Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Is it OK to Deny Medical Treatment to Those Unvaccinated Against Covid?

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R. M. Huffman is a physician, author, and observer of culture.

Some doctors are openly discussing refusal to treat patients who decline, for whatever reason, to get the jab. This would set a dangerous precedent and shatter fundamental tenets of medical practice.

An insidious sentiment has begun metastasizing throughout the United States and Britain, expressed by politicians, pundits, and – most disturbingly – by physicians themselves: that the unvaccinated who contract Covid-19 should be denied medical care.

It gets worse. A former US senator from Missouri, Claire McCaskill, also wants the unvaccinated to have their insurance rates raised. Piers Morgan, the British TV personality, demands to his nearly 8 million Twitter followers that the NHS must refuse them hospital beds. An emergency medical physician in Arizona responds to a video clip of people unmasked in a grocery store with a message, “Let ‘em die”. A liver surgeon at Massachusetts General suggests that declining a Covid vaccine should be treated by doctors as a functional Do Not Intubate/Do Not Resuscitate order.

These are neither private thoughts nor quiet conversations with overworked colleagues: these are calls to action, shared on social media, intended for public consumption.

This should terrify you.

Physicians are translating these verbal assaults into action. Doctors in Florida staged a mock walkout, frustrated that their hospitals are filling up. A North Texas task force was obliged to walk back a proposal to allot ICU beds based on vaccination status rather than need. An Alabama family practitioner is firing all patients who chose not to be vaccinated, whether they were sick or not.

The medical community in the West is teetering on the edge of philosophical malpractice, and for the sake of patients’ present and future, its members must step back and recall why and how we do our jobs.

A fundamental tenet of medical practice is non-maleficence, summed up in the Latin primum non nocere – first, do no harm. In televised remarks on June 2 of this year, President Joe Biden declared of the three available Covid vaccines: “The bottom line is this — I promise you: They are safe. They are safe.” This message has been echoed, without qualification, by powerful entities ranging from hospital administrations mandating staff vaccinations to professional organizations: “The vaccine is safe.”

Let me be clear: I believe vaccination is one of the most important therapeutic innovations in the history of medicine. Vaccines have saved millions upon millions of lives. That said, I also believe that the way these Covid vaccines, with their novel mechanisms of action, have been introduced to the public – as a silver bullet, idiot-if-you-decline, nail-in-the-coronavirus-coffin solution – is disingenuous, hyperbolic, and simply not justified by the existing data.

There are some indications that the vaccines may not be entirely safe to all. VAERS – the United States government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System – suggests that, while adverse events are extremely rare, they include paralysis, inflammation of the heart, blood clots, and death. These have been largely dismissed on the grounds that the VAERS reporting doesn’t establish causation, and that isolated cases – like the BBC presenter who died after she received the jab – aren’t data, and all that’s certainly true.

However, drug therapies, especially novel ones, cannot be treated as “innocent until proven guilty”; rather, all possible adverse events must be thoroughly and formally explored as consequent to the drug, because occasionally the true harm is worse than anyone imagined, as Merck famously discovered with FDA-approved Vioxx back in the early 2000s. Research published in the medical journal Lancet estimated that 88,000 Americans had heart attacks from taking Vioxx, and 38,000 of them died.

There is no evidence at this stage that the Covid vaccinations are anywhere near as dangerous as that. But the medical industry’s general dismissal of their potential dangers, to the point of imposing vaccine mandates on young, healthy populations like those in the US military, betrays its commitment to non-maleficence and will cost lives.

No medical therapy comes without risk, but informed consent – another foundational principle of medicine – demands that even minuscule risk be related accurately to the patient. A tiny percentage doesn’t mean an insignificant number; at least 6,000 (and rising) deaths attributed to voluntary Covid vaccination per VAERS is twice the fatalities from the 9/11 attacks. That cannot be brushed aside with a comment about “statistical significance”.

In perhaps the most irresponsible instance of failure to note risk, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine has declared unequivocally that the “vaccination is safe before, during, or after pregnancy”, knowing full well that no trial has ever been done to thoroughly test that premise.

In medicine, circumstances abound where a negligible risk nevertheless prompts drastic action. Just a handful of reports describing low blood pressure during an operation means that if you’ve taken phentermine, commonly prescribed for weight loss, on the day before elective surgery, your case will almost certainly be canceled. In 2003, the FDA gave the venerable drug droperidol (prescribed to help with nausea and vomiting that are side effects of other drugs) a black box warning, despite more than three decades of wide use without a single case report of confirmed cardiac complications in antiemetic doses.

Any anesthesiologist will include risk of heart attack or stroke in his preoperative discussion with a patient, no matter how many thousands of uneventful anesthetics he or she has given. Doctors have historically been concerned with infinitesimal risk and made concerted efforts to inform and protect the patient accordingly. Our collective failure to do the same in the case with novel Covid-19 vaccines is unconscionable and baffling.

In modern medicine, patient autonomy is sacrosanct. One cannot be given a medical intervention by force; most famously, Jehovah’s Witnesses can refuse blood, even as a lifesaving measure, and a physician ignores that wish at great professional peril.

Covid-19 vaccine decliners are largely painted in media, both traditional and social, as purposefully ignorant, brainwashed by anti-science conspiracy theorists. Such a broad branding doesn’t explain the reticence of a former Pfizer executive, or a cardiologist and internistwho’s authored hundreds of published papers, or thousands of doctors and nurses who’ve been on the front line of the fight against Covid for eighteen months and have seen up close the devastation it can cause.

Real reasons abound: a mistrust borne of witnessing Anthony Fauci and then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams change their positions on television; a recognition that evidence for long-term efficacy is weak and may be decreasing; moral objection to drug therapy developed using cell lines from electively aborted fetuses; a personal evaluation of risks and benefits of vaccine versus Covid based on age and health. Even so, the validity of the reason doesn’t matter. Patient autonomy is to be respected without exception. To do otherwise means to fundamentally change the relationship between patient and physician.

Perhaps we should change it, though. Never mind that nobody seeks out Covid, or that their “risky behavior” simply entails normal activities of daily life, or that questions about vaccine safety are building. Perhaps if a person’s decisions are judged by the medical industry to be irresponsible and unsafe, that should preclude care, freeing up resources – beds, money, doctors’ time – for patients who actually demonstrate concern for their own health.

Imagine the precedent that would set, though. The disease burden of the Western world is largely predicated on bad patient habits, mainly tobacco use, alcohol abuse, and caloric overconsumption and sedentary lifestyle leading to widespread obesity (with a rate in the US of 42% and climbing). These cost the taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars yearly, soaking up enormous resources, and – if the habits aren’t changed – will ultimately render care futile, to be temporizing measures at best.

One might counter that these behaviors don’t affect others, unlike failing to protect against a communicable disease. Ignoring the fact that Covid vaccines are non-sterilizing and aren’t proof against transmission: will we apply that standard to gay men with AIDS? To intravenous drug users with hepatitis C? To sex workers with STDs? To drunk drivers who cause fatal car wrecks? Once medical caregivers declare themselves arbiters of who deserves treatment, there exists no principle that limits such self-appointment to “but only unvaccinated Covid patients, and just for now.” It’s a horrifying prospect.

For physicians, nurses, and everyone involved in delivering medical care, what we must do is simple: treat the patient. Treat the vasculopath getting his sixth bypass and still smoking two packs a day. Treat the chronic pain patient who weighs three times what her skeleton was designed to support. Treat the gangbanger who broke his wrist fleeing from police and crashing into a family of five, killing four of them. Treat the drunk with a blood alcohol concentration of .441, back in the ER yet again. Treat the man who shoved a flashlight so far up his colon that he has to have an operation to remove it. Treat them all with the same excellent care you’d provide to anyone else.

And treat the unvaccinated in the same way you treat the vaccinated.

I have, and will continue to do so.

We provide care based on need, not our own perception of who’s deserving of it. Shake your head clear of the fog of frustration that’s drifted up over the course of the Covid pandemic. Remember why you chose this thankless, difficult, honorable profession. Do your job.

And if you can’t, please, please go do something else.

On the Road to Serfdom ?

The Orwellian Vaccine Passport Agenda Relies On The Lie Of The “Social Contract”

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Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

There is a fundamental question that needs to be asked when examining the vaccine passport issue, and what I find is that almost no one in the mainstream is tackling it directly. The question is this:

Is it legally and morally acceptable to constrict the rights and economic access of people in order to force them to submit to an experimental “vaccine”, or any other medical procedure for that matter?

Furthermore, who gets to decide what medical procedures are acceptable to enforce? Who gets to be the all powerful and benevolent overseer of every human being’s health path. I ask this because I don’t think many people realize the future repercussions of allowing governments or corporations (the same thing these days) to dictate covid vaccinations. It doesn’t stop there; in fact, we have no idea where this stops once the Pandora’s box is opened.

For example, the primary argument of the covid cult and the establishment in favor of vaccine passports is the “social contract” fantasy. They claim that because we “live in a society”, everything we do affects everyone else in some way, and because we are all interconnected in our “collective” we are thus beholden to the collective. In other words, the collective has the “right” to micro-manage the life of the individual because if the individual is allowed to make his/her own decisions they might potentially cause harm to the whole group.

In case you are not familiar with this philosophy it is an extension of socialism and cultural Marxism, and it stands at the very core of vaccine passport propaganda. I have actually had public debates with pro-socialist people in the past who have tried to defend the merits of socialism and every single time the argument comes down to one singular disconnect – I say that if a group of people want to go off and start their own little socialist community they have every right to…as long as it is VOLUNTARY. Then if it fails and collapses it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t affect me or anyone else who did not want to participate.

The problem is that these Socialists/communists/Marxists/collectivists simply do not grasp the notion of voluntarism. They believe that people need to be forced into doing the right thing or helping others, and they are the people that get to decide what the right thing is and who gets the help. They are the people that get to decide what freedoms are acceptable and what freedoms are inconvenient to their agenda. When they say “We live in a society…”, what they really mean is “You live in OUR society, and WE will determine what is best for you.”

When I argue that a socialist community should be voluntary, they inevitably argue that people will not commit to such a system voluntarily so they must be forced to do what is best for the “greater good”.

In terms of vaccine passports, the collectivist social contract is a key element. They claim that being unvaxxed is not a personal freedom because the unvaxxed are a risk to the lives of everyone else. The social contract is therefore violated because by making a personal life choice you are endangering the rights of others.

It’s interesting though how the covid cult is made up of people that do not apply the same logic to other health issues like abortion. I mean, there is zero substantiated evidence to support the claim that unvaccinated people are any more of a threat to the lives of others than vaccinated people are, and we will get into that in just a moment. But, when we talk about an abortion, we are talking about a personal medical decision that leads to the direct and observable death of another innocent human being with his/her own rights. Abortions end the lives of over 800,000 unborn people per year in the US, far more than covid supposedly does.

“My body my choice” apparently only applies to killing babies, but not to people who do not want to become guinea pigs for a mRNA cocktail with no long term testing to prove its safety.

Imagine though if we reversed the scenario and applied the broad social contract argument to something like children and population? A collectivist/leftist member of the global warming cult could also argue that abortion should be legally mandated, because having a child or “too many children” increases carbon emissions and this puts society “at risk” even further (again, with no proof to support the claim). By allowing the social contract narrative to go unchecked, we open the door to horrific new oppressive measures and a complete erasure of our autonomy.

I think it’s safe to say that the “social contract” ideology is highly selective and hypocritical. The covid cult does not care about saving lives, they only care about their ideological narrative and the power to make people submit to it. But let’s dig even further into the reasoning behind the social contract claim. Who is actually dying because of unvaccinated individuals, which according to state vax statistics make up around 50% of the US population?

The average Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of covid is a mere 0.26% according to dozens of studies and the government’s own numbers. Meaning, unvaxxed people are not even a remote threat to 99.7% of the population. Around 40% of all covid deaths are made up of people in nursing homes with preexisting conditions, which means that we do not know if they actually died of covid or due to the health problems they were already suffering from. The pool of people who might be affected by the unvaxxed grows smaller and smaller…

And what about the ridiculous contradiction that arises when we talk about the mandate narrative verses the passport narrative? If masks and vaccines actually work, then how is an unvaxxed or unmasked person a threat to a vaxxed person? If the vaccines and masks don’t work, then why use them at all, and why demand forced vaccinations through passport measures?

Mainstream propaganda asserts that the unvaxxed will somehow become petri dishes for new mutations that will harm vaccinated people. There is no evidence to support this claim. In fact, there is more evidence that suggests it is vaccinated people that will trigger mutations and variants. The media says that this is not cause for any concern, but if it’s not then neither should we be concerned about mutations that gestate in the unvaxxed population, if there are any.

The fact of the matter is that more and more scientific evidence is proving that the experimental vaccines are NOT effective and that the unvaxxed are actually safer from covid regardless of the variant or mutation.

The true infection numbers within the US are impossible to know because up to 59% of people that catch covid and spread it are asymptomatic according to the CDC. They never know that they have it so they are unlikely to test for it. That said, it is clear that many millions of Americans have dealt with the virus and now have a natural immunity to it (I happen to be one of them). Establishment elitists like Anthony Fauci refuse to acknowledge natural immunity as a factor, and they say that ONLY people who are vaccinated are qualified to receive a passport. Why?

Multiple studies are being released from countries with high vaccination rates like Israel that completely contradict Fauci’s narrative on natural immunity. Israel has a vax rate of around 63% according to government stats, but scientific evidence they have released shows that vaccinated people are 13-27 times more likely to contract covid and 8 times more likely to be hospitalized when compared with people who have natural immunity. It almost appears as if the mRNA vaccines make people MORE susceptible to the virus rather than less susceptible.

Recent data released from the state of Massachusetts supports this concern. In the month of July, MA reported at least 5100 covid infections, all people who were fully vaccinated. Over 80 of them died, which is a much higher death rate than among the unvaccinated. In my county of 20,000 people, which has a low vaccination rate and no mask mandates, there were only 17 total covid deaths in the first year year of the pandemic.

This begs the question: Why take the mRNA cocktail at all? What is there to gain? Well, there is nothing to gain in terms of health safety. Even if you happen to be part of the 0.26% of people at risk from covid, you are better off in the long run taking your chances with natural immunity than getting the jab.

The answer to the question is not about health, but about denial of access. Government’s and their corporate partners are trying to make it so you MUST take the vaccine in order to participate in normal social activities, or even to keep a job. Not only that, but the process goes on forever because every year there will be new variants and new booster shots. The only reason to take the vaccine is to keep at least a handful of your freedoms and to avoid poverty and starvation.

Here is where we must go back to the original query presented at the beginning of this article:

Is it legally and morally acceptable to constrict the rights and economic access of people in order to force them to submit to an experimental “vaccine”?

The covid cult will say that private business rights trump individual rights so companies should be allowed to discriminate against employees based on their vaccination status. But then again, what we are facing in most cases are NOT private businesses but conglomerates that are funded by government bailouts and that are colluding directing with governments to enforce the passport agenda. So I would have to say no, these businesses do not have a legal right to feed on public tax dollars and then claim they are private entities that have the freedom to invade the medical privacy of employees and customers.

And since when do collectivists actually care about private business rights, anyway? More hypocrisy…

If we are talking about small and medium business with no government stimulus then the issue gets more tricky. In many states and other countries the businesses are only enforcing passports because if they don’t they will be punished by the government. In this case the private business rights argument goes out the window. The covid cult respects business independence only when it suits them.

Frankly, it is small businesses that are being hurt the most by the covid mandates and the extra costs involved just in enforcing the passports in their own establishments is going to bury them. Any small business owner that voluntarily supports the passport rules must have a financial death wish.

In terms of government, the covid cult will claim that there are Supreme Court precedents for legal enforcement of vaccinations. Honestly, I don’t care, and neither do millions of other Americans. A bunch of high priests in black robes do not get to dictate my independent health decisions; I make those decisions and there’s nothing that they can do about it. This is where we have to come to terms with the morals and principles involved – The lives of others are in no way affected by my decision to refuse to comply with vaccine passports. And just because a group of people have irrational fears about the threat of covid does not mean people with more discernment about the facts should be required to make them “feel better” or feel safer.

The bottom line is this: Our freedoms are more important than your paranoid fears, and we will not comply. We do not subscribe to your false social contract, and you are in no position to dictate the terms of our “society”. Don’t like it? You are more than welcome to leave the country and start a vaccinated Utopia somewhere else. We’ll see how that works out for you in the long run.

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Australia Goes Fully Lunatic

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Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

The government of South Australia is running a trial for a system that could eventually force citizens to take a photo of themselves via a government app to report their location on demand within 15 minutes of authorities requesting it, or face a police investigation.

Yes, really.

The revelation was highlighted in an Atlantic piece by Conor Friedersdorf which questions whether Australia can still call itself a liberal democracy in light of the crippling restrictions it has placed on its own population.

With no end in sight for the lifting of the country’s brutal lockdown, Aussies could face even more invasive state intrusion into their private lives under the justification of stopping the spread of the virus.

The South Australian government is preparing to roll out an app that “will contact people at random asking them to provide proof of their location within 15 minutes,” according to reports.

If people refuse to report their location or are unable to do so, police are then dispatched to hunt them down.

“We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,”said Premier Steven Marshall.

This is barely much different from literally fitting people with electronic ankle bracelets that track their every movement like prisoners under home arrest, a policy that was actually considered by Australian authorities earlier this year.

From the The Atlantic:

Intrastate travel within Australia is also severely restricted. And the government of South Australia, one of the country’s six states, developed and is now testing an app as Orwellian as any in the free world to enforce its quarantine rules. People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”

. “No matter your views of COVID, what’s happening in Australia is alarming, extreme and dangerous,”remarked journalist Glenn Greenwald.

As we have exhaustively highlighted, Australia has enforced one of the most draconian lockdowns in the world in an effort to pursue a disastrous ‘zero COVID’ strategy.

Last month, the Premier of Victoria asserted that authorities “won’t hesitate” to go “door-to-door” to carry out mandatory COVID tests on Australians.

Aussies were also ordered not to talk to each other, even while wearing masks, while people who merely post anti-lockdown information online could also face fines of up to $11,000 dollars under an absurdly authoritarian new law.

Capitalism in Decay

Michael Hudson v. George Soros on China’s Rejection of “Market” Capitalism

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by Yves Smith via Naked Capitalism

Earlier this week, the Financial Times posted a comment by famed investor George Soros, Investors in Xi’s China face a rude awakening. This article would have been very useful if it had stuck to its headline warning, which is more or less along the lines that Xi has made very clear that he’s not going to allow investors, above all foreign investors, to exercise more influence in Chinese business and society.

However, Soros then goes on in a vein that the article subhead accurately summarizes: “The leader’s crackdown on private enterprise shows he does not understand the market economy.” Oh, contraire, China’s success has been built on learning from the mistakes of other Asian countries that developed quickly but then fell prey to financialization, particularly Japan, and had difficulties making the transition from being export and investment led to consumption led.

In particularly, Soros is cheesed off at Xi restricting foreign investment, particularly in stocks. First, China is a capital exporter. It doesn’t need foreign funds. Second, despite the Anglopshere idealization of public stock markets, China doesn’t need one either, although getting rid of the one it has now would be messy and very disruptive.

As Amar Bhide pointed out in a landmark Harvard Business Review article, Efficient Markets, Deficient Governance, anonymous, freely traded shares inherently lead to poor governance. Public companies cannot share critical business information that investors need to make informed decisions. Transient shareholders also lack the motivation and means to improve the performance of the companies they’ve invested in. Bhide has pointed out in other venues that while all other types of investments, such as derivatives and venture capital, existed in pre-modern times, arms length share trading did not because stock is a legally vague and weak promise.

And despite the idealization of share ownership, it’s almost entirely divorced from the funding of business. The most important source for new investment is retained earnings. Second is borrowing. Share sales are a distant third. The overwhelming majority of stock trading is shuffling paper among investors.

The most charitable interpretation of Soros’ position is that he suffers from a China version of the saying attributed to Charles Wilson, “What’s good for GM is good for America,” which here becomes, “What’s good for people like me of course is good for China.” Except as Michael Hudson explains, it isn’t.

Below are sections of the Soros article, with Hudson’s remarks in bold italics:

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has collided with economic reality. His crackdown on private enterprise [what the classical economists called rent-seeking and unearned income] has been a significant drag on the economy [meaning the economy’s polarization concentrating wealth and income in the hands of the richest One Percent]. The most vulnerable sector is real estate, particularly housing. China has enjoyed an extended property boom over the past two decades, but that is now coming to an end. Evergrande, the largest real estate company, is over-indebted and in danger of default. This could cause a crash. [That’s just what is needed.]

….One of the reasons why middle-class families are unwilling to have more than one child is that they want to make sure that their children will have a bright future. [This is true of every advanced nation today. It is most extreme in the neoliberalized countries, e.g., the Baltics and Ukraine – Soros’s poster countries.]

We have skipped over Xi’s crackdown on the private tutoring industry…as if tutoring is essential to providing for security and an adequate standard of living for the next generation. How about strong public education, including remedial and advanced tracks, and vocational/technical training for those not bound to universities?

Back to Soros and Hudson:

Xi does not understand how markets operate [meaning that he rejects rapacious rent-seeking, exploitative free-for-all, and shapes markets to serve overall prosperity for China’s 99 Percent]. As a consequence, the sell-off was allowed to go too far [by which he means, too far to maintain the dominance of the One Percent; it seeks to reverse economic polarization, not intensify it]. It began to hurt China’s objectives in the world [meaning America’s neoliberal objectives for how it had hoped to make money for itself off China].

Recognising this, Chinese financial authorities have gone out of their way to reassure foreign investors and markets have responded with a powerful rally. But that is a deception. Xi regards all Chinese companies as instruments of a one-party state…

Pension fund managers allocate their assets in ways that are closely aligned with the benchmarks against which their performance is measured. [The tragedy of financializing pensions is that fund managers are rated on making money financially – in ways that hurt the industrial economy by promoting financial engineering instead of industrial engineering.]

Almost all of them claim that they factor environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) standards into their investment decisions. [At least, that’s what their public relations advisors advertise. Exxon claims to be cleaning up the environment by expanding offshore oil drilling in Guyana, etc. As for “social standards,” the neoliberal mantra is trickle-down economics: by making our stock prices rise, by stock buybacks and higher dividend payouts, we are helping wage-earners earn a pension, even though we are offshoring and de-industrializing the economy, de-unionizing it and “freeing” the economy from consumer and workplace protection laws.]

….The US Congress should pass a bipartisan bill explicitly requiring that asset managers invest only in companies where actual governance structures are both transparent and aligned with stakeholders. [Wow. Such a bill would block Americans from investing in many American companies whose behavior is not at all aligned with stakeholders. What proportion: 50%? 75%? More?] This rule should obviously apply to the performance benchmarks selected by pensions and other retirement portfolios.

If Congress were to enact these measures, it would give the Securities and Exchange Commission the tools it needs to protect American investors, including those who are unaware of owning Chinese stocks and Chinese shell companies. That would also serve the interests of the US and the wider international community of democracies. [So Mr. Soros wants to block the US from investing in China. That is President Xi’s objective also: China doesn’t need U.S. dollars, and is in fact de-dollarizing.]

There are a lot of reasons to criticize Xi and the Chinese regimes, but combatting foreign influence and a bit late in the game pushing back against high levels of inequality are not among them.

And Soros presents himself as having superior insight into China, and then acts as if an American strike on Chinese public companies would dent them. Good luck with that.

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Anger, Frustration at FDA Over Biden’s Booster Plan; Two Top Regulators Resign

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by Beth Mole via : ARS Technica

The US Food and Drug Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland

Two top vaccine regulators have resigned from the Food and Drug Administration, revealing anger, frustration, and turmoil at the federal agency as it faces intensifying pressure to authorize COVID-19 vaccine booster shots and doses for children under the age of 12.

The two regulators leaving are Marion Gruber, director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review (OVRR), and OVRR Deputy Director Phil Krause. Gruber has been with the FDA for more than 30 years, and Krause has been at the agency for more than a decade.

Their resignations, first reported by pharmaceutical trade publication BioCentury, were apparently sparked by frustration that the Biden administration had overstepped the FDA in announcing plans to offer COVID-19 booster shots beginning on September 20. The pair also clashed with higher-up Peter Marks, who reportedly went along with the administration’s plans. Marks is the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), which includes the OVRR.

Marks announced the two resignations in a letter sent to FDA staff. Gruber’s planned departure on October 31 is a “huge loss” for the agency, Marks wrote. Krause, who will depart in November, played a “key role in our interactions to address critical vaccine-related issues,” he added. The letter was published in full by biopharmaceutical outlet Endpoints News.

Regulatory rebellion

As news spread of the high-profile resignations, current and former FDA regulators were quick to reveal growing tensions coming from some in the agency who see the Biden administration’s booster plan as premature, unnecessary, and out of step with regulators’ opinions. Politico, which spoke with 11 former and current health officials, described the situation at the FDA as a “potential mutiny” among agency staff and outside vaccine experts.

Adding to the tension, the upheaval at the FDA comes as parents, caregivers, and teachers anxiously look to the agency to expeditiously review and authorize COVID-19 vaccine doses for young children, who are filling hospitals at higher rates than ever before during the pandemic.

In a memo sent to CBER staff Tuesday, acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock tried to bring calm to the agency and ease concerns of interference. “These are difficult times, requiring extraordinary effort, and I want to take the opportunity to once again thank you for your perseverance and dedication,” she wrote. “The issues are complex and the days are long, but please know the work you all have done to date and will continue to do in the days, weeks, and months ahead will hopefully one day allow us to fully put COVID-19 behind us and better prepare us for future challenges.”

Likewise, in a White House press briefing Tuesday, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients called the FDA’s work the “gold standard.” He defended the booster decision, saying the announcement was made merely to stay ahead of the virus, prepare Americans for an additional dose, and allow vaccine providers time to plan. The administration has “also been very clear throughout that this is pending FDA conducting an independent evaluation and CDC’s panel of outside experts issuing a booster dose recommendation,” Zients said. He also noted that acting FDA Commissioner Woodcock was involved in the decision to offer boosters.

Eastern Europe Awakening

Isn’t It Time to Finally Stop Using the Term ‘Post-Soviet’?

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By Paula Erizanu via Calvert Journal

On paper, the term post-Soviet manifests in the image of a lone concrete bus stop on a windblown steppe or the harsh lines of a decaying brutalist tower block. The phrase itself has been around since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, but culturally, it pinpoints a specific moment in the 2010s: when the likes of Russian fashion designer Gosha Rubchinskiy burst onto the catwalk with streetwear collections dripping in Soviet references. Rubchinskiy’s very first fashion collection, 2008’s Empire of Evil, riffed on US President Ronald Reagan’s infamous Cold War-era speech, which condemned the Soviet Union’s “totalitarian darkness”. The designer was just one of many creatives and brands attempting to capture Eastern Europe as “poor but sexy”: fetishising the Soviet dream — rather than its reality — while capturing its own unique street culture.

Yet although it is a touchstone in the West, the term “post-Soviet” is rarely used in the 15 independent countries that once made up the former USSR. Despite a seven decade-long attempt to create a single “Soviet people”, almost all of the countries that gained their independence in 1990 and 1991 re-embraced their formerly suppressed national identities. Today, they are simply very different countries: from digital-first EU-member state Estonia, to isolated, one-party dictatorship Turkmenistan. New borders put a halt to the cultural exchanges and communication that linked these states during the Soviet era. Although some countries remain closer than others, it is globalisation and the internet that now forge artistic and creative connections in eastern Europe and Central Asia. Today, Moldovans are likely to know more about American culture than about developments in the neighbouring Ukraine — not to mention “far away” places like Kazakhstan.

Thirty years on from the fall of the USSR, it’s contentious whether we should be using the term “post-Soviet” to refer to these countries at all. The phrase might have been appropriate to understand these young states in 1995, when they were navigating the route from the socialist Soviet empire to independent, capitalist nations. But the wild 90s are long over — and all of these countries have transformed into new and very different entities. Does it still provide any key insights, or is it time to drop the term?

For many, perhaps the greatest issue with the term “post-Soviet” is its little-acknowledged imperialist undertones. Despite asserting itself as an internationalist project with equal republics, the Soviet Union continued the imperialist aggression of Tsarist Russia, from its invasion of the socialist democratic Georgia in 1921, to the occupation of the Baltic countries and my own native Moldova (then known as Bessarabia) during the Second World War. These annexations were swiftly followed by forced Russification, state-organised famines, countless deportations, and ethnic engineering, paired with a centralised industrialisation plan. In my own family, my grandfather, living in a northern Moldovan village, lost both his father and three of his siblings to famine in 1946-1947: newly-installed communist party representatives came into their house and cleared crops stored for the winter in order to send them elsewhere. Our story is not unique — there are countless such family stories across Moldova and Ukraine. Amid this pain, slowly yet insidiously, individual national cultures were also steamrollered. Local intelligentsia were executed, while artists were expected to conform to Moscow’s vision.

While Western empires are starting to be held accountable for their colonial past, Russia has barely acknowledged its imperialism as a source of oppression for other people. On the contrary, the Kremlin celebrates the Soviet past as proof of Russia’s role as a great power, whether by promoting a one-sided view of the Second World War as the “Great War for the Defense of the Fatherland”, or reviving the cult of Stalin. The term “post-Soviet” perpetually links countries that were once part of the USSR back to their former oppressor, stopping them from reclaiming their own identities.

“What we call the ‘post-Soviet legacy’ often takes roots in Russian domination before the Soviet time,” Ukrainian journalist, Maksim Eristavi, tells me. Born in Zaporizhzhya, an industrial town in eastern Ukraine, bordering Donbas, the 35-year-old says that researching western empires across the world helped him understand “post-Soviet” conflicts, such as the ongoing fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in Donbas as a “colonial” war. “Russian colonialism has had different stages, but they still share one DNA.”

“I am technically part of the first “post-Soviet” generation. But I would never use that term to self-identify”

Born during the 1992 Russo-Moldovan war in Transnistria — whose bombs my mother could hear from the maternity ward in Chișinău — I am technically part of the first “post-Soviet” generation. But I would never use that term to self-identify, despite my curiosity over Soviet history. I feel Moldovan and Romanian, the latter representing the pre-Soviet heritage of Moldovans, which was suppressed during the USSR. While I feel connected to Eastern European culture more generally, Romanian is my native tongue; it is Romanian culture, as it is expressed in Moldova, which primarily formed me. Western and Russian cultural influences are also widely felt, to different degrees, through music, media, and religion. But, like Eristavi says, it is Russian rather than Soviet influence that had dominated Moldova through the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, since the 1990s.

Ensuring that a country has a strong “post-Soviet” identity has also been a way for Russia to maintain power over its former colonies. One such example is the breakaway republic of Transnistria, which became part of the USSR in 1924 — 20 years before the rest of Moldova. Today, the region clings to a vision of itself which is very much focused on its Soviet past. Monuments dating back to the former regime are omnipresent. Soviet-era language policies also have a very real contemporary impact. During the Soviet era, officials banned Romanian books in Moldova, changed the country’s alphabet from Latin to Cyrillic, and promoted the idea that Moldovans spoke a separate, “Moldovan” language rather than Romanian. Today, despite the fact that Transnistria’s population is a third Ukrainian, a third Russian, and a third Romanian, the lingua franca there is Russian, and Romanian-language schools are constantly harassed by the breakaway government in Tiraspol. Censorship and authoritarianism are still strong, perpetuating close ties with Moscow and animosity towards Chișinău. Russian troops remain in Transnistria to this day, despite the fact that the Kremlin signed international treaties to withdraw them.

Yet for some generations formed during the Soviet era, the term “post-Soviet” still bears relevance and personal meaning: as an important cultural influence, career set up, and as a turning point in their lives. Uzbek novelist and poet Hamid Ismailov was born in 1954 in Tokmok, in Soviet Kyrgyzstan. He believes that all people who lived in the USSR as adults are, by definition, post-Soviet. “Until people like myself, who lived in the Soviet Union, are still alive, we are ‘post-Soviet’, because part of us is Soviet,” he says. “We might hate it but we lived through it and our life will be dictated by our Soviet heritage anyway. When we die, the term will completely disappear.” This lived experience means that Soviet culture and the Soviet system inevitably informs their creative work, whether that is in the shared humour and references from Soviet-era comedies, or the traumas of totalitarianism and censorship.

Indeed, one of the major themes linking and uniting artists from across the former Soviet space is dealing with the baggage that imperialism and oppression left behind. In its bid to create “homo Sovieticus” — a new “Soviet people” — communist officials would often repress “bourgeois” or “national” cultures. Today, scores of artists are working to reclaim this long repressed heritage, whether in fabrics, fashion and photography, like Belarusian Masha Maroz, or in painstakingly-engineered collages, like Kazakhstani artist Saule Suleimenova. In many ways, it is this work that has become a real “post-Soviet” — or rather, “post-colonial” — cultural project, rather than any streetwear show.

Even Ismailov, however, warns that the term “post-Soviet” can be misleading. Within his generation, people will often have a Soviet identity in addition to their Uzbek, Estonian, or Ukrainian one rather than a pan-regional “post-Soviet” heritage. “Compare the Baltic states, for example, to Central Asian countries: there are gradations in how Soviet these places remain today,” he says. “The further we go into the future, the more different these countries will become.”

Of the 15 countries that once made up the USSR, perhaps Russia is the only country still fully embracing its Soviet heritage. To a large extent, identifying as the inheritor of the Soviet Union is serving the Kremlin’s narrative of Russia as a great power. The cultural legacy of the Soviet Union can be felt in the censorship of films and book covers that challenge Soviet-era narratives, the rise of the cult of Stalin, or the show trials of cultural figures. Yet, ironically, the term “post-Soviet” itself does not get embraced by the Kremlin’s cultural — or political — circles. Instead, it gets used by young Russian urbanites who are at odds with the authoritarian climate of their country and use the term “post-Soviet” as a “cooler” way to mean contemporary Russian, explains Russian artist Anna Engelhardt.

Soviet imperialism is also shaping modern Russian culture in other, less obvious ways, and very differently to their unequal partners across Central Asia and eastern Europe. Just like in the West, where families from formerly colonised states came to London or Paris to seek better opportunities, millions of people from former Soviet republics migrated to Russia after the fall of the USSR. “It’s like a divorce in a patriarchal family,” Ismailov says. “Initially you think the divorce is between the husband and wife but there are kids, a house, this and that — it’s much more complicated. If you have used and abused colonies, then these colonies will require payback [of some kind].”

This migration is now leaving a mark on Russia’s cultural scene. Tajik-born singer-songwriter Manizha represented Russia at the 2021 Eurovision performance. Her track, Russian Woman, promoted an inclusive, multi-racial, feminist take on Russian womanhood — and yet she was targeted for xenophobic attacks. Uzbek-Korean designer J.Kim produces blistering collections from her base in Moscow. Zine Agasshin is at the cutting-edge of Russian beauty, and caters exclusively for people of colour. Russia’s non-Slavic minorities, also long maligned by the Soviet authorities are making their presence felt anew. In literature, too, Moscow-born Alisa Ganieva and Kazan-born Guzel Yakhina, reflect on their Dagestani and Tatar heritage to great success on the Russian literary scene.

The question remains as to how much of this trend should be defined as a post-colonial legacy, a post-Soviet legacy, or both. The conversation is complicated by the fact that discussing post-colonialism remains taboo in Russia. “Figures like Manizha and Tatarka tackle issues of cultural representation, which is important,” says Engelhardt, “but they don’t engage with the role of the state in perpetuating this colonialism. As soon as you discuss racism, colonialism, and orientalism while living in Russia and not abroad, it becomes dangerous.” Engelhardt focuses on Russian colonial practices in her art, but works under an alias for safety reasons. She learnt at school that Russian imperialism had stopped in the 19th century, and that the Soviet Union liberated indigenous peoples — leaving her and her friends in shock when conflicts such as those in Chechnya and Donbas broke out.

Her work has led her to avoid the term “post-Soviet” and to urge others instead to be more specific in their language when talking about the problems and identities of individual countries. But she would also like to see a change in how we see and use the word “Soviet” itself. Ideally, she says, the world would not see the Soviet Union first and foremost as an ideological project that “fell apart” due to economic woe, but also as a colonial empire that many peoples fought to topple — indeed, in my native Moldova, the process that led to the country’s secession from the USSR is called “the national liberation movement”.

Of course, any push for specificity will throw into harsh light one of the reasons why the term “post-Soviet” has become so ubiquitous in the cultural sphere: global inertia and ignorance. Eastern Europe and Central Asia is still a part of the world that many reporters, critics, and curators know little about, pushing many to cling to the wide, comforting strokes of all-encompassing terminology. Correcting this lack of knowledge is the main mission behind The Calvert Journal, although we know that the term we use to refer to the region as a whole — the New East — is not without its problems.

Ultimately, while the term “post-Soviet” lingers, we need to acknowledge that many of the people celebrating 30 years of independence from the USSR are also marking an anti-imperialist struggle.

While acknowledging the Soviet past, “post-Soviet” conceals the ongoing struggles of former republics, and their pre-Soviet heritage and history. More importantly, the phrase is a burden which holds nations back while trying to shape their own different presents and future. Thirty years following independence, it’s time to drop the use of this term to a minimum — and see each of these 15 independent countries on their own terms.

Western Hegemony's Collapse

The Revengeful Suffering Orchestrated by the American Empire on Afghans Will be of Biblical Proportions

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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and host of RT’s On Contact, a weekly interview series on US foreign policy, economic realities and civil liberties in American society. He’s the author of 14 books, including several New York Times best-sellers.

Wounded women arrive at a hospital for treatment after two blasts, which killed at least five and wounded a dozen, outside the airport in Kabul on August 26, 2021. © Wakil KOHSAR / AFP

Washington, humiliated in Afghanistan as it was in Iraq, Syria, and Vietnam, is blind to its declining strength, ineptitude, and savagery, but still capable of murderous retribution against those who expose these truths.

The Carthaginian general Hannibal, who came close to defeating the Roman Republic in the Second Punic War, committed suicide in 181 BC in exile as Roman soldiers closed in on his residence in the Bithynian village of Libyssa, now modern-day Turkey. It had been more than thirty years since he led his army across the Alps and annihilated Roman legions at the Battle of Trebia, Lake Trasimene, and Cannae. Considered one of the most brilliant tactical victories in warfare, centuries later it inspired the plans of the German Army Command in World War I when they invaded Belgium and France. Rome was only able to finally save itself from defeat by replicating Hannibal’s military tactics.

It did not matter in 181 BC that there had been over 20 Roman consuls (with quasi-imperial power) since Hannibal’s invasion. It did not matter that Hannibal had been hunted for decades and forced to perpetually flee, always just beyond the reach of Roman authorities. He had humiliated Rome. He had punctured its myth of omnipotence. And he would pay. With his life. Years after Hannibal was gone, the Romans were still not satisfied. They finished their work of apocalyptic vengeance in 146 BC by razing Carthage to the ground and selling its remaining population into slavery. Cato the Censor summed up the sentiments of empire: Carthāgō dēlenda est (Carthage must be destroyed). Nothing about empire, from then until now, has changed.

Imperial powers do not forgive those who expose their weaknesses or make public the sordid and immoral inner workings of empire. Empires are fragile constructions. Their power is as much one of perception as of military strength. The virtues they claim to uphold and defend, usually in the name of their superior civilization, are a mask for pillage, the exploitation of cheap labor, indiscriminate violence, and state terror.

The current American empire, damaged and humiliated by the troves of internal documents published by WikiLeaks, will, for this reason, persecute Julian Assange for the rest of his life. It does not matter who is president or which political party is in power. Imperialists speak with one voice. The killing of thirteen US troops by a suicide bomber at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday evoked from Joe Biden the full-throated cry of all imperialists: “To those who carried out this attack … we will not forgive, we will not forget, we will hunt you down and make you pay.” This was swiftly followed by two drone strikes in Kabul against suspected members of the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K), which took credit for the suicide bombing that left some 170 dead, including 28 members of the Taliban.

The Taliban, which defeated US and coalition forces in a 20-year war, is about to be confronted with the wrath of a wounded empire. The Cuban, Vietnamese, Iranian, Venezuelan, and Haitian governments know what comes next. The ghosts of Toussaint Louverture, Emilio Aguinaldo, Mohammad Mossadegh, Jacobo Arbenz, Omar Torrijos, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Juan Velasco, Salvador Allende, Andreas Papandreou, Juan Bosh, Patrice Lumumba, and Hugo Chavez know what comes next. It isn’t pretty. It will be paid for by the poorest and most vulnerable Afghans.

The faux pity for the Afghan people, which has defined the coverage of the desperate collaborators with the US and coalition occupying forces and educated elites fleeing to the Kabul airport, begins and ends with the plight of the evacuees. There were few tears shed for the families routinely terrorized by coalition forces, or the some 70,000 civilians who were obliterated by US air strikes, drone attacks, missiles, and artillery, or gunned down by nervous occupying forces who saw every Afghan, with some justification, as the enemy during the war. And there will be few tears for the humanitarian catastrophe the empire is orchestrating on the 38 million Afghans, who live in one of the poorest and most aid-dependent countries in the world.

Since the 2001 invasion, the United States deployed about 775,000 military personnel to subdue Afghanistan and poured $143 billion into the country, with 60 percent of the money going to prop up the corrupt Afghan military and the rest devoted to funding economic development projects, aid programs, and anti-drug initiatives – with the bulk of those funds being siphoned off by foreign aid groups, private contractors, and outside consultants.

Grants from the United States and other countries accounted for 75 percent of the Afghan government budget. That assistance has evaporated. Afghanistan’s reserves and other financial accounts have been frozen, meaning the new government cannot access some $9.5 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan central bank. Shipments of cash to Afghanistan have been stopped. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced that Afghanistan will no longer be able to access the lender’s resources.

Things are already dire. There are some 14 million Afghans – one in three – who lack sufficient food. There are two million Afghan children who are malnourished. There are 3.5 million people in Afghanistan who have been displaced from their homes. The war has wrecked infrastructure. A drought destroyed 40 percent of the nation’s crops last year. The assault on the Afghan economy is already seeing food prices skyrocket. The sanctions and severance of aid will force civil servants to go without salaries, and the health service, already chronically short of medicine and equipment, will collapse. The suffering orchestrated by the empire will be of biblical proportions. And this is what the empire wants.

UNICEF estimates that 500,000 children were killed as a direct result of sanctions on Iraq. Expect child deaths in Afghanistan to soar above that horrifying figure. And expect the same imperial heartlessness Madeleine Albright, then the US ambassador to the United Nations, exhibited when she told ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent Lesley Stahl that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children because of the sanctions were “worth it.” Or the heartlessness of Hillary Clinton, who joked, “We came, we saw, he died” when informed of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s brutal death. Or the demand by Democratic Senator Zell Miller of Georgia, who after the attacks of 9/11 declared: “I say, bomb the hell out of them. If there’s collateral damage, so be it.” No matter that the empire has since turned Libya, along with Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, into cauldrons of violence, chaos, and misery. The power to destroy is an intoxicating drug that is its own justification.

Like Cato the Censor, the US military and intelligence agencies are, if history is any guide, at this moment planning to destabilize Afghanistan by funding, arming, and backing any militia, warlord or terrorist organization willing to strike at the Taliban. The CIA, which should exclusively gather intelligence, is a rogue paramilitary organization that oversees secret kidnappings, interrogation at black sites, torture, manhunts, and targeted assassinations across the globe. It carried out commando raids in Afghanistan that killed a large number of Afghan civilians, which repeatedly sent enraged family members and villagers into the arms of the Taliban. It is, I expect, reaching out to Amrullah Saleh, who was Ashraf Ghani’s vice president and who has declared himself “the legitimate caretaker president” of Afghanistan. Saleh is holed up in the Panjshir Valley. He, along with warlords Ahmad Massoud, Ata Mohammad Noor, and Abdul Rashid Dostum, are clamoring to be armed and supported to perpetuate conflict in Afghanistan.

“I write from the Panjshir Valley today, ready to follow in my father’s footsteps, with mujahideen fighters who are prepared to once again take on the Taliban,” Ahmad Massoud wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post. “The United States and its allies have left the battlefield, but America can still be a ‘great arsenal of democracy,’ as Franklin D. Roosevelt said when coming to the aid of the beleaguered British before the U.S. entry into World War II,” he went on, adding that he and his fighters need “more weapons, more ammunition and more supplies.”

These warlords have done the bidding of the Americans before. They will do the bidding of the Americans again. And since the hubris of empire is unaffected by reality, the empire will continue to sow dragon’s teeth in Afghanistan as it has since it spent $9 billion – some estimates double that figure – to back the mujahideen that fought the Soviets, leading to a bloody civil war between rival warlords once the Soviets withdrew in 1989 and the ascendancy in 1996 of the Taliban.

The cynicism of arming and funding the mujahideen against the Soviets exposes the lie of America’s humanitarian concerns in Afghanistan. One million Afghan civilians were killed in the nine-year conflict with the Soviets, along with 90,000 mujahideen fighters, 18,000 Afghan troops, and 14,500 Soviet soldiers. But these deaths, along with the destruction of Afghanistan, were “worth it” to cripple the Soviets.

Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, along with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, oversaw the arming of the most radical Islamic mujahideen groups fighting the Soviet occupation forces, leading to the extinguishing of the secular, democratic Afghan opposition. Brzezinski detailed the strategy – designed, he said, to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam – taken by the Carter administration following the 1979 Soviet invasion to prop up the Marxist regime of Hafizullah Amin in Kabul:

We immediately launched a twofold process when we heard that the Soviets had entered Afghanistan. The first involved direct reactions and sanctions focused on the Soviet Union, and both the State Department and the National Security Agency prepared long lists of sanctions to be adopted, of steps to be taken to increase the international costs to the Soviet Union of their actions. And the second course of action led to my going to Pakistan a month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis a joint response, the purpose of which would be to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible; and we engaged in that effort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British, the Chinese, and we started providing weapons to the Mujaheddin, from various sources again — for example, some Soviet arms from the Egyptians and the Chinese. We even got Soviet arms from the Czechoslovak communist government, since it was obviously susceptible to material incentives; and at some point we started buying arms for the Mujahideen from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, because that army was increasingly corrupt.

The clandestine campaign to destabilize the Soviet Union by making it “bleed for as much and as long as is possible” was carried out, like the arming of the contra forces in Nicaragua, largely off the books. It did not, as far as official Washington was concerned, exist – a way to avoid the unwelcome scrutiny of covert operations carried out by the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s that made public the three decades of CIA-backed coups, assassinations, blackmail, intimidation, dark propaganda, and torture. The Saudi government agreed to match the US funding for the Afghan insurgents. The Saudi involvement gave rise to Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, which fought with the mujahideen. The rogue operation, led by Brzezinski, organized secret units of assassination teams and paramilitary squads that carried out lethal attacks on perceived enemies around the globe. It trained Afghan mujahideen in Pakistan and China’s Xinjiang province. It shifted the heroin trade, used to fund the insurgency, from southeast Asia to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This pattern of behavior, which destabilized Afghanistan and the region, is reflexive in the military and the intelligence community. It will, without doubt, be repeated now in Afghanistan, with the same catastrophic results. The chaos these intelligence agencies create becomes the chaos that justifies their existence and the chaos that sees them demand more resources and ever greater levels of violence.

All empires die. The end is usually unpleasant. The American empire, humiliated in Afghanistan as it was in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, as it was at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam, is blind to its own declining strength, ineptitude, and savagery. Its entire economy, a “military Keynesianism,” revolves around the war industry. Military spending and war are the engine behind the nation’s economic survival and identity. It does not matter that with each new debacle the United States turns larger and larger parts of the globe against it and all it claims to represent. It has no mechanism to stop itself, despite its numerous defeats, fiascos, blunders and diminishing power, from striking out irrationally like a wounded animal. The mandarins who oversee our collective suicide, despite repeated failure, doggedly insist we can reshape the world in our own image. This myopia creates the very conditions that accelerate the empire’s demise.

The Soviet Union collapsed, like all empires, because of its ossified, out-of-touch rulers, its imperial overreach, and its inability to critique and reform itself. We are not immune from these fatal diseases. We silence our most prescient critics of empire, such as Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Andrew Bacevich, Alfred McCoy, and Ralph Nader, and persecute those who expose the truths about empire, including Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Daniel Hale, and John Kiriakou. At the same time a bankrupt media, whether on MSNBC, CNN, or Fox, lionizes and amplifies the voices of the inept and corrupt political, military and intelligence class including John Bolton, Leon Panetta, Karl Rove, H.R. McMaster and David Petraeus, which blindly drives the nation into the morass.

Chalmers Johnson, in his trilogy on the fall of the American empire – ‘Blowback’, ‘The Sorrows of Empire’, and ‘Nemesis’ – reminds readers that the Greek goddess Nemesis is “the spirit of retribution, a corrective to the greed and stupidity that sometimes governs relations among people.” She stands for “righteous anger,” a deity who “punishes human transgression of the natural, right order of things and the arrogance that causes it.” He warns that if we continue to cling to our empire, as the Roman Republic did, “we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates.”

“I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and, in the end, produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent,” Johnson writes. “The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government – a republic – that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”

If the empire was capable of introspection and forgiveness, it could free itself from its death spiral. If the empire disbanded, much as the British Empire did, and retreated to focus on the ills that beset the United States, it could free itself from its death spiral. But those who manipulate the levers of empire are unaccountable. They are hidden from public view and beyond public scrutiny. They are determined to keep playing the great game, rolling the dice with lives and national treasure. They will, I expect, preside gleefully over the deaths of even more Afghans, assuring themselves it is worth it, without realizing that the gallows they erect are for themselves.

On the Road to Serfdom ?

The Internet of Bodies Ends Bodily Autonomy

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by MATT via What About the Roads

internet of bodies

Our interconnected globalized world runs on the Internet. Not that long ago, connecting to the Internet required accessing a computer that was physically connected to a router. Then things went wireless and the rise of the smartphone put the Internet in everyone’s pocket. On top of this was built the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) which was comprised of things ranging from home appliances to munitions with sensors, software, and other technologies to connect to and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet wirelessly. The same technologies and concepts which underpin the IoT are entering a new arena called the Internet of Bodies where the human body itself will be online, potentially ending the concept of bodily autonomy as we know it.

In the era of vaccine mandates the subject of bodily autonomy is a hot one. One side of the argument believes that all of humanity must submit themselves to being jabbed with an experimental injection. The rest of us believe that the ability to decide for one’s self what does and does not happen to one’s body is a fundamental right and what makes this a right is self-evident. But vaccine mandates are just one battle in the war on bodily autonomy. There is a bigger fight that needs to take place against the agenda to hook the human body into the Internet.

The Internet of Bodies only recently entered the lexicon—though the idea of using the human body to generate products, resources, and data isn’t new—and it is exactly what it sounds like, “A network of human bodies whose integrity and functionality rely at least in part on the Internet and related technologies, such as artificial intelligence,” writes Atlantic Council member, Andrea M. Matwyshyn in the William & Mary Law Review. “It will challenge notions of human autonomy and self-governance.”

Another one of the first instances of its use appears to come from an obscure Romanian military journal, Land Forces Academy Review. In the Review’s October 2019 edition there is an article titled, “FROM HUMAN BODY DIGITIZATION TO INTERNET OF BODIES TOWARD A NEW DIMENSION OF MILITARY OPERATIONS” by Vasile Florin Popescu of the National Defense University of Romania. Though an obscure source, this brief report encapsulates the obvious trajectory for this technology perfectly. It should come as no surprise that from the earliest days of conceptualizing the Internet of Bodies that the military applications of such a concept were at the forefront.

So, how does one connect a human body to an internet network? Subcutaneous devices injected under the skin, of course. Popescu envisions self-assembling always-on graphene semiconductors which can be powered by the human body’s heat and electrical current, computers made of silicon oxide and magnesium oxide which dissolve in the human body, smart tattoos made from circuits with embedded antennae and sensors being created by DARPA, and Motorola’s “vitamin identification” which is swallowed and activated by gastric acid in the stomach as some of the wonderful innovations by which our bodies can be connected to this new internet. This will all be possible within the next five years in his estimation.

This make it sound like the Internet of Bodies is something still being tinkered with in labs, something still off in the near-distant future. The truth is that the first generation of this technology, in the form of externally worn devices, is already here and is being used to gather data on and alter the behavior of users. In 2018, Strava, a fitness tracking app that logs users’ movements, comically exposed U.S. military operations around the world. Heart rate data from the Apple Watch is gathered by insurance giant John Hancock to verify exercise levels while researchers at FitBit claim to be able to use data from wears to detect COVID-19 cases before symptoms emerge. Let’s not forget about those Bluetooth-enabled track and trace apps rolled out in the name of combating the so-called pandemic.

The next generation of this technology will be the aforementioned internally implanted devices. “Smart skin circuits that are capable of transforming the peripheral nervous system into an interface, cyber-contact lenses, millirobots, digital tattoos, or pay-per-view implants,” envisions Popescu, are some of the inventions that will help to merge man and machine.

Again, these aren’t concepts from a sci-fi story set in the far off future but real technologies being developed in the present.

Work on digital tattoos, delivered by sugar-based microneedles to track someone’s vaccination status, are being funded by none other than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “When the needles dissolve in about two minutes, they deliver the vaccine and leave the pattern of tags just under the skin, where they become something like a bar-code tattoo,” according to researchers at Rice University. These “digital certificates” as Gates calls them have much broader applications than just tracking a person’s vaccination status. A bar-code could just as easily be linked to a person’s biometric identification or Central Bank Digital Currency wallet which can be turned on or off at any moment by those with the power to do so and once off that body becomes disconnected from the network. “Instead of devices connected to the Internet as in the [Internet of Things], human bodies can be connected to a network, with the potential to be controlled and monitored remotely,” writes Popescu.

What about those contact lenses? The Department of Defense and Innovega iOptics have been workingon this for a decade. So has Google.

Millirobots (nanobots), which falls under the umbrella of nanotechnology, are already being created by the thousands by companies like Ginkgo Bioworks in Boston. Scores of researchers with transhumanist aspirations hope that one day soon they will be able to create a “human brain/cloud interface” with the help of nanobots. Clyde Lewis explains just how dystopian this would be:

This new concept proposes using neural nanobots to connect to the human brain’s neocortex – the newest, smartest, ‘conscious’ part of the brain – to the ‘synthetic neocortex’ in the cloud. The nanobots would then provide direct, real-time monitoring and control of signals to and from brain cells.Nanomedicine, artificial intelligence and computation will lead this century to the development of a human ‘brain-cloud interface.’

“These devices would navigate the human vasculature, cross the blood-brain barrier and precisely auto-position themselves among, or even within, brain cells,” explained Freitas. “They would then wirelessly transmit encoded information to and from a cloud-based supercomputer network for real-time brain-state monitoring and data extraction.”

Things get even wilder when you consider the fact that this could allow for a Matrix-style ability to download reams of information into the brain. The B-CI could even enable us to create a future ‘global superbrain’, according to the team, connecting networks of human brains and AI to form a hive mind.

From its inception the Internet has been a tool of the military-industrial-complex. The creation of the ARPANET, the precursor to the modern day Internet, was fostered by the Pentagon’s “needs for a command and control system that would be responsive to military requirements.” Revelations from whistleblowers like Russ Tice, William Binney, Edward Snowden, and Thomas Drake have shown how private companies like Google, AT&T, Verizon, and Facebook work with intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) to use the Internet to gather has much information as they possibly can. Former CIA head, David Petraeus spoke at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, in 2012 practically salivating over the ability to spy on people through the Internet of Things.

The Internet of Bodies will be no different. Popescu closes his article recommending that “the ability of 21st century armies to understand, predict, adapt and exploit Internet of Bodies (IoB) on the future battlefield is essential to maintaining and increasing their competitive advantage.” But don’t just take the word of a largely unknown Romanian military commander. A RAND Corporation research reportpublished in 2020 entitled “The Internet of Bodies: Opportunities, Risks, and Governance” also finds that the military will use the Internet of Bodies to “track the health and well-being of service members, enhance their cognitive and physical abilities, improve training, and enable enhanced warfighting capabilities.”

Not only will these super soldiers outfitted with their smart sensors and devices will be deployed to fight more endless wars overseas, they will undoubtedly be used at home to battle so-called domestic extremists disobeying the government’s dictates. As we reported recently, the Department of Homeland Security recently issued a new terror threat alert which warns of “racially- or ethnically-motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists” who “view the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks.” The DHS also notes their concern over “conspiracy theories on perceived election fraud and alleged reinstatement, and responses to anticipated restrictions relating to the increasing COVID cases” which are perpetuated by “Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked media outlets.”

If these developments are allowed to proceed then the battle for bodily autonomy will be lost. While the fight against vaccine mandates is a vital one to win we must also stop supporting the economy of the Internet of Bodies. Small and simple ways to push back include no longer using the latest “smart” devices, walking away from a medical system that wants to outfit you with implantable devices, and stopping any support for any institutions that want you hooked up to a human brain/cloud interface.

In short, we simply need to stop supporting our own enslavement.

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Breaking News! Faking the Un-Vaccinated Deaths

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. . . In most states, a person is only considered fully vaccinated fourteen days after they have had the full series of the vaccine.

This means that anyone coming into an American hospital who has only had one dose, or who has had both vaccines but had the second one less than two weeks prior, will likely be counted as “unvaccinated.”

So when the South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control released a report about COVID severity on July 23, 2021, they reported higher morbidity and mortality rates in the “not fully vaccinated.” Are these people who have had one vaccine and gotten sick, two vaccines and gotten sick, or no vaccines at all? Without more details, it is impossible to know what is really going on . . .

Authored by Jennifer Margulis via The Epoch Times

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Romania Stops Vaccine Imports, Shutters Vaccination Centers, Transfers Vaccine Stocks to Denmark, Vietnam, Ireland, S. Korea, etc.

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How Romania became a vaccine export powerhouse

Romania closes 117 Covid vaccination centres — July 7, Associated Press:

Declining demand for coronavirus vaccinations in Romania has prompted authorities to close 117 vaccination centers and to reduce the schedule at 371 others, health officials said Tuesday.

“In the previous week we re-evaluated the efficiency of fixed vaccination centers. About 80% of fixed vaccination centers vaccinate less than 25% of the vaccination capacity allocated to each stream,” national vaccination committee chief Valeriu Gheorghita said at a press conference Tuesday.

Romania halts most Covid-19 vaccine imports as people shun jabs — The Irish Times, July 1:

Romania has halted the import of most Covid-19 vaccines after a slowdown in its inoculation drive prompted the government to sell more than a million doses to Denmark and seek an extension to the validity of tens of thousands of expired shots.

Romania to start destroying expired COVID-19 vaccines as vaccination numbers drop — Romania Insider, June 25:

Romania could start destroying some of the COVID-19 vaccines received earlier this year as they are set to expire while the population’s interest in vaccination has dropped significantly. [Or more likely those who wanted it, already got it.]

As a result, Romania now holds a surplus of vaccines and will start to destroy some of the unused doses received earlier this year as they will expire soon. About a week ago, the authorities asked the suppliers to send fewer COVID-19 vaccines than planned for the same reason.

Denmark buys 1.1m Pfizer doses from Romania — The Local, June 30

Denmark has bought 1.1m doses of the Pfizer vaccine from the Romanian government, potentially bringing forward vaccinations by two to three weeks.
In a press release on Tuesday evening, Denmark’s health minister Magnus Heunicke said that the slow pace of vaccination in Romania had left the country with doses that it could not use.

 

 

 

 

Romanian PM doesn’t want different rules for vaccinated, unvaccinated — Universulnet.com, August 28

Prime Minister Florin Citu on Saturday said he wasn’t in favor of introducing different rules for people in public places depending on whether they had had a Covid vaccine or not.

“I am not a fan of the vaccinated, the unvaccinated going separately to the mall,” he said.

“The malls were open last year when we didn’t have a vaccine. It would be hilarious and absurd to close them now, when we have this solution: the vaccine,” he said during a visit to a vaccine center in the northern city of Botosani.

Bulgaria and Romania have low vaccination rates – and low COVID rates — LifeSite News, August 27:

Contrary to the expectations heavily promoted by politicians, media, and public health establishment, Bulgarians and Romanians saw a low number of COVID-19 infections this summer as they continued to refuse to take the COVID vaccines.

In fact, Bulgaria and Romania have some of the lowest rates of COVID infections per 100,000 people in Europe, according to an August 22 statistical analysis of European countries.

“The current vaccination rate in Romania is half compared to that of Bulgaria (0.13 vaccines per 100 inhabitants on average in the last seven days) and 7.5 times lower than the EU average (0.45 vaccines per 100 inhabitants),” according to Romania Insider. “On the opposite end, Denmark has administered 0.94 vaccine doses per 100 inhabitants on average over the last seven days.” Bulgaria and Romania’s vaccination rates since the 2020 release of the jab are not significantly different.

The two countries sandwich Denmark for lowest infection rates on the continent.

While the publication said that “the number of new COVID-19 cases has risen to the highest level since the end of May,” the article fails to provide the necessary context.

Romania’s reported COVID cases peaked at nearly 60,000 in November 2020, before a vaccine was made available.

Through the summer, Romania’s 25 percent vaccination rate did not lead it to experience a surge in infections. “Officials say Romania has received more [than] 16 million doses of several western-made vaccines but less than 55 per cent have been used, as the number of vaccines administered daily has dropped to around 20,000 from 100,000 last month,” the Irish Times reported.

The publication admitted “a slowing infection rate has weakened the impetus for some in Romania to get vaccinated: only 31 new cases of Covid-19 and five deaths were reported on Thursday, adding to a national total of 1.08 million infections and 33,786 fatalities.”

For example, the week of July 5 saw a low of 285 confirmed cases.While the past several weeks of August have seen an increase to almost 4,000 cases in one week, it’s still much lower than pre-vaccination rates and the early months of 2021.