Lest people think that 2020 was only about Covid-19, lockdowns, and economic disaster, don’t forget about the protests, riots, and escalating exhibits of rage.
The triggering event was the death of George Floyd. He was killed during an arrest on May 25th in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The entire thing was caught on video. It had all the potential to be a turning point with regard to police brutality and race – the nation was riveted and outraged.
But then, as often occurs, the protests were co-opted. Extremists took over, extremists on the other side took umbrage, and Mr. Floyd became a footnote.
2020 devolved into ongoing violence in American streets that most of us haven’t seen in our lifetimes. Distinct sides were chosen, lines were drawn, and those who saw the middle ground were quickly shouted down while America burned.
May
Minneapolis immediately erupted into violent riots that turned deadly.
Rioters set the police station on fire.
Within a week of Mr. Floyd’s death, demonstrations had spread to 30 cities across the United States, many turning from peaceful protests to riots.
Riots in Denver:
Seattle was the site of particularly destructive and violent riots.
In fact, protestors took over a six-block area in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle, driving out police and maintaining their presence there for months. They even strategically changed the name of the area to make it part of a bigger movement.
June
The National Guard was deployed to cities across the country in an attempt to quell the violence.
Seattle:
Atlanta:
Los Angeles and Hollywood:
In this article, a National Guardsman shared a personal account of what was really going on during the Seattle riots.
July
In July, police and rioters in cities across the country were engaged in violent clashes.
Federal police squared off with rioters in Portland.
August
On August 23, fuel was added to the raging inferno when Jacob Blake was shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. At this point, the facts of the shootings were no longer relevant – any police violence against a black suspect was going to result in riots.
By that evening, Kenosha was on fire.
The destruction of Kenosha, a moderate-sized town, was shocking.
By September 1st, riots occurred for the 95th consecutive day in Portland.
Violence also erupted in Louisville, Kentucky when the Grand Jury declined to charge the officers accused of killing Breonna Taylor, a local paramedic, with homicide.
Did police shootings suddenly cease? Did racially-motivated violence end? Did the justice system radically evolve? Did everyone finally agree and settle their differences amicably?
It’s almost enough to make a person ask questions about the widespread violence from May through October.
What are your thoughts on this timing? Let me know in the comments.
Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, gun-toting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com. Daisy is the best-selling author of 4 books and lives in the mountains of Virginia with her two daughters and an ever-growing menagerie. You can find her on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
So what is the unions’ price tag for reopening schools nationally? A cool $100 billion “investment,” as the left calls it. Smells more like ransom to us. The Democrat progressives and unions are holding your kids hostage.
Too cynical, you say? Not at all. Unions have been behind the closures all along.
Classic American school classroom. Photo: Andrew Postell, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
I&I Editorial
Schools have been closed for the better part of a year now, for the putative reason that COVID-19 makes them unsafe. Only distance learning and Zoom and other online classes are safe enough for both teachers and kids, we’re told. Even though the science says otherwise, powerful teachers unions keep schools closed anyway. But why?
Let’s start with a blunt fact: The teachers unions — including the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), along with a host of radicalized local unions — don’t have your kids’ best interests at heart, despite their well-funded, slick propaganda to the contrary.
They oppose reopening schools, despite overwhelming evidence they should be reopened immediately.
As a must-read piece in the American Institute for Economic Research recently noted:
Significant evidence shows that a truncated school year supplemented with online learning is vastly inferior to the education children get in-person. Virtual learning is particularly harmful to students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds who do not have sufficient resources to support their learning.
This is a looming disaster for all children, but especially for poor and minority kids.
A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) estimated that school closures could cost the 24.2 million affected U.S. students nearly 5.53 million total years of life, largely due to lower incomes, less educational achievement, and worse health outcomes.
Higher levels of drug abuse and overdoses, massive increases in mental health hospital visits, along with surging suicide rates among children have been cited by the Centers for Disease Control as stemming from pandemic school closures.
Meanwhile, fears of schools becoming incubators for renewed surges of COVID-19 infections are grossly exaggerated, other studies and data show.
Start with the fact that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, just 168 kids 17 or under have died from COVID-19 through Dec. 19. That’s less than 0.05% of the total of nearly 300,000 COVID-19 deaths. By comparison, those aged 65 to 74 accounted for more than 21% of the total deaths.
Studies this year by peer-reviewed journals back these data up.
“COVID-19 is generally a mild disease in children, including infants,” a study in the British medical journal Lancet found.
Even the usually union-friendly New York Times was recently forced to admit: “Researchers once feared that school reopening’s might spread the virus through communities. But so far there is little evidence that it’s happening.”
The most cynical expression of unions’ lack of concern for students came earlier this year in Los Angeles, where the 35,000-member United Teachers of Los Angeles demanded, among other things, that local officials defund the police; pushed for a “moratorium” on charter schools; and insisted policymakers enact Medicare for All, provide more welfare for illegal immigrants, and levy enormous new taxes on commercial properties and “wealth.”
Of course, none of these things have anything to do with education. They’re just part of the much broader extremist agenda of the far left, which now largely controls American education.
The frightening thing is leftist teachers unions seem to have a strong ally in Joe Biden, who recently suggested that it might be better to keep schools closed all year.
So what is the unions’ price tag for reopening schools nationally? A cool $100 billion “investment,” as the left calls it. Smells more like ransom to us. The Democrat progressives and unions are holding your kids hostage.
Too cynical, you say? Not at all. Unions have been behind the closures all along.
As a recent study of 835 school districts asserted: “Using data on the reopening decisions of 835 public school districts in the United States, we find that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions are less likely to reopen in person even after we control … for differences in local demographic characteristics.”
But health concerns weren’t the reason for closures. They were a pretext.
As the study cited above noted, closures “provide additional benefits to union members by reducing childcare responsibilities, hours of direct instruction, and commute times. Furthermore, because teachers’ unions with more power are in better positions to influence school districts, we expect that school districts in locations with stronger teachers’ unions will be less likely to reopen with in-person instruction.”
In short, teachers unions are using COVID-19 to extort more benefits and more money from the education system for their members. They don’t care about the kids.
For his part, if he gains office, Biden will be more interested in keeping his solid union support happy than in sending kids back to school.
Polls show parents want their kids back in school. The only people who don’t want the schools to reopen appear to be leftist politicians and their union supporters. For the record, since 1990, the the NEA and AFT, the two largest teachers unions, have given Democrats at least 94% of their political contributions.
There’s a solution for this dilemma. De-unionize the nation’s public schools. Unions have damaged American education, dumbing down curricula, filling kids’ heads with anti-American socialist dogma, and presiding over decades of rising costs and declining or stagnant test scores. It’s time to restore local control by parents over education. A system that works.
Scott Horton proves the truism that Libertarians can clearly see both sides of partisan issues. Scott Horton and Pete Quinones sat down to review 2020. Here’s a peek at what they discussed.ImpeachmentWhat’s going on in Ukraine?Trump was impeached over UkraineBiden’s unqualified son worked in UkraineBiden fired the prosecutor of his son’s company in UkraineA Ukrainian testified at Trump’s impeachment trialA U.S. Ambassador was caught picking Ukraine’s prime ministerIt all comes back to Ukraine. Listen to Scott connect the pieces.
COVID 19Most of us agreed that “15 days to flatten the curve” was reasonable. But forced lockdowns are un-American. The Left think that the virus spreads through disobedience to the state.The Right think virus is not serious, and so precaution is thrown to the wind.Scott argues that there’s irrationality on all sides. Listen to his prediction on why the worst is yet to come.George FloydGeorge Floyd’s death almost became the U.S. government’s worst nightmare. Then we got divided against each other, instead of united against the state.Find out what went wrong, and why it still matters, to left-wingers and right-wingers.Stolen ElectionTrump was framed for treason, and half the country thinks the election was stolen. But Scott makes a good argument that Trump’s loss is his own fault.
For example, Dr. Ngozi Ezike, Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health stated the following during the first wave of the pandemic,
If you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live and then you were also found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death, despite if you died of a clear alternative cause it’s still listed as a COVID death. So, everyone who is listed as a COVID death that doesn’t mean that was the cause of the death, but they had COVID at the time of death.
During the first wave, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment had to announce a change to how it tallies coronavirus deaths due to complaints that it inflated the numbers.
The Facts:Ontario public health clearly states that deaths will be marked as COVID deaths whether or not it’s clear if COVID was the cause or contributed to the death. This means that those who did not die as a result of COVID are included in the death count.
Reflect On:Why is there so much confusion surrounding this pandemic? Why is there such a strong campaign of censorship of information that is going hand in hand with it?
What Happened: Ontario (Canada) Public Health has a page on their website titled “How Ontario is responding to COVID-19.” On it, they clearly state that deaths are being marked as COVID deaths and are being included in the COVID death count regardless of whether or not COVID actually contributed to or caused the death. They state the following,
Any case marked as “Fatal” is included in the deaths data. Deaths are included whether or not COVID-19 was determined to be a contributing or underlying cause of death…”
This statement from Ontario Public Health echoes statements made multiple times by Canadian public health agencies and personnel. According to Ontario Ministry Health Senior Communications Advisor Anna Miller,
As a result of how data is recorded by health units into public health information databases, the ministry is not able to accurately separate how many people died directly because of COVID versus those who died with a COVID infection.
Again, this means when we observe the COVID-19 death count in Ontario, Canada, we are observing an inaccurate number given the fact that those who died with COVID may not have necessarily died as a result of it. Theoretically if a person committed suicide and tested positive for COVID or died in a car crash, of a heart attack, of cancer, diabetes or any other illness, they are also included in the COVID death count. Let’s not forget the fact that a positive PCR test does not mean one has COVID.
This has been common theme during the span of this pandemic so far. For example, in late June Toronto (Ontario, Canada) Public Health tweeted that “Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto.”
It’s not just in Canada where we’ve seen these types of statements being made, it’s all over the world. There are multiple examples from the United States that we’ve written about before.
For example, Dr. Ngozi Ezike, Director of the Illinois Department of Public Health stated the following during the first wave of the pandemic,
If you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live and then you were also found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death, despite if you died of a clear alternative cause it’s still listed as a COVID death. So, everyone who is listed as a COVID death that doesn’t mean that was the cause of the death, but they had COVID at the time of death.
During the first wave, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment had to announce a change to how it tallies coronavirus deaths due to complaints that it inflated the numbers.
The only issue is that we can’t know how many people have been added to the COVID death count in multiple places across the globe that did not actually die as a result of COVID. Theoretically, this could drive the global death count significantly lower than the official numbers we are getting.
At the end of the summer the CDC put out data showing that 94% of deaths that have been marked as COVID deaths had at least two or there other causes listed. Out of all the deaths that have been labelled as a COVID-19 death in the United States up to the end of August, for 6% of them COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned and for 94% of the deaths there were other causes and conditions in addition to COVID-19. The CDC states that “for deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death.” So how do we know that COVID was the cause for many of these deaths or even contributed? Many believe COVID was the cause and even contributed to the comorbitities listed. You can view the updated numbers here in table 3 from the CDC as they are similar.
We also saw this very early on in Italy, where 99 percent of those who were marked as COVID deaths had multiple comorbidities.
With the last two examples it’s important to mention that COVID may have been the cause or even a contributing factor. We already know that people with comorbidities as well as the elderly are the most vulnerable. We also know that for people 70 years and younger the survival rate of the virus is 99.95 percent, according to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, MD,PhD, from the Stanford University School of Medicine. This is why approximately 50,000 doctors and scientists have now signed The Great Barrington Declaration strongly opposing lockdown measures, citing information showing that they are doing more harm than good and explaining that we don’t have to lockdown everything to protect the vulnerable. There are, according to them, more proper and efficient ways of doing so.
Why This Is Important: There are a lot of questions on the minds of many people, not only with regards to the severity of the virus, PCR testing, and the measures being taken by governments to combat it, but also the fact that information, evidence, science and expert opinion during this pandemic has been heavily censored. A lot of scientists and doctors have been doing their best to create awareness about this as we don’t hear a peep from the mainstream about it. Social media outlets have been censoring and blocking information that opposes the official narrative that’s beamed out by government health authorities. It’s odd how one scientist, like Dr. Anthony Fauci for example, can get all the air time in the world and given instant virality, yet thousands of other experts it the field who share an opposite opinion are completely ignored. It raises a lot of questions and red flags.
Over the last few months, I have seen academic articles and op-eds by professors retracted or labeled “fake news” by social media platforms. Often, no explanation is provided. I am concerned about this heavy-handedness and, at times, outright censorship. – Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH (source)
The bottom line is, science is being suppressed, and this is no secret. Below is a tweet from Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard professor of medicine that emphasizes this point, which was also recently emphasized by Kamran Abbas, a doctor, executive editor of the British Medical Journal, and the editor of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization. He has published an article about COVID-19, the suppression of science and the politicization of medicine. There are many examples to choose from, I thought I’d simply mention these few to get my point across. It’s also not surprising to find conflicts of interests among government COVID advisors.
While the US public was forced to grovel for months for a $600 direct payment, the same piece of legislation pumps billions of dollars into “democracy programs” — US government code for regime-change operations via civil society NGOs — and foreign military assistance. The measly $600 survival checks pale in comparison to the massive foreign spending on regime change and titanic allocations to prop up US-friendly authoritarian militaries.
The longest piece of legislation in United States history, containing both a coronavirus relief package and the annual omnibus spending package, quickly passed through Congress on December 22, with little opposition. While technically separate bills, the omnibus and stimulus were debated and passed together, at the same time.
The massive piece of legislation — a staggering 5,593 pages in length — lays bare the priorities of the US government, prioritizing regime change in foreign nations and the imperatives of empire over the basic needs of Americans.
In just a few hours, it passed through the House of Representatives by 359-53, and through the Senate by 92-6.
While the US public was forced to grovel for months for a $600 direct payment, the same piece of legislation pumps billions of dollars into “democracy programs” — US government code for regime-change operations via civil society NGOs — and foreign military assistance. The measly $600 survival checks pale in comparison to the massive foreign spending on regime change and titanic allocations to prop up US-friendly authoritarian militaries.
On so-called “Democracy Programs” alone, the legislation appropriates $2.417 billion, and $6.175 billion on the “Foreign Military Financing Program.” Another $112.9 million is appropriated for “International Military Education and Training.”
$6 billion more is allocated toward the domestic procurement of US Air Force missiles and US Navy weapons of war. This is in addition to the $740 billion defense bill passed earlier in December.
By contrast, the stimulus package comes at a value of $900 billion, with the largest portion devoted to business bailouts.
The Federal News Network reports that the $1.4 trillion omnibus includes $671.5 billion allocated to “base defense spending,” with another $77 billion going to “overseas contingency operations.”
Some unnecessary nuance meant to obfuscate a political reality which reveals how little the US government cares about its citizens: the foreign funding is in the omnibus bill and coronavirus relief in a stimulus bill, but the bills were combined into a single piece of legislation pic.twitter.com/7aCXRMcOeX
Stimulating regime change and intervening in the Global South
The legislation stipulates: “$300,000,000 shall be made available for a Countering Chinese Influence Fund to counter the malign influence of the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party and entities acting on their behalf globally.”
Similarly, the legislation devotes $8 million to NGOs for activities in Tibet or to support the Tibetan government-in-exile. It appears that, every fiscal year between 2021 and 2025, it allows for the additional appropriation of $8 million per year to support Tibetan communities in Tibet, as well as $6 million per year to support them in Nepal and India, and another $3 million per year for “Tibetan governance.”
The bill also allocates $3.3 million for the US government-backed media outlet Voice of America, and $4 million to the similarly operated Radio Free Asia every year between fiscal years 2021 and 2025, in order “to provide uncensored news and information in the Tibetan language to Tibetans, including Tibetans in Tibet.”
In perhaps the most bizarre appeal to a regime-change activist lobby, an entire section of the bill is devoted to defining US policy “regarding the succession or reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.”
The bill also directs the secretary of state to establish a US consulate in Tibet.
Meanwhile, aid to a number of countries is conditioned on their taking part in Washington’s economic aggression. For example, $85.5 million in assistance to Cambodia is contingent on it “taking effective steps” to enforce “international sanctions with respect to North Korea,” and “assert[ing] its sovereignty against interference by the People’s Republic of China.”
As for Latin America, the legislation stipulates that “not less than $33,000,000 shall be made available for democracy programs for Venezuela.” By contrast, the legislation appropriates $461.3 million for Colombia, a country which has seen massacre after massacre and scores of political assassinations — with more than 290 human rights activists killed in 2020 alone.
While 20 percent of the funds are not releasable until Colombia shows it is “taking effective steps to hold accountable perpetrators of gross violations of human rights in a manner consistent with international law,” given Washington’s record in the country, it will likely give the green light regardless of the facts on the ground.
Globally, $70 million is made available to support “internet freedom,” with an additional $2.5 million potentially available “to surge Internet freedom programs in closed societies.”
Meanwhile, a Ronald Reagan-inspired program aimed at expanding US influence and the “war on drugs” in the Caribbean, the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, is being given a $74.8 million injection.
The combined Corona Package/Omnibus includes $74m for the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative.
The CBSI w/its roots in the Reagan founded CBI is an important mechanism for the “war on drugs” & gains US influence in security agencies across the region.
In Zimbabwe, where former President Robert Mugabe passed away in 2017, the government is still not off the hook. The legislation states: “The Secretary of the Treasury shall instruct the United States executive director of each international financial institution to vote against any extension by the respective institution of any loan or grant to the Government of Zimbabwe.” This language is aimed at depriving the cash-strapped African nation of international relief.
$15 million is going toward “democracy programs” in South Sudan, while $60m is being repurposed away from the “Global War on Terrorism” and “made available for assistance for Sudan”.
In central Africa, $325 million is being earmarked for assistance to Congo, with some part of this appearing to be intermingled with “peacekeeping” operations.
The phantom Russian menace
With $453 million appropriated for assistance to Ukraine, $290 million for “countering Russia,” $173 million for NATO, and $132 million for NATO ally Georgia, the legislation comes close to appropriating a billion dollars toward new cold war policies against Moscow.
The rationale for this spending may be the re-emergence of an old menace; a hint buried more than 5,000 pages into the document states that it is US policy “to not recognize any incorporation of Belarus into a ‘Union State’ with Russia, since this so-called ‘Union State’ would be both an attempt to absorb Belarus and a step to reconstituting the totalitarian Soviet Union.”
In one striking example of how hell-bent the legislation’s authors are on regime change and confronting Russia, the following phrase appears verbatim nine times: “The Government of Belarus, led illegally by Alyaksandr Lukashenka.”
The legislation also demands a report from the director of national intelligence, the secretary of state, and the secretary of treasury that identifies all of Lukashenka’s assets and those of his family, plus “identification of the most significant senior foreign political figures in Belarus, as determined by their closeness to Alyaksandr Lukashenka.”
The insistence on such information seems aimed at fast-tracking a list of entities to impose sanctions, in an effort to destabilize the country and make it ripe for a takeover by the US- and EU-backed opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskay, whose name appears six times in the legislation.
Along with detailed attention on cyber activities in Belarus, the bill explains how US officials will put together a comprehensive strategy and cost estimate for carrying out various operations aimed at the country, one of which includes: “Expand independent radio, television, live stream, and social network broadcasting and communications in Belarus to provide news and information, particularly in the Belarusian language, that is credible, comprehensive, and accurate.”
Middle East madness
As the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden has promised not to condition aid to Israel in any circumstance, including potential annexation of the West Bank, Congress has rushed to pump the apartheid regime full of fresh cash.
Of the $6.1 billion appropriated for funding foreign militaries, a whopping $3.3 billion — more than half — “shall be available for grants only for Israel,” and must be “disbursed within 30 days of enactment of this Act.”
Additionally, it appears that $500 million is appropriated for “Israeli Cooperative Programs,” which includes weapons procurements.
While it is difficult to interpret different allocations and far-distanced portions of the legislation going to the same target, one thing is clear: loads of money has been appropriated to a far-away apartheid state, as Americans remain unprotected from rent-related water shutoffs under the legislation.
The plan leaves people behind, with: -NO support for adult dependents -NO hazard pay for essential workers -NO student loan relief -NO recurring stimulus payment -NO retroactive unemployment insurance -NO water shutoff moratorium -NO aid to states and local governments
Meanwhile, any aid to the Palestinian Authority will be held up if its officials initiate or support any kind of investigation at the International Criminal Court (ICC) that seeks the prosecution of Israeli nationals for crimes against humanity.
In neighboring Syria, which has been constantly bombed by Israel since the outbreak of the foreign-backed proxy war against the country’s government, Congress has appropriated $40 million toward ” non-lethal stabilization” — in other words, destabilization assistance.
While the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has largely been defeated, $710 million to counter the group remains “available until September 30, 2022”.
Iran, meanwhile, is mentioned 22 times in the legislation.
The ‘‘Afghanistan Security Forces Fund” of $3 billion will “remain available until September 30, 2022,” and is geared toward the “security forces of Afghanistan, including the provision of equipment, supplies, services, training, facility and infrastructure repair, renovation, construction, and funding…”
The legislation also appropriates $250 million to reimburse the governments of Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Oman on border security spending, with $150 million going to Jordan, a geostrategic lynchpin that shares a borders with Iraq, Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian West Bank.
Another $241.4 million of appropriations through the “Department of State, foreign operations, and related programs” will be made “available for assistance to Tunisia.”
Egypt’s military, notorious for its repressive crackdowns on dissent, is due to receive a colossal $1.3 billion, according to the guidelines established in the Camp David Accords.
While US citizens continue to suffer the economic fallout of haphazard government shutdowns that have been largely ineffective in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, Congress passed a greatly reduced stimulus packaged alongside a massive handout to corporate America and its foreign client states.
Now it is up to the outgoing president — notorious for his “America First” rhetoric — to sign the legislation into law. Reports indicate he intends to do just that.
Alexander Rubinstein has covered foreign policy, police, prisons, and protests for a variety of publications including The Grayzone and Mint Press News. Follow him on Twitter at @RealAlexRubi.
It’s one thing for the starship Enterprise to boldly go where no man has gone before, but even Mr. Spock recognized the dangers of a world dominated by AI. “Computers make excellent and efficient servants,” he observed in “The Ultimate Computer” episode of Star Trek, “but I have no wish to serve under them.”
Those who eye these developments with lingering mistrust have good reason to be leery: the government has long had a tendency to unleash untold horrors upon the world in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.
Indeed, “we the people” have been treated like lab rats by government agencies for decades now: caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.
You don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace, making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.
Now this same government—which has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests (GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.) and used it against us, to track, control and trap us—wants us to fall in line as it prepares to roll out COVID-19 vaccines that owe a great debt to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for its past work on how to weaponize and defend against infectious diseases.
The Trump Administration by way of the National Institute of Health awarded $22.8 million to seven corporations to develop artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, etc., with smart phone apps, wearable devices and software “that can identify and trace contacts of infected individuals, keep track of verified COVID-19 test results, and monitor the health status of infected and potentially infected individuals.”
This is all part of Operation Warp Speed, which President Trump has likened to the Manhattan Project, a covert government effort spearheaded by the military to engineer and build the world’s first atomic bomb.
There is every reason to tread cautiously.
There is a sinister world beyond that which we perceive, one in which power players jockey for control over the one commodity that is a necessary ingredient for total domination: you.
By you, I mean you the individual in all your singular humanness.
Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself—mind, body and soul—in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.
The groundwork being laid with these vaccines is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.
The term “matrix” was introduced into our cultural lexicon by the 1999 film The Matrix in which Neo, a computer programmer/hacker, awakens to the reality that humans have been enslaved by artificial intelligence and are being harvested for their bio-electrical energy.
Hardwired to a neuro-interactive simulation of reality called the “Matrix,” humans are kept inactive and docile while robotic androids gather the electricity their bodies generate. In order for the machines who run the Matrix to maintain control, they impose what appears to be a perfect world for humans to keep them distracted, content, and submissive.
Here’s the thing: Neo’s Matrix is not so far removed from our own technologically-hardwired worlds in which we’re increasingly beholden to corporate giants such as Google for powering so much of our lives. As journalist Ben Thompson explains:
Google+ is about unifying all of Google’s services under a single log-in which can be tracked across the Internet on every site that serves Google ads, uses Google sign-in, or utilizes Google analytics. Every feature of Google+—or of YouTube, or Maps, or Gmail, or any other service—is a flytrap meant to ensure you are logged in and being logged by Google at all times.
Everything we do is increasingly dependent on and, ultimately, controlled by our internet-connected, electronic devices. For example, in 2007, there were an estimated 10 million sensor devices connecting human utilized electronic devices (cell phones, laptops, etc.) to the Internet. By 2013, it had increased to 3.5 billion. By 2030, it is estimated to reach 100 trillion.
Much, if not all, of our electronic devices will be connected to Google, a neural network that approximates a massive global brain.
Google’s resources, beyond anything the world has ever seen, includes the huge data sets that result from one billion people using Google every single day and the Google knowledge graph “which consists of 800 million concepts and billions of relationships between them.”
The end goal? The creation of a new “human” species, so to speak, and the NSA, the Pentagon and the “Matrix” of surveillance agencies are part of the plan. As William Binney, one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA, said, “The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”
Mind you, this isn’t population control in the classic sense. It’s more about controlling the population through singularity, a marriage of sorts between machine and human beings in which artificial intelligence and the human brain will merge to form a superhuman mind.
The term “singularity”—that is, computers simulating human life itself—was coined years ago by mathematical geniuses Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann. “The ever accelerating progress of technology,” warned von Neumann, “gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
Advances in neuroscience indicate that future behavior can be predicted based upon activity in certain portions of the brain, potentially creating a nightmare scenario in which government officials select certain segments of the population for more invasive surveillance or quarantine based solely upon their brain chemistry.
Case in point: researchers at the Mind Research Center scanned the brains of thousands of prison inmates in order to track their brain chemistry and their behavior after release. In one experiment, researchers determined that inmates with lower levels of activity in the area of the brain associated with error processing allegedly had a higher likelihood of committing a crime within four years of being released from prison. While researchers have cautioned against using the results of their research as a method of predicting future crime, it will undoubtedly become a focus of study for government officials.
There’s no limit to what can be accomplished—for good or ill—using brain-computer interfaces.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center have created a brain-to-brain interface between lab rats, which allows them to transfer information directly between brains. In one particular experiment, researchers trained a rat to perform a task where it would hit a lever when lit. The trained rat then had its brain connected to an untrained rat’s brain via electrodes. The untrained rat was then able to learn the trained rat’s behavior via electrical stimulation. This even worked over great distances using the Internet, with a lab rat in North Carolina guiding the actions of a lab rat in Brazil.
Clearly, we are rapidly moving into the “posthuman era,” one in which humans will become a new type of being. “Technological devices,” writes journalist Marcelo Gleiser, “will be implanted in our heads and bodies, or used peripherally, like Google Glass, extending our senses and cognitive abilities.”
Transhumanism—the fusing of machines and people—is here to stay and will continue to grow.
“We don’t have much data on people coinfected with COVID-19 and influenza,” said Howard Nadworny, M.D.,…”
If true, it would be because the CDC stopped REPORTING flu cases weeks early during a spike, not at the end of flu season! Unless things have changed since last year the CDC does not REQUIRE flu reporting. See this from the CDC.
As for not having the data I was told by Erie County health that Covid cases “should be” tested for influenza also. I was also told that death by influenza or COVID likely cannot be differentiated.
Influenza miraculously disappeared last April. COVID vs Flu is a con game. See the CDC link.
Herbert Morrow, D.O., isn’t sure what will happen if Erie County suffers a severe flu season in the middle of a COVID-19 pandemic.
The UPMC Hamot family physician expects he will see more patients with respiratory illnesses, especially if people don’t get their flu shots.
“One concern is that is could be difficult to tell which illness a patient has, just based on their symptoms,” said Morrow, a physician at Your Hometown Health Partners in Millcreek Township. “We have learned a lot about COVID-19 and one of the things we have learned is that it can present differently in different people. Sometimes those include flu symptoms.”
COVID-19 reached Erie County in March, at the end of a record flu season that infected at least 4,400
After a record 2019-2020 flu season that infected at least 4,400 Erie County residents and filled Erie-area hospitals with patients, doctors and other health-care professionals are worried a similar flu season will overwhelm hospitals that are already filling with COVID-19 patients. [DAVID CRIGGER, BRISTOL HERALD COURIER VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS]
county residents and filled Erie hospitals with patients.
Doctors and other health-care professionals are worried a similar flu season will overwhelm hospitals that are already filling with COVID-19 patients. They also are concerned that people will be infected with both diseases at the same time.
“We don’t have much data on people coinfected with COVID-19 and influenza,” said Howard Nadworny, M.D., a Saint Vincent Hospital infectious diseases specialist and advisor to the Erie County Department of Health. “COVID happened right at the end of flu season and when it was due to hit in the Southern Hemisphere, many of those countries were in lockdown for COVID, so there weren’t many flu cases.”
But there is data on people getting infected with other viruses while battling COVID-19, so doctors think it can happen with flu, Nadworny said.
“We don’t know how bad it is getting both viruses,” Nadworny said. “But even if a co-infection doesn’t make people worse, having both viruses in the community will increase the number of people in our hospitals.”
Since COVID-19 and flu share many of the same symptoms, including fever and coughing, testing for the viruses is important.
A single swab test for COVID-19, flu and respiratory syncytial virus is expected to soon be available, Morrow said. Doctors now can test for both flu and RSV with one swab.
“We will likely decide on a patient-by-patient basis whether to test for one, two or all three of those illnesses,” Morrow said.
No flu cases have been reported in the county this fall, Erie County Department of Health Director Melissa Lyon said Tuesday. Flu season usually occurs between January and April, but it has arrived as early as October.
But 480 confirmed flu cases have been reported in Pennsylvania through Nov. 28, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health. Forty of the state’s 67 counties have reported at least one flu case.
Twelve people have been hospitalized with flu and there has been one flurelated death in the state.
The best defense against getting co-infected with flu and COVID-19 is to get a flu shot, Lyon said. Though the LECOM Health Center for Health and Aging’s influenza vaccination campaign ended in early November, there are plenty of places to get a flu shot.
“You can go to your primary-care physician and many pharmacies are still giving flu shots,” Lyon said. She also recommended Federally Qualified Health Centers, which include Community Health Net and Wayne Primary Care.
Lyon also recommended getting the COVID-19 vaccine when it is available.
The first doses — which are expected to go to health-care workers, first responders and nursinghome residents — could be given by the end of December.
Until a COVID-19 vaccine is available to the general population sometime in 2021, the best defense is social distancing and face masks. Fortunately, these also reduce the spread of flu, Nadworny said.
“They are spread in roughly the same way, through small respiratory droplets that are inhaled,” Nadworny said. “Wearing a face mask and maintaining social distance will protect you from both of these illnesses.” Contact David Bruce at dbruce@timesnews. com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNBruce.
The CDC and USAID spent Millions and more on the Wuhan Lab and had a presence there.
Wuhan has been known to be a virus petri dish for years.
Why was an epidemic centered on Wuhan a big surprise? Was it a surprise, a giant screwup coverup, intentional, or …?
CDC, USAID. These are the people working to keep US safe.
What happened to the female Chinese scientist who send deadly (supposedly SARS) virus samples to China from Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory? Why was the lab working on deadly viruses? Bioweapons? Is there a relationship to COVID?
Coronavirus had been infecting people in the US even before China reported its first cases on December 31, 2019, research by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Red Cross has revealed.
American medics officially registered their first Covid-19 patient on January 19, 2020, but the findings in a paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases suggest the virus may have been circulating in the US prior to that.
The researchers studied almost 7,400 blood donations made in nine US states between December 13, 2019 and January 17, 2020. Evidence of Covid-19 bodies antibodies, the presence of which suggest a person had contact with the virus, were present in 106 of those samples, according to the study.
This means coronavirus could have been in the US a month before it saw its first confirmed case, and weeks before the Chinese authorities announced the infection in the city of Wuhan.
The analysis of hospital data from across the US in late 2019 also showed a spike in flu patients, many of whom had “heavy coughing” and other severe respiratory symptoms.
European researchers have also speculated that coronavirus had been present in their countries before China officially announced the outbreak of the new strain. A French survey has discovered there were Covid-19 antibodies in blood samples taken in early December 2019. A similar study carried out by their Italian peers revealed that samples in Italy were already showing antibodies in September.
Spanish virologists, meanwhile, found traces of coronavirus in sewage water samples collected in March 2019 – a full nine month before the events in Wuhan.
The precise origins of coronavirus are currently unknown, but the US has been making active attempts to blame it on China since the start of the pandemic. President Donald Trump has often referred to the disease – which has so far infected more than 13.8 million people, and killed more than 271,000 in America – as the “Chinese virus,” provoking vehement protest from Beijing.
It has become an almost daily occurrence to find news stories of parents being ‘called out’ by their newly politicised children for expressing on social media ‘wrong’, ‘unwoke’ views, or of people being fired for something they may or may not have said years ago. Anyone who openly dares to emphasise the ‘Great’ in ‘Great Britain’ is simply asking to be labelled a ‘racist’.
There was a time when the British were known for their stoicism, their ability to battle through hardship, no matter the odds. The so called ‘blitz spirit’ of eighty years ago, that saw the nation ‘pull together and carry on’, regardless of the Nazi bombardment of our cities, characterised a generation that had suffered two world wars yet could not be bowed.
During the Covid pandemic, however, this ‘blitz spirit’ has been noticeably absent. There has been certainly very little in the way of a nation pulling together; in its place, there has been just a lot of bickering, mud-slinging and name calling-among politicians, activists, and the increasingly fragmented populace.
Predictably, Covid-19 was quickly turned into a divisive political issue by many in the oppositional media. The assertion now — that anyone against face coverings, vaccines, or testing is assumed to be on the extreme right, while those obeying the safety rules, are on the left — is as simplistic as it is loopy. One might have imagined that a deadly pandemic would act as a great uniter, finally bringing an end to the squabbling that has characterised UK (and US) politics for the last few years. Instead, we have been baked in identity politicking, making an already turbulent time more turbulent than ever.
Some malcontents have taken their vitriol to new levels of malice, publicly hoping, for instance, that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson would not recover from the coronavirus. No pulling together there. No blitz spirit. No compassion. Just bitterness, feuding and ever-deepening separation.
The fertile, if airy, ‘soil’ of cyberspace has become the perfect breeding ground for radicals of every stripe to spread their doctrines of division amongst the young, politically ripe millennials during lockdown. Pitching everyone against everyone — left against right, young against old, black against white, women against men, trans (seemingly) against everyone — appears to be the aim. All of that successfully seems to be driving a wedge of seething resentment between communities.
It has become an almost daily occurrence to find news stories of parents being ‘called out’ by their newly politicised children for expressing on social media ‘wrong’, ‘unwoke’ views, or of people being fired for something they may or may not have said years ago. Anyone who openly dares to emphasise the ‘Great’ in ‘Great Britain’ is simply asking to be labelled a ‘racist’. For those naïve enough to believe in basic biology — that the anatomy of women and men are different – the gulag awaits you. If you dare to utter the unthinkable, that ‘all lives matter’, prepare to leave town.
Many agitators — unconcerned by either civility or tolerance — continue perpetuating the notion, developed by precocious two-year-olds, that if you shout for long enough, your wishes might be served up. This sense of entitlement has come to characterise a group whose younger demographic seem to have no comprehension of the horrors of a war — or indeed, of many authentic hardships — in their own relatively comfortable lives.
This lack of respect for, or understanding of, history, along with an apparent need to invent, import, or re-animate grievances from the past, then lead them to advocate inflicting what they decide is the appropriate revenge for a grievance on people who have had no part in causing it. Tolerance is to be expected only from others. For many ‘progressives’, there is no such thing as a two-way street. Agitators now seem to put their energy and focus into prioritising pet causes to which they feel everyone else ought to acquiesce. These might include men who have changed gender competing in female sports; defunding the police so that the most disadvantaged communities will be even further unable to protect themselves; expanding censorship in academia and Big Tech, or paying billions in taxpayer funds to other countries for promises to stop using fossil fuels at some far-off date and with no means of enforcement. Oh, and by the way, there is no debating anything. Just do what you are told.
While the Remainer-disruptors dragged out their opposition to Brexit as long as they could, seeing off two different prime ministers in the process, they may have relished their power. It was only after the Tories’ landslide victory in December 2019, that they finally let go of their dream of overturning Brexit – but not before having branded all those in favour of leaving the EU as bigoted xenophobes.
That slur is a particular slap in the face to the people of this patient nation. For decades, they have done their best to move in step with the creeping, ‘progressive’ times in which we live. The acceptance of a variety of often controversial societal changes, such as the ever encroaching desires of various sexual lobbies, ushered in under the banner of ‘human rights’, seems lost on the liberals, so intent are they on pushing their identity politics agenda. If this is how appreciation is shown for the British public’s quiet, respectful acceptance of often controversial, ‘tipping point’ changes within society, then no wonder much of the public may have decided that they have had enough of this new orthodoxy.
Although the coronavirus outbreak, with its restrictions of movement, briefly muted woke activism for a short time, it was not long before the extreme, activist milieu became restless. Until the death of George Floyd, a black American seemingly killed by a white policeman, these individuals had been busy berating figures on the right for not taking Covid-19 seriously enough. Suddenly, none of that mattered anymore. A frenzy of orchestrated Black Lives Matter protests erupted across Britain, despite the incident bearing absolutely no similarity to anything happening on Britain’s streets, and despite the relative anonymity of the BLM movement in Britain until that point.
Many in the media, nevertheless, made sure that the message was loud and clear: protesting against perceived racism — even if on another continent — was more important than any pandemic.
Thus, after months of being told we would be prosecuted for breaching the Covid rules, we then had to observe on television thousands of protestors, not just flouting the safety rules, but tearing down historical monuments — all off the back of a grievance that felt largely imported.
Even as the protests turned violent, no one was arrested. Up until this point, the government had made clear that any breach of lockdown rules would be met by the full force of the law — no caveats, no exceptions. Probably no one was happy about it, but still we complied — for the greater good.
Then, all of a sudden, chaos was erupting in towns and cities across the UK. There on the news, amidst the violence of civil unrest, not only were the lockdown rules being flouted, but, under the banner of Black Lives Matter, a raft of widespread anti-social behaviour was being tolerated. When the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was vandalised, the police, evidently held hostage to political correctness, stood by and watched as their role was publicly undermined by open disregard for the law.
The protestors’ dismissal of British heritage, a bid to ‘cancel’ history, appears a threat to the nation. We supposedly have nothing to be proud of. Our achievements have presumably been little more than the spoils of an evil, bigoted patriarchal system. These malcontents, by pledging allegiance to the Marxist architects of that narrative, not only insult the memory of those who have fought and died for the freedoms we now take for granted; they are also two-stepping towards totalitarianism.
While the rights of sexual and ethnic minorities appear to be immovably written in stone, the freedom to visit our families, the pub, or the library can be withdrawn by the state at a moment’s notice. Thousands of protestors marching through cities on the same day: no problem. Crowds flocking to the seaside on a summer day: the risk of arrest. One man’s freedom, it seems, has become another man’s cause for resentment.
So what will we be left with, as we try to reclaim our post-Covid lives in a not yet post-woke world? An increasing atmosphere of distrust and walking on eggshells. People are increasingly afraid to speak their minds. Even law enforcement is in a state of politically correct paralysis (here,here, here and here) .
While the UK was busy promoting multiculturalism and demoting choices such as Christianity, the nuclear family and a cultural heritage caringly assembled by people frequently written off as white and dead, we seem have failed to notice the societal divisions it has caused. According to reports, for example, about 19,000 of our children have been groomed and gang raped. The coronavirus pandemic, rather than bringing us together, has served to highlight divisions that are transforming the United Kingdom into something regressive, unevolved, and unrecognisable. Sadly, the United Kingdom is anything but united at this time.
Classic American school classroom. Photo: Andrew Postell, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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