The Trump campaign has accused Democrat Party officials in half a dozen battleground states of widespread election fraud, mostly involving mail-in ballots. Democrats, most legacy media, and even some Republicans have dismissed the allegations and urged the President to concede defeat.
President Donald Trump has accused the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation of possibly being ‘in on’ the alleged plot to steal the election from him.
“This is total fraud and how the FBI and the Department of Justice, I don’t know, maybe they’re involved, but how people are allowed to get away with this stuff is unbelievable. This election was rigged. This election was a total fraud,” Trump alleged, speaking to Fox News in a telephone interview Sunday morning.
“They’ve been there a long time. Some of them have served a lot of different presidents, and they have their own views. All I can say is… with all the fraud that’s taken place, nobody has come to me and said ‘the FBI has nabbed the people that are doing this scheme,'” he added. The President went on to complain that the FBI and the DoJ have yet to investigate Obama-era officials’ potential illegal activities, including spying on the Trump campaign in 2016.
“Where are they with Comey, with McCabe, with Brennan, with all these people? They lied to Congress, they lied, they leaked… Where are they with all this stuff?” Trump asked, referring to former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and former CIA director John Brennan and their roles in instigating Russiagate.
Suggesting that the world was watching what’s going on in the United States regarding the election fraud allegations, Trump said that he’s had leaders of other countries calling him up and saying the 3 November vote was “the most messed-up election we’ve ever seen.”
‘Hundreds and Hundreds of Affidavits’
Going through his campaign’s claims, Trump pointed to alleged widespread fraud involving mail-in ballots, including cases of people receiving multiple ballots, dead people ‘voting’ and requesting applications to vote, so-called ‘glitches’ of Dominion voting machines which shifted thousands of votes from Trump to Biden, and problems of poll watchers being “thrown out” of counting rooms in major Democrat strongholds. Trump insisted his campaign had “hundreds and hundreds” of sworn affidavits to back up these allegations.
The President also recalled the discrepancy between results coming in on election night and those coming in later, thanks to large “vote dumps” in Biden’s favour in Michigan, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. “And all of a sudden I went from winning by a lot to losing by a little, and in some cases it took a period of time to do it,” he said.
Trump accused state judges and the media of shirking their responsibilities to hear his campaign’s lawsuits and cover the fraud allegations, and attacked big tech for its alleged censorship. “The media doesn’t want to talk about it. They know how fraudulent this is. It’s no different than Hunter,” he said, referring to Joe Biden’s son and his alleged pay-to-play corruption in Ukraine during the Obama presidency.
“We don’t have freedom of the press in this country. We have suppression by the press. You can’t have a scandal if nobody reports about it,” Trump complained, referring to efforts by Twitter and Facebook to cover up a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop allegedly proving illegal activities, and other mainstream media’s lack of coverage.
‘One Nice, Big, Beautiful Lawsuit’
As for the courts, Trump claimed that judges in the swing states weren’t allowing his campaign to put the evidence in.
“We’re not allowed to put in our proof. They say ‘you don’t have standing’. I said to the lawyers that I would like to file one nice, big, beautiful lawsuit with tremendous proof. We have affidavits. We have hundreds and hundreds of affidavits… [people] willing to sign under penalty of perjury (you go to jail)… These are respected people. These are people that are putting their life at risk. And they don’t want to take the affidavits. Then they say we don’t have proof.”
Trump also expressed doubts about whether his campaign’s fraud claims could reach the Supreme Court. “The problem is it’s hard to get into the Supreme Court. I’ve got the best Supreme Court advocates that want to argue the case if it gets there. But they said it’s very hard to get a case up there.”
Echoing claims made by other members of his staff – as well as members of his family – about the supposed unlikelihood of Biden receiving 15 million more votes than Barack Obama, Trump suggested repeatedly in the interview that he believed there was no way that Biden got 80 million votes, or could win more votes in African-American communities than Obama.
“I got 63 million votes four years ago and won quite handily in the electoral college… We were hoping to get 68 or so and we felt that was a path to an easy victory. I got 74 million votes – the largest in the history of a sitting president. So many millions more than we were even trying to get. And everyone said this is over. I’m telling you, 10 o’clock [election night] everybody thought it was over. And then the phoney mail-ins started coming in,” Trump said.
Major US media called the election in Biden’s favour on 7 November, with the Democrat projected to win 51.1 percent of the popular vote and 306 votes in the Electoral College, well above the requisite 270. President Trump has refused to concede. The Electoral College is expected to cast its votes formally for president and vice-president on 14 December, with votes to be counted by Congress on 6 January, and the inauguration slated for 20 January 2021.
From Syria to Libya to Nagorno-Karabakh, this new method of military offense has been brutally effective. We are witnessing a revolution in the history of warfare, one that is causing panic, particularly in Europe.
In an analysis written for the European Council on Foreign Relations, Gustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow, argues that the extensive (and successful) use of military drones by Azerbaijan in its recent conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh holds “distinct lessons for how well Europe can defend itself.”
Gressel warns that Europe would be doing itself a disservice if it simply dismissed the Nagorno-Karabakh fighting as “a minor war between poor countries.” In this, Gressel is correct – the military defeat inflicted on Armenia by Azerbaijan was not a fluke, but rather a manifestation of the perfection of the art of drone warfare by Baku’s major ally in the fighting, Turkey. Gressel’s conclusion – that “most of the [European Union’s] armies… would do as miserably as the Armenian Army” when faced by such a threat – is spot on.
What happened to the Armenian Army in its short but brutal 44-day war with Azerbaijan goes beyond simply losing a war. It was more about the way Armenia lost and, more specifically, how it lost. What happened over the skies of Nagorno-Karabakh – where Azerbaijan employed a host of Turkish- and Israeli-made drones not only to surveil and target Armenian positions, but shape and dominate the battlefield throughout – can be likened to a revolution in military affairs. One akin to the arrival of tanks, mechanised armoured vehicles, and aircraft in the early 20th century, that eventually led to the demise of horse-mounted cavalry.
It’s not that the Armenian soldiers were not brave, or well-trained and equipped – they were. It was that they were fighting a kind of war which had been overtaken by technology, where no matter how resolute and courageous they were in the face of the enemy, the outcome was preordained – their inevitable death, and the destruction of their equipment; some 2,425 Armenian soldiers lost their lives in the fighting, and 185 T-72 tanks, 90 armored fighting vehicles, 182 artillery pieces, 73 multiple rocket launchers, and 26 surface-to-air missile systems were destroyed.
A new kind of warfare
What happened to Armenia was not an isolated moment in military history, but rather the culmination of a new kind of warfare, centered on the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones). Azerbaijan’s major ally in the war against Armenia – Turkey – has been perfecting the art of drone warfare for years, with extensive experience in full-scale modern conflict gained in recent fighting in Syria (February-March 2020) and Libya (May-June 2020.)
Over the course of the past decade, Turkey has taken advantage of arms embargoes imposed by America and others which restricted Ankara’s access to the kind of front-line drones used by the US around the world, to instead build from scratch an indigenous drone-manufacturing base. While Turkey has developed several drones in various configurations, two have stood out in particular – the Anka-S and Bayraktar.
While the popular term for the kind of drone-centric combat carried out by Turkey is “drone swarm,” the reality is that modern drone warfare, when conducted on a large scale, is a deliberate, highly coordinated process which integrates electronic warfare, reconnaissance and surveillance, and weapons delivery. Turkey’s drone war over Syria was managed from the Turkish Second Army Command Tactical Command Center, located some 400km away from the fighting in the city of Malatya in Turkey’s Hatay Province.
It was here that the Turkish drone operators sat, and where they oversaw the operation of an integrated electromagnetic spectrum (EMS) warfare capability designed to jam Syrian and Russia air-defense radars and collect signals of military value (such as cell phone conversations) which were used to target specific locations.
For every $1 in losses suffered by Turkey, Syria lost approximately $5
The major systems used by Turkey in this role are the KORAL jamming system and a specially configured Anka-S drone operating as an airborne intelligence collection platform. The Anka-S also operated as an airborne command and control system, relaying targeting intelligence to orbiting Bayraktar UAVs, which would then acquire the target visually before firing highly precise onboard air-to-surface rockets, destroying the target. When conducted in isolation, an integrated drone strike such as those carried out by Turkey can be deadly effective; when conducted simultaneously with four or more systems in action, each of which is capable of targeting multiple locations, the results are devastating and, from the perspective of those on the receiving end, might be likened to a deadly “swarm.”
The fighting in Syria illustrated another important factor regarding drone warfare – the disparity of costs between the drone and the military assets it can destroy. Turkish Bayraktar and Anka-S UAV’s cost approximately $2.5 million each. Over the course of fighting in Syria’s Idlib province, Turkey lost between six and eight UAVs, for a total replacement cost of around $20 million.
In the first night of fighting in Syria, Turkey claims (and Russia does not dispute) that it destroyed large numbers of heavy equipment belonging to the Syrian Army, including 23 tanks and 23 artillery pieces. Overall, Turkish drones are credited with killing 34 Syrian tanks and 36 artillery systems, along with a significant amount of other combat equipment. If one uses the average cost of a Russian-made tank at around $1.2 million, and an artillery system at around $500,000, the total damage done by Turkey’s drones amounts to some $57.3 million (and this number does not include the other considerable material losses suffered by the Syrian military, which in total could easily match or exceed that number.) From a cost perspective alone, for every $1 in losses suffered by Turkey, the Syrians lost approximately $5.
Turkey was able to take the lessons learned from the fighting in Idlib province and apply them to a different theater of war, in Libya, in May 2020. There, Turkey had sided with the beleaguered forces of the Government of National Accord (GNA), which was mounting what amounted to a last stand around the Libyan capital of Tripoli. The GNA was facing off against the forces of the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA), based out of Benghazi, which had launched a major offensive designed to capture the capital, eliminate the GNA, and take control of all of Libya.
How to capture half a country
The LNA was supported by the several foreign powers, including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia (via Wagner Group, a private military contractor.) Turkey’s intervention placed a heavy emphasis on the integrated drone warfare it had perfected in Syria. In Libya, the results were even more lop-sided, with the Turkish-backed GNA able to drive the LNA forces back, capturing nearly half of Libya in the process.
Both the LNA and Turkish-backed GNA made extensive use of combat drones, but only Turkey brought with it an integrated approach to drone warfare. Observers have grown accustomed to the concept of individual US drones operating freely over places such as Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan, delivering precision strikes against terrorist targets. However, as Iran demonstrated this past May, drones are vulnerable to modern air-defense systems, and US drone tactics would not work over contested airspace.
Likewise, the LNA, which made extensive use of Chinese-made combat drones flown by UAE pilots, enjoyed great success until Turkey intervened. Its electronic warfare and integrated air-defense capabilities then made LNA drone operations impossible to conduct, and the inability of the LNA to field an effective defense against the Turkish drone operations resulted in the tide of battle rapidly shifting on the ground. If anything, the cost differential between the Turkish-backed GNA and the LNA was greater than the $1-to-$5 advantage enjoyed by Turkey in Syria.
The big players – the US, Russia & China – are playing catch-up
By the time Turkey began cooperating with Azerbaijan against Armenia in September 2020, Turkish drone warfare had reached its zenith, and the outcome in Nagorno-Karabakh was all but assured. One of the main lessons drawn from the Turkish drone experiences in Syria, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh is that these conflicts were not fought against so-called “poor countries.”
Rather, the Turks were facing off against well-equipped and well-trained forces operating equipment which closely parallels that found in most small- and medium-sized European countries. Indeed, in all three conflicts, Turkey was facing off against some of the best anti-aircraft missile defenses produced by Russia. The reality is that most nations, if confronted by a Turkish “drone swarm,” would not fare well.
And the multiple deployment of drones is only going to expand. The US Army is currently working on what it calls the “Armed, Fully-Autonomous Drone Swarm,” or AFADS. When employed, AFADS will – autonomously, without human intervention – locate, identify, and attack targets using what is known as a “Cluster Unmanned Airborne System Smart Munition,” which will dispense a swarm of small drones that fan out over the battlefield to locate and destroy targets.
China has likewise tested a system that deploys up to 200 “suicide drones”designed to saturate a battlespace and destroy targets by flying into them. And this past September, the Russian military integrated “drone-swarm”capabilities for the first time in a large-scale military exercise.
The face of modern warfare has been forever altered, and those nations that are not prepared or equipped to fight in a battlefield where drone technology is fully incorporated in every aspect of the fight can expect outcomes similar to that of Armenia: severe losses of men and equipment, defeat, humiliation and the likely loss of their territory. This is the reality of modern warfare which, as Gustav Gressel notes, should make any nation not fully vested in drone technology “think – and worry.”
At the time of this writing, the United States currently maintains the highest number of Covid-19 deaths and ranks 11th for the highest deaths per capita. There have been approximately 262,000 recorded Covid-19 deaths in the United States, which is certainly a concerning number.
However, a new study (link removed but now available at Archive.org) published by Dr. Genevieve Briand at Johns Hopkins University notes some critical accounting errors done at the national level.
The study – which is still being vetted – simply examines the raw data that should have been questioned months ago.
The overall conclusion is that Covid-19, at least according to collected data, is not the killer disease that it is currently hyped up to be. AIER is not endorsing the study as is without further study, but we are interested in the argument being examined and discussed.
Viewing Covid-19 Deaths in Context
It is already well established that Covid-19 is a disease that is most dangerous to those over the age of 65 and who have preexisting conditions. In the United States, there has been an observed 2.1% mortality rate, with elderly individuals making up over half that number.
Young and healthy people are not by any significant capacity threatened by Covid-19.
One of the most important factors when it comes to Covid-19 is preventing excess death. According to the CDC,
“Estimates of excess deaths can provide information about the burden of mortality potentially related to the COVID-19 pandemic, including deaths that are directly or indirectly attributed to COVID-19. Excess deaths are typically defined as the difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time periods and expected numbers of deaths in the same time periods.”
Essentially, there is an average number of deaths every year due to a variety of causes that for the most part have remained constant through the years. This includes morbidities such as heart disease, which has long been the leading cause of death, and cancer, which has long plagued our existence. For Covid-19 to be a serious cause of alarm, it would need to significantly increase the number of average deaths.
However, according to the study,
“These data analyses suggest that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.”
Total deaths in the United States show no significant change and even mirror past trends of seasonal illness.
Source: CDC Data, Methodology Included in this Video
According to this graph constructed using data provided by the CDC from the last 6 years, total deaths have remained relatively constant and increases can be explained by various factors such as a larger population. The spikes in deaths in 2020 are consistent with historical trends, only topping 2018 by 11,292 deaths. There have been over 262,000 deaths attributed to Covid-19 in the United States, yet total deaths have not increased in any alarming capacity; they have only mirrored existing trends. In short, according to 6 years of data collected by the CDC, Covid-19 has not led to any significant increase in deaths.
Diving Deeper
What is even more interesting if not more alarming is that the spike in recorded Covid-19 deaths seen in 2020 has coincided with a proportional decrease in death from other diseases.
“This suggests, according to Briand, that the COVID-19 death toll is misleading. Briand believes that deaths due to heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia may instead be recategorized as being due to COVID-19.”
Deaths have remained relatively constant, yet reported deaths due to deadly conditions such as heart disease have fallen while reported Covid deaths have risen. This suggests that the current Covid death count is in some capacity relabeled deaths due to other ailments. According to the graph, reported Covid deaths even overtook heart disease as the main cause of death at one point, which should raise suspicion.
This aligns with many other well-established facts about the virus, such as those with comorbidities are the most at risk. According to the CDC, about 94% of Covid deaths occur with comorbidities. This suggests that it could be possible that a large number of deaths could have been mainly due to more serious ailments such as heart disease but categorized as a Covid-19 death, a far less lethal disease.
According to this graph provided by the study, deaths labeled under Covid-19 increased while deaths labeled under others decreased. It is important to note that this sample only applies to the month of April as the author notes these were the weeks with the highest reported deaths. Gu writes
“The CDC classified all deaths that are related to COVID-19 simply as COVID-19 deaths. Even patients dying from other underlying diseases but are infected with COVID-19 count as COVID-19 deaths. This is likely the main explanation as to why COVID-19 deaths drastically increased while deaths by all other diseases experienced a significant decrease…
“If [the COVID-19 death toll] was not misleading at all, what we should have observed is an increased number of heart attacks and increased COVID-19 numbers. But a decreased number of heart attacks and all the other death causes doesn’t give us a choice but to point to some misclassification,” Briand replied.”
Furthermore, Briand’s research notes that the percentage of death has remained relatively constant through all age groups. Covid death statistics seem to mirror the normal distribution of death amongst age groups, further lending credence to the argument that many Covid deaths are recategorized deaths.
Briand provides this graph constructed from CDC data that shows that deaths amongst various age groups have remained relatively constant.
By simply looking at the raw data presented by the CDC Gu writes that
“All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers. We found no evidence to the contrary,” Briand concluded.
What Do We Do With This Information?
Briand and likely many others suppose that the extreme emphasis on Covid-19 has led to the unintended classification of the disease as the cause of death. She further stresses that although this data challenges the idea that Covid is an unprecedented and lethal disease, we should still be concerned with mitigating death in general.
However, it is clear that this significant accounting error regarding Covid deaths, if true, is not productive. It has caused mass hysteria and misinformed public policy. Closing down communities to fight a virus that according to the data, has had no significant contribution to total deaths, reduces our overall capacity to build a healthy society.
[ZH: Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) noted on Twitter: “Folks: I know a lot of you are referencing this Johns Hopkins paper that’s been pulled. Unfortunately it is wrong. The excess deaths are real. Yes, they’re very, very skewed by age, but they’re real. Pretending otherwise doesn’t help.”]
Lockdowns have resulted in severe damage to our capacity to improve the general health of society.From the catastrophic economic damage that lowers the standard of living for everyone to surgeries being deemed “unessential,” our current policies are not helping in preventing deaths in general; they are likely leading to more. Suicides and substance abuse are up, mental and physical health are down, all due to lockdowns.
The late Dr. Donald Henderson, who led the eradication of smallpox, noted in 2006 that
“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”
The hysteria over Covid-19 has likely led to the alleged accounting error noted in Briand’s study, the reclassification of expected deaths from all causes into Covid deaths.
By Peter Andrews, Irish science journalist and writer based in London. He has a background in life sciences, and graduated from the University of Glasgow with a degree in genetics.
Four German holidaymakers who were illegally quarantined in Portugal after one was judged to be positive for Covid-19 have won their case, in a verdict that condemns the widely-used PCR test as being up to 97-percent unreliable.
Earlier this month, Portuguese judges upheld a decision from a lower court that found the forced quarantine of four holidaymakers to be unlawful. The case centred on the reliability (or lack thereof) of Covid-19 PCR tests.
The verdict, delivered on November 11, followed an appeal against a writ of habeas corpus filed by four Germans against the Azores Regional Health Authority. This body had been appealing a ruling from a lower court which had found in favour of the tourists, who claimed that they were illegally confined to a hotel without their consent. The tourists were ordered to stay in the hotel over the summer after one of them tested positive for coronavirus in a PCR test – the other three were labelled close contacts and therefore made to quarantine as well.
Unreliable, with a strong chance of false positives
The deliberation of the Lisbon Appeal Court is comprehensive and fascinating. It ruled that the Azores Regional Health Authority had violated both Portuguese and international law by confining the Germans to the hotel. The judges also said that only a doctor can “diagnose” someone with a disease, and were critical of the fact that they were apparently never assessed by one.
They were also scathing about the reliability of the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test, the most commonly used check for Covid.
The conclusion of their 34-page ruling included the following: “In view of current scientific evidence, this test shows itself to be unable to determine beyond reasonable doubt that such positivity corresponds, in fact, to the infection of a person by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”
In the eyes of this court, then, a positive test does not correspond to a Covid case. The two most important reasons for this, said the judges, are that, “the test’s reliability depends on the number of cycles used’’ and that “the test’s reliability depends on the viral load present.’’ In other words, there are simply too many unknowns surrounding PCR testing.
Tested positive? There could be as little as a 3% chance it’s correct
This is not the first challenge to the credibility of PCR tests. Many people will be aware that their results have a lot to do with the number of amplifications that are performed, or the ‘cycle threshold.’ This number in most American and European labs is 35–40 cycles, but experts have claimed that even 35 cycles is far too many, and that a more reasonable protocol would call for 25–30 cycles. (Each cycle exponentially increases the amount of viral DNA in the sample).
Earlier this year, data from three US states – New York, Nevada and Massachusetts – showed that when the amount of the virus found in a person was taken into account, up to 90 percent of people who tested positive could actually have been negative, as they may have been carrying only tiny amounts of the virus.
The Portuguese judges cited a study conducted by “some of the leading European and world specialists,” which was published by Oxford Academic at the end of September. It showed that if someone tested positive for Covid at a cycle threshold of 35 or higher, the chances of that person actually being infected is less than three percent, and that “the probability of… receiving a false positive is 97% or higher.”
While the judges in this case admitted that the cycle threshold used in Portuguese labs was unknown, they took this as further proof that the detention of the tourists was unlawful. The implication was that the results could not be trusted. Because of this uncertainty, they stated that there was “no way this court would ever be able to determine” whether the tourist who tested positive was indeed a carrier of the virus, or whether the others had been exposed to it.
Sshhh – don’t tell anyone
It is a sad indictment of our mainstream media that such a landmark ruling, of such obvious and pressing international importance, has been roundly ignored. If one were making (flimsy) excuses for them, one could say that the case escaped the notice of most science editors because it has been published in Portuguese. But there is a full English translation of the appeal, and alternative media managed to pick it up.
And it isn’t as if Portugal is some remote, mysterious nation where news is unreliable or whose judges are suspect – this is a western EU country with a large population and a similar legal system to many other parts of Europe. And it is not the only country whose institutions are clashing with received wisdom on Covid. Finland’s national health authority has disputed the WHO’s recommendation to test as many people as possible for coronavirus, saying it would be a waste of taxpayer’s money, while poorer South East Asian countries are holding off on ordering vaccines, citing an improper use of finite resources.
Testing, especially PCR testing, is the basis for the entire house of cards of Covid restrictions that are wreaking havoc worldwide. From testing comes case numbers. From case numbers come the ‘R number,’ the rate at which a carrier infects others. From the ‘dreaded’ R number comes the lockdowns and the restrictions, such as England’s new and baffling tiered restrictions that come into force next week.
The daily barrage of statistics is familiar to us all by this point, but as time goes on the evidence that something may be deeply amiss with the whole foundation of our reaction to this pandemic – the testing regime – continues to mount.
With idle tales this fills our empty ears; The next reports what from the first he hears; The rolling fictions grow in strength and size, Each author adding to the former lies. Here vain credulity, with new desires, Leads us astray, and groundless joy inspires; The dubious whispers, tumults fresh designed, And chilling fears astound the anxious mind.
-Ovid’s Metamorphosis
While the foundations of the USA tremble under the force of unprecedented vote fraud, color revolutionary operations, and the danger of a renewed fascist takeover of the Wall Street-Big Tech-NSA/FBI/CIA combine, certain facts must be separated from fiction.
Despite the mainstream media announcements of Biden’s victory, the fact is that things are far from certain as President Trump has made the point that he will fight all cases of blatant vote fraud which have appeared across the USA.
Despite mainstream media assertions to the contrary, there are indeed growing mountains of evidence that vote fraud has occurred among democrat-controlled swing states which have either given tens of thousands of Trump votes to Biden via “glitches”, blocked republican observers, used rosters replete with dead voters, modified dates on ballots or hundreds of thousands of mystery ballots appearing out of thin air in the middle of the night tipping the scales for Biden.
Every opposing narrative to this political lie is being surgically shut down, such as the immense censoring of the President’s Twitter account and cancelling of the “Stop the Steal” Facebook group that garnered over 350 000 members in only 24 hours. Meanwhile MSNBC, CBS, NPR and NBC have decided to take the unprecedented action of censoring the President’s press conference of Nov. 5 which raised serious questions about the legitimacy of the fraudulent votes.
While more cases of fraud can be listed here, and here, and here, and here, and here, the political situation is so tumultuous that I think it is important to take another approach to the historic moment we are currently living through by reviewing a parallel moment of great potential which was squandered three centuries ago.
Jonathan Swift and the Battle for Britain’s Soul
On November 9, 1710, the Satirist and political organizer Jonathan Swift wrote a pamphlet called the Art of Political Lying providing a decisive blow against the proto-deep state of the 18th century which had only recently taken control of the Island (Britain) during the 1688 Glorious Revolution and 1694 creation of the Bank of England.
In 1702, a young Queen Anne took the throne of England, and it was here that a clash occurred which was nearly entirely written out of history. From the moment the Venetian Party of England orchestrated the 1688 coup: wars, speculation and usury became the driving force of Britain. The long-hoped for peace with France organized by the great Colbert and his mentor Cardinal Jules Mazarin years earlier was lost and a new epoch of forever wars began to dominate British Foreign policy and British spending. It was in this new war economy that the bill to charter the Bank of England was passed. Under this bank, monetary policy became tied to the creation of ever-growing debts without providing the means to pay them off.
While many informed citizens today may be aware of this fact, and even comprehend the parallels to the takeover of the United States by international financiers during the 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve, very few people have come to realize that there was a valiant fight in opposition to this 17-18th century coup from which could teach us much of what organises today’s world.
Political adviser and satirist Jonathan Swift (left) and a propaganda painting depicting the puppet king William of Orange during the Glorious Revolution
The Republican Resistance
In opposition to the City of London-based deep state, an anti-imperial faction had been organized around the Speaker of the House of Commons Robert Harley (1661-1724) who worked closely with an influential network of collaborators who did much to resist the empire which had not yet consolidated its migration from the swamps of Venice to more secure grounds in the City of London.
Harley had worked closely with his advisor Daniel Defoe (1) and other Tories to counter the monstrous Central Bank of England with a National Land Bank in 1696. The Land Bank was designed to serve as a tool to generate credit for manufacturing, internal improvements and centers of education across Britain with a focus on long term projects that generated real wealth. Harley’s group also worked tirelessly to establish peace treaties with France in order to create a climate of stability needed for investments into the real economic sector to occur rather than leak money into wars of death and destruction, and in many ways this form of political economy served as a precursor to the later system that arose under the guidance of Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton.
Sadly, Harley’s Land bank was soon taken over by speculators and run into the ground as the Venetian Party deep state continued to rise in power.
When William died in 1702, Princess Anne became Queen and the cabal of Britain’s Venetian Party (then operating under the banner of the Whig Junto) continued to exercise vast influence over affairs of state driving the nation into ever deeper unpayable debts and war.
As the late historian Graham Lowry brilliantly demonstrated in his book How the Nation Was Won, tides began to turn against the Venetian Party Whigs by 1710 as Queen Anne had come to realize how she had been deceived by her close confidante Sarah Churchill, who together with her husband John Churchill (aka: Lord Marlborough) had gained full control of the British armies, siphoned millions of pounds from war profiteering, and insider trading in the City of London while gaining castles more luxurious than those owned by the royal household itself. (2)
Queen Anne Drains the Swamp
After eight years of manipulation, the Queen had decided that she had enough and on September 20, 1710, she dissolved the Parliament and began draining the swamp under the guidance of Robert Harley whom she promptly made Prime Minister (then called “First Minister”), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1710-11) and Lord High Treasurer (1711-1714). Before the Parliament was reconvened, the majority of John Churchill’s Whig allies were forced to resign in disgrace while Sarah Churchill was removed from her position as “confidante”, having been replaced with Abigail Masham, a key figure in Harley’s republican network of court insiders.
As Lowry demonstrates, Harley’s co-conspirators centered in the Scriblerus Club led by the satirist and Irish statesman Jonathan Swift who arrived in London weeks before the humanist counter-coup was unleashed and remained Harley’s chief advisor and propagandist from August 1710 until 1713. Other members of the Scriblerus Club included Queen Anne’s physician John Aberthnot, poet Alexander Pope, playwright John Gay, philosopher/statesman Henry St. John and Thomas Parnell (to name a few). An important characteristic of all these figures was that they were cultural warriors of the highest level whose poetry, plays and music was inspired by the intention to uplift the minds and morals of the people.
Describing Harley’s efforts to finally end the forever wars with France that ultimately resulted in the 1713 Treaty of Ultrecht and revive his 1696 plans for a National Land Bank (though this time with an international colonial infrastructure development orientation under a government-run South Sea company to counteract both the Bank of England and also the British East India Company), Swift wrote in his 1714 Memoires: “Mr. Harley, to give credit to his administration, resolved upon two very important points: first, to secure unprovided debts of the nation and secondly to put an end to the war.”
Much like today’s easily bewildered world, press agencies of 1710 were too often used by the forces of evil to make black appear white, up appear down and right appear wrong. Slanders and mistruths were soon spread across the press of Harley’s corrupting influence on the Queen and the population was soon induced to riot and even burn effigies of both the Queen and Harley in public squares.
In the face of this battle over information, Swift wrote The Art of Political Lying which some historians have called “the most influential pamphlet in British political history.”
The Art of Political Lying
In this biting essay, the satirist lays bare the techniques of mass manipulation artfully stating:
“Although the devil be the father of lies, he seems, like other great inventors, to have lost much of his reputation, by the continual improvements that have been made upon him. Who first reduced lying into an art, and adapted it to politics, is not so clear from history, although I have made some diligent inquiries. I shall therefore consider it only according to the modern system, as it has been cultivated these twenty years past in the southern part of our own island… the moderns have made great additions, applying this art to the gaining of power and preserving it, as well as revenging themselves after they have lost it; as the same instruments are made use of by animals to feed themselves when they are hungry, and to bite those that tread upon them… It can conquer kingdoms without fighting, and sometimes with the loss of a battle. It gives and resumes employments; can sink a mountain to a mole-hill, and raise a mole-hill to a mountain: hath presided for many years at committees of elections; can wash a black-a-moor white; make a saint of an atheist, and a patriot of a profligate; can furnish foreign ministers with intelligence, and raise or let fall the credit of the nation. This goddess flies with a huge looking-glass in her hands, to dazzle the crowd, and make them see, according as she turns it, their ruin in their interest, and their interest in their ruin.”
Although weakened and bruised, the Venetian Party both in England and its French Jesuitical allies made every attempt to thwart Harley’s designs for peace with France from 1710-1713 beginning with a March 8, 1711 assassination attempt on Harley. Concerned over Harley’s slow recovery and doubting the loyalty of Harley’s physician whom many suspected of being an asset of Marlborough, Swift published a widely read poem:
“To Mr. Harley’s surgeon
On Britain, Europe’s safety lies
And Britain’s lost if Harley dies;
Harley depends upon your skill
Think what you save or what you kill.”
Luckily Harley recovered and peace negotiations recommenced after several months, but soon it became clear that the Duke of Marlborough, still controlling the British armies and working closely with Dutch mercenaries was not going to let peace win without a fight, announced that he would soon take Paris, and commenced a vicious attack on the French town of Bouchain causing the Queen to write to Harley saying:
“the Duke of Marlborough shows plainer than ever by this new project his unwillingness for peace, but I hope our negotiations will succeed and there it will not be in his power to prevent it.”
Here Swift’s razor-sharp pen was again deployed to expose the military industrial complex of London when he published the immensely popular book “Conduct of the Allies” on November 23, 1712. In this short work Swift wrote:
“We are destroying many thousand lives, exhausting our substance, not for our own interest, which would be but common prudence; not for a thing indifferent which would be sufficient folly; but perhaps to our own destruction which is perfect madness.”
Swift attacked that carnage caused by “that set of people who are called the monied men; such as had raised vast sums by trading with stocks and funds and lending upon great interest and premiums; whose perpetual harvest is war.”
Citing the 50 million pounds of unpayable debts incurred by Marlborough’s war with France Swift called out the “conspiracy on all sides to go on with those measures, which must perpetuate the war.”
This immensely popular pamphlet went through three editions in only three months and invoked such indignation among the population that the heroic image of the Duke of Marlborough portrayed by the media was torn to shreds and vast support was won for the peace process. In her December 6 speech opening of the Parliament, Queen Anne stated: “I am glad that I can now tell you that not withstanding the arts of those who delight in war, both place and time are appointed for opening the treaty of a general peace”.
Not only did peace negotiations finally move forward, but the Queen convened a House inquiry into Marlborough’s siphoning of funds and war profiteering resulting in his being stripped of all offices on December 29, 1712 and replaced with Harley’s long time ally James Butler (2nd Duke of Ormonde) as Commander of the Army.
The next 18 months were some of the most intense in British political history with continuous battles waged to sabotage the peace process from oligarchical representatives within both England and France itself. Much like today, these oligarchs and their upper level managers were always more interested in keeping the world at constant war, underdeveloped and stupid in order to maintain a global hegemony above nations. While the Duke of Ormonde maintained a neutral position in France during the long drawn out peace negotiations, dark things were occurring in France.
The Venetian Party Strikes Back
From the first week of the treaty negotiations throughout the subsequent two months, over four consecutive heirs to the French throne died of the same mysterious symptoms leaving a Duke of Orleans and a Jesuitical cabal who controlled the ailing King Louis XIV in a strategic position of power never before seen in French history. When Harley’s lead peace negotiator the Duke of Hamilton was deployed to take his new position as Ambassador to France, a duel was arranged resulting in Hamilton’s successful killing of one of Marlborough’s chief henchmen General McCartney (3). However, when McCartney’s second then stabbed an unsuspecting Hamilton to death minutes later, Marlborough quickly demonstrated his guilt as he promptly packed his bags and fled to Holland, not to return until August 1, 1714… the day Queen Anne died.
Upon the queen’s death (most likely due to poisoning under the hand of her new physician Daniel Malthus – great grandfather of the misanthropic high priest of depopulation, Thomas Malthus), the Venetian Party took full control of Britain and never let go again.
With the ascension of George Ludwig to the throne in 1714, the satanic Hellfire Club rose in prominence, Marlborough was re-instated to all of his former positions, Robert Harley was imprisoned in the Tower of London and the economy was driven into a new epoch of colonial exploitation. Wars were unleashed abroad as the South Sea Company was turned into a speculative bubble that soon burst by 1720 tearing down the British people while enriching City of London insiders in the same way that Wall Street cleaned up bankrupt assets for pennies on the dollar in 1929. Under the control of the British Africa Company and Board of Trade, the poisonous slave trade came to dominate the 18th century and a newly enforced era of divide to conquer tactics was unleashed in full force.
Writing years later of the events of 1710-1714 after he had long returned to a new base of operations in Dublin, Jonathan Swift wrote a poem reminiscing of this period of hope and tragedy:
“And oh! How short are human schemes! Here ended all our golden dreams. What St John’s skill in state affairs What Ormonde’s valour, Oxford’s cares To save their sinking country lent, Was all destroyed by one event, Too soon that precious life was ended On which alone our weal depended.”
Concluding Thoughts
It may not be clear why this history lesson is important for us today.
The reason is simple: You are living in history. And unless we come to terms with the longer waves of the past, we will forever be incapable of shaping our destiny in any meaningful way.
Donald Trump has made it clear that he will not be giving into the political liars who have conspired to steal the American election and return the republic to the status of imperial deep state war machine which the world knew over the course of the past 50 years and unless the president is successful in the coming battle in ways which Queen Anne, Robert Harley and Swift were not then there is good reason to presume that the future will be darker than you would care to imagine.
Footnotes
(1) This is the same Defoe who famously wrote Robinson Crusoe. In 1696, Harley commissioned Defoe’s “Essays Upon Several Projects”, which called for the Bank of England to be nationalized saying: “A bank might be very beneficial to this kingdom; and this might be so if either their own ingenuity or public authority would oblige them to take the public good into equal concern with their private interest. To explain what I mean: Banks being established by public authority, ought also, as all public things are, to be under limitations and restrictions from that authority, and those limitations and restrictions being regulated with a proper regard to the ease of trade in general and the improvement of the stock in particular, would make a bank a useful, profitable thing indeed.” This story is told in full by historian Phil Valenti in The American Almanac, July 7, 1997.
(2) This is the same Churchill whose family generated the genocidal imperialist Sir Winston two centuries later.
(3) General McCartney had been fired by Queen Anne during her Swamp Draining the year prior.
Throughout his campaign, Joe Biden railed against Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ foreign policy, claiming it weakened the United States and left the world in disarray.
He pledged to reverse this decline and recover the damage Trump did to America’s reputation. While Donald Trump called to make America Great Again, Biden seeks to Make the American Empire Great Again.
Among the president-elect’s pledges is to end the so-called forever wars – the decades-long imperial projects in Afghanistan and Iraq that began under the Bush administration.
Yet Biden – a fervent supporter of those wars – will task ending them to the most neoconservative elements of the Democratic party and ideologues of permanent war.
Michele Flournoy and Tony Blinken sit atop Biden’s thousands-strong foreign policy brain trust and have played central roles in every U.S. war going back to the Clinton administration.
In the Trump era, they’ve cashed in, founding Westexec Advisors – a corporate consulting firm that has become home for Obama administration officials awaiting a return to government.
Flournoy is Biden’s leading pick for secretary of defense and Blinken is expected to be national security advisor.
Biden’s foxes guard the henhouse
Since the 1990s, Flournoy and Blinken have steadily risen through the ranks of the military-industrial complex, shuffling back and forth between the Pentagon and hawkish think-tanks funded by the U.S. government, weapons companies, and oil giants.
Under Bill Clinton, Flournoy was the principal author of the 1996 Quadrinellial Defense Review, the document that outlined the U.S. military’s doctrine of permanent war – what it called “full spectrum dominance.”
Flournoy called for “unilateral use of military power” to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.”
As Bush administration officials lied to the world about Saddam Hussein’s supposed WMD’s, Flournoy remarked that “In some cases, preemptive strikes against an adversary’s [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities may be the best or only option we have to avert a catastrophic attack against the United States.”
Tony Blinken was a top advisor to then-Senate foreign relations committee chair Joe Biden, who played a key role in shoring up support among the Democrat-controlled Senate for Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq.
As Iraq was plunged into chaos and bloodshed, Flournoy was among the authors of a paper titled “Progressive Internationalism” that called for a “smarter and better” style of permanent war. The paper chastised the anti-war left and stated that “Democrats will maintain the world’s most capable and technologically advanced military, and we will not flinch from using it to defend our interests anywhere in the world.”
With Bush winning a second term, Flournoy advocated for more troop deployments from the sidelines.
In 2005, Flournoy signed onto a letter from the neoconservative think tank Project for a New American Century, asking Congress to “increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps (by) at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.”
In 2007, she leveraged her Pentagon experience and contacts to found what would become one of the premier Washington think tanks advocating endless war across the globe: the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
CNAS is funded by the U.S. government, arms manufacturers, oil giants, Silicon Valley tech giants, billionaire-funded foundations, and big banks.
Flournoy joined the Obama administration and was appointed as under secretary of defense for policy, the position considered the “brains” of the Pentagon.
She was keenly aware that the public was wary of more quagmires. In the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, she crafted a new concept of warfare that would expand the permanent war state while giving the appearance of a drawdown.
Flournoy wrote that “unmanned systems hold great promise” – a reference to the CIA’s drone assassination program.
This was the Obama-era military doctrine of hybrid war. It called for the U.S. to be able to simultaneously wage war on numerous fronts through secret warfare, clandestine weapons transfers to proxies, drone strikes, and cyber-attacks – all buttressed with propaganda campaigns targeting the American public through the internet and corporate news media.
Architects of America’s Hybrid wars
Flournoy continued to champion the endless wars that began in the Bush-era and was a key architect of Obama’s disastrous troop surge in Afghanistan. As U.S. soldiers returned in body bags and insurgent attacks and suicide bombings increased some 65% from 2009 and 2010, she deceived the Senate Armed Services Committee, claiming that the U.S. was beginning to turn the tide against the Taliban.
Even with her lie that the U.S. and Afghan government were starting to beat the Taliban back, Flournoy assured the senate that the U.S. would have to remain in Afghanistan long into the future.
Ten years later – as the Afghan death toll passed 150,000 – Flournoy continued to argue against a U.S. withdrawal.
That’s the person Joe Biden has tasked with ending the forever war in Afghanistan. But in Biden’s own words, he’ll “bring the vast majority of our troops home from Afghanistan” implying some number of American troops will remain, and the forever war will be just that. Michele Flournoy explained that even if a political settlement were reached, the U.S. would maintain a presence.
In 2011, the Obama-era doctrine of smart and sophisticated warfare was unveiled in the NATO regime-change war on Libya.
Moammar Gaddafi – the former adversary who sought warm relations with the U.S. and had given up his nuclear weapons program – was deposed and sodomized with a bayonet.
Flournoy, Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and corporate media were in lockstep as they waged an extensive propaganda campaign to deceive the U.S. public that Gadaffi’s soldiers were on a Viagra-fueled rape and murder spree that demanded a U.S. intervention.
All of this was based on a report from Al Jazeera – the media outlet owned by the Qatari monarchy that was arming extremist militias to overthrow the government.
Yet an investigation by the United Nations called the rape claims “hysteria.” Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found no credible evidence of even a single rape.
Even after Libya was descended into strife and the deception of Gadaffi’s forces committing rape was debunked, Michele Flournoy stood by her support for the war.
Tony Blinken, then Obama’s deputy national security advisor, also pushed for regime change in Libya. He became Obama’s point man on Syria, pushed to arm the so-called “moderate rebels” that fought alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS, and designed the red line strategy to trigger a full-on U.S. intervention. Syria, he told the public, wasn’t anything like the other wars the U.S. had waging for more than a decade.
Despite Blinken’s promises that it would be a short affair, the war on Syria is now in its ninth year. An estimated half a million people have been killed as a result and the country is facing famine,
Largely thanks to the policy of using “wheat to apply pressure” – a recommendation of Flournoy and Blinken’s CNAS think tank.
When the Trump administration launched airstrikes on Syria based on mere accusations of a chemical attack, Tony Blinken praised the bombing, claiming Assad had used the weapon of mass destruction sarin. Yet there was no evidence for this claim, something even then-secretary of Defense James Mattis admitted.
While jihadist mercenaries armed with U..S-supplied weapons took over large swaths of Syria, Tony Blinken played a central role in a coup d’etat in Ukraine that saw a pro-Russia government overthrown in a U.S.-orchestrated color revolution with neo-fascist elements agitating on the ground.
At the time, he was ambivalent about sending lethal weapons to Ukraine, instead opting for economic pressure.
Since then, fascist militias have been incorporated into Ukraine’s armed forces. And Tony Blinken urged Trump to send them deadly weapons – something Obama had declined to do.
Trump obliged.
The Third Offset
While the U.S. fuelled wars in Syria and Ukraine, the Pentagon announced a major shift called the Third Offset strategy – a reference to the cold war era strategies the U.S. used to maintain its military supremacy over the Soviet Union.
The Third Offset strategy shifted the focus from counterinsurgency and the war on terror to great power competition against China and Russia, seeking to ensure that the U.S. could win a war against China in Asia. It called for a technological revolution in warfighting capabilities, development of futuristic and autonomous weapons, swarms of undersea and airborne drones, hypersonic weapons, cyber warfare, machine-enhanced soldiers, and artificial intelligence making unimaginably complex battlefield decisions at speeds incomprehensible to the human mind. All of this would be predicated on the Pentagon deepening its relationship with Silicon Valley giants that it birthed decades before: Google and Facebook.
The author of the Third Offset, former undersecretary of defense Robert Work, is a partner of Flournoy and Blinken’s at WestExec Advisors. And Flournoy has been a leading proponent of this dangerous new escalation.
In June, Flournoy published a lengthy commentary laying out her strategy called “Sharpening the U.S. Military’s Edge: Critical Steps for the Next Administration”.
She warned that the United States is losing its military technological advantage and reversing that must be the Pentagon’s priority. Without it, Flournoy warned that the U.S. might not be able to defeat China in Asia.
While Flournoy has called for ramping up U.S. military presence and exercises with allied forces in the region, she went so far as to call for the U.S. to increase its destructive capabilities so much that it could launch a blitzkrieg style-attack that would wipe out the entire Chinese navy and all civilian merchant ships in the South China Sea. Not only a blatant war crime but a direct attack on a nuclear power that would spell the third world war.
At the same time, Biden has announced he’ll take an even more aggressive and confrontational stance against Russia, a position Flournoy shares.
As for ending the forever wars, Tony Blinken says not so fast.
The end of forever wars?
So Biden will end the forever wars, but not really end them. Secret wars that the public doesn’t even know the U.S. is involved in – those are here to stay.
In fact, leaving teams of special forces in place throughout the Middle East is part and parcel of the Pentagon’s shift away from counterinsurgency and towards great power competition.
The 2018 National Defense Strategy explains that “Long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia are the principal priorities” and the U.S. will “consolidate gains in Iraq and Afghanistan while moving to a more resource-sustainable approach.”
As for the catastrophic war on Yemen, Biden has said he’ll end U.S. support, but in 2019, Michele Flournoy argued against ending arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
Biden pledged he will rejoin the Iran deal as a starting point for new negotiations. However, Trump’s withdrawal from the deal discredited the Iranian reformists who seek engagement with the west and empowered the principlists who see the JCPOA as a deal with the devil.
In Latin America, Biden will revive the so-called anti-corruption campaigns that were used as a cover to oust the popular social democrat Brazilian president Lula da Silva.
His Venezuela policy will be almost identical to Trump’s – sanctions and regime change.
In Central America, Biden has proposed a 4 billion dollar package to support corrupt right-wing governments and neoliberal privatization projects that create even more destabilization and send vulnerable masses fleeing north to the United States.
Behind their rhetoric, Biden, Flournoy, and Blinken will seek nothing less than global supremacy, escalating a new and even more dangerous arms race that risks the destruction of humanity. That’s what Joe Biden calls “decency” and “normalcy.”
Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera for MintPress News
Dan Cohen is a journalist and filmmaker. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. Dan is a correspondent at RT America and tweets at @DanCohen3000.
Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera for MintPress News
There are two major frauds underlying this rush to implement testing on a massive global scale that the prominent critics of the Coronavirus hysteria don’t seem to be addressing.
Dr. Yeadon, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and many other distinguished public figures have told us that there is no meaningful information to be obtained from these tests. The PCR tests look for virus fragments, but they cannot distinguish between a dead fragment of an old Corona flu virus and a live reproductive Covid virus. Only the serology test checks for antibodies, but this test is not even used in the current mass testing.
One can argue that, on the contrary, a positive test result, whether real or false, but correlated with an asymptomatic case is a sign of a healthy person who cannot be affected anymore by the virus since the person has built already its immunity against it. That’s why it is a case of asymptomatic positive.
Furthermore, if these asymptomatic cases are in fact a proof of acquired immunity, then they are the very certification for health in those individuals.
By this logic, we should consider that the people who test negative are rather the vulnerable ones to potential infections. It should be inferred that it’s the test-negative person who needs to be monitored and protected from being infected.
Now, we also know that it not necessary that simple as immunity is not a one-level line of defense within the body defenses. Even the serology test which detects antibodies in merely 40 percent of the cases, is only the first level of immunization. Then, as everybody learned, there are the T-cells that are some kind catch-all net of protection. But, again, that’s not what the PCR tests are about.
OK, so tests are misleading on several levels, top virologists and immunologists from around the world keep telling us. The logic is simple; the more tests are performed, the more we get both positive and negative results. So why are we persisting in testing? Why does this testing mania continue? Is it because of individuals like Bill Gates that are greedy to make profits out of the fear these tests induce in the population? Is it because, the medical industry is out of control in their obsessive duty? Is it because they are just stupid?
What is that these tests do achieve at great costs to society and the individuals?
The other day, supposedly two people in the city of Shanghai tested positive. And? The Chinese leaders, allegedly very focused on “zero tolerance” for even a single infection, lined up the 10 million or 20 million inhabitants for testing right away.
Among the Europeans, the 5+ million Slovakians were the first nation to be fully tested, to the last man and woman. All 5+ million! And? What did that achieve? Is the entire nation of Slovakia now better off in some way? Not really. They have to live with same restrictions as their neighbors.
So again, what information was acquired? Information about the virus? About the level of immunization of the country? They could have learned almost as much by running a test on a representative sample of the population and then simply extrapolating to the rest of the nation. This is being done every day, in all sorts of domains — including predicting election results — to a precision of half a percent.
What else could it be? What is in those testing kits that we don’t think about?
Our saliva! Our nasal pickings, our body fluids, which contain our signature DNA. They are collecting these identity particles and taking them away somewhere. They are taking them to the laboratory, together with all our personal tracing information. Name, address, phone number, Social Security number, and the lab results: all going into the one big database.
“The idea of creating a combined database of information is not a new one, having been proposed in 2014 by long-serving Minister of Internal Affairs Vladimir Kolokoltsev. Six years ago, Kolokoltsev suggested that the unified database should include DNA analysis and information, as well as vehicles and forensic records. Earlier this year, the ministry announced it would be creating a Federal Biometric Information System. When it’s launched at the end of 2021, the pilot system should be able to analyze videos to recognize criminals by their face, voice, eyes, visible tattoos, and even possibly their gait.“
The Chinese are also quite open about their database. During the G20 summit, President Xi proposed a GLOBAL health QR code system supposedly to revive coronavirus-battered trade & travel.
But the West keeps mum about this subject. Here, we’re all about human rights, individual rights, liberty and democracy; but we are testing, testing, testing. And collecting samples. And voilà, it just happens that at end of the day, we too will have a database covering every identifier of every individual: DNA, iris scans, and results from facial recognition cameras and license plate readers, on top of your name, address, phone number, and Social Security number, tracing us from one corner of the world to another. That’s the “Health” Passport they are taking about.
Isn’t that what’s going on under the cover of the illogical, irrational rush to test everyone for a Novel Coronavirus that doesn’t exist and that allegedly has a kill rate below that of the seasonal flu?
This is separate from the question of the vaccine, which for now may be just a test run. The current push for mass vaccination is just training people for the next phase of the vaccination plot.
For now it is just testing for collecting. Worldwide, each country is doing the same. No conflict here among the superpowers, China, Russia, the EU and the US they all are in agreement. Under the cover of fake trade wars, fake riots, but real economic depression, election theater, fake war mongering, etc., the elite has factored in the costs for mapping out the real DNA ID of each one of us — for future control of the animal farm once called humanity.
Remember those videos of the Chinese falling dead as they walked on the street? The mobile crematories? U-Haul trucks carting the dead to a mass grave in NYC? Pop-up hospitals and tents to treat the ‘infected’? 30,000 ventilators needed at a moment’s notice? Trailers full of ‘bodies’ waiting for processing? The war on hydroxychloroquine? 4 decades of peer-reviewed studies that prove that masks are ineffective? Fauci stating that the healthy don’t need to wear masks? “14 days to get over the curve”? Etc., et. al.?
That’s the whole point. They wouldn’t need to make it mandatory if it had a 5 or 10% mortality rate. The risk-benefit analysis would cause most people to take their chances with the vaccine even if they don’t like the idea of it. The risk that the vaccine has unexpected serious side-effects (or intentional ones) far outweighs to risk of the virus.
As enough people are maimed by the vaccine, it’ll become pretty evident the vaccines are dangerous. That’s why they want to vaccine hundreds of millions within 24 hours. It’ll be logistically impossible and they’ll end up getting exposed. Enough will escape and be unharmed, demonstrating being unvaccinated is the only way to be healthy.
Their plan will ultimately fail. But at least they’ll do us the favor of knocking off most of the retards.
Seriously would you knowingly take an mRNA vaccine with spike protein molecules uncannily similar to HIV spike proteins for a flu virus that has 99% survival rate?! AIDS in a bottle, mRNA Vaccine mandates will be tied to welfare, social security, medicare, medicaid, travel, etc.
mRNA vaccine introduces the HIV spike protein and your own body produces antibodies to the HIV spike protein. Surprise surprise, HIV antibodies don’t provide immunity to the host like chicken pox or measles virus because if they did, AIDS would be cured. What really happens is the HIV spike protein mRNA will cause cellular DNA specific strain of HIV AIDS killing the idiot who took the COVID 19 vaccine. Depopulation is successfully accomplished without the serfs realizing they are dying of AIDS and the Gates Rockefeller Schwab EURO great RESET gang and their families inherit the earth while you and your family eat maggots 6 foot under the ground in your graves!
It’s likely that the plan will be to mandate and then back down, then unleash the next virus which will be a true pandemic. At which they will blame all the vaccine hesitant and then force another vaccine on the remaining population which will sterilize 1/2 the remaining popluation. Within 20 years we will be back down to approximately 2 billion people or fewer. The elites will never take any of these vaccines.
I bet they drop another Corona strain and I’m sure as hell not talking about China because they never started this, the same old September 11 perps did.
I hope they don’t back off of all of this, because if they keep up its over for this corrupt nightmare.
They’ll eventually threaten you with the ability to work, buy groceries etc. The masks will come off but you’ll need to show your ID first. Those who don’t get one will be terminated from their jobs. No school…….Child Services will eventually make it around to recover children from homes who don’t. You won’t be able to see a doctor, vote (lol), get a meal. The infrastructure is in place.
By Ben Aris, editor-in-chief of business news publication bne IntelliNews.
It seems that the struggle to find a remedy to deal with coronavirus is being overtaken by geopolitical rivalries and prejudice. Not to mention the commercial interests at stake in a market potentially worth up to $100 billion.
Another vaccine has entered the race to rid the world of the Covid-19 pandemic, but unlike the US version, when the team behind the British-produced AstraZeneca product announced its successful preliminary trial results, the company’s shares plummeted in trading on Monday.
By contrast, US pharma giant Pfizer’s earlier announcement, on November 9, saw stock markets around the world (including in Russia) rallying and analysts immediately upgraded their 2021 outlooks with a “back-to-work”optimistic scenario that sees the crisis ending in the second half of next year.
According to reports, the problem with AstraZeneca’s drug is that it was slammed in an investment bank analyst’s note that led to a big sell off in the company’s shares.
Following the announcement, Jeffrey Porges, an analyst with the American investment bank SVB Leerink, which specializes in medical and pharmaceutical assets, criticized the vaccine, accusing AstraZeneca of embellishing its results, not disclosing any statistics for side effects or severe cases, and failing to include the number of participants at risk and other details in accordance with FDA (Food and Drug Administration) requirements. “We believe this product will never be certified in the US,”Porges said.
He separately noted that using adenovirus vaccines (which place the coronavirus DNA inside another virus) against Covid-19 (the Russian Sputnik V uses similar technology) will be unreliable in principle, due to part of the population’s immunity to adenoviruses. Porges concluded that the market for adenovirus vaccines will be smaller than that of the rival RNA-formulas (which both US jabs use).
An AstraZeneca spokesman called the criticism “too harsh.” According to the company, it is in talks with the FDA to organize clinical trials on a separate sample in the United States.
Commercial competition
The accusations of shoddy science made against AstraZeneca’s vaccine echo similar claims made against Sputnik V after it reported results from its Phase Two trials. Some leading researchers wrote to the British medical journal The Lancet, claiming they had found problems with data submitted as part of the peer-reviewed paper by Russia’s Gamaleya Institute which suggested the trial results had been fabricated.
The question marks raised over Sputnik V have contributed to it being widely ignored in the Western media as a serious rival to the US vaccines. Indeed, when Pfizer’s drug was announced the market popped, but there was almost no market reaction at all to Sputnik V’s results when they were published in The Lancet, which is one of the most respected medical journals in the world.
It seems that the whole race to find a remedy to deal with what is a global public health emergency has been overtaken by geopolitical rivalries and prejudice. And that is not to mention the commercial interests, which are huge. The coronavirus vaccine market is thought to be worth up to $100 billion and Russia has said that it hopes to capture a third of that. If that happens, then Russia will earn more in a year from one drug than it currently earns from exporting arms or grain – and it is currently the biggest grain exporter in the world.
There is a lot of money on the table and commercial interests are quickly coming to the fore. A price war has already broken out. AstraZeneca’s vaccine appears to be by far the cheapest, selling for $3-$4 a dose. Russia’s Sputnik V export price is an estimated $8-$10 per dose, although presumably it will sell its vaccine on the domestic market at cost, even if the fund has not said so explicitly.
As both these drugs are based on adenovirus vaccine technology, they are more robust, whereas the US rivals rely on RNA-messenger technology that has to be kept extremely cold or it breaks down, causing major logistical problems and greatly increasing costs.
Development of the Russian drug was financed by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), the sovereign wealth fund, and is a for-profit venture, but even its higher export price is still a lot less than the cost of the US RNA-vaccine rivals.
Pfizer, which filed for US approval of its formula on November 21, said earlier that a dose of its product will carry a $19.50 price tag. Moderna, thought to be close to signing a deal for a comprehensive rollout in the European Union, announced last week that it will charge between $25-$37. Both are RNA-vaccines and it is not clear if these estimates include the transport costs or not.
It is particularly unfair to rubbish AstraZeneca, as the company has said from the outset that it is a not-for-profit project and will sell its drug at cost in the interests of public health.
The US rival vaccines are produced by commercial companies and intend to grab as large a slice of the up to $100 billion vaccine market. Russia lies somewhere in the middle. AstraZeneca last summer struck a deal on joint production with Russian businessman Alexey Repik’s R-Pharm company to produce its vaccine in Russia. Its licensing deal allows for global distribution but bars distribution in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) – Sputnik V’s core market. Over 50 countries have already signed pre-order deals for Sputnik V, including Hungary and Poland in the EU. Turkey is negotiating to make Sputnik V under licence.
We should be happy
Let’s be clear about a few things here. Firstly, we should welcome the fact that there are now four reportedly viable competing vaccines (five if you count the fact Russia has talked about a second vaccine, developed in Siberia, which has just started trials). That gives everyone a choice between the rival products. Don’t trust the Sputnik V? Fine. Take one of the others.
Secondly, we should celebrate the fact that this virus looks particularly vulnerable to treatment. All of the leading candidates report extremely high efficacy rates.
The US FDA demands an efficacy rate of at least 50 percent to register a vaccine for general release. The EU sets the bar higher at 75 percent. All the current corona-candidates have reported efficacies of at least 90 percent; even the Oxford vaccine reported over 90 percent when the second half of the trial group were given a smaller dose in the second jab. The reported final 70 percent result is an average of the two sets of trials.
Thirdly, being generous, there are some question marks over the data from both AstraZeneca and Sputnik V, but against that, both teams have conducted the full trial – with over 40,000 volunteers in Sputnik’s case, or roughly the same number of participants as in the Pfizer trial.
Moreover, all the trials are reporting the same efficacy rates of approximately 90 percent, meaning both technologies seem to work equally effectively. Excluding the possibility that the Russian researchers are flat out making up their results (which many will chose not to do), then the trials all show that the vaccines are similarly effective, even if they have been sloppy in their reporting in their haste to lay a claim to part of that $100 billion market.
One of Porges’ objections was that the AstraZeneca results do not disclose any statistics for side effects or severe cases, but the same can be said of all the candidates, including the US vaccines. The trials are only that – trials. The potential for malign side effects will only become clear over time. In the meantime, the sample sizes in the trials to date have been deemed sufficiently large by medical experts and both Pfizer and Sputnik V have opted for 40,000 people. Neither of these trials have thrown up significant problems. The AstraZeneca tests were halted for a month after one subject developed neurological problems, but an investigation determined the problem was unrelated to the vaccine and the process resumed.
Fourthly, and most impressively, we should be amazed that in the space of ten months that we have any vaccine at all. Vaccines are extremely hard to produce. There are multiple hurdles to overcome, and we have to bear in mind the fact that all viruses mutate as that is a basic part of their survival strategy. Normally, it takes about 18 to 24 months to produce an effective vaccine. The annual autumnal flu vaccine doesn’t have a 90 percent efficacy rate and five years on there is still no effective formula against H1N1 (bird flu), SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) or MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome) – all of which belong to the coronavirus family.
There have been calls for governments to step in and buy up sufficient vaccines to inoculate the whole world, as this would be the cheapest solution to the economic damage caused by the pandemic. Several years ago, the WHO did a study that found the most productive investment a government can make into its economy is into healthcare.
The benefits are not just from reducing the cost of treating sick people – although those are significant – but mostly from the fact that by far the more productive wealth creation asset a country has is its people. Good healthcare means people work harder for longer and so they produce far more wealth than is spent on improving healthcare. And people who are still alive can obviously work even harder than those that have died from coronavirus.
This video provides one of the most erudite and informative looks at Covid-19 and the consequences of lockdowns. As AIER notes, it was remarkable this week to watch as it appeared on YouTube and was forcibly taken down only 2 hours after posting.
What likely triggered the Silicon Valley censor-mongers is the fact that a former Chief Science Officer for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer says “there is no science to suggest a second wave should happen.” The “Big Pharma” insider asserts that false positive results from inherently unreliable COVID tests are being used to manufacture a “second wave” based on “new cases.”
As Ralph Lopez write at HubPages, Yeadon warns that half or even “almost all” of tests for COVID are false positives. Dr. Yeadon also argues that the threshold for herd immunity may be much lower than previously thought, and may have been reached in many countries already.
“we are basing a government policy, an economic policy, a civil liberties policy, in terms of limiting people to six people in a meeting…all based on, what may well be, completely fake data on this coronavirus?”
Dr. Yeadon answered with a simple “yes.”
Even more significantly, even if all positives were to be correct, Dr. Yeadon said that given the “shape” of all important indicators in a worldwide pandemic, such as hospitalizations, ICU utilization, and deaths, “the pandemic is fundamentally over.”
Yeadon said in the interview:
“Were it not for the test data that you get from the TV all the time, you would rightly conclude that the pandemic was over, as nothing much has happened. Of course people go to the hospital, moving into the autumn flu season…but there is no science to suggest a second wave should happen.”
In a paper published this month, which was co-authored by Yeadon and two of his colleagues, “How Likely is a Second Wave?”, the scientists write:
“It has widely been observed that in all heavily infected countries in Europe and several of the US states likewise, that the shape of the daily deaths vs. time curves is similar to ours in the UK. Many of these curves are not just similar, but almost super imposable.“
In the data for UK, Sweden, the US, and the world, it can be seen that in all cases, deaths were on the rise in March through mid or late April, then began tapering off in a smooth slope which flattened around the end of June and continues to today. The case rates however, based on testing, rise and swing upwards and downwards wildly.
The survival rate of COVID-19 has been upgraded since May to 99.8% of infections. This comes close to ordinary flu, the survival rate of which is 99.9%. Although COVID can have serious after-effects, so can flu or any respiratory illness. The present survival rate is far higher than initial grim guesses in March and April, cited by Dr. Anthony Fauci, of 94%, or 20 to 30 times deadlier. The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) value accepted by Yeadon et al in the paper is .26%. The survival rate of a disease is 100% minus the IFR.
Dr. Yeadon pointed out that the “novel” COVID-19 contagion is novel only in the sense that it is a new type of coronavirus. But, he said, there are presently four strains which circulate freely throughout the population, most often linked to the common cold.
In the scientific paper, Yeadon et al write:
“There are at least four well characterized family members (229E, NL63, OC43 and HKU1) which are endemic and cause some of the common colds we experience, especially in winter. They all have striking sequence similarity to the new coronavirus.”
The scientists argue that much of the population already has, if not antibodies to COVID, some level of “T-cell” immunity from exposure to other related coronaviruses, which have been circulating long before COVID-19.
The scientists write:
“A major component our immune systems is the group of white blood cells called T-cells whose job it is to memorize a short piece of whatever virus we were infected with so the right cell types can multiply rapidly and protect us if we get a related infection. Responses to COVID-19 have been shown in dozens of blood samples taken from donors before the new virus arrived.”
Introducing the idea that some prior immunity to COVID-19 already existed, the authors of “How Likely is a Second Wave?” write:
“It is now established that at least 30% of our population already had immunological recognition of this new virus, before it even arrived…COVID-19 is new, but coronaviruses are not.”
They go on to say that, because of this prior resistance, only 15-25% of a population being infected may be sufficient to reach herd immunity:
“…epidemiological studies show that, with the extent of prior immunity that we can now reasonably assume to be the case, only 15-25% of the population being infected is sufficient to bring the spread of the virus to a halt…”
In the US, accepting a death toll of 200,000, and a survival rate of 99.8%, this would mean for every person who has died, there would be about 400 people who had been infected, and lived. This would translate to around 80 million Americans, or 27% of the population. This touches Yeadon’s and his colleagues’ threshold for herd immunity.
Finally, the former Pfizer executive and scientist singles out one former colleague for withering rebuke for his role in the pandemic, Professor Neil Ferguson. Ferguson taught at Imperial College while Yeadon was affiliated. Ferguson’s computer model provided the rationale for governments to launch draconian orders which turned free societies into virtual prisons overnight. Over what is now estimated by the CDC to be a 99.8% survival rate virus.
Dr. Yeadon said in the interview that “no serious scientist gives any validity” to Ferguson’s model.
Speaking with thinly-veiled contempt for Ferguson, Dr. Yeadon took special pains to point out to his interviewer:
“It’s important that you know most scientists don’t accept that it [Ferguson’s model] was even faintly right…but the government is still wedded to the model.”
Yeadon joins other scientists in castigating governments for following Ferguson’s model, the assumptions of which all worldwide lockdowns are based on. One of these scientists is Dr. Johan Giesecke, former chief scientist for the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who called Ferguson’s model “the most influential scientific paper” in memory, and also “one of the most wrong.”
It was Ferguson’s model which held that “mitigation” measures were necessary, i.e. social distancing and business closures, in order to prevent, for example, over 2.2 million people dying from COVID in the US.
Ferguson predicted that Sweden would pay a terrible price for no lockdown, with 40,000 COVID deaths by May 1, and 100,000 by June. Sweden’s death count is under 6,000. The Swedish government says this coincides to a mild flu season. Although initially higher, Sweden now has a lower death rate per-capita than the US, which it achieved without the terrific economic damage still ongoing in the US. Sweden never closed restaurants, bars, sports, most schools, or movie theaters. The government never ordered people to wear masks.
Dr. Yeadon speaks bitterly of the lives lost as a result of lockdown policies, and of the “savable” countless lives which will be further lost, from important surgeries and other healthcare deferred, should lockdowns be reimposed.
Anyone still presuming that a Positive PCR test is showing a COVID case needs to read this very carefully:
· even 25 cycles of amplification, 70% of “positives” are not “cases.” virus cannot be cultured. it’s dead.
· by 35: 97% non-clinical.
· the US runs at 40, 32X the amplification of 35.
a lot of people still seem to not understand what this means, so let’s lay that out for a minute.
PCR tests look for RNA. there is too little in your swab. so they amplify it using a primer based heating and annealing process.
Each cycle of this process doubles the material
the US (and much of the world) is using a 40 Ct (cycle threshold). so, 40 doublings, 1 trillion X amplification.
This is absurdly high.
The way that we know this is by running this test, seeing the Ct to find the RNA, and then using the same sample to try to culture virus.
If you cannot culture the virus, then the virus is “dead.” it’s inert. if it cannot replicate, it cannot infect you or others. it’s just traces of virus, remnants, fragments etc.
PCR is not testing for disease, it’s testing for a specific RNA pattern and this is the key pivot
When you crank it up to 25, 70% of the positive results are not really “positives” in any clinical sense.
I hesitate to call it a “false positive” because it’s really not. it did find RNA.
but that RNA is not clinically relevant.
It cannot make you or anyone else sick
so let’s call this a non-clinical positive (NCP).
· if 70% of positives are NCP’s at 25, imagine what 40 looks like. 35 is 1000X as sensitive.
· this study found only 3% live at 35
· 40 Ct is 32X 35, 32,000X 25
no one can culture live virus past about 34 and we have known this since march. yet no one has adjusted these tests.
presuming it bears out, this is a key finding.
it shows that many patients that are PCR+ for COV-19 are not shedding infectious virus.
this would imply shorter quarantine needed and provide a testable basis for discharge of isolated patients. pic.twitter.com/UvumjkxVxv
This is more very strong data refuting the idea that you can trust a PCR+ as a clinical indicator.
That is NOT what it’s meant for. at all.
Using them to do real time epidemiology is absurd.
The FDA would never do it, the drug companies doing vaccine trials would never do it… it’s because it’s nonsense.
And this same test is used for “hospitalizations” and “death with Covid” (itself a weirdly over inclusive metric)
PCR testing is not the answer, it’s the problem.
It’s not how to get control of an epidemic, it’s how to completely lose control of your data picture and wind up with gibberish and we have done this to ourselves before.
The last major false positive pseudo-epidemic was Swine Flu in 2009. Everyone said we would never let it happen again. pic.twitter.com/Hdif5l5Gam
A quick word what this data does and does not mean.
Saying “a sample requiring 35 Ct to test + has a 3% real clinical positive rate” does not mean “97% of + tests run at 35 Ct are NCP’s”
People seem to get confused on this, so let’s explain:
Most tests are just amplified and run. they don’t test every cycle as these academics do. that would make the test slow and expensive, so you just run 40 cycles then test.
Obviously, a real clinical positive (RCP) that would have been + at 20 is still + at 40.
but when you run the tests each cycle as the academics do, that test would already have dropped out.
so saying that only 3% at 35 are RCP really means that 3% of those samples not PCR + at 34 were PCR and RCP + at 35.
this lets us infer little about overall NCP/RCP rate.
so we cannot say “at 25 Ct, we have a 70 NCP rate.” in fact, it’s hard to say much of anything. it depends entirely on what the source material coming in looks like.
you cannot even compare like to like.
This is what I mean by “the data is gibberish”
Today at 40 Ct, 7% PCR positive rate could be 1% RCP prevalence when that same thing meant 6% RCP prev in April.
If there is lots more trace virus around, more people who have recovered and have fragments left over, etc. this test could be finding virus you killed 4 months ago.
So if we consider RCP rate/PCR+ rate, we would expect that number to drop sharply late in an epidemic because there is more dead virus around for PCR to find, but we have no idea what that ratio is or how it changes.
This spills over in to deaths, reported hospitalization etc.
Testing is being made out to be like the high beams on a car, but when it’s snowing like hell at night, that is the LAST thing you want. It is not illuminating our way, it’s blinding us.
A bad inaccurate map is much worse than no map at all, and this is a world class bad map…
We’re basing policy that is affecting billions of humans on data that is uninterpretable gibberish.
It’s a deranged technocrat’s wet dream, but for those of us along for the ride, it’s a nightmare.
Testing is not the solution, it’s the problem.
Any technocrat or scientist that does not know this by now is either unfit for their job or has decided that they just don’t care and prefer power to morality.
This is, of course, precisely the kind of person who winds up running a gov’t agency… oopsie.
While the foundations of the USA tremble under the force of unprecedented vote fraud, color revolutionary operations, and the danger of a renewed fascist takeover of the Wall Street-Big Tech-NSA/FBI/CIA combine, certain facts must be separated from fiction.
