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The End is Here

The Decline Of American Empire: A Kübler-Ross Cycle Analysis

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Editor’s Note: The author is looking to end his article with some optimistic message. That’s highly unlikely. The End is here.

Authored by Andrew Roberts via Quillette.com,

How will the United States react domestically should she be dislodged from her role of global top-dog power by China? As well as the obvious economic and strategic ramifications of an end to American imperium, there will be profound emotional and psychological effects on a society that has taken its hegemony for granted for more than three-quarters of a century.

The via dolorosa presently stretched before the United States will likely encompass the replacement of the dollar as the global currency of last resort, the recognition that the South China Seas are no longer navigable by the US Navy, the understanding that Africa has been effectively colonized by China, and the possible swallowing of Ukraine by Russia and Taiwan by China. If the United States maintains its present course, Americans should prepare themselves for a century of humiliating retreats. So, how are these developments likely to play out in an already deeply divided polity and society?

An analogy can be drawn with the British Empire, and the prolonged grieving process experienced by Britons in the three-and-a-half decades after India became independent in 1947. Within a generation and a half, the largest empire in the history of Mankind was reduced to struggling with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Empires tend to rise and fall faster in modern than in ancient history, so what can Britain’s loss of Empire teach us about the possible decline and fall of America’s?

A useful means of understanding how Britons slowly accommodated themselves to their postwar loss of power and prestige is provided by the Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle—the five-stage process by which individuals deal with tragedy, bereavement, and a dawning knowledge of imminent demise. The British people’s journey through those five stages of grief has profound implications for America, assuming she continues down her chosen path of impotence and retreat.

The first stage of the Kübler-Ross Cycle is Denial, which was the initial response of the British government after the loss of the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown. Notwithstanding the ideological anti-imperialism of Clement Attlee’s Labour government, it insisted that India would remain part of the British Commonwealth (as it was still then designated) and attached to the Western anti-Communist bloc. Indeed, the whole concept of the Commonwealth—founded in December 1931 but not taken seriously until 1947—can be seen as a sop to a people in denial about the loss of Empire.

America is already in the Denial stage of appreciating the loss of power overseas. President Biden’s speeches and press conferences at the time of the coalition’s over-hasty and humiliating scuttle from Afghanistan betray a psychology symptomatic of the first stage of the Kübler-Ross cycle. “Last night in Kabul,” Biden announced in the White House State Dining Room on August 31st, “the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan—the longest war in American history. We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety. … No nation has ever done anything like it in all of history. Only the United States had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it, and we did it today.”

In fact, plenty of nations have the capacity, will, and ability to lose wars, but the United States had not done it since Vietnam. And as Biden’s speeches and actions have subsequently shown, his administration is in denial about the message that defeat at the hands of the Taliban sends to vacillating allies and jubilant antagonists alike.

Britain was shaken out of her Denial stage by the Suez Crisis of 1956, which arrived less than a decade after the loss of India.

The second stage of the Kübler-Ross Cycle is Anger, and the fury that greeted Anthony Eden over his invasion of—and subsequent withdrawal from—the Canal Zone was symptomatic of a deeper anger about Britain’s dwindling position on the world stage. The role of the United States in forcing Britain’s humiliating retreat after a successful military operation further underlined the new world order, and sent a large number of Conservatives such as Enoch Powell into the barren cul-de-sac of lifelong anti-Americanism. The anger in British politics was also evident in the activities of the League of Empire Loyalists, which disrupted political meetings in the early 1960s. Its members were furious that after Suez and the independence of Sudan, the Conservatives no longer considered itself the party of Empire.

The capacity for anger in modern American politics hardly needs emphasising since the appalling scenes at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The mid-term elections in November 2022 may see at least some outpouring of anger over American loss of hegemony. It will be the first time that large sections of the American electorate have gone to the polls since the Afghan catastrophe. Anger with the Democrats will likely result in their loss of the House of Representatives and the relegation of Biden to lame-duckery.

Britain entered the third stage of the Kübler-Ross Cycle—Negotiation—in the 1960s when she made the rational choice to cleave to the United States; in Harold Macmillan’s revealing phrase, to try to become Greece to America’s Rome. His relationship with President Kennedy and support during the Cuban Missile Crisis were the foundations of a new post-Churchill Special Relationship. This was a logical response to the Suez debacle, and it could not even be weakened by Harold Wilson’s and Edward Heath’s refusal to be drawn into Vietnam.

It remains to be seen what the United States will do in her Negotiation stage. Certainly, she starts at a disadvantage because President Biden is not as good a diplomatic negotiator as President Xi of China or Russian President Putin, both of whom seem to outmanoeuvre him repeatedly. It is therefore doubtful that the United States can negotiate with her opponents and rivals successfully in an effort to defend a rules-based world order once she is eclipsed as the world’s pre-eminent superpower.

When Britain entered the Depression stage of Kübler-Ross in the 1970s, she did so with a total bipartisan commitment to national decline. She experienced depression in both its metaphysical and material senses. Economically and in prestige, she risked slipping into the third rank of world powers thanks to socialism and the pathos-laden Heathite Conservative response to it. In that doleful decade, Britain experienced the OPEC oil price trebling; IRA violence and internment in Northern Ireland; a miners’ strike that led to power cuts and a three-day week, stagflation, price and income caps; and trade union militancy that threatened the primacy of Parliament. The worst (because longest-lasting) of that decade’s developments came when Britain turned her back on the Commonwealth and joined the EEC in 1973. Only a country in the grip of severe depression, self-doubt, and historical amnesia could have done such a thing.

When the United States recognizes that it no longer matters in the world as it once did, that key allies are distancing themselves and flirting with China, that the global organizations erected by Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks no longer guarantee her primacy, and that there is little she can do about it, then depression will hit America. It will leave her confused, morose, and liable to turn in on herself politically. It will be an ugly time.

In the 1980s, Britain embraced the fifth and final stage of the Cycle—Acceptance. This was almost entirely down to one person, Margaret Thatcher. The Falklands War seemed to arrest the lamentable drift and surrender since Suez, and the spectacular victory in the Cold War, in part due to her close alliance with Ronald Reagan, finally provided closure after the loss of Empire. Although she could never again be top-dog power, Britain’s replacement by her close ally was palatable because the Special Relationship had been shown to work well for both countries and also for the wider world in ridding the world of Soviet Communism.

For modern America, however, acceptance of decline cannot have any sense of closure because the successor-state is totalitarian. Every precept of National Socialist China is entirely antithetical to American values. Britain’s successor-state shared her language, common law, liberal principles, free market, and outlook. The United States can take no such comfort when peering into her post-imperial future. So, America’s final Acceptance stage is fraught with far greater dangers than the other four put together. The Free World really will have met its “time when the locusts feed.”

Is all this inevitable? Not if the United States can grasp the leadership of the West once more instead of wallowing in self-destructive and profoundly decadent obsessions with its own faults, real and imagined. The United States ought to heed the words of Winston Churchill during the Munich Debate of October 5th, 1938.

The people, he said, should be told that “we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history … And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”

President Biden has already made it clear that he does not understand those words or appreciate their present importance. For now, Americans remain preoccupied with navel-gazing about Critical Race Theory and endlessly revisiting slavery 158 years after its abolition. Hopefully sometime before China takes Taiwan, Putin takes Ukraine, and Iran develops the Bomb, the United States will reject Acceptance of her eclipse and embrace her own supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour.

Comments:

Whites Says:
(1) One of the few areas where the US still retains technological superiority over China is in the area of integrated circuits of which Taiwan is a major producer. Should China conquer Taiwan, all this technology – developed painstakingly over decades, and something that China is still trailing behind in – will fall into China’s lap like a ripe fruit before a hungry monkey. China will waste little time in assimilating this technology and for the US it goes downhill from here, triggering a domino effect, as it were.

(2) The fall of Taiwan (Ukraine is relatively inconsequential) will send an unmistakable signal to whatever few allies the US has, whether white or non-white, that the US cannot be counted on to defend them any more from external threats and they’re better off aligning with someone else – whether Russia or China or anybody else – that can walk the talk. This loss of power and leverage will soon translate into loss of business opportunities.

(3) US national prestige – or whatever passes for it – will soon become notional prestige.

(4) And please disabuse yourself of the delusion that the US is destined to become a “white nation”, whatever that means. No longer, that boat has sailed. Another delusion is that the US can survive in majestic isolation. Not now, not ever.

(5) And finally- should China win, she’ll take no prisoners. Nothing less than complete humiliation and destruction of the United States, socially, technologically, internationally, economically will result over the next few decades. Our children and grandchildren will be around to witness the resulting anomie and utter insignificance.

Apparently small things can have huge unintended consequences. The fall of Taiwan will certainly be to the US what the “fall of the Berlin wall” was to the USSR.

HorseBuggy Says:

History taught us that when an empire is in decline the elites of that empire found a group to blame on the decline.

The group being targeted now for shame and destruction is the straight white person.

All the elites and media are all saying the same things. A religious white straight male is the root of all problems.

Most kids are being taught this in school so they will not know any better.

The democrat and republican party is really one, even if Trump is president. He didn’t drain the swap all he did is fortify it.

There is nothing you can do, so live within your means and avoid as many crazy people as you can.

The system will collapse and maybe the new one will be better.

China will in fact rule the world within a few years. They already do in a way.

History will talk about an America that was occupied with trans studies while China focused on science. An America that was obsessed with pronouns while China was building weapons technologies that make everyone’s defenses as powerful as a napkin.

Military Affairs

Russian Drivers vs. NATO Tanks

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Capitalism in Decay

The Dangerous Alliance of Rothschild and the Vatican of Francis

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by F. William Engdahl via William Engdahl

Image: Pope Francis in Colombo Author: Prasanna Welangoda License: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license License Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pope_Francis_in_Colombo.jpg

Holy Moly! The most globalist and interventionist Pope since the Crusades of the 12th Century has formalized an alliance with the largest figures in global finance led by none other than that noble banking family, Rothschild. The new alliance is a joint venture they call “Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican.” The venture is one of the more cynical and given the actors, most dangerous frauds being promoted since Davos WEF guru and Henry Kissinger protégé, Klaus Schwab, began to promote the Great Reset of the world capitalist order. What and is behind this so-called Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican?

On their website they proclaim in a typical UN doublespeak, “The Council for Inclusive Capitalism is a movement of the world’s business and public sector leaders who are working to build a more inclusive, sustainable, and trusted economic system that addresses the needs of our people and the planet.” A more sustainable, trusted economic system? Doesn’t that sound like the infamous UN Agenda 21 and its Agenda 2030 daughter, the globalist master plan? They then claim, “Inclusive Capitalism is fundamentally about creating long-term value for all stakeholders – businesses, investors, employees, customers, governments and communities.”

They continue, “Council members make actionable commitments aligned with the World Economic Forum International Business Council’s Pillars for sustainable value creation—People, Planet, Principles of Governance, and Prosperity—and that advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.”

In announcing the deal with the Vatican, Lynn Forester de Rothschild declared, “This Council will follow the warning from Pope Francis to listen to ‘the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor’ and answer society’s demands for a more equitable and sustainable model of growth.”

Their reference to Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum is no accident. The group is yet another front group in what is becoming a globalist bum’s rush to try to convince a skeptical world that the same people who created the post-1945 model of IMF-led globalization and giga-corporate entities more powerful than governments, destroying traditional agriculture in favor of toxic agribusiness, dismantling living standards in industrialized countries to flee to cheap labor countries like Mexico or China, will now lead the effort to correct all their abuses? We are being naïve if we swallow this.

Rothschild and pals

First off it is useful to see who are the “inclusive” capitalists joining forces with the Pope and Vatican. The founder is a lady who carries the name Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild. She is the wife of the 90-year old retired mega-billionaire head of London’s NM Rothschilds Bank, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild. Lady Lynn however is from “commoner” roots, born into a US working class family in New Jersey whose father, as she tells, worked two jobs to put her and her brothers through law and medical schools. She seemed to have had some influential mentors, as she went to Wall Street then to telecoms including Motorola and made reported tens of millions before hooking up with Sir Evelyn and his reported $20 billion in assets. Reports have it that Henry Kissinger played a personal role in encouraging the Transatlantic union of the two.

Lady Lynn is interesting as well beyond her famous husband. According to the list of names of those who flew on the private jet of convicted child sex trafficker and reported Mossad operative Jeffrey Epstein, one name that appears is “de Rothschild, Lynn Forester.”

It is interesting to note, that the same Lynn Forester in 1991, before she took Sir Evelyn as her husband, generously let a British friend have full use of one of Lynn’s Manhattan apartment properties, following the apparent murder of the woman’s father, British media tycoon and Mossad agent, Robert Maxwell. The British friend of Lynn, Ghislaine Maxwell, today is awaiting trial for complicity in child sex trafficking as the partner of Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell reportedly maintained the Manhattan address of Lady Lynn until very recently to register a bizarre non-profit called Terramar that she and Epstein set up in 2012, allegedly aimed at saving our oceans. When Epstein was arrested she quickly dissolved the non-profit. One of the donors to Ghislaine’s TerraMar was something called the Clinton Foundation, which leads to the next friend.

Lady Lynn has another long-time friend named Hillary Clinton, whose husband, Bill, was also logged on Epstein’s Lolita Express private jet, around two dozen times. Lynn and her new husband, Sir Evelyn, in fact were so close to the Clintons that in 2000 the Rothschild newlyweds spent part of their honeymoon as guests at the White House of Mr and Mrs Clinton. Lady Lynn after that became a major fund-raiser in 2008 and again 2016 for a possible Hillary bid for President, called a “bundler.” She also advised Hillary on her economic program, a free market one based on Adam Smith as she described it in an interview once.

Lady Lynn’s “Guardians”

The Rothschild venture with the Vatican at this point, in addition to co-founder Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, includes hand-picked money moguls and their select foundations who pompously call themselves the “Guardians.” That’s a term sounding more like a South Side Chicago gang or some kind of mafia overlords. They call themselves the moral guardians, together now with their new friends at the Vatican, for reform of capitalism.

The Guardian member list includes Rajiv Shah, the CEO of the Rockefeller Foundation, and former partner of the Gates Foundation’s AGRA scam to introduce GMO seeds in Africa. The Rockefeller Foundation has been involved in promoting a pandemic “lockdown” since 2010, and is a core part of the WEF Great Reset agenda. He just released a Rockefeller report, Reset the Table: Meeting the Moment to Transform the US Food System.

Rothschild’s Guardians also include Darren Walker the CEO of the Ford Foundation. Those two foundations, Ford and Rockefeller, have done more to shape an imperial American foreign policy than even the US State Department or CIA, including the funding of the failed Green Revolution in India and Mexico, and the creation by Rockefeller funds of GMO crops.

The head of DuPont, a GMO giant and chemicals group is another Guardian as well as scandal-ridden vaccine and drug companies, Merck and Johnson & Johnson. Merck lied about the risks of its arthritis drug Vioxx until more than 55,000 users died of heart attacks. Johnson & Johnson has been involved in numerous frauds in recent years including around negative effects of its anti-psychotic drug Risperdal, illegal presence of cancer-causing asbestos in its baby powder, and potentially thousands of legal actions for its role as a leading supplier of the opioid in Purdue Pharma’s deadly prescription painkiller OxyContin.

Other Guardians include CEOs of Visa, Mastercard, Bank of America, Allianz insurance, BP. In 2016 Visa along with USAID were behind the catastrophic Modi experiment to introduce a cashless economy in India.

Notable also is Guardian Mark Carney, former Bank of England head and also advocate of cashless digital central bank currencies to replace the dollar. Carney is now United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance.

Carney is also a Board member of the Davos World Economic Forum, the public promoter of the Global Reset of capitalism to impose the dystopian Agenda 2030 “sustainable” economy. In fact several of Rothschild’s Guardians are on the WEF Board, including billionaire Marc Benioff, founder of cloud computing Salesforce, and OECD head Angel Gurria. And ex-Credit Suisse CEO, Tidjane Thiam is on the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum.

Other Guardians of the inclusive capitalism transformation include the head of Bank of America, which bank was sued by the US Government for fraud connected with the 2008 US subprime mortgage crisis, as well as for laundering money for the deadly Mexican drug cartels and Russian organized crime. The select Guardian list also includes Marcie Frost, the controversial head of CalPERS, the huge fraud-ridden California state pension fund managing over $360 billion.

The head of State Street Corporation, one of the world’s largest asset management companies with US$3.1 trillion under management, is another Guardian. In January 2020 State Street announced it would vote against directors of companies in major stock indices that do not meet targets for environmental, social and governance changes. This is what is called Green Investing, as part of so-called Socially Responsible Investing. The WEF strategy, pushed also by WEF board members like Larry Fink of BlackRock, reward companies that they deem “socially responsible.” This is the key to the inclusive capitalism agenda of not just Rothschild’s inclusive capitalism Guardians, but also the WEF.

Their website claims that the Guardians manage more than $10.5 trillion dollars and control companies that employ 200 million workers. Now a brief look at their new Vatican partner.

Vatican Morals?

Ironically, or maybe not, Pope Francis, the partner chosen to give Rothschild’s group of mega-capitalists “moral” credibility, is himself embroiled in what could be the largest financial scandals, fraud and misuse of church funds in the modern history of the Vatican. That, despite the fact Pope Francis declared as new Pope in 2013, one of his main tasks would be to clean up the scandal-ridden Vatican finances. That has hardly taken place even after more than six years. Some Vatican observers even claim the financial corruption has worsened.

The unravelling scandal revolves around now-disgraced Cardinal Angelo Becciu who until 2018 was de facto chief-of-staff to the Pope and regular confidante. Becciu was Substitute for General Affairs in the Secretariat of State, a key position in the Roman Curia until June, 2018 when the pope elevated him to Cardinal, ironically enough, responsible for the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Becciu, clearly no saint, was able to invest hundreds of millions even billions over years of Church funds, including donations for the poor in Peter’s Pence, into projects he chose with a former banker from Credit Suisse. Projects included €150 million share in a luxury London real estate complex and $1.1 million into a film, Rocketman, about the life of Elton John. That comes to light as the ongoing Vatican child sex scandals caused Pope Francis to defrock Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, the first Cardinal to fall in the Church’s deep sexual abuse charges.

Italian press reports that the Pope knew about the dubious investments of Becciu and even praised them before the depth of the scandals broke. In November, 2020 Italian police raided the residence of Becciu’s former Vatican accountant and found €600,000 in cash and evidence the Vatican employee received $15 million in fake invoicing over years.

With a background like this, the new Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican of Lynn de Rothschild warrants close scrutiny as they clearly plan big things along with Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum to “reform” the world economy, and it won’t be nice or moral we can be sure.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Rand Paul: “Throw Fauci In Prison For Five Years”

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by Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

Senator Rand Paul escalated his feud with Anthony Fauci Thursday by calling for the NAID head’s arrest and imprisonment for continually lying to Congress and denying he funded gain of function research on coronaviruses.

Appearing on Fox Business, the Senator remarked “Fauci should go to prison for five years for lying to congress. They [the DOJ] have prosecuted other people and they have selectively gone after republicans, but in no way will they do anything about him lying.”

Paul added that Fauci “should be prosecuted for lying, and at the very least he should be taken out of his position because I think he cost people lives through misinformation.“

Every time he tells people, ‘Oh, wear a cloth mask,’ he is actually endangering people. If you are around someone with COVID, you don’t want to wear a mask because they don’t work,” he added.

Watch:

“We’ve referred him to the Department of Justice,” Paul urged, adding “but then again, Merrick Garland is the one now going after parents that go to school board meetings, so I don’t have a lot of hope that Merrick Garland is objectively looking at Fauci’s lying.”

Meanwhile, Joe Biden is joking that Fauci is the President:

Paul joins Senator Ted Cruz who also this week called for Fauci to be prosecuted.

Elsewhere during the interview, Paul took aim at the stalled Biden spending bill, noting that Democrats “couldn’t run a 7-Eleven, much less the government.”

Paul explained “If they want to force it through with no amendments and they want to do it in a short period of time, they have to have unanimous consent. Well, a lot of us don’t consent… just because the Democrats are incompetent and haven’t brought it forward that we should speed up time to let them spend more money that is bankrupting our country.”

The Senator continued, “They’ve had plenty of time to go to committee, to do all the things they need to do to do it through reconciliation. Instead, they’re going to wait to the last minute and ask people like me, who are dead set against raising the debt ceiling, like, say, ‘Oh, can you pretty, pretty please speed it up and let only Democrats pass this?’ No. If they want to raise the debt ceiling, they ought to do it.”

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Why Hide What Happens in the First Two Weeks After Injection?

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by Dr Clare Craig via: Hart

To what extent is vax merely front-loading infections into the initial 14-day period which is then excluded from calculations?

There have been numerous papers published showing how well the vaccines protect people after the second dose. Some of this effect is an illusion. The effect happens as a result of inaccurate measuring and a phenomenon called survivorship bias.

Survivorship bias happens when a group is compared at two time points, but the members of the group change between the time points. [Those who get infected within the first two weeks after injection for some reason do not count.] It would be like assessing the quality of a swimming school which favours the technique of throwing people into the middle of the ocean, leaving them for a couple of hours and claiming credit for how well the remaining students can swim. After two hours, the only people left would be the ones who could already swim and possibly a few who learnt to swim the hard way! The poor souls who drowned in the interim don’t even make the count. Attributing the remaining people’s swimming ability to the coach who turned up 2 hours later would obviously give a very misleading picture. Pointing out that no-one drowned in later lessons would be equally misleading in determining the success of the ‘teaching technique’.

With covid vaccination there is a two week period after vaccination that is not included in the data. The rationale given for this is that vaccines take a while to induce antibodies and therefore the first two weeks’ data are not relevant. Obviously this is flawed. What if the vaccines have deleterious effects that are visible straightaway, that have nothing to do with antibody production? An example is the high rate of shingles seen after covid vaccination, suggesting there is a problem with viral reactivation. This may explain why Sars-CoV-2 infection rates are actually higher in the vaccinated than in the unvaccinated in the first two weeks after vaccination.

The effect of eliminating the first two weeks is a misleading data bias. If people become infected and are dying during that period, this needs to be included. [Especially since we know for a fact that infection rates shoot up during this period.] The possibility that the vaccine itself may exert an effect on infection rate cannot be overlooked and the entire dataset needs to be included in order to accurately assess effectiveness. By only measuring the period after the higher risk of infection (0-14 days) it is possible to be deceived. Any signal would be missed.

Aside from it being nonsensical in terms of individual risk to remove this period of time, there will also be an impact on the wider community. If the vaccine in fact causes a spike in infections during the first two weeks, this will inevitably increase spread and will lead to an increased number of infections in that community during that time. [In other words the early vaxxed get infected at higher rates then spread it to the unvaxxed whose stats therefore looks worse while the early vaxxed do not drag down the vaxxed’ numbers.] Therefore, the assessment of the impact of the vaccination programme must include not only the effect on the individual, but the impact on the wider community.

This point is of particular relevance for close-knit communities where many are being vaccinated at the same time, such as schools and in particular communities with a high number of vulnerable people such as care homes and hospitals. What we are effectively doing is ‘speeding up’ the wave of infections (and deaths). Ultimately at the end of the viral season, the same number of people died. Because of excluding the earlier deaths (1-14 days), we are misled into thinking that the vaccines were more effective than they actually were. By only looking at the later period and seeing fewer deaths during that time, the illusion was created that lives were saved. This is evident in data from many countries following vaccine roll-out. The graph below showing the UK versus Europe illustrates this point, as the UK was the fastest to roll out the vaccine. The total number of deaths, represented by the area under the curve, was similar to other countries, but is just compressed into a shorter time period.

Covid Deaths in winter in UK and the European Union

Let’s now examine some specific examples, e.g. this study of nursing home residents in the United States. The results show that over the course of the study 6.8% of the vaccinated population were infected and 6.8% of the unvaccinated population were infected. However, by deciding that the first 14 days after vaccination should be excluded, the grey area for the vaccinated group is compared to the black and grey area combined for the unvaccinated. Doing so could lead to the claim of 66% vaccine efficacy against infection. The authors of this study were honest enough to share the raw data and did not claim 66% efficacy.

Data from US paper showing the percentage of the nursing home population to be infected by time after the clinic came to their home and by vaccination status

However, numerous studies have relied on this trick to make claims of vaccine efficacy. The most obvious examples of this are the original Pfizer trial study and the AstraZeneca trial.

Graph from AstraZeneca trial showing censorship of early period (‘Exclusion Period’)

To take a second example, a Danish paper measured infection numbers in healthcare workers and care home residents. Prior to the beginning of the vaccination programme 4.8% of the healthcare workers had been infected and 3.8% of the care home residents had been. The study ended at the end of the Danish winter wave after 95% of the care home residents had been vaccinated and 28% of the healthcare workers had been. Given the worse position at the start and the lower vaccination rate in healthcare workers you might expect that they were worse off overall. However, the percentage infected by the end of the wave was 7.0% among healthcare workers but 7.7% among care home residents.

Data from Danish paper showing percentage of population infected among care home residents and healthcare workers

How much of the vaccine efficacy reported in covid research is really a measure of survivorship bias coupled with naturally acquired immunity? This is a critical question. No claim of vaccine efficacy should be made without first addressing this.

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Ursula von der Leyen Is the Wife of Covid Vaccine Director

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Editor’s Note: It is a small clique, from the West to the East.
Via Anti-Empire

Heiko von der Leyen is the Medical Director of Orgenesis, a US biotech company that specializes in “cell-based vaccines” and gene therapies and deems itself “the Uber of the cell and gene therapy space”.

He has held this position since September 2020 and served on its Scientific Advisory Board since 2019.

He is married to the Atlantic Council-decorated Ursula von der Leyen, a third-rate politician and failed German minister of defense raised up in backroom deals to serve as EU’s most influential official. Ursula says it’s time to talk about making Covid shots government-compulsory across the 445-million European Union: 

The overwhelming majority of vaccines administered in the EU are Pfizer and Moderna mRNA shots.

Until 2020 mRNA shots had never been approved for use in humans.

The widespread injection of mRNA cocktails into so many arms since late 2020 has been praised as priming the humanity to accept gene therapies down the line.

This is what true love looks like folks. What a supportive wife! For marital bliss and a happy life look for a bride as supportive as Ursula.

Here presenting a ‘leadership’ award to Pfizer’s CEO at Atlantic Council

She is definitely the winner of the Anti-Empire’s Supportive Wife of 2021 Award. The Anti-Empire’s Supportive Mother of 2021 Award however goes east, to Tatyana Golikova, Russia’s Covid commissar who has worked tirelessly for vaccine passports while her stepson Vladimir Khristenko manufactures the KoviVak vaccine (approved for use since February 2021).

Capitalism in Decay

US’ Financial Cliff over the Abyss in Numbers

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Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

The emergence and acceptance of Modern Monetary Theory has turned our economic system upside down.Skeptics of its substance and sustainability have been brushed aside temporarily but expect the MMT experiment to collapse and end in ruin. To us that believe in old school economics, debt matters and is tied directly to interest rates and inflation. Central banks across the world claim the lack of inflation is the key force driving their QE policy and permitting it to continue, however, the moment inflation begins to take root much of their flexibility will be lost. This translates into governments being forced to pay higher interest rates on their debt.

With America’s national debt now blowing past 29 trillion dollars, it is important to keep the numbers in perspective. Nothing is as sobering as looking at future budgets. Those of us rooted in the tried and true economics relied upon in the past are worried. For years the argument that “This Time Is Different” has flourished but history shows that periods of rapid credit expansion always end the same way and that is in default. This also underlines the reality that any claims Washington makes about the budget deficit being under control is a total lie.

Click (Here) To View National Debt Clock

America is not alone in spending far more than it takes in and running a deficit. This does not make it right or mean that it is sustainable. Much of our so-called economic growth is the result of government spending feeding into the GDP. This has created a false economic script and like a Ponzi scheme, it has a deep relationship to fraud.

Global debt has surged since 2008, to levels that should frighten any sane investor because debt has always had consequences. Much of the massive debt load hanging above our heads in 2008 has not gone away it has merely been transferred to the public sector where those in charge of such things feel it is more benign. A series of off-book and backdoor transactions by those in charge has transferred the burden of loss from the banks onto the shoulders of the people, however, shifting the liability from one sector to another does not alleviate the problem.

When the 2018 financial year budget was first unveiled it was projected to be $440 billion. An under-reported and unnoticed later report painted a far bleaker picture. The report titled the “Mid-Session Review” forecast the deficit much higher than originally predicted. The newer report predicted the deficit would come in at $890 billion which is more than double what they predicted in March of 2017.

Such a miss should bring up the question of whether the discrepancy in the 2018 budget is an outlier or a sign of incompetence. This is especially troubling because what was projected as a total budget deficit of $526 billion for the 2019 Fiscal Year was later revised to a staggering $1.085 trillion. Not only should the sheer size of these numbers trouble us but we should remember that until recently some Washington optimists were forecasting that deficits would begin to decline in 2020 and that we would even have a small surplus of 16 billion in 2026. Since then, the wild spending those in charge have justified due to Covid-19 has blown the lid off that glimmer of hope and replaced it with more trillion-dollar deficits going forward.

Back then, the summary that began on page one of the Mid-Session Review came across as a promotional piece using terms like MAGAnomicics. It praised and touted the Trump administration for its vision and great work. This is a time when it would be wise to remember numbers don’t lie but the people using them do. That report is an example of how to re-frame a colossal train wreck into something more palatable. The report even went so far as to assure us that the deficit would fall to 1.4 percent of the GDP in 2028, from what was then 4.4 percent.

As a result of the American economy having survived with little effect what was years ago was described as a “financial cliff” the American people have become emboldened and now enjoy a false sense of security. Today instead of dire warnings we hear news from Washington and the media about how the stock market continues to push into new territory and all is well.

In 2019, National Debt Hit 23 Not 12 Trillion dollars

The chart to the right predicted that by 2019 the national debt would top 12 trillion dollars, instead it hit 23 trillion. Projections made by the government or any group predicting budgets based on events that may or may not happen at some future date are simply predictions and not fact. This means that such numbers are totally unreliable. The ugly truth many people ignore is that starting in 2018 entitlements became the driving force that will carry the deficit higher and higher into nosebleed territory. Even though we have seen deficits reach unprecedented levels the deficits in our future will be dramatically worse.

It isvery disturbing that so many people have forgotten or never taken the time to learn recent financial history. By recent, I’m referring to the last fifty to one hundred years. The path that Fed Chairman Paul Volcker set right decades ago has again become unsustainable and many people will be shocked when this reality hits. Do not underestimate the value of insight gained from decades of economic perspective. It tells us the economy of today is far different from the way things have always been.

Back in September of 2012, I wrote an article reflecting on how the economy of today had been greatly shaped by the actions that took place starting around 1979. Interest rates, inflation, and debt do matter and are more significant than most people realize. Rewarding savers and placing a value on the allocation of financial assets is important. It should be noted that many Americans living today were not even born or too young to appreciate the historical importance and ramifications of the events that took place back then. The impact of higher interest rates had a massive positive impact on corralling the growth of both credit and debt. It acted as a crucial reset to the economy which lasted for decades. Below is a copy of that article.

A Time For Action, 1980?

In his book “A Time For Action” written in 1980 William Simon, a former Secretary of the Treasury tells how he was “frightened and angry”. In short, he sounded the trumpet about how he saw the country was heading down the wrong path. William Simon (1927 – 2000) was a businessman and a philanthropist. He became the Secretary of the Treasury on May 8, 1974, during the Nixon administration, and was reappointed by President Ford and served until 1977.

I recently picked up a copy of the book that I had read decades ago and while re-reading it I reflected on and tried to evaluate the events that brought us to today. As often the future is unpredictable, looking back, it is hard to imagine how we have made it this long without finding long-term solutions and addressing the concerns that Simon wrote about so many years ago. Back then it was about billions of dollars of debt, today it is about trillions of dollars. It appears that something has gone very wrong.

Do Not Underestimate The Importance Of The Reset By Paul Volcker In 1980

By the end of the 70s inflation started to soar. Only by taking interest rates to nosebleed levels was then-Fed Chairman Paul Volcker able to bring inflation back under control. Paul Volcker, a Democrat was appointed as Federal Reserve chairmanby President Carter and reappointed by President Reagan. Volcker is widely credited with ending the stagflation crisis where inflation peaked at 13.5% in 1981. He did this by raising the fed fund rate which averaged 11.2% in 1979 to 20% in June of 1981. This caused the prime rate to hit 21.5% and slammed the economy into a brick wall. This also affected and shaped the level of interest rates for decades.

Rates Today Are Ready To Fall Off The Chart!

This action and the increased interest rates in the following years are credited by many to have caused Congress and the President to eventually balance the budget and bring back some sense of fiscal integrity and price stability to America. As the debt from the Vietnam war and soaring oil prices became institutionalized we moved on. Interest rates slowly dropped and the budget came under control. In recent years spending has again started to grow and at the same time taxes have been cut. This has slowly occurred over years and has been ingrained in the system.

In 2012, with our debt at 23 trillion and growing the path has again become unsustainable and many people will be shocked when reality hits. As our debt climbs some Americans feel just as frightened and angry as Simon did so many years ago. America has kicked the can down the road, failing time and time again to face the tough decisions. Part of the problem is the amount of debt has grown so large that we can no longer imagine or put a face on it. Until now, a series of different events have delayed the day of reckoning that will eventually arrive.Many of us see it coming, but the one thing we can bank on is that when it arrives most people will be caught totally off guard.

Summary of the current situation

Today we stand at the abyss, yet no one sees or feels threatened by a “financial cliff.” Insane spending has become the new normal. Who would have thought it would come to this? The updated revisions of the past have been washed away and replaced with more numbers, larger numbers. What we are witnessing today is insane. It is time to revisit the issue of how interest rates, inflation, and debt all come together. While this is not what those in charge want, it will happen. Simply put, there will be a reckoning, this time is not different.

Western Hegemony's Collapse

Did You Know? The ‘Missing’ Star Athlete Peng Shuai Is Not Missing At All

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via Moon of Alabama

The New York Times has falsely claimed that the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai accused her former lover of sexual assault. She did not do that.

In her post on the Chinese website Weibo (English translation) Peng Shuai only lamented that the relation with her old lover had come to an end. She did not accuse him of anything that could be considered an assault. The NYT made that up.

Peng Shuai did write:

Romantic attraction is such a complicated thing that explain it clearly. From that day on, I renewed my love for you. Throughout my time with you after that, purely based on our interactions, you were a very good person, and you treated me well. We talking about recent history, as well as ancient eras. You educated me on so many topics, and we had discussions about economics, politics. We never ran out of things to talk about. We played chess, sang, played table tennis, played pool and also played tennis together. We always had endless fun. It was as if our personalities fit perfectly together.

What an ‘assault’!

Still the Times has continued to wrangle the non-issue into various ‘news’ pieces andeditorials. It is obviously using it to bash China.

On today’s front page we find this nonsense.

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The women’s professional tennis tour announced Wednesday that it was immediately suspending all tournaments in China, including Hong Kong, in response to the disappearance from public life of the tennis star Peng Shuai after she accused a top Communist Party leader of sexual assault.With the move, the Women’s Tennis Association became the only major sports organization to push back against China’s increasingly authoritarian government. Women’s tennis officials made the decision after they were unable to speak directly with Peng after she accused Zhang Gaoli, a former vice premier of China, in social media posts that were quickly deleted.

Peng Shuai did not disappear from public life. She has sent an email to the WTA which asked to respect her privacy. She has posted pictures of herself and video showed her taking part in a public tennis event and going to dinner in a public restaurant. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has held a 30 minute video conference with her and found her well and happily alive.

Despite that the WTA and especially Steve Simon, its chief executive, have instead gone public with the issue and continue to intrude her privacy.

The IOC in contrast has been discrete and has shown respect for Peng Shuai’s privacy. A short clip of their video call was published with her consent.

And today the IOC announced that it had another video call with Peng Shuai:

We share the same concern as many other people and organisations about the well-being and safety of Peng Shuai. This is why, just yesterday, an IOC team held another video call with her. We have offered her wide-ranging support, will stay in regular touch with her, and have already agreed on a personal meeting in January.

Unlike the NYT and loudmouth Steve Simon the IOC knows how to behave itself:

There are different ways to achieve her well-being and safety. We have taken a very human and person-centred approach to her situation. Since she is a three-time Olympian, the IOC is addressing these concerns directly with Chinese sports organisations. We are using “quiet diplomacy” which, given the circumstances and based on the experience of governments and other organisations, is indicated to be the most promising way to proceed effectively in such humanitarian matters.

It is no wonder then that Peng Shuai does not want to talk with the WTA’s Steve Simmon but stays in contact with the IOC.

The IOC again confirms that Peng Shuai is safe and well:

The IOC’s efforts led to a half-hour videoconference with Peng Shuai on 21 November, during which she explained her situation and appeared to be safe and well, given the difficult situation she is in. This was reconfirmed in yesterday’s call. Our human and person-centred approach means that we continue to be concerned about her personal situation and will continue to support her.

If the NYT were a decent paper it would stop its Peng Shuai campaign and delete its false claims of ‘sexual assault’ accusations and the ‘missing’ athlete.

But unfortunately it isn’t.

Current Events

Anti-China Propaganda (Like Anti-Russia) Escalation Signifies US’ Despair

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by Tom Fowdy via RT
Why China’s Uyghurs are back in the headlines
A demonstrator holds a placard as activists demonstrate outside the Colosseum, calling on G20 leaders to boycott the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics due to China’s treatment of Tibet, Uyghur Muslims and Hong Kong, a day before the G20 summit is held in Rome, Italy. © REUTERS / Yara Nardi

After months of silence, the Western media have refocused their attention on the Uyghurs of China’s Xinjiang region. The agenda is simple – to manufacture public consent for a boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a piece for RT pointing out that for the time being, the United States appeared to have shelved the Xinjiang issue – its accusation that China was waging genocide against the Turkic minority group known as the Uyghurs in the far-western province.

I noted that the Biden administration seemed to be strategically limiting confrontation with China, and creating some space for engagement, which resulted in the admittedly frosty Xi-Biden virtual summit last month.

Now that the summit is out of the way, and the Beijing Winter Olympics is on the horizon, it is no coincidence that, after months of silence on Xinjiang, the mainstream media in the West has started pushing new angles and so-called revelations, as well as a number of conspicuous anti-China reports.

In the past week alone, we’ve had attempts to deepen the links of Xi Jinping to the situation in Xinjiang via ‘leaked documents’, accusations that China is developing surveillance tech to target journalists, and a report about China extraditing “Taiwanese nationals” who are accused of fraud in other countries to its own territory.

It should be obvious – except for many it won’t be – that this tidal wave of anti-China propaganda is a deliberately coordinated effort to manufacture consent for a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics and an attempt to humiliate China.

Numerous sources in the media have already suggested that the Biden administration has already decided on a boycott, and others, such as the United Kingdom and Australia, may follow suit. This explains the onslaught of anti-China atrocity propaganda, with much more to come, including the findings of the ‘Uyghur Tribunal’, which are scheduled to be published later this month.

It is pure, unbridled manipulation and political theatre, yet ultimately Western audiences will fall for it in the belief that what they are being fed is the objective, impartial truth on matters of concern.

In reality, it is a form of ‘manufacturing consent’ – a term most famously associated with linguist and media scholar Noam Chomsky, who penned a book of the same name. His essays on the matter are of unparalleled value. He explains to us that manufacturing consent is a construct whereby the US government effectively manipulates and coordinates mass media to replicate its narrative in order to buy public support for aggressive foreign policies under the guise of highlighting issues of “moral concern” – most usually claims of atrocities or other human rights abuses.

Chomsky’s work explores how an army of think tanks, so-called experts, and other mediums are weaponised to establish talking points and set a stage of debate. Such coverage is always strictly according to preference, and deliberately and hypocritically ignores similar abuses or atrocities in other countries.

Why, for example, does the media talk about China, but not Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen? Why does it not demonize Vietnam as a similarly evil communist regime? Yet part of the process is that if the US intended to create a narrative against either country, it could.

This is how it controls public consciousness; the public buy into this because they are taught to believe they are enlightened, and that their ideology represents the ultimate political and moral truth.

Consequently, they assume that when it comes to foreign policy, their governments do not act out of self-interest or deception, but legitimately promote the values they profess to hold against a target demonized through the constant application of atrocity propaganda. They are conditioned to think the mainstream media is independent and impartial and that propaganda is only something adversarial countries do.

In line with this, cherry-picked experts are given a platform to legitimate these claims – such as German anti-communist scholar Adrian Zenz, who has become the constant ‘go-to man’ on Xinjiang – as well as dissidents, and a debate is generated on the grounds of ‘we must do something’, building up to the agenda the government in question wishes to push. For a historical example, see the notorious claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and so the UK and US had to go to war in Iraq.

Despite the level of deception involved in that effort, Western audiences don’t appear to have learned any lessons, and ‘genocide in Xinjiang’ is simply the latest claim periodically weaponised in this way to legitimate various policy goals of the US government.

Xinjiang and the Uyghurs have been an instrumental strategic tool used to reset US policy on China, largely throughout the Trump era – and to push allied countries to do the same. The Xinjiang claims first began appearing in 2018, when the Trump administration unleashed its trade war on Beijing and began to reorient US policy towards competition with China.

Their early usage involved legitimating allegations against Chinese tech companies such as Huawei and Hikvision, to justify sanctions against them. Throughout 2019, the issue was largely frozen in order to sustain trade talks between China and the US. Then in 2020, as the ‘phase one deal’ was completed and Trump sought to go all out against China in view of the election and the pandemic, the Xinjiang story was ramped up again at a greater intensity.

This pattern continued after Trump lost the election in a strategic bid to box Biden in on China, with the legally flawed declaration of ‘genocide’ by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

In its early months, the Biden administration continued to weaponise Xinjiang with a view to setting the scene for its presidency, marshalling allies and undermining China’s Comprehensive Investment Agreement with the EU, before shelving the issue for a period of time. And now it has returned, in a bid to manufacture consent for a diplomatic boycott of the Olympics, which, while largely symbolic and inconsequential, aims to deprive China of attaining any legitimacy from the event.

As just one example of how coordinated and deceitful the whole process is, within moments of the new Xinjiang ‘leaked documents’ being published in the media, you had members of the anti-China group IPACimmediately demanding a boycott in the British Parliament.

Yes, there are human rights problems in the tightly controlled Xinjiang region. It is a strict area of control owing to the legacy of ethnic conflict and terrorism. Beijing has sought to assimilate the Uyghur group in order to secure stability.

The new documents attempt to insinuate that Xi Jinping is complicit by affirming he made comments about assimilation, yet President Emmanuel Macron of France has arguably made harsher arguments for the same thing with regard to French Muslims.

Would the integration of French Muslims ever be characterised as ‘genocide’? The absurdity of this suggestion illustrates how the hysteria of the Xinjiang coverage deliberately omits what is a mixed picture, and ignores the prosperity and opportunity brought to Uyghurs, as well as affirmative action programs the Chinese government runs in their favour. Many Uyghurs are members and officials of the Communist Party.

In which case, the all-out crusade and posturing on the issue of the Uyghurs can be seen as a deliberately deceitful and opportunist act pushed by an American government which has a long and well documented history of waging atrocity propaganda to attract support for its highly aggressive foreign policy, under the guise of self-righteousness.

People should be aware of what is happening and not fall for it again.

Uncategorized

Antibody Neutralizing ALL Covid Variants Found, Chinese Scientists Claim

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via RT

Note from Editor: Is that why Bill Gates now is talking about the smallpox epidemic?

Chinese scientists claim to have isolated an antibody which can effectively neutralize all strains of Covid-19, referencing both lab experiments and those performed on a living organism.

In a study published on Tuesday, Chinese scientists from a variety of institutions, including Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, suggested that they may have the panacea to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The authors claim that monoclonal antibody 35B5 has been shown in both in vitro (laboratory or test-tube experiment) and in vivo (performed on living organism) studies to neutralize wild-type Covid-19 (without mutations) as well as variants of concern (VOCs). The in vivo tests were carried out on humanized mice.

The scientists noted that the antibody also works on the highly mutated Delta variant, which has been responsible for deadly waves of infection around the world since it first emerged in India earlier this year.

“35B5 neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 [Covid-19] by targeting a unique epitope [part of the antigen molecule which the antibody attaches itself to] that avoids the prevailing mutation sites,” the study explains. In other words, 35B5 targets a unique part of the virus that does not change during the mutation process.

By targeting part of the virus which is not impacted by the mutations identified in circulating VOCs, antibody 35B5 demonstrated capacity for “pan-neutralizing efficacy” across multiple strains. These findings, the scientists argue, could be “exploited for the rational design of a universal SARS-CoV-2 [Covid-19] vaccine.”

The part of the antigen targeted by antibody 35B5 is also present in the Omicron variant, the researchers note.

The research could prove particularly valuable amid the spread of Omicron, which is highly mutated. Leaders and scientists around the world are concerned the mutant virus could evade vaccine-induced immunity and immunity gained from previous infection.