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A high-level Pfizer employee was caught on undercover camera by Project Veritas when he inadvertently dropped several bombshells which we’re confident will be subject to extreme damage control over the coming weeks.

Posted by M. C. on January 27, 2023

Jordon Trishton Walker, Pfizer’s Director of R&D, Strategic Operations – and an mRNA Scientific Planner, said that the company is exploring a way to “mutate” COVID via “Directed Evolution” in order to anticipate new strains for their Covid-19 vaccine.

“One of the things we [Pfizer] are exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves so we could create — preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that. If we’re gonna do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine — no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f**king viruses,” said Walker, adding that he believes Pfizer scientists are going about it slowly “because you obviously don’t want to advertise that you are figuring out future mutations.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/directed-evolution-pfizer-rd-exec-says-covid-19-created-wuhan-cash-cow-company

Walker also admitted that Covid-19 mutations were going to be “a cash cow” for Pfizer.

Walker:Part of what they [Pfizer scientists] want to do is, to some extent, to try to figure out, you know, how there are all these new strains and variants that just pop up. So, it’s like trying to catch them before they pop up and we can develop a vaccine prophylactically, like, for new variants. So, that’s why they like, do it controlled in a lab, where they say this is a new epitope, and so if it comes out later on in the public, we already have a vaccine working.

Veritas Journalist:Oh my God. That’s perfect. Isn’t that the best business model though? Just control nature before nature even happens itself? Right?

Walker:Yeah. If it works.

Veritas Journalist:What do you mean if it works?

Walker:Because some of the times there are mutations that pop up that we are not prepared for. Like with Delta and Omicron. And things like that. Who knows? Either way, it’s going to be a cash cow. COVID is going to be a cash cow for us for a while going forward. Like obviously.

Veritas Journalist:Well, I think the whole research of the viruses and mutating it, like, would be the ultimate cash cow.

Walker:Yeah, it’d be perfect.

He also explained that Big Pharma and government agencies such as the FDA are not working in the best interests of Americans.

Walker:[Big Pharma] is a revolving door for all government officials.

Veritas Journalist:Wow.

Walker:In any industry though. So, in the pharma industry, all the people who review our drugs — eventually most of them will come work for pharma companies. And in the military, defense government officials eventually work for defense companies afterwards.

…

Veritas Journalist:How do you feel about that revolving door?

Walker:It’s pretty good for the industry to be honest. It’s bad for everybody else in America.

Veritas Journalist:Why is it bad for everybody else?

Walker:Because when the regulators reviewing our drugs know that once they stop regulating, they are going to work for the company, they are not going to be as hard towards the company that’s going to give them a job.

Watch the entire video below: 

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Not Settled!

Posted by M. C. on January 26, 2023

From the introduction to The Druids by Peter Berresford Ellis

The French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, once said: “There are no final truths. The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.”

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Foxes watching the hen house? DC insiders oversee Biden defense plans – Responsible Statecraft

Posted by M. C. on January 26, 2023

After years at the trough, these govt. contractors are now empowered to judge how billions are spent on a key national security strategy.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/01/25/contractors-and-weapons-firms-to-oversee-national-defense-strategy/

Written by
Eli Clifton

Earlier this month, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees named eight commissioners who will review President Joe Biden’s National Defense Strategy and provide recommendations for its implementation.

But the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, which is tasked with “examin[ing] the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS,” according to the Armed Services Committees, is largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.

The potential conflicts of interest start at the very top of the eight-person commission. The chair of the commission, former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.

“Iridium and its Board members follow Iridium’s Code of Business Conduct and Ethics and all rules and regulations applicable to dealings with the U.S. government,” Iridium spokesman Jordan Hassin told Responsible Statecraft.

A January 11 press release announcing the commission’s roster cited Harman’s current board memberships at the Department of Homeland Security and NASA but made no mention of her Iridium board membership, which paid her $180,000 in total compensation in 2021. Harman held 50,352 shares in Iridium, now worth approximately $3 million, in March 2022, according to the company’s disclosures.

“The members of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy each hold long records of ethical public service and national security leadership,” a Senate Armed Services Committee spokesperson told Responsible Statecraft. “The commissioners have committed to adhering to all government ethics policies to prevent any potential conflicts of interest. Congress will provide responsible oversight throughout the Commission’s work.”

That oversight will be complicated, judging by the financial ties to government and defense contractors held by six of the eight commission members.

“Lets face it, the National Defense Strategy and the Commission on the National Defense Strategy are flipsides of the same coin,” Mark Thompson, national security analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, told Responsible Statecraft. “Both are heavily infected by Pentagon spending and Pentagon contractors.”

“These folks have a vested interest in spending more,” said Thompson. “In Washington’s national security community, the way you get credibility is to work at think tanks funded by defense contractors or serving on boards of defense contractors.”

Indeed, Thompson’s characterization of who has “credibility” appears to be reflected in appointments to the Commission.

Commission member John “Jack” Keane serves on the board of IronNet, a firm that describes itself as providing “Collective Defense powered with network detection and response (NDR), we empower national security agencies to gain better visibility into the threat landscape across the private sector with anonymized data, while benefiting from the insight and vigilance of a private/public community of peers.” The firm’s 2022 second quarter report made clear that IronNet is dependent on government contracts.

“Our business depends, in part, on sales to government organizations, and significant changes in the contracting or fiscal policies of such government organizations could have an adverse effect on our business and results of operations,” the report said.

See the rest here

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How Much Better Society Would Be If Government Followed The Constitution

Posted by M. C. on January 26, 2023

https://rumble.com/v273vac-how-much-better-society-would-be-if-government-followed-the-constitution.html

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What If the Davos Agenda Has Already Been Defeated? | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on January 26, 2023

WEF/NATO: “Weapons are the way to peace”

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/what-if-the-davos-agenda-has-already-been-defeated/

by Tom Luongo

redesigning the international monetary system: a davos debate: george soros

DAVOS/SWITZERLAND, 27JAN11 – George Soros, Chairman, Soros Fund Management, USA, is captured during the session ‘Redesigning the International Monetary System: A Davos Debate’ at the Annual Meeting 2011 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 27, 2011. Copyright by World Economic Forum swiss-image.ch/Photo by Michael Wuertenberg

In November 2021 I wrote a piece entitled “Have We Finally Reached Peak Davos?” This article was scarily spot on. When you’ve written as much as I have over the past five years, however, it’s easy to look back and point at how prescient you were.

Even if you’ve gotten a whole lotta stuff wrong, which I have.

That particular article, though, was nearly point-for-point correct in assessing the state of The Davos Crowd’s Great Reset project.

I wrote a Twitter thread about this the other day to pound the next few nails in Davos’ coffin before the opening of this year’s convocation of clueless globalists.

In this business the goal isn’t to get everything right but to be right more often than you’re wrong while spurring debate and conversation. This is how we crowdsource something close to the truth and/or steelman our own arguments in an endless quest for process improvement.

I wrote about that process recently and why it’s important to identify those who are still on that journey, those who are starting it, and those who are stuck in the morass of their own preconceptions.

Embrace and encourage the first two groups and question the ethics of those in the last.

Because in 2023 the mission is beginning to shift, from trying to forecast what these Cantillionaire midwits will do next to further assisting people in improving their data parsing abilities.

The more people that parse the Davos bullshit in real time, the less time they spend abreacting to it and using that saved time more productively to thwart Davos‘ plans.

So here we are as Davos 2023 winds down and it’s pretty obvious, watching the proceedings, that their entire edifice built on a crude admixture of psychopathy and hubris is tumbling down.

And it’s not only because more of us can see them for what they are, cheap communists in expensive suits, but because there are stark divisions forming within their own ranks.

The problem, however, for most of the committed Davosians is that they still live in the wine-and-cheese-filled amniotic sack of this Swiss Alps version of Oz. They don’t see the gathering storm barreling down the yellow brick road as anything more threatening than a single mosquito is to a cow.

As anyone who has lived in central Florida or studied its cattle industry knows, a few million mosquitos can exsanguinate a cow in a matter of days.

So, watching the proceedings at this year’s Davos was fascinating because, for the first time, the sheen was gone. Too many people were seeing the walls of the echo chamber for what they were; old, shabby, and drafty rather than having the veneer of wisdom that comes with age.

See the rest here

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How Equifax Became A Private IRS | ZeroHedge

Posted by M. C. on January 26, 2023

Equifax aggressively raises prices on the Work Number product line annually, and has, according to Begor, “already got our January 1, 2023 price increases in the market.” Long term, he says, “we have an ability to grow price well in excess of GDP.” This is fairly shocking stuff from a CEO, who should know better than to confess to monopolization. Only, it seems as if Begor wasn’t confessing, he was bragging.

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

WEDNESDAY, JAN 25, 2023 – 11:00 PM

Authored by Matt Stoller via BIG (emphasis ours),

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/how-equifax-became-private-irs

The movie The Big Short is about the housing crisis and its collapse, along with all the fraudulent activity up and down the financial system that abetted it. It is as much a cultural story as it is one about finance, a film about what banking corruption does to human beings and the law itself. In it, there’s a famous scene where fund investors betting on a housing collapse are trying to learn about the Florida housing market, and are interviewing some frat-boy type Florida real estate agents. The agents keep discussing their self-serving and illegal behavior, like falsifying paperwork or selling to people who knowingly can’t pay back loans. At a certain point, the main character asks his colleagues, ‘why are they confessing?’ to which the others respond, “they’re not confessing, they’re bragging.”

The point of this scene is to show that people in the industry during the housing bubble weren’t just breaking the law, but saw the law itself as irrelevant. Enforcement was so weak that those in finance and real estate would just openly brag about all the crime they were doing.

It was a true story. And it continues to be a true story in most white collar areas.

Late last year, the CEO of Equifax Mark Begor presented at a Goldman Sachs conference for investors, and openly told the investors how much market power his firm has in the business of selling income verification services to creditors. “We have meaningful pricing power,” he said, because “only Equifax has that income and employment data.” Equifax aggressively raises prices on the Work Number product line annually, and has, according to Begor, “already got our January 1, 2023 price increases in the market.” Long term, he says, “we have an ability to grow price well in excess of GDP.” This is fairly shocking stuff from a CEO, who should know better than to confess to monopolization. Only, it seems as if Begor wasn’t confessing, he was bragging.

Here’s the audio.

Still, why wouldn’t Begor brag to investors? Equifax’s controversial behavior is near-legendary. The firm is an important credit bureau, and credit data is exactly what we wouldn’t want to fall into the hands of hackers, who could then easily use it to engage in identity theft, en masse. But in 2017, Equifax had a massive scandal, one of the biggest data breaches in history, when it accidentally exposed the personal data of 147 million people. The Federal Trade Commission fined the company more than $575 million, and the CEO, CIO, and chief security officer were all forced out.

Yet the firm didn’t suffer any long-term reputation damage. And in all the hoopla around the scandal, there really wasn’t a lot of discussion about why that is, and how Equifax actually makes money. So looking at Begor’s braggadocio around the firm’s market power is useful. The product Begor told investors about at the Goldman Sachs confab is called The Work Number, which is a business line that bundles data about the incomes of hundreds of millions of people and sells it to interested parties, like lenders, landlords, employers, and government agencies. Payroll and data is by some estimates a $10 billion market, and now brings in a majority of the firm’s domestic revenue.

See the rest here

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Massive Corruption Scandal In Ukraine

Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2023

You can make a buck selling US taxpayer funded arms. I hear the Swiss real estate market is booming also.

https://rumble.com/v26ycwi-massive-corruption-scandal-in-ukraine.html

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“Chinese Aggression” Sure Looks An Awful Lot Like US Aggression

Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2023

It’s just taken as matter of fact when the US says it’s moving more and more war machinery into the waters around China as a defensive precaution to deter Chinese aggression. Because the narrative is coming from the most effective propaganda machine ever devised, we hear “No bro, the US is militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival on the other side of the planet defensively. Because like what if China tries to do something aggressive?”

Now you know why McCarthy’s approval was never in doubt.

Caitlin Johnstone

https://open.substack.com/pub/caitlinjohnstone/p/chinese-aggression-sure-looks-an?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android

Punchbowl News reports that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is planning a trip to Taiwan, which will be yet another incendiary provocation against Beijing if it occurs. The previous House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sparked a significant escalation in hostilities with her visit last year, the consequences of which are still reverberating today.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp explains:

Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan was viewed in Beijing as a major provocation, and it sparked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around the island. The exercises included China firing missiles over Taiwan and simulating a blockade of the island, both unprecedented actions.

China has kept up the military pressure on Taiwan since Pelosi’s visit, and its warplanes regularly now cross the median line, an informal barrier that divides the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Before Pelosi’s trip, China barely crossed the line. Now, it’s an almost-daily occurrence.

Beijing views the US House speaker visiting Taiwan as an affront to the one-China policy and the understanding the US and China reached in 1979, when Washington severed formal relations with Taipei.

Antiwar.com @Antiwarcom

Report: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy Plans to Visit Taiwan Nancy Pelosi’s visit when she was House speaker provoked the largest-ever Chinese military drills around Taiwan by Dave DeCamp @DecampDave #Taiwan #China #KevinMcCarthy #Pelosi news.antiwar.com/2023/01/23/rep…

Image
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10:18 PM ∙ Jan 23, 2023

29Likes8Retweets

US-led provocations and escalations against China are becoming a regular occurrence, both from the US itself and from its imperial assets like Australia and Taiwan. Yet according to the western political/media class, the urgent threat of our day is “Chinese aggression”.

After the House of Representatives voted to approve the new Select Committee on China — a Republican initiative designed to increase internal pressure in the US government to ramp up the new cold war — the committee’s chairman Mike Gallagher put out a statement saying that it is “time to push back against the Chinese Communist Party’s aggression in bipartisan fashion.”

Gallagher is a particularly noxious warmonger who says urgent efforts must be made to stop China from “destroying the capitalist system led by the United States in order to make way for the triumph of world socialism with Chinese characteristics.” He advocates the “selective decoupling” from specific sectors of the Chinese economy and says the US is in “the early stages of a new cold war” against China. He advocates pouring weapons into Taiwan in much the same way the US did in the lead-up to its proxy war in Ukraine, and asserts that the US needs to be preparing for a direct hot war with China in the near future.

Gallagher’s hawkishness on China is quickly becoming the mainstream consensus position in the western political/media class as the US-centralized empire ramps up aggressions while continually complaining about Chinese aggression.

Rep. Gallagher Press Office @RepGallagher

The Select Committee on the CCP will expose the CCP’s strategy to undermine American leadership and work on a bipartisan basis to identify common sense approaches to counter CCP aggression. There is no more critical challenge facing our nation.

5:16 PM ∙ Jan 11, 2023

250Likes85Retweets

The US empire has been increasingly positioning its war machinery around China since the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia” in ways that would have led to an immediate third world war if the roles were reversed, and its aggressions have escalated with each subsequent administration. Just in the last couple of months we’ve had news that the US is planning on returning to its Subic Bay base in the Philippines as part of its encirclement campaign against China, and also intends to station missile-armed marines along Japan’s Okinawa islands. The US is also reportedly working on building a network of missile systems on a chain of islands near the Chinese mainland, explicitly for the goal of countering China. The US and its allies have dramatically increased their naval presence in disputed waters near China, viewed as acts of aggression by Beijing.

None of this would be tolerated by the United States if China were openly moving its war machinery into adjacent areas with the stated goal of “countering the US”. If China were doing this, it would be a near-unanimous consensus throughout the western world that China was engaged in hostile provocations and was clearly the aggressor. Nobody would listen to China if it claimed it was militarily encircling the US for defensive purposes.

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Dailywire Article-Walmart Raises Minimum Wages As Worker Shortages Crunch Labor Market

Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2023

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has remarked that the workforce “participation gap” is largely a result of “excess retirements” that occurred beyond “what would have been expected from population aging alone,” even as younger cohorts largely return to the job market.

“Excess retirements” is government speak for people laid off due to worthless, disastrous government lockdowns and restrictions that have found other ways to survive.

Excess retirements reminds me of when our local government over regulated hospitals experience “excess receipts” yet still always seem to be in dire financial straits.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/walmart-raises-minimum-wages-as-worker-shortages-crunch-labor-market

By  Ben Zeisloft

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - MAY 19: Shopping carts sit in the parking lot of a Walmart store on May 19, 2020 in Chicago, Illinois. Walmart reported a 74% increase in U.S. online sales for the quarter that ended April 30, and a 10% increase in same store sales for the same period as the effects of the coronavirus helped to boost sales.
Scott Olson via Getty Images

Walmart announced on Tuesday that the grocery and retail corporation will increase average wages for many associates as the job market witnesses a persistent shortage of labor supply.

Walmart U.S. CEO John Furner revealed in a memo that the company plans to implement raises in select stores such that rates are more appealing relative to competitors. Average pay for Walmart employees across the nation will now surpass $17.50 per hour.

“Starting next month, we’ll begin investing in higher wages for associates,” Furner wrote. “This includes a mixture of associates’ regular annual increases and targeted investments in starting rates for thousands of stores, to ensure we have attractive pay in the markets we operate.”

Walmart is one of the largest private sector employers in the United States; the company currently has 1.7 million domestic associates, according to the retailer’s website. The firm also announced the expansion of various programs related to education initiatives for employees, including an increase in the number of college degrees for which associates can be reimbursed.

Amazon, another leading private sector employer, likewise unveiled nationwide wage increases toward the end of last year: average hourly pay for employees in customer fulfillment and transportation are slated to increase above $19.00 per hour, with employees earning between $16.00 per hour and $26.00 per hour depending on their position and location in the United States, according to a press release from the e-commerce firm.

The wage increases occur as private and public sector employers struggle to hire.

See the rest here

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Laurels for Sanity on Ukraine – The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2023

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/laurels-for-sanity-on-ukraine/

sohrab

Sohrab Ahmari

The world is fast approaching the one-year anniversary of Russia’s—awful, no-good—invasion of Ukraine. The tragedy was soon compounded by Western leaders and media warmongers taking a highly simplistic ideological approach to a complex conflict. Sobriety and restraint went out the window, as foreign policy establishments soon forgot the wreckage of Afghanistan and Iraq, and set out on a new proxy war—this time against the country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and most valuable energy reserves.

Readers of this column, and this magazine, have already been treated to plenty able critiques of this approach. So it is worth taking a different tack now: by handing out laurels to the few dissident voices who, resisting enormous pressure to the contrary, have spoken out for realism and restraint and against mindless escalation over the past year.

First up, a laurel to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for recently hitting the breaks on deliveries of advanced artillery—specifically, the Leopard 2 tank—to Ukraine. Yes, it is true that Berlin won’t get in the way of others, such as Poland, dispatching the same hardware to the battle zone. But even this minor, and mostly symbolic, dilatory gesture on Scholz’s part suggests that there is some limit to how far the most important country on the Continent will go in fueling a Russo-European war.

And let us hand one to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, for pursuing a nimble strategy when his neighbors have given in to hysteria. Orbán and his nation are as wary as anyone else in Central and Eastern Europe of Russian imperialism. But Orbán doesn’t believe that the West can or should transform an intra-Slavic conflict into an all-out, ideological war. He has also warned that Europe can’t win an energy war against Russia—not without devastating her own industrial base and working class. As he told me in an interview in September, “If someone believes you can beat Russia, and change things in Moscow, it is a pure mistake.”

Closer to home, a laurel to Senator Josh Hawley, for questioning the seemingly limitless amounts of U.S. taxpayer dollars his fellow lawmakers are prepared to spend on a proxy war against Moscow. In May, the Missouri populist voted no on a $40 billion package (since then the total aid has added up to some $100 billion). “This package,” he explained, “treats Ukraine as a client state of America, a fraught relationship that will put us on the hook for financing the war and then the reconstruction. If this isn’t a classic case of misplaced priorities, I don’t know what is.”

See the rest here

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