in the pandemic was given not to the public health bodies but to the National Security Council and its agencies. The policy document that the ensuing policy decisions were based on has never been published.

Why would a virus that has as yet done very little be a national security matter? The most likely explanation is because it was known or suspected to be a non-natural, engineered agent. This likely conclusion is supported by other evidence, in particular, by what intelligence reports suggest both the U.S. and CCP knew about the virus in November 2019.

A recent report from the U.S. Senate showed that the CCP made a major safety intervention at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on November 12th 2019 to address the “complex and grave situation facing [bio]security work”. The Senate report also implied that around the same time the WIV must have begun work on a vaccine for the new coronavirus – deduced from the fact that Yusen Zhou (who mysteriously died shortly afterwards) applied for a vaccine patent on February 24th 2020. These facts indicate that the CCP became aware that a leaked virus was circulating in mid-November, presumably because it noticed people falling ill and, via testing, traced it back to the WIV (while there is no direct evidence of this, U.S. intelligence reports have noted WIV workers falling ill with a Covid-like illness in November).

The CCP’s response to discovering this appears to have been to address safety issues at the WIV and to begin working on a vaccine, but otherwise to suppress information about the virus and not treat it as a major threat. The CCP does not appear to have alerted its health services during November or December as medics in Wuhan had to discover it for themselves.

This play-it-down and suppress policy continued even once doctors in Wuhan spotted the novel virus in their patients and obtained the near-complete sequence from a private lab on December 27th. The CCP then continued to insist for weeks that the virus wasn’t spreading between humans, aggressively suppressed any suggestion it came from a lab and pushed from the start the scarcely plausible theory that it had jumped from animals in the wet market.

The sharing of the full virus sequence on January 11th only happened because a Chinese scientist breached protocol to do so, and was disciplined for it. Even once the CCP abandoned its play-it-down policy and initiated aggressive non-pharmaceutical interventions on January 23rd it continued to frustrate efforts to investigate the WIV and its virus database. It’s clear then, that up to January 23rd the CCP showed no sign of being worried about the virus, but every sign of worrying its origins would be discovered.

Separately, the U.S. intelligence community has let it be known that it was aware of a new virus circulating in China from mid-November. As an Israeli news website reported: “In the second week of November, U.S. intelligence recognised that a disease with new characteristics was developing in Wuhan, China. They followed its spread, when at that stage this classified information was not known to the media and did not come out of the Chinese regime either.”

This intelligence is said to have come “in the form of communications intercepts and overhead images showing increased activity at health facilities”. The U.S. military “then alerted NATO and the [Israeli] IDF of the outbreak precisely at the end of November”.

So we know the U.S. had intelligence on the virus circulating in mid-November. I think we have to assume this intel was linked to the CCP safety intervention at the WIV via intercepted communications, and thus that like the CCP, U.S. intelligence knew or suspected it was lab-engineered from that point. If so, no one appears to have told Dr. Fauci and his associates, as Fauci’s FOI emails reveal him and his colleagues to be figuring out that it was likely engineered (and that they funded it) at the end of January.

On February 1st, Fauci initiated an urgent cover-up operation, designed to discredit the idea of a lab leak as a baseless conspiracy theory, telling his associates: “You will have tasks today that must be done.” It is not clear whether Fauci orchestrated this cover-up on his own initiative or, more likely, after being instructed or pre-primed to do so by people in the biodefence network. The motive in any case was the same: to point the finger away from the U.S.’s funding of the implicated virus research and to avoid discrediting the field.

It thus appears that from November 2019, both the CCP and the intelligence community of the U.S. and its allies were watching the leaked outbreak to see what would happen and whether, as they hoped, it would fizzle out. Chinese President Xi Jinping and the CCP were keen to ignore it and suppress any alarm, as well as any hint of a lab leak. The biodefence network, on the other hand, appears to have been much more nervous about the new virus. As soon as word began to get out it amplified the news, spread alarm, pressed for strong interventions and activated biosecurity protocols, putting its members in charge wherever possible.

Despite this alarmist mode, however, members of the biodefence network consistently backed the natural origins and wet market theory and suppressed the lab leak theory. This is very telling, as there is no way they could have known at that point it was not of lab origin, and as we know there was plenty of evidence to suggest it was, not least what we presume they knew about the Chinese intervention at the WIV. If we assume for a moment they did not suspect it was lab-engineered it is very hard to account for their high degree of alarm about the new virus, or their activation of biodefence protocols and treating it as a national security matter, at a time when officially it had not yet killed anyone and there were few hospital patients.

Furthermore, publicly endorsing the lab leak theory or at least keeping it in play would clearly have been helpful to them as it would have added to the cause for alarm, reinforced their narrative of exposing the CCP’s virus cover-up and unambiguously made it a national security matter. The choice instead to back the CCP’s implausible version of events and suppress the lab leak theory thus betrays that it must have been seriously inconvenient for them in another way, namely that it implicated them and risked discrediting their research.

It is also telling in this regard that when some in the U.S. Government did start pushing the lab leak theory, the Chinese responded not by denying it but by trying to blame the U.S. for the leak. This feels like a warning shot: don’t expose us on this or we’ll expose you.

As is well known, the CCP’s play-it-down strategy came to an abrupt end on January 23rd 2020, when it caved in to the alarmist calls for lockdowns and NPIs (which actually have a long history in China). Thereafter the country embraced its new policy with zeal, turning itself into a showcase for the extreme pandemic response measures, joining in the promotion of them around the world and really making them their own.

Thus we find that the pandemic was largely a creation of the U.S. biodefence network, with China joining in after January 23rd. U.S. intelligence officers had been following the virus (which they, like the CCP, knew was lab-engineered) from mid-November, and the biodefence network made sure news of the virus got out once doctors noticed it, spreading alarm before there was anything really to be alarmed about and treating it immediately as a biosecurity threat.

I believe they did this initially, in part, out of genuine concern about the engineered virus, but also partly because they were itching to try out all the biosecurity protocols they’d been preparing for decades – not least the warp speed rollout of an mRNA vaccine. This latter motive also helps explain why it all carried on once it was obvious the virus was not a major threat to human life and the extreme responses were not justified. It was, in other words, a kind of trial run for a biological attack orchestrated by the biodefence network of the U.S. and its allies.

If true, this certainly helps to make sense of it all. But it is hardly a comforting thought, because it reinforces that they’re not done with us yet, but are just getting ready to do it again, and who can stop them?

'Gaslighting' Is The Word Of The Year For Good Reason

 This is about Covid but it applies likely to almost every subject: Green energies, Global Warming and CO2, Wars and colonialism, you name it, you are being lied to.

 But most often the lies are complex, made of half truths and assumptions. The only thing you can be certain of is that they always benefit the people pushing them. 

 Here's how it works:

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Every year Merriam-Webster picks a word to capture the culture of a moment in time. The choice is based on the frequency and quantity of search as well as the departure from the norm. This year the choice seems perfect: gaslighting. It’s drawn from the 1944 film noir starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman.

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in “Gaslight” (1944). (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.)

The term means to be subjected to extended psychological trickery to cause the victim to question his or own reality. In the film, Boyer plays a handsome stranger who meets the beautiful heiress Bergman on a foreign journey and they fall in love. He convinces her to marry and move back together to London to her family home, whereby he embarks upon a subtle campaign to convince her she is bonkers while he secretly searches the home for legacy jewels he intends to steal.

It’s painful to watch but the experience connects with our own as we watch mainstream media, see respectable scientists canceled for supposedly spreading disinformation, or when we watch a White House press conference. They try to convince us that they are normal and we are the crazy ones, probably guilty of wrongthink or not aware of the full facts. The more they insist on their version of truth, the more we are invited to see ourselves as nuts for failing to give them all the benefit of our doubt.

The film has this crucial moment when Bergman flips from believing that she is a broken spirit and confused person suddenly to realizing that she is the victim of an elaborate hoax. Once she realizes this, and all the pieces fall into place, she calls him out as a fraud and a thief. The film ends as this genre must in those days. He is arrested and the victim is made whole.

So it is for all of us over this past year, as vast numbers of people realize that we are being gaslit by major media, Big Tech, and government. We were told that we faced a crisis so grim and horrible that we had to surrender our freedoms in the name of pathogenic control, even though we could clearly read the data on the risk. They closed schools, businesses, and weekly worship and told us it was for our own good.

To this day, they won’t admit that they were wrong. They were gaslighting us the entire time.

Tellingly, last year’s word was vaccine. The year before was pandemic. So you see how this goes. Pandemic to vaccine to gaslight. Yep, that pretty well sums up the last three years in a nice narrative from beginning to end. One hopes that we are all now waking up to the scam that has been perpetuated on us.

The notion that it was the “worst pandemic in a hundred years” is certainly disputable. We still don’t have real clarity on precisely how many people died from COVID, and this confusion is due to vast false positives of PCR testing backed by subsidized and rampant death misclassification. To this day, we do not know precisely how many people died from COVID or merely with COVID, or even if they truly had symptomatic COVID at all. None of this do we know for sure.

Then we can talk about the vaccine, which was never sterilizing of the virus simply because it is not possible to create such a thing around a fast-mutating coronavirus, a fact which we knew long before the pandemic began. So they called it a vaccine and lied that it would prevent infection and stop transmission even though that was never possible. Once this became obvious, and the whole point of mandates disappeared, they demanded we get it anyway at the pain of losing our jobs.

Now we have major media outlets admitting that more people are dying with the vaccine than without. And yet we are supposed to move on with our lives as if no one ever said anything false. There are no regrets, no apologies, no admissions of guilt. Even now, foreign nationals cannot travel to the United States to see the Statue of Liberty without showing proof of vaccination!

In a word, we’ve been gaslit at every turn.

One hopes that Americans watching events in China today get the point. Zero COVID was never epidemiology. It was an ideology of totalitarianism, a great excuse to do to us what bad actors in tech, media, and government wanted to do anyway but could not get away with in normal times. China easily migrated from virus-control theater to full surveillance. Even now, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is combing through cell-phone data to ferret out political dissenters. The point is to punish in ways that were not possible decades ago.

Sadly, it will likely work. If your ability to work and live, and feed yourself and your family, are contingent on political obedience, the party in control enjoys more security in ways that dictators of old could only have dreamt.

The heck of it is that our own experience with virus control was in fact copied directly from the CCP model. In the third week of February 2020, Anthony Fauci sent his deputy assistant Clifford Lane on a WHO junket to Wuhan and other cities. The WHO produced a disgusting report that wholly recommended the China approach to the world. It said:

“Achieving China’s exceptional coverage with and adherence to these containment measures has only been possible due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat. At a community level this is reflected in the remarkable solidarity of provinces and cities in support of the most vulnerable populations and communities. Despite ongoing outbreaks in their own areas, Governors and Mayors have continued to send thousands of health care workers and tons of vital PPE supplies into Hubei province and Wuhan city.

“At the individual level, the Chinese people have reacted to this outbreak with courage and conviction. They have accepted and adhered to the starkest of containment measures—whether the suspension of public gatherings, the month-long ‘stay at home advisories or prohibitions on travel. Throughout an intensive 9-days of site visits across China, in frank discussions from the level of local community mobilizers and frontline health care providers to top scientists, Governors and Mayors, the Joint Mission was struck by the sincerity and dedication that each brings to this COVID-19 response.”

In a word, barf. Actually, Fauci, Lane, and everyone else involved in this gaslighting deserves full moral condemnation. They told us that the right way to manage a pandemic but their virus control very quickly and easily became political control.

This is true not only in China but also the United States. Early on, any protests against lockdowns were regarded not only as contrary to public health but also politically seditious. The media played along with this. And later with the vaccines, the refusal to get the shot was treated nearly as an act of treason.

Which is one of many problems with lockdowns. Not only do they not work at stopping the pathogen over the long term—at best they “slow the spread” for no good reason—but they intensify political control over society and attack fundamental rights and liberties. Fauci himself made frequent statements that disparaged the very idea of freedom itself, while meme culture jumped on the idea and started a deliberate misspelling: “freedumb.”

That movie “Gaslight” is a painful experience as the viewer watches a wretched man gradually crush the spirit of a sincere and trusting woman. It’s utterly abusive but at some point she wakes up to the racket and works to see justice done. So should we all.

‘SMART Cities’ worldwide being converted into ‘open concentration camps,’ says ex-Silicon Valley engineer turned whistleblower

 If only all this was just hype but the technological tools are being implemented day after day as part of the Agenda 2030 and the Smart City project.

 Listen to the video below and be very frightened...

 https://leohohmann.com/2022/11/23/smart-cities-worldwide-being-converted-into-open-concentration-camps-says-ex-silicon-valley-engineer-turned-whistleblower/#more-12026

United Nation's Psychotic New Plan Exposed（Video - 16')

  When conspiracy theories go mainstream, you know you have a problem!

  What are the Davos Elites really after?

  Understanding that the system which gave them birth is toast, it may just be their own survival at the expense of everyone else!

  Are they really trying to engineer a crash to their own liking by ignoring pesky but mostly correct economic orthodoxy? Your take is as good as mine at this stage although it is now a matter of months, maybe weeks before the masks fall off.

 

"No Possibility Of Reconciliation" Any Longer: US And China Are Now "Officially In An Economic War"

 Forget Ukraine, it is a side show. 

The real war is between the US and China. It is still about trade and technology at this stage but it is getting warmer by the day. 

The challenge of China on the hegemony of the US is existential . It is THE story of the next 10 years. 

Semiconductor stocks across the globe - in Hong Kong, Europe and certainly in the US - are tumbling after the Biden administration on Friday unveiled new restrictions on technology exports to China which are meant to undercut Beijing's ability to develop wide swaths of its economy, from semiconductors and supercomputers to surveillance systems and advanced weapons.

As noted earlier, the US Commerce Department on Friday unveiled sweeping new regulations that limit the sale of semiconductors and chip-making equipment to Chinese customers, striking at the foundation of the country’s efforts to build its own chip industry. The agency also added 31 organizations to its unverified list, including Yangtze Memory Technologies and a subsidiary of leading chip equipment maker Naura Technology, severely limiting their ability to buy technology from abroad.

The move is the Biden admin’s most aggressive yet as it tries to stop China from developing technological capabilities it sees as a threat. And, as Bloomberg notes, depending on how broadly Washington enforces the restrictions, the impact could extend well beyond semiconductors and into industries that rely on high-end computing, from electric vehicles and aerospace to simple gadgets like smartphones.

The two countries are now officially in an “economic war,” Dylan Patel, chief analyst at SemiAnalysis, said. A Chinese analyst said there is “no possibility of reconciliation” any longer.

Chinese state media and officials over the weekend raged against the action, warning of economic consequences and stirring speculation about potential retaliation. He Xiaopeng, chairman and CEO of Chinese EV maker Xpeng, warned last month that escalating US restrictions on chip exports will set back the nation’s autonomous driving sector.

“This is the US salvo against China’s efforts to build its domestic tech capabilities,” said Patel, who estimates the restrictions could reduce global technology and industry trade by hundreds of billions of dollars. “It’s the US firing back, making clear they will fight back.”

European and Chinese semiconductor stocks tumbled on the news. ASML Holding NV, the most advanced maker of equipment for producing semiconductors, fell more than 3%. Bellwether Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. fell as much as 5.2% in Hong Kong on Monday, the most since Aug. 15, as Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Charles Shum slashed his estimate on 2023 growth by 50%. Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd. plunged 10%, while Shanghai Fudan Microelectronics Group Co. plummeted 25%. Naura fell by its daily limit of 10% in mainland China, the biggest fall since April.

signal about US policy on China: a very hawkish consensus is now cemented in place."

US officials said the new restrictions are necessary to stop China from becoming more of an economic and military menace. As a reminder, it was back in 2018 when we first explained that the "trade" war with China was really all about chips and semiconductors, preventing China from overtaking the US before it's too late. They are seeking to ensure the country’s chipmakers don’t secure the capability to make advanced semiconductors.

China “has poured resources into developing supercomputing capabilities and seeks to become a world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030,” said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration Thea D. Rozman Kendler. “It is using these capabilities to monitor, track and surveil their own citizens, and fuel its military modernization.”

Reaction in China was furious. The nationalistic Global Times newspaper warned the “savage attack on free trade” would have dire consequences for the US.

“Only arrogant and ignorant people can truly believe that the US can block the development of China’s semiconductor or other technology industries by these illegitimate means,” it said in an editorial. “The US hegemony in science and technology that harms others without benefiting itself may bring some short-term difficulties to China’s semiconductor industry, but will in turn strengthen China’s will and ability to stand on its own in science and technology.”

Quoted by Bloomberg, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said the measures are unfair and will “deal a blow to global industrial and supply chains and world economic recovery.”

“The reality is the US is determined to use chips as a tool to contain China,” Gu Wenjun, head of Chinese chip researcher ICwise, wrote in an online commentary. “There is no possibility of reconciliation.”

The new US regulations broadly limit chipmakers from selling to China artificial intelligence semiconductors and those that can be used for supercomputers. Nvidia Corp. warned in September that government restrictions on exporting AI chips to China could affect hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, sending its stock tumbling. Chipmakers can request a Commerce Department exception to those rules. But they should presume such requests will be denied, senior officials said.

Commerce also put in place a raft of restrictions on supplying US machinery that’s capable of making advanced semiconductors. It’s targeting the types of memory and logic chips that are at the heart of state-of-the-art designs.

Specifically, the restrictions cover production of logic chips using so-called nonplanar transistors made with 16-nanometer technology or anything more advanced than that, 18-nanometer dynamic random access memory chips and Nand-style flash memory chips with 128 layers or more (the smaller the number of nanometers, the more capable the chip).

Stacy Rasgon and a team from Sanford C. Bernstein explained the restrictions on AI, supercomputers and advanced chip-making equipment, while pointing out that the standard CPUs used in personal computers and servers would not be blocked from export to China, as some had feared.

“The changes represent a further escalation, and we do not know what China might do in response,” the Bernstein analysts wrote. “Potential retaliation remains a risk.”

Well there is always an invasion or blockade of Taiwan, just as Biden is doing his best to drain the "emergency" petroleum reserve to win a few Democratic votes.

Finally, as Bloomberg notes, one key question is how the US rules will affect the ability of companies like ASML to sell into China. The Dutch company is effectively the most important supply chain company for chipmakers around the world.

ASML has had to strike a challenging balance between the US and China. It has been selling its deep ultraviolet, or DUV, machines to Chinese customers, but has held back from selling its more advanced extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, machines. Under the new Commerce Department restrictions, the company may be limited from selling DUV technology to Chinese customers too, Citigroup analysts wrote.

“We are assessing the potential implications of the new regulations, if any, and cannot comment at this moment,” said Monique Mols, a spokesperson for ASML.

According to Patel of SemiAnalysis, the unverified list is a serious threat to China’s tech ambitions. In the past, the Commerce Department cut off access to critical technologies for companies like Huawei when they were added to the so-called entity list, meaning the agency had gathered evidence against them. The unverified list simply means the Commerce Department can’t verify that a company’s activities are safe.

“That is huge,” he said. “They can pretty much blacklist any company they want in China within two months.”

Vladimir Putin's Battle Cry Against The Deep State

 Is this the real war?

Authored by Oscar Silva-Valladares via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

The recent ceremony of accession of four Ukrainian regions to Russia brought a speech from President Putin that outlined the reasons behind Russia’s current struggles, the character and identify of its foes and, more importantly, laid the groundwork for Russia’s next level of confrontation with the West beyond the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine.  In his speech, Putin clearly defined the present fight as a worldwide battle in which Russia plays a leading role against the Deep State that ultimately runs the West and which uses all available tools - including military, economic, cultural, and social – in its attempt to preserve unipolar world domination

Putin’s words were directed to three distinctive audiences: the collective West, the Global South and Russia. He went back to Middle Ages history to remind the origins and impact of Western resource exploitation and colonialism in the Americas, Asia and Africa through imperialistic wars, racism, and slavery.  He touched upon the military exploits of the 20th century led primarily by the US and its allies and its impact in Germany and Japan at the end of the Second World War, Korea in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960-70s and its latest failed adventures in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. He also highlighted the dire days of Russia during the 1990s and the Western powers’ attempts to turn it into a dismembered and passive cheap natural resources outlet. Putin’s message to Russians had nationalistic and religious tones, touching on the defence of traditional family values as a call to arms against the threat caused by dwindling population growth. He also named US monetary printing as one of the key tools used by the Western establishment to achieve its self-preservation and supremacy goals, reminding that paper doesn’t feed nor warms human beings.

It would be tempting to see this speech narrowly as just another manifestation of Russia’s position in the big geopolitical battles, but what Putin has done is setting international rivalry in deep historical and cultural terms which have an undoubted appeal across the globe. Critics will see Putin’s benign characterization of Russia as a cynical ploy that hides the country’s role, through its commanding post in the Soviet Union, in the subjugation of Eastern European countries after World War II, but nevertheless the Global South will see things differently.

Putin’s scathing attack against the West is a multi-headed weapon as it rallied to the conservative segments of a population dismayed by globalism imposing a deeply disturbing agenda that goes against traditional views on family, marriage and sex, but it also has leftist tones, as his criticism also goes against the same globalism that is worsening wealth disparity, and even a libertarian appeal as he referred to the imposition of states of emergency, media control and sanctions on other societies as examples of Western made totalitarianism. Putin’s primary target was the Anglo-Saxon establishment, mainly the US and Great Britain, and he attempted to build a wedge within the West as he focused on sovereignty, a cry with resonance in countries like Hungary and Italy, and on traditional anti-war sentiments in Germany and Japan by remembering the horrors of the World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

An immediate consequence of Putin’s rhetorical escalation will be increased US pressure on the Global South to follow anti-Russian sanctions.  To successfully counter this menace, and as Russia needs its continuous support, it will have to combine ideology with pragmatic and tangible support in terms of access to critical energy and food resources to the poorer countries. The recent abstentions of China, India and Brazil on a UN Security Council resolution calling for condemnation of the Ukraine referenda no doubt were driven by these countries’ expectations on Russia’s future actions.

Following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and as it gradually abandoned socialism, Russia lost the powerful ideological appeal that it had during decades in the Global South and in the West’s anti-establishment segments.  The most remarkable aspect of Putin’s recent speech is bringing back ideological confrontation into the forefront. This new battle looks to present the West’s defence of democracy, freedom, and sovereignty as hollow and hypocritical. A combined message of anti-colonialism and conservatism is a powerful tool but Putin’s indirect and subtle appeal to people power as the only way to finally counter the Deep State is even stronger. Putin’s identification of the Deep State as humanity’s foe may be his ultimate ideological legacy, something avoidable if the US would have resigned itself to be just a normal country and to focus primarily on its people’s prosperity.

A Collapse In Fiat Currencies Within The Next 2 Years? | Alasdair Macleod (Video > 1h)

  Great video but two years? How optimistic! 

  Still a very knowledgeable talk. Plenty to learn about finance there.

  But the process has now started... (see below)

 

Leaked Paper Shows UK Cops Preparing For "Greater Civil Unrest" This Winter

New Prime Minister Liz Truss may have only weeks to deliver a confidence turnaround in the UK economy or face a surge in violent crime and breakdown in public order caused by a cost-of-living crisis.

The Times revealed police chiefs fear "economic turmoil and financial instability" has the "potential to drive increases in particular crime types," such as shoplifting, burglary, vehicle theft, and online fraud and blackmail, as Brits face one of the worst collapses in living standards in a century amid energy hyperinflation. 

"Prolonged and painful economic pressure" could spark "greater civil unrest," similar to the 2011 London riots, the leaked national strategy paper read. 

"Greater financial vulnerability may expose some staff to a higher risk of corruption, especially among those who fall into significant debt or financial difficulties," it continued. 

One police chief noticed increased violent crime as inflation is stuck at multi-decade highs. This comes as energy regulator Ofgem increased the cap on power bills to a record £3,549 ($4,189) beginning Oct. 1 from £1,971 ($2,330). That cap is expected to rise to £5,439 ($6,427) by January and £7,272 ($8,594) by spring. 

Besides police, energy executives warned that mass civil unrest looms as people cannot afford their heating and electricity bills this winter. 

About 160,000 Brits have joined a movement against skyrocketing electricity bills, vowing not to pay come Oct. 1. 

Last Friday, Russia's energy giant Gazprom PJSC halted flows via Nord Stream 1 to Europe, sending EU natural gas and electricity prices soaring on Monday. This means Truss hardly has any time to deliver a coherent strategy to save households from energy poverty and businesses from failing. 

The massive protest in Prague this past weekend, where tens of thousands of Czechs flooded the streets, offers a glimpse of the impending social unrest that could hit the street of the UK if power bills continue rising without government intervention. 

Published last week was a new report via Verisk Maplecroft, a UK-based risk consulting and intelligence firm, warning there's a high risk of social unrest in Europe later this year due to rising inflation. 

Europeans are finally waking up to how bad Western sanctions on Russia have backfired, as their governments sacrificed ordinary people over NATO's proxy fight against Russia in Ukraine. These protests could spread like wildfire across Europe, and it appears the UK is preparing for the worst-case scenario.

Çatalhöyük in Anatolia is rewriting the earliest signs of civilization

  This is the oldest "infographic" known. It represents the relatively big village  of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia in modern Turkey. (7000+ people)

 What is extraordinary about this drawing is that it dates from approximately 6,200 BC (The drawing can be dated in part thanks to the erupting volcano in the background.) or close to the very beginning of civilization although the origin of the village seems to be around 7,200 BC which is very close to the filling up of the Black Sea around 7,400 BC.  (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.05.011)

 It shows a relatively egalitarian society where all the houses are more or less the same size and tools are used in common. No fortifications or military equipment were found but the sheer number of people must have been the best defense at that time since no other such large settlements are known in the area.

 All this would be about 2,500 years after the end of the younger Dryas 11,600 years ago, the last glaciation which fits almost perfectly with the time it took for early agriculture and domestication of animals to develop.

 This happened a few thousand years before the earliest signs of civilization in Mesopotamia, China and Egypt. (At that time the Sahara is still green and populations have not yet been concentrated in the Nile Valley.)

 As such, the complete human civilization process fits within 9,000 short years since these early signs of organization and well within the latest "warm" period beginning uncannily with the very earliest signs of "warmth" as can be seen in the chart below.

 Which itself is almost insignificant on a slightly larger scale map based on measurements taken at Lake Vostok in Antarctica where the full "recent" warm period above is little but the last red blip!

What If?

  What if it is time to end this blog?

  Or rather to go back to technical subjects that almost no one is interested in? 😁

  I had great fun sharing some insight with people about energy, technology and the market but now that the long anticipated collapse is upon us, foresight is quickly becoming obsolete. What's the point of keeping tracks of your direction in a polar fog if your short term objective is solely focused on not falling into ice cracks? 

 Likewise, we will quickly be overwhelmed with short term emergencies so that eventually, most people will focus on "cheap" easy to understand solutions paving the way to demagogues and tyrants as history repeats itself.

 We literally and pathetically learn almost nothing as a society repeating the same mistakes time after time. The end of democracy is therefore in sight proving Mencken was right: "Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance"

 My sole smallish schadenfreude is that the collapse will not follow the roadmap anticipated by the World Economic Forum towards their dystopian "New World Order". What we will get instead is a new world disorder. A fog of war from which few will benefit since income will crash faster than population. (Although you can trust these people that they will try. They are after all the richest and brightest.)

 With luck and provided we avoid a nuclear armaggedon, (50% chance according to most "experts"), we will still get the four horsemen of war, pestilence, famine and death. It is at this stage unavoidable. The die is cast. 

 This Winter will be hard but nothing compared to next year and the following years as the rapid unraveling of our social order will make everything scarce. Especially in developing countries which will suffer even more. Inflation and "free" money is nothing but transfer from the poor who don't have access to it to the rich who do. 

 And this is THE reason why this blog must be terminated as it will slowly turn to doom and gloom in line with current events.

 Interesting times ahead for sure!      

 

Authored by Tumoas Malinen via The Epoch Times,

Probably the most important thing in forecasting is the ability to ask: What if something is not how you think it is? Open speculation on world developments is the key to establishing a position, where basically nothing can really surprise you. And at that point, you have come so far as a forecaster.

The “What if?” questions I am currently asking are:

1. What if the raid of the Mar-a-Largo resort of President Trump was politically motivated?

2. What if the war in Ukraine was part of some plan to break the emerging Eurasian (China, Europe, Russia) global power structure?

3. What if central banks, or the “power brokers” behind them, know that monetary policies are going to crush the economy with interest rate hikes?

4. (To continue:) What if central bankers are deliberately pushing for the central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs, to gain total oversight over the economy?

The first two are rather political, but as I mentioned before, politics has become a major factor affecting the global economy. That is why the questions need to be addressed and, perhaps, speculated upon.

Speculation on the actual reasons behind the Trump raid are already running high. There have been reports of Federal Bureau of Investigation whistleblowers coming forward with statements on the politicization of the FBI. At this point, this is naturally pure speculation, and political games, but these are alternative narratives we can consider, because if they turn out to be true, they will have serious repercussions.

Most important, if the raid was politically motivated, why is former President Donald Trump viewed as such a threat to the current system, or the “establishment,” such that his possible becoming again the president of the United States should be stopped? Comparing the tenures of Presidents Barrack Obama and Joe Biden with that of the one term of President Trump, for example, the latter was a rather peaceful and prosperous world.

Due to the Ukraine–Russia war, Europe may be facing its darkest winter since 1945. Our economic systems and societies are unlikely to be able to withstand major energy and possible food crises combined with interest rate hikes. Due to sanctions and central bank policies, we could be facing the deepest economic crisis since World War II, which also would make primarily Europeans a lot poorer.

What’s Going On?

This leads to the question: Why on earth did President Vladimir Putin attack Ukraine?

He had to know that it would lead to a serious backlash. It also is possible that there were other forces in play that paved the path toward war. There’s the scenario that some powerful entities in the United States wanted to stop the formation of the economic power structure among China, Europe, and Russia. The “entities” would have known which policies would push Putin “over the edge.”  This is, again, just speculation, but it’s an idea we need to consider, because, if accurate, it would mean that the economic prosperity of Europeans and possibly the world is being “sacrificed” for a geopolitical play or to accomplish an even more ominous objective.

Could this impoverishment, and thus a controlling of the middle-class through ravaging inflation and indebtedness, be a possible endgame of the “globalists” possibly threatened by another presidential term for Trump?

The question with central bank policies is equally pressing and worrying.

A sound economy needs no savior. It also does not need anyone to “push” it to grow with, for example, artificially low interest rates, as a healthy economy grows organically from the risk-taking of entrepreneurs, corporations, and individuals with the assistance of the financial system. Mistakes naturally do happen, and they sometimes lead to serious financial crashes and economic crises. However, stringent and punitive policies toward excessive financial speculation are truly the only remedy against “moral hazard” and other financial malpractices leading to crises. The financial crises in Finland and Japan during the early 1990s are good examples of this. And it should be remembered that the biggest economic crisis thus far, the Great Depression of the 1930s, occurred just 16 years after the creation of the Federal Reserve.

Moreover, for the past decades, central bankers have manipulated our economies through interest rates and asset purchasing (and selling) programs (quantitative easing and tightening). What has this led us into? The global economy is more fragile than ever, and many heavily indebted sovereigns, such as those in the eurozone, remain solvent only by continuous central bank support. Essentially, the world economy is in constant need of resuscitation because of central bank policies.

How demented would be that, after destroying an economy, central bankers would make themselves appear as our saviors?

It would be Machiavellian: to crash something just to get more power over it.

This, however, could be the “hand” central bankers are playing, especially through the looming issuance of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The issuance of digital currencies controlled by the central banks would eventually annihilate the banking system, or make it an obedient follower of central bank policies. This is because, especially during crises, deposits would flock to the central bank from commercial banks, as all deposits in the central bank are essentially fully covered by the taxpayers, or the State, and the money creation (printing) abilities of the central bank. This would lead the central bank to obtain a monopoly-like power in banking.

Then only cash would need to be banned for the central banks to gain full control of interest rates, and the economy.  The end result would be an economic dystopia, where the ability of citizens’ to control their own (economic) fate—a particular kind of agency—will effectively have been taken away.

This is something central bankers may try to sell us after the economy crashes, through the rationalization of “safety.” This again is speculation that ought to be considered as the end result of such an aim; it truly would be horrible, on the level of a kind of enslavement of the populace.

So, I urge everyone to ask the “What if?” questions presented above (and more).

This is because if any of them (not to mention several not discussed above) turn out to be true, we are living in a very different world that has been presented to us.

China's Imminent Economic Collapse: How It Will Impact You (Video - 15')

 More on the imploding Chinese bubble.

 It is getting more and more obvious that the black swan of this crisis will be Chinese.

 Get ready, the whole world will be impacted.