• The WHO Wants to Rule the World
    Ramesh Thakur
    The World Health Organisation (WHO) will present two new texts for adoption by its governing body, the World Health Assembly comprising delegates from 194 member states, in Geneva on 27 May–1 June. The new pandemic treaty needs a two-thirds majority for approval and, if and once adopted, will come into effect after 40 ratifications.

    The amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) can be adopted by a simple majority and will be binding on all states unless they recorded reservations by the end of last year. Because they will be changes to an existing agreement that states have already signed, the amendments do not require any follow-up ratification. The WHO describes the IHR as ‘an instrument of international law that is legally-binding’ on its 196 states parties, including the 194 WHO member states, even if they voted against it. Therein lies its promise and its threat.

    The new regime will change the WHO from a technical advisory organisation into a supra-national public health authority exercising quasi-legislative and executive powers over states; change the nature of the relationship between citizens, business enterprises, and governments domestically, and also between governments and other governments and the WHO internationally; and shift the locus of medical practice from the doctor-patient consultation in the clinic to public health bureaucrats in capital cities and WHO headquarters in Geneva and its six regional offices.

    From net zero to mass immigration and identity politics, the ‘expertocracy’ elite is in alliance with the global technocratic elite against majority national sentiment. The Covid years gave the elites a valuable lesson in how to exercise effective social control and they mean to apply it across all contentious issues.

    The changes to global health governance architecture must be understood in this light. It represents the transformation of the national security, administrative, and surveillance state into a globalised biosecurity state. But they are encountering pushback in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and most recently Ireland. We can but hope that the resistance will spread to rejecting the WHO power grab.

    Addressing the World Governments Summit in Dubai on 12 February, WHO Director-General (DG) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attacked ‘the litany of lies and conspiracy theories’ about the agreement that ‘are utterly, completely, categorically false. The pandemic agreement will not give WHO any power over any state or any individual, for that matter.’ He insisted that critics are ‘either uninformed or lying.’ Could it be instead that, relying on aides, he himself has either not read or not understood the draft? The alternative explanation for his spray at the critics is that he is gaslighting us all.

    The Gostin, Klock, and Finch Paper

    In the Hastings Center Report “Making the World Safer and Fairer in Pandemics,” published on 23 December, Lawrence Gostin, Kevin Klock, and Alexandra Finch attempt to provide the justification to underpin the proposed new IHR and treaty instruments as ‘transformative normative and financial reforms that could reimagine pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.’

    The three authors decry the voluntary compliance under the existing ‘amorphous and unenforceable’ IHR regulations as ‘a critical shortcoming.’ And they concede that ‘While advocates have pressed for health-related human rights to be included in the pandemic agreement, the current draft does not do so.’ Directly contradicting the DG’s denial as quoted above, they describe the new treaty as ‘legally binding’. This is repeated several pages later:

    …the best way to contain transnational outbreaks is through international cooperation, led multilaterally through the WHO. That may require all states to forgo some level of sovereignty in exchange for enhanced safety and fairness.

    What gives their analysis significance is that, as explained in the paper itself, Gostin is ‘actively involved in WHO processes for a pandemic agreement and IHR reform’ as the director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law and a member of the WHO Review Committee on IHR amendments.

    The WHO as the World’s Guidance and Coordinating Authority

    The IHR amendments will expand the situations that constitute a public health emergency, grant the WHO additional emergency powers, and extend state duties to build ‘core capacities’ of surveillance to detect, assess, notify, and report events that could constitute an emergency.

    Under the new accords, the WHO would function as the guidance and coordinating authority for the world. The DG will become more powerful than the UN Secretary-General. The existing language of ‘should’ is replaced in many places by the imperative ‘shall,’ of non-binding recommendations with countries will ‘undertake to follow’ the guidance. And ‘full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons’ will be changed to principles of ‘equity’ and ‘inclusivity’ with different requirements for rich and poor countries, bleeding financial resources and pharmaceutical products from industrialised to developing countries.

    The WHO is first of all an international bureaucracy and only secondly a collective body of medical and health experts. Its Covid performance was not among its finest. Its credibility was badly damaged by tardiness in raising the alarm; by its acceptance and then rejection of China’s claim that there was no risk of human-human transmission; by the failure to hold China accountable for destroying evidence of the pandemic’s origins; by the initial investigation that whitewashed the origins of the virus; by flip-flops on masks and lockdowns; by ignoring the counterexample of Sweden that rejected lockdowns with no worse health outcomes and far better economic, social, and educational outcomes; and by the failure to stand up for children’s developmental, educational, social, and mental health rights and welfare.

    With a funding model where 87 percent of the budget comes from voluntary contributions from the rich countries and private donors like the Gates Foundation, and 77 percent is for activities specified by them, the WHO has effectively ‘become a system of global public health patronage’, write Ben and Molly Kingsley of the UK children’s rights campaign group UsForThem. Human Rights Watch says the process has been ‘disproportionately guided by corporate demands and the policy positions of high-income governments seeking to protect the power of private actors in health including the pharmaceutical industry.’ The victims of this Catch-22 lack of accountability will be the peoples of the world.

    Much of the new surveillance network in a model divided into pre-, in, and post-pandemic periods will be provided by private and corporate interests that will profit from the mass testing and pharmaceutical interventions. According to Forbes, the net worth of Bill Gates jumped by one-third from $96.5 billion in 2019 to $129 billion in 2022: philanthropy can be profitable. Article 15.2 of the draft pandemic treaty requires states to set up ‘no fault vaccine-injury compensation schemes,’ conferring immunity on Big Pharma against liability, thereby codifying the privatisation of profits and the socialisation of risks.

    The changes would confer extraordinary new powers on the WHO’s DG and regional directors and mandate governments to implement their recommendations. This will result in a major expansion of the international health bureaucracy under the WHO, for example new implementation and compliance committees; shift the centre of gravity from the common deadliest diseases (discussed below) to relatively rare pandemic outbreaks (five including Covid in the last 120 years); and give the WHO authority to direct resources (money, pharmaceutical products, intellectual property rights) to itself and to other governments in breach of sovereign and copyright rights.

    Considering the impact of the amendments on national decision-making and mortgaging future generations to internationally determined spending obligations, this calls for an indefinite pause in the process until parliaments have done due diligence and debated the potentially far-reaching obligations.

    Yet disappointingly, relatively few countries have expressed reservations and few parliamentarians seem at all interested. We may pay a high price for the rise of careerist politicians whose primary interest is self-advancement, ministers who ask bureaucrats to draft replies to constituents expressing concern that they often sign without reading either the original letter or the reply in their name, and officials who disdain the constraints of democratic decision-making and accountability. Ministers relying on technical advice from staffers when officials are engaged in a silent coup against elected representatives give power without responsibility to bureaucrats while relegating ministers to being in office but not in power, with political accountability sans authority.

    US President Donald Trump and Australian and UK Prime Ministers Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson were representative of national leaders who had lacked the science literacy, intellectual heft, moral clarity, and courage of conviction to stand up to their technocrats. It was a period of Yes, Prime Minister on steroids, with Sir Humphrey Appleby winning most of the guerrilla campaign waged by the permanent civil service against the transient and clueless Prime Minister Jim Hacker.

    At least some Australian, American, British, and European politicians have recently expressed concern at the WHO-centred ‘command and control’ model of a public health system, and the public spending and redistributive implications of the two proposed international instruments. US Representatives Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) warned on 5 February that ‘far too little scrutiny has been given, far too few questions asked as to what this legally binding agreement or treaty means to health policy in the United States and elsewhere.’

    Like Smith and Wenstrup, the most common criticism levelled has been that this represents a power grab at the cost of national sovereignty. Speaking in parliament in November, Australia’s Liberal Senator Alex Antic dubbed the effort a ‘WHO d’etat’.

    A more accurate reading may be that it represents collusion between the WHO and the richest countries, home to the biggest pharmaceutical companies, to dilute accountability for decisions, taken in the name of public health, that profit a narrow elite. The changes will lock in the seamless rule of the technocratic-managerial elite at both the national and the international levels. Yet the WHO edicts, although legally binding in theory, will be unenforceable against the most powerful countries in practice.

    Moreover, the new regime aims to eliminate transparency and critical scrutiny by criminalising any opinion that questions the official narrative from the WHO and governments, thereby elevating them to the status of dogma. The pandemic treaty calls for governments to tackle the ‘infodemics’ of false information, misinformation, disinformation, and even ‘too much information’ (Article 1c). This is censorship. Authorities have no right to be shielded from critical questioning of official information. Freedom of information is a cornerstone of an open and resilient society and a key means to hold authorities to public scrutiny and accountability.

    The changes are an effort to entrench and institutionalise the model of political, social, and messaging control trialled with great success during Covid. The foundational document of the international human rights regime is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pandemic management during Covid and in future emergencies threaten some of its core provisions regarding privacy, freedom of opinion and expression, and rights to work, education, peaceful assembly, and association.

    Worst of all, they will create a perverse incentive: the rise of an international bureaucracy whose defining purpose, existence, powers, and budgets will depend on more frequent declarations of actual or anticipated pandemic outbreaks.

    It is a basic axiom of politics that power that can be abused, will be abused – some day, somewhere, by someone. The corollary holds that power once seized is seldom surrendered back voluntarily to the people. Lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, travel restrictions, and all the other shenanigans and theatre of the Covid era will likely be repeated on whim. Professor Angus Dalgliesh of London’s St George’s Medical School warns that the WHO ‘wants to inflict this incompetence on us all over again but this time be in total control.’

    Covid in the Context of Africa’s Disease Burden

    In the Hastings Center report referred to earlier, Gostin, Klock, and Finch claim that ‘lower-income countries experienced larger losses and longer-lasting economic setbacks.’ This is a casual elision that shifts the blame for harmful downstream effects away from lockdowns in the futile quest to eradicate the virus, to the virus itself. The chief damage to developing countries was caused by the worldwide shutdown of social life and economic activities and the drastic reduction in international trade.

    The discreet elision aroused my curiosity on the authors’ affiliations. It came as no surprise to read that they lead the O’Neill Institute–Foundation for the National Institutes of Health project on an international instrument for pandemic prevention and preparedness.

    Gostin et al. grounded the urgency for the new accords in the claim that ‘Zoonotic pathogens…are occurring with increasing frequency, enhancing the risk of new pandemics’ and cite research to suggest a threefold increase in ‘extreme pandemics’ over the next decade. In a report entitled “Rational Policy Over Panic,” published by Leeds University in February, a team that included our own David Bell subjected claims of increasing pandemic frequency and disease burden behind the drive to adopt the new treaty and amend the existing IHR to critical scrutiny.

    Specifically, they examined and found wanting a number of assumptions and several references in eight G20, World Bank, and WHO policy documents. On the one hand, the reported increase in natural outbreaks is best explained by technologically more sophisticated diagnostic testing equipment, while the disease burden has been effectively reduced with improved surveillance, response mechanisms, and other public health interventions. Consequently there is no real urgency to rush into the new accords. Instead, governments should take all the time they need to situate pandemic risk in the wider healthcare context and formulate policy tailored to the more accurate risk and interventions matrix.


    The lockdowns were responsible for reversals of decades worth of gains in critical childhood immunisations. UNICEF and WHO estimate that 7.6 million African children under 5 missed out on vaccination in 2021 and another 11 million were under-immunised, ‘making up over 40 percent of the under-immunised and missed children globally.’ How many quality adjusted life years does that add up to, I wonder? But don’t hold your breath that anyone will be held accountable for crimes against African children.

    Earlier this month the Pan-African Epidemic and Pandemic Working Group argued that lockdowns were a ‘class-based and unscientific instrument.’ It accused the WHO of trying to reintroduce ‘classical Western colonialism through the backdoor’ in the form of the new pandemic treaty and the IHR amendments. Medical knowledge and innovations do not come solely from Western capitals and Geneva, but from people and groups who have captured the WHO agenda.

    Lockdowns had caused significant harm to low-income countries, the group said, yet the WHO wanted legal authority to compel member states to comply with its advice in future pandemics, including with respect to vaccine passports and border closures. Instead of bowing to ‘health imperialism,’ it would be preferable for African countries to set their own priorities in alleviating the disease burden of their major killer diseases like cholera, malaria, and yellow fever.

    Europe and the US, comprising a little under ten and over four percent of world population, account for nearly 18 and 17 percent, respectively, of all Covid-related deaths in the world. By contrast Asia, with nearly 60 percent of the world’s people, accounts for 23 percent of all Covid-related deaths. Meantime Africa, with more than 17 percent of global population, has recorded less than four percent of global Covid deaths (Table 1).

    According to a report on the continent’s disease burden published last year by the WHO Regional Office for Africa, Africa’s leading causes of death in 2021 were malaria (593,000 deaths), tuberculosis (501,000), and HIV/AIDS (420,000). The report does not provide the numbers for diarrhoeal deaths for Africa. There are 1.6 million such deaths globally per year, including 440,000 children under 5. And we know that most diarrhoeal deaths occur in Africa and South Asia.

    If we perform a linear extrapolation of 2021 deaths to estimate ballpark figures for the three years 2020–22 inclusive for numbers of Africans killed by these big three, approximately 1.78 million died from malaria, 1.5 million from TB, and 1.26 million from HIV/AIDS. (I exclude 2023 as Covid had faded by then, as can be seen in Table 1). By comparison, the total number of Covid-related deaths across Africa in the three years was 259,000.

    Whether or not the WHO is pursuing a policy of health colonialism, therefore, the Pan-African Epidemic and Pandemic Working Group has a point regarding the grossly exaggerated threat of Covid in the total picture of Africa’s disease burden.

    A shorter version of this was published in The Australian on 11 March

    Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
    For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

    Author

    Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University.

    View all posts
    Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work.

    https://brownstone.org/articles/the-who-wants-to-rule-the-world/
    The WHO Wants to Rule the World Ramesh Thakur The World Health Organisation (WHO) will present two new texts for adoption by its governing body, the World Health Assembly comprising delegates from 194 member states, in Geneva on 27 May–1 June. The new pandemic treaty needs a two-thirds majority for approval and, if and once adopted, will come into effect after 40 ratifications. The amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) can be adopted by a simple majority and will be binding on all states unless they recorded reservations by the end of last year. Because they will be changes to an existing agreement that states have already signed, the amendments do not require any follow-up ratification. The WHO describes the IHR as ‘an instrument of international law that is legally-binding’ on its 196 states parties, including the 194 WHO member states, even if they voted against it. Therein lies its promise and its threat. The new regime will change the WHO from a technical advisory organisation into a supra-national public health authority exercising quasi-legislative and executive powers over states; change the nature of the relationship between citizens, business enterprises, and governments domestically, and also between governments and other governments and the WHO internationally; and shift the locus of medical practice from the doctor-patient consultation in the clinic to public health bureaucrats in capital cities and WHO headquarters in Geneva and its six regional offices. From net zero to mass immigration and identity politics, the ‘expertocracy’ elite is in alliance with the global technocratic elite against majority national sentiment. The Covid years gave the elites a valuable lesson in how to exercise effective social control and they mean to apply it across all contentious issues. The changes to global health governance architecture must be understood in this light. It represents the transformation of the national security, administrative, and surveillance state into a globalised biosecurity state. But they are encountering pushback in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and most recently Ireland. We can but hope that the resistance will spread to rejecting the WHO power grab. Addressing the World Governments Summit in Dubai on 12 February, WHO Director-General (DG) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attacked ‘the litany of lies and conspiracy theories’ about the agreement that ‘are utterly, completely, categorically false. The pandemic agreement will not give WHO any power over any state or any individual, for that matter.’ He insisted that critics are ‘either uninformed or lying.’ Could it be instead that, relying on aides, he himself has either not read or not understood the draft? The alternative explanation for his spray at the critics is that he is gaslighting us all. The Gostin, Klock, and Finch Paper In the Hastings Center Report “Making the World Safer and Fairer in Pandemics,” published on 23 December, Lawrence Gostin, Kevin Klock, and Alexandra Finch attempt to provide the justification to underpin the proposed new IHR and treaty instruments as ‘transformative normative and financial reforms that could reimagine pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.’ The three authors decry the voluntary compliance under the existing ‘amorphous and unenforceable’ IHR regulations as ‘a critical shortcoming.’ And they concede that ‘While advocates have pressed for health-related human rights to be included in the pandemic agreement, the current draft does not do so.’ Directly contradicting the DG’s denial as quoted above, they describe the new treaty as ‘legally binding’. This is repeated several pages later: …the best way to contain transnational outbreaks is through international cooperation, led multilaterally through the WHO. That may require all states to forgo some level of sovereignty in exchange for enhanced safety and fairness. What gives their analysis significance is that, as explained in the paper itself, Gostin is ‘actively involved in WHO processes for a pandemic agreement and IHR reform’ as the director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law and a member of the WHO Review Committee on IHR amendments. The WHO as the World’s Guidance and Coordinating Authority The IHR amendments will expand the situations that constitute a public health emergency, grant the WHO additional emergency powers, and extend state duties to build ‘core capacities’ of surveillance to detect, assess, notify, and report events that could constitute an emergency. Under the new accords, the WHO would function as the guidance and coordinating authority for the world. The DG will become more powerful than the UN Secretary-General. The existing language of ‘should’ is replaced in many places by the imperative ‘shall,’ of non-binding recommendations with countries will ‘undertake to follow’ the guidance. And ‘full respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of persons’ will be changed to principles of ‘equity’ and ‘inclusivity’ with different requirements for rich and poor countries, bleeding financial resources and pharmaceutical products from industrialised to developing countries. The WHO is first of all an international bureaucracy and only secondly a collective body of medical and health experts. Its Covid performance was not among its finest. Its credibility was badly damaged by tardiness in raising the alarm; by its acceptance and then rejection of China’s claim that there was no risk of human-human transmission; by the failure to hold China accountable for destroying evidence of the pandemic’s origins; by the initial investigation that whitewashed the origins of the virus; by flip-flops on masks and lockdowns; by ignoring the counterexample of Sweden that rejected lockdowns with no worse health outcomes and far better economic, social, and educational outcomes; and by the failure to stand up for children’s developmental, educational, social, and mental health rights and welfare. With a funding model where 87 percent of the budget comes from voluntary contributions from the rich countries and private donors like the Gates Foundation, and 77 percent is for activities specified by them, the WHO has effectively ‘become a system of global public health patronage’, write Ben and Molly Kingsley of the UK children’s rights campaign group UsForThem. Human Rights Watch says the process has been ‘disproportionately guided by corporate demands and the policy positions of high-income governments seeking to protect the power of private actors in health including the pharmaceutical industry.’ The victims of this Catch-22 lack of accountability will be the peoples of the world. Much of the new surveillance network in a model divided into pre-, in, and post-pandemic periods will be provided by private and corporate interests that will profit from the mass testing and pharmaceutical interventions. According to Forbes, the net worth of Bill Gates jumped by one-third from $96.5 billion in 2019 to $129 billion in 2022: philanthropy can be profitable. Article 15.2 of the draft pandemic treaty requires states to set up ‘no fault vaccine-injury compensation schemes,’ conferring immunity on Big Pharma against liability, thereby codifying the privatisation of profits and the socialisation of risks. The changes would confer extraordinary new powers on the WHO’s DG and regional directors and mandate governments to implement their recommendations. This will result in a major expansion of the international health bureaucracy under the WHO, for example new implementation and compliance committees; shift the centre of gravity from the common deadliest diseases (discussed below) to relatively rare pandemic outbreaks (five including Covid in the last 120 years); and give the WHO authority to direct resources (money, pharmaceutical products, intellectual property rights) to itself and to other governments in breach of sovereign and copyright rights. Considering the impact of the amendments on national decision-making and mortgaging future generations to internationally determined spending obligations, this calls for an indefinite pause in the process until parliaments have done due diligence and debated the potentially far-reaching obligations. Yet disappointingly, relatively few countries have expressed reservations and few parliamentarians seem at all interested. We may pay a high price for the rise of careerist politicians whose primary interest is self-advancement, ministers who ask bureaucrats to draft replies to constituents expressing concern that they often sign without reading either the original letter or the reply in their name, and officials who disdain the constraints of democratic decision-making and accountability. Ministers relying on technical advice from staffers when officials are engaged in a silent coup against elected representatives give power without responsibility to bureaucrats while relegating ministers to being in office but not in power, with political accountability sans authority. US President Donald Trump and Australian and UK Prime Ministers Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson were representative of national leaders who had lacked the science literacy, intellectual heft, moral clarity, and courage of conviction to stand up to their technocrats. It was a period of Yes, Prime Minister on steroids, with Sir Humphrey Appleby winning most of the guerrilla campaign waged by the permanent civil service against the transient and clueless Prime Minister Jim Hacker. At least some Australian, American, British, and European politicians have recently expressed concern at the WHO-centred ‘command and control’ model of a public health system, and the public spending and redistributive implications of the two proposed international instruments. US Representatives Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) warned on 5 February that ‘far too little scrutiny has been given, far too few questions asked as to what this legally binding agreement or treaty means to health policy in the United States and elsewhere.’ Like Smith and Wenstrup, the most common criticism levelled has been that this represents a power grab at the cost of national sovereignty. Speaking in parliament in November, Australia’s Liberal Senator Alex Antic dubbed the effort a ‘WHO d’etat’. A more accurate reading may be that it represents collusion between the WHO and the richest countries, home to the biggest pharmaceutical companies, to dilute accountability for decisions, taken in the name of public health, that profit a narrow elite. The changes will lock in the seamless rule of the technocratic-managerial elite at both the national and the international levels. Yet the WHO edicts, although legally binding in theory, will be unenforceable against the most powerful countries in practice. Moreover, the new regime aims to eliminate transparency and critical scrutiny by criminalising any opinion that questions the official narrative from the WHO and governments, thereby elevating them to the status of dogma. The pandemic treaty calls for governments to tackle the ‘infodemics’ of false information, misinformation, disinformation, and even ‘too much information’ (Article 1c). This is censorship. Authorities have no right to be shielded from critical questioning of official information. Freedom of information is a cornerstone of an open and resilient society and a key means to hold authorities to public scrutiny and accountability. The changes are an effort to entrench and institutionalise the model of political, social, and messaging control trialled with great success during Covid. The foundational document of the international human rights regime is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pandemic management during Covid and in future emergencies threaten some of its core provisions regarding privacy, freedom of opinion and expression, and rights to work, education, peaceful assembly, and association. Worst of all, they will create a perverse incentive: the rise of an international bureaucracy whose defining purpose, existence, powers, and budgets will depend on more frequent declarations of actual or anticipated pandemic outbreaks. It is a basic axiom of politics that power that can be abused, will be abused – some day, somewhere, by someone. The corollary holds that power once seized is seldom surrendered back voluntarily to the people. Lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, travel restrictions, and all the other shenanigans and theatre of the Covid era will likely be repeated on whim. Professor Angus Dalgliesh of London’s St George’s Medical School warns that the WHO ‘wants to inflict this incompetence on us all over again but this time be in total control.’ Covid in the Context of Africa’s Disease Burden In the Hastings Center report referred to earlier, Gostin, Klock, and Finch claim that ‘lower-income countries experienced larger losses and longer-lasting economic setbacks.’ This is a casual elision that shifts the blame for harmful downstream effects away from lockdowns in the futile quest to eradicate the virus, to the virus itself. The chief damage to developing countries was caused by the worldwide shutdown of social life and economic activities and the drastic reduction in international trade. The discreet elision aroused my curiosity on the authors’ affiliations. It came as no surprise to read that they lead the O’Neill Institute–Foundation for the National Institutes of Health project on an international instrument for pandemic prevention and preparedness. Gostin et al. grounded the urgency for the new accords in the claim that ‘Zoonotic pathogens…are occurring with increasing frequency, enhancing the risk of new pandemics’ and cite research to suggest a threefold increase in ‘extreme pandemics’ over the next decade. In a report entitled “Rational Policy Over Panic,” published by Leeds University in February, a team that included our own David Bell subjected claims of increasing pandemic frequency and disease burden behind the drive to adopt the new treaty and amend the existing IHR to critical scrutiny. Specifically, they examined and found wanting a number of assumptions and several references in eight G20, World Bank, and WHO policy documents. On the one hand, the reported increase in natural outbreaks is best explained by technologically more sophisticated diagnostic testing equipment, while the disease burden has been effectively reduced with improved surveillance, response mechanisms, and other public health interventions. Consequently there is no real urgency to rush into the new accords. Instead, governments should take all the time they need to situate pandemic risk in the wider healthcare context and formulate policy tailored to the more accurate risk and interventions matrix. The lockdowns were responsible for reversals of decades worth of gains in critical childhood immunisations. UNICEF and WHO estimate that 7.6 million African children under 5 missed out on vaccination in 2021 and another 11 million were under-immunised, ‘making up over 40 percent of the under-immunised and missed children globally.’ How many quality adjusted life years does that add up to, I wonder? But don’t hold your breath that anyone will be held accountable for crimes against African children. Earlier this month the Pan-African Epidemic and Pandemic Working Group argued that lockdowns were a ‘class-based and unscientific instrument.’ It accused the WHO of trying to reintroduce ‘classical Western colonialism through the backdoor’ in the form of the new pandemic treaty and the IHR amendments. Medical knowledge and innovations do not come solely from Western capitals and Geneva, but from people and groups who have captured the WHO agenda. Lockdowns had caused significant harm to low-income countries, the group said, yet the WHO wanted legal authority to compel member states to comply with its advice in future pandemics, including with respect to vaccine passports and border closures. Instead of bowing to ‘health imperialism,’ it would be preferable for African countries to set their own priorities in alleviating the disease burden of their major killer diseases like cholera, malaria, and yellow fever. Europe and the US, comprising a little under ten and over four percent of world population, account for nearly 18 and 17 percent, respectively, of all Covid-related deaths in the world. By contrast Asia, with nearly 60 percent of the world’s people, accounts for 23 percent of all Covid-related deaths. Meantime Africa, with more than 17 percent of global population, has recorded less than four percent of global Covid deaths (Table 1). According to a report on the continent’s disease burden published last year by the WHO Regional Office for Africa, Africa’s leading causes of death in 2021 were malaria (593,000 deaths), tuberculosis (501,000), and HIV/AIDS (420,000). The report does not provide the numbers for diarrhoeal deaths for Africa. There are 1.6 million such deaths globally per year, including 440,000 children under 5. And we know that most diarrhoeal deaths occur in Africa and South Asia. If we perform a linear extrapolation of 2021 deaths to estimate ballpark figures for the three years 2020–22 inclusive for numbers of Africans killed by these big three, approximately 1.78 million died from malaria, 1.5 million from TB, and 1.26 million from HIV/AIDS. (I exclude 2023 as Covid had faded by then, as can be seen in Table 1). By comparison, the total number of Covid-related deaths across Africa in the three years was 259,000. Whether or not the WHO is pursuing a policy of health colonialism, therefore, the Pan-African Epidemic and Pandemic Working Group has a point regarding the grossly exaggerated threat of Covid in the total picture of Africa’s disease burden. A shorter version of this was published in The Australian on 11 March Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author. Author Ramesh Thakur, a Brownstone Institute Senior Scholar, is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and emeritus professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University. View all posts Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work. https://brownstone.org/articles/the-who-wants-to-rule-the-world/
    BROWNSTONE.ORG
    The WHO Wants to Rule the World ⋆ Brownstone Institute
    The World Health Organisation (WHO) will present two new texts for adoption by its governing body, the World Health Assembly comprising delegates from 194 member states, in Geneva on 27 May–1 June.
    0 Comments 0 Shares 9476 Views
  • NICK FUENTES: ISRАЕL IS NOT OUR АLLY. THEY HAVE A MATRIX OF CОNTRОL OVER THE US.

    https://www.bitchute.com/video/1YT7VDiJlXyB/
    NICK FUENTES: ISRАЕL IS NOT OUR АLLY. THEY HAVE A MATRIX OF CОNTRОL OVER THE US. https://www.bitchute.com/video/1YT7VDiJlXyB/
    0 Comments 0 Shares 108 Views
  • THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE IN THE DILECTIC MATRIX THE SAD TRITH DAMMED EITHER WAY RED OR BLUE POLITICS
    https://www.bitchute.com/video/8x40t1WGgAJg/
    THE ILLUSION OF CHOICE IN THE DILECTIC MATRIX THE SAD TRITH DAMMED EITHER WAY RED OR BLUE POLITICS https://www.bitchute.com/video/8x40t1WGgAJg/
    Like
    1
    0 Comments 0 Shares 340 Views
  • University of Pennsylvania - New chip opens door to AI computing at light speed:

    https://phys.org/news/2024-02-chip-door-ai.html

    #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #NeuralNetwork #SiliconPhotonics #SiPh #Processor #VectorMatrixMultiplication #SpecialProjects #ComputerScience #Photonics #Physics
    University of Pennsylvania - New chip opens door to AI computing at light speed: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-chip-door-ai.html #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #NeuralNetwork #SiliconPhotonics #SiPh #Processor #VectorMatrixMultiplication #SpecialProjects #ComputerScience #Photonics #Physics
    PHYS.ORG
    New chip opens door to AI computing at light speed
    University of Pennsylvania engineers have developed a new chip that uses light waves, rather than electricity, to perform the complex math essential to training AI. The chip has the potential to radically accelerate the processing speed of computers while also reducing their energy consumption.
    0 Comments 0 Shares 2537 Views
  • Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is Obedience: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
    Caitlin JohnstoneWednesday 24 Jan 24
    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):



    Everyone says they want peace, but they mean different things by this. To an anti-imperialist, peace means the end of violence, oppression and exploitation. To a Zionist, peace means Palestinians lie down and accept their fate and neighboring nations cease disobeying Israel. To a supporter of the US empire, peace means all nations around the world submit to US unipolar hegemony. Many say they want peace when what they really want is tyranny.

    If “peace” to you means other populations bow down and submit to your will, then it makes perfect sense for you to believe that your wars are being waged to attain peace, because those wars are being used to violently bludgeon those populations into obedience. If your definition of peace means the cessation of all violence and abuse, then you will support ceasefires, peace negotiations, diplomacy, the de-escalation of tensions, the cessation of imperialist extraction, and the end of apartheid and injustice.

    Pay less attention to people’s words about wanting “peace” and focus instead on what actions they are supporting to accomplish that end. This will show you the truth about what they really want.




    https://x.com/caitoz/status/1748455323126632957?s=20


    Someone asked “Can we all agree that our world would be better without a Hamas?”

    This is the sort of question that can only make sense to you if you view Hamas as some kind of invasive alien presence that was imposed upon Palestine from the outside instead of a natural emergence from the material circumstances that have been forced upon Palestinians. If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound.

    If Hamas had been completely eliminated a decade ago, there would be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel today under that or some other name. If Hamas is completely eliminated tomorrow, there will be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel in a matter of years (assuming there are any Palestinians left when this is all over, of course). If a man starts strangling me, at some point I’m going to try to gouge his eyes and crush his testicles. That’s just what happens when humans find themselves under a sufficient amount of existential pressure.

    Asking if the world would be better without Hamas is as nonsensical as asking if Alaska would be better without coats. The presence of coats in Alaska is the natural consequence of the material conditions in that region, and as long as those material conditions persist for the population of Alaska then there will necessarily be coats.

    Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable.



    Biden has started a new US war in Yemen while backing a genocide in Gaza, both of which are fully supported by the party which supposedly opposes him. But by all means go ahead and spend the rest of the year fixating on the US presidential race.



    Know how you can tell it no longer matters who the US president is? They stopped getting assassinated.



    The Biden administration’s justifications for its acts of war in Yemen are premised on the absurd assumption that the world economy should march on completely uninhibited during an active genocide.



    Supporting the world’s most powerful government bombing the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide is the most sycophantic bootlicking you can possibly cram into a single political opinion.




    https://x.com/caitoz/status/1748478825602953304?s=20


    Israel isn’t relentlessly murderous and abusive because it’s run by Jews, it’s relentlessly murderous and abusive because that’s the only way to maintain an ethnostate that was abruptly dropped on top of an already existing civilization. This would be true if it’d been a Mormon state or a Romani state.

    Take any already existing country with its own ethnic and religious makeup and its own relationships with surrounding countries and drop a brand new artificial ethnostate on top of it with a deluge of immigrants who are designated special and above the people in that region, and you’re going to get a ton of violence. You’re also going to see the dominant group espouse supremacist ideological beliefs to justify why it’s fine for them to be placed above the other group and receive better treatment by the state. These things would happen regardless of what those respective ethnic and religious makeups happen to be.

    How can we be sure of this? Because we’ve seen it happen time and time again in other settler-colonialist projects throughout history which had nothing to do with Jews or Muslims.

    It’s not about Jews and Judaism, it’s about the nature and character of the ethnostate which got placed overtop a pre-existing civilization in the 1940s. The religions and ethnicities are interchangeable with pretty much any other in terms of how much violence would be necessary to institute and maintain such a state.



    People who say they oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza but don’t forcefully oppose Biden’s facilitation of Israel’s actions in Gaza do not actually oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza.



    There’s a type of uninformed comment I keep seeing, usually from Americans, that goes something like this: “What do I care about Israel and Hamas? It’s none of our business and we should stay out of it.”

    This comment is born of the misunderstanding that people want the US to meddle in middle eastern affairs to stop the slaughter in Gaza, which is a notion many Americans reflexively oppose these days because they have learned that US “humanitarian interventions” in that region are consistently disastrous and often very costly.

    But that isn’t what’s being called for. What’s being called for is for the US to STOP intervening in Israel and Gaza — to END an intervention that is ALREADY taking place. The US has been pouring billions of dollars of weaponry into Israel every year for many years now, and has sent a whole lot more since October 7 to assist the Israeli butchery that’s been happening in Gaza. If the US ceased supporting Israel’s violence in Gaza, that violence would necessarily be forced to end.

    As a retired Israeli major general named Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate in November, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

    If you don’t want your government engaging in foreign conflicts and intervening in foreign affairs, then you should oppose the US-backed massacres in Gaza, because that’s exactly what it is. The anti-interventionist position for an American to have is to demand that the Biden administration stop actively facilitating this mass atrocity.

    https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/many-say-they-want-peace-when-what
    Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is Obedience: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix Caitlin JohnstoneWednesday 24 Jan 24 Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): Everyone says they want peace, but they mean different things by this. To an anti-imperialist, peace means the end of violence, oppression and exploitation. To a Zionist, peace means Palestinians lie down and accept their fate and neighboring nations cease disobeying Israel. To a supporter of the US empire, peace means all nations around the world submit to US unipolar hegemony. Many say they want peace when what they really want is tyranny. If “peace” to you means other populations bow down and submit to your will, then it makes perfect sense for you to believe that your wars are being waged to attain peace, because those wars are being used to violently bludgeon those populations into obedience. If your definition of peace means the cessation of all violence and abuse, then you will support ceasefires, peace negotiations, diplomacy, the de-escalation of tensions, the cessation of imperialist extraction, and the end of apartheid and injustice. Pay less attention to people’s words about wanting “peace” and focus instead on what actions they are supporting to accomplish that end. This will show you the truth about what they really want. ❖ https://x.com/caitoz/status/1748455323126632957?s=20 ❖ Someone asked “Can we all agree that our world would be better without a Hamas?” This is the sort of question that can only make sense to you if you view Hamas as some kind of invasive alien presence that was imposed upon Palestine from the outside instead of a natural emergence from the material circumstances that have been forced upon Palestinians. If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound. If Hamas had been completely eliminated a decade ago, there would be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel today under that or some other name. If Hamas is completely eliminated tomorrow, there will be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel in a matter of years (assuming there are any Palestinians left when this is all over, of course). If a man starts strangling me, at some point I’m going to try to gouge his eyes and crush his testicles. That’s just what happens when humans find themselves under a sufficient amount of existential pressure. Asking if the world would be better without Hamas is as nonsensical as asking if Alaska would be better without coats. The presence of coats in Alaska is the natural consequence of the material conditions in that region, and as long as those material conditions persist for the population of Alaska then there will necessarily be coats. Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable. ❖ Biden has started a new US war in Yemen while backing a genocide in Gaza, both of which are fully supported by the party which supposedly opposes him. But by all means go ahead and spend the rest of the year fixating on the US presidential race. ❖ Know how you can tell it no longer matters who the US president is? They stopped getting assassinated. ❖ The Biden administration’s justifications for its acts of war in Yemen are premised on the absurd assumption that the world economy should march on completely uninhibited during an active genocide. ❖ Supporting the world’s most powerful government bombing the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide is the most sycophantic bootlicking you can possibly cram into a single political opinion. ❖ https://x.com/caitoz/status/1748478825602953304?s=20 ❖ Israel isn’t relentlessly murderous and abusive because it’s run by Jews, it’s relentlessly murderous and abusive because that’s the only way to maintain an ethnostate that was abruptly dropped on top of an already existing civilization. This would be true if it’d been a Mormon state or a Romani state. Take any already existing country with its own ethnic and religious makeup and its own relationships with surrounding countries and drop a brand new artificial ethnostate on top of it with a deluge of immigrants who are designated special and above the people in that region, and you’re going to get a ton of violence. You’re also going to see the dominant group espouse supremacist ideological beliefs to justify why it’s fine for them to be placed above the other group and receive better treatment by the state. These things would happen regardless of what those respective ethnic and religious makeups happen to be. How can we be sure of this? Because we’ve seen it happen time and time again in other settler-colonialist projects throughout history which had nothing to do with Jews or Muslims. It’s not about Jews and Judaism, it’s about the nature and character of the ethnostate which got placed overtop a pre-existing civilization in the 1940s. The religions and ethnicities are interchangeable with pretty much any other in terms of how much violence would be necessary to institute and maintain such a state. ❖ People who say they oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza but don’t forcefully oppose Biden’s facilitation of Israel’s actions in Gaza do not actually oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza. ❖ There’s a type of uninformed comment I keep seeing, usually from Americans, that goes something like this: “What do I care about Israel and Hamas? It’s none of our business and we should stay out of it.” This comment is born of the misunderstanding that people want the US to meddle in middle eastern affairs to stop the slaughter in Gaza, which is a notion many Americans reflexively oppose these days because they have learned that US “humanitarian interventions” in that region are consistently disastrous and often very costly. But that isn’t what’s being called for. What’s being called for is for the US to STOP intervening in Israel and Gaza — to END an intervention that is ALREADY taking place. The US has been pouring billions of dollars of weaponry into Israel every year for many years now, and has sent a whole lot more since October 7 to assist the Israeli butchery that’s been happening in Gaza. If the US ceased supporting Israel’s violence in Gaza, that violence would necessarily be forced to end. As a retired Israeli major general named Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate in November, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.” If you don’t want your government engaging in foreign conflicts and intervening in foreign affairs, then you should oppose the US-backed massacres in Gaza, because that’s exactly what it is. The anti-interventionist position for an American to have is to demand that the Biden administration stop actively facilitating this mass atrocity. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/many-say-they-want-peace-when-what
    Like
    1
    0 Comments 0 Shares 7709 Views
  • Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is Obedience: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
    Caitlin JohnstoneWednesday 24 Jan 24
    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):



    Everyone says they want peace, but they mean different things by this. To an anti-imperialist, peace means the end of violence, oppression and exploitation. To a Zionist, peace means Palestinians lie down and accept their fate and neighboring nations cease disobeying Israel. To a supporter of the US empire, peace means all nations around the world submit to US unipolar hegemony. Many say they want peace when what they really want is tyranny.

    If “peace” to you means other populations bow down and submit to your will, then it makes perfect sense for you to believe that your wars are being waged to attain peace, because those wars are being used to violently bludgeon those populations into obedience. If your definition of peace means the cessation of all violence and abuse, then you will support ceasefires, peace negotiations, diplomacy, the de-escalation of tensions, the cessation of imperialist extraction, and the end of apartheid and injustice.

    Pay less attention to people’s words about wanting “peace” and focus instead on what actions they are supporting to accomplish that end. This will show you the truth about what they really want.




    https://x.com/caitoz/status/1748455323126632957?s=20


    Someone asked “Can we all agree that our world would be better without a Hamas?”

    This is the sort of question that can only make sense to you if you view Hamas as some kind of invasive alien presence that was imposed upon Palestine from the outside instead of a natural emergence from the material circumstances that have been forced upon Palestinians. If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound.

    If Hamas had been completely eliminated a decade ago, there would be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel today under that or some other name. If Hamas is completely eliminated tomorrow, there will be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel in a matter of years (assuming there are any Palestinians left when this is all over, of course). If a man starts strangling me, at some point I’m going to try to gouge his eyes and crush his testicles. That’s just what happens when humans find themselves under a sufficient amount of existential pressure.

    Asking if the world would be better without Hamas is as nonsensical as asking if Alaska would be better without coats. The presence of coats in Alaska is the natural consequence of the material conditions in that region, and as long as those material conditions persist for the population of Alaska then there will necessarily be coats.

    Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable.



    Biden has started a new US war in Yemen while backing a genocide in Gaza, both of which are fully supported by the party which supposedly opposes him. But by all means go ahead and spend the rest of the year fixating on the US presidential race.



    Know how you can tell it no longer matters who the US president is? They stopped getting assassinated.



    The Biden administration’s justifications for its acts of war in Yemen are premised on the absurd assumption that the world economy should march on completely uninhibited during an active genocide.



    Supporting the world’s most powerful government bombing the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide is the most sycophantic bootlicking you can possibly cram into a single political opinion.




    https://x.com/caitoz/status/1748478825602953304?s=20


    Israel isn’t relentlessly murderous and abusive because it’s run by Jews, it’s relentlessly murderous and abusive because that’s the only way to maintain an ethnostate that was abruptly dropped on top of an already existing civilization. This would be true if it’d been a Mormon state or a Romani state.

    Take any already existing country with its own ethnic and religious makeup and its own relationships with surrounding countries and drop a brand new artificial ethnostate on top of it with a deluge of immigrants who are designated special and above the people in that region, and you’re going to get a ton of violence. You’re also going to see the dominant group espouse supremacist ideological beliefs to justify why it’s fine for them to be placed above the other group and receive better treatment by the state. These things would happen regardless of what those respective ethnic and religious makeups happen to be.

    How can we be sure of this? Because we’ve seen it happen time and time again in other settler-colonialist projects throughout history which had nothing to do with Jews or Muslims.

    It’s not about Jews and Judaism, it’s about the nature and character of the ethnostate which got placed overtop a pre-existing civilization in the 1940s. The religions and ethnicities are interchangeable with pretty much any other in terms of how much violence would be necessary to institute and maintain such a state.



    People who say they oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza but don’t forcefully oppose Biden’s facilitation of Israel’s actions in Gaza do not actually oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza.



    There’s a type of uninformed comment I keep seeing, usually from Americans, that goes something like this: “What do I care about Israel and Hamas? It’s none of our business and we should stay out of it.”

    This comment is born of the misunderstanding that people want the US to meddle in middle eastern affairs to stop the slaughter in Gaza, which is a notion many Americans reflexively oppose these days because they have learned that US “humanitarian interventions” in that region are consistently disastrous and often very costly.

    But that isn’t what’s being called for. What’s being called for is for the US to STOP intervening in Israel and Gaza — to END an intervention that is ALREADY taking place. The US has been pouring billions of dollars of weaponry into Israel every year for many years now, and has sent a whole lot more since October 7 to assist the Israeli butchery that’s been happening in Gaza. If the US ceased supporting Israel’s violence in Gaza, that violence would necessarily be forced to end.

    As a retired Israeli major general named Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate in November, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

    If you don’t want your government engaging in foreign conflicts and intervening in foreign affairs, then you should oppose the US-backed massacres in Gaza, because that’s exactly what it is. The anti-interventionist position for an American to have is to demand that the Biden administration stop actively facilitating this mass atrocity.

    https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/many-say-they-want-peace-when-what

    https://thealtworld.com/caitlin_johnston/many-say-they-want-peace-when-what-they-really-want-is-obedience
    Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is Obedience: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix Caitlin JohnstoneWednesday 24 Jan 24 Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): Everyone says they want peace, but they mean different things by this. To an anti-imperialist, peace means the end of violence, oppression and exploitation. To a Zionist, peace means Palestinians lie down and accept their fate and neighboring nations cease disobeying Israel. To a supporter of the US empire, peace means all nations around the world submit to US unipolar hegemony. Many say they want peace when what they really want is tyranny. If “peace” to you means other populations bow down and submit to your will, then it makes perfect sense for you to believe that your wars are being waged to attain peace, because those wars are being used to violently bludgeon those populations into obedience. If your definition of peace means the cessation of all violence and abuse, then you will support ceasefires, peace negotiations, diplomacy, the de-escalation of tensions, the cessation of imperialist extraction, and the end of apartheid and injustice. Pay less attention to people’s words about wanting “peace” and focus instead on what actions they are supporting to accomplish that end. This will show you the truth about what they really want. ❖ https://x.com/caitoz/status/1748455323126632957?s=20 ❖ Someone asked “Can we all agree that our world would be better without a Hamas?” This is the sort of question that can only make sense to you if you view Hamas as some kind of invasive alien presence that was imposed upon Palestine from the outside instead of a natural emergence from the material circumstances that have been forced upon Palestinians. If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound. If Hamas had been completely eliminated a decade ago, there would be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel today under that or some other name. If Hamas is completely eliminated tomorrow, there will be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel in a matter of years (assuming there are any Palestinians left when this is all over, of course). If a man starts strangling me, at some point I’m going to try to gouge his eyes and crush his testicles. That’s just what happens when humans find themselves under a sufficient amount of existential pressure. Asking if the world would be better without Hamas is as nonsensical as asking if Alaska would be better without coats. The presence of coats in Alaska is the natural consequence of the material conditions in that region, and as long as those material conditions persist for the population of Alaska then there will necessarily be coats. Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable. ❖ Biden has started a new US war in Yemen while backing a genocide in Gaza, both of which are fully supported by the party which supposedly opposes him. But by all means go ahead and spend the rest of the year fixating on the US presidential race. ❖ Know how you can tell it no longer matters who the US president is? They stopped getting assassinated. ❖ The Biden administration’s justifications for its acts of war in Yemen are premised on the absurd assumption that the world economy should march on completely uninhibited during an active genocide. ❖ Supporting the world’s most powerful government bombing the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide is the most sycophantic bootlicking you can possibly cram into a single political opinion. ❖ https://x.com/caitoz/status/1748478825602953304?s=20 ❖ Israel isn’t relentlessly murderous and abusive because it’s run by Jews, it’s relentlessly murderous and abusive because that’s the only way to maintain an ethnostate that was abruptly dropped on top of an already existing civilization. This would be true if it’d been a Mormon state or a Romani state. Take any already existing country with its own ethnic and religious makeup and its own relationships with surrounding countries and drop a brand new artificial ethnostate on top of it with a deluge of immigrants who are designated special and above the people in that region, and you’re going to get a ton of violence. You’re also going to see the dominant group espouse supremacist ideological beliefs to justify why it’s fine for them to be placed above the other group and receive better treatment by the state. These things would happen regardless of what those respective ethnic and religious makeups happen to be. How can we be sure of this? Because we’ve seen it happen time and time again in other settler-colonialist projects throughout history which had nothing to do with Jews or Muslims. It’s not about Jews and Judaism, it’s about the nature and character of the ethnostate which got placed overtop a pre-existing civilization in the 1940s. The religions and ethnicities are interchangeable with pretty much any other in terms of how much violence would be necessary to institute and maintain such a state. ❖ People who say they oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza but don’t forcefully oppose Biden’s facilitation of Israel’s actions in Gaza do not actually oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza. ❖ There’s a type of uninformed comment I keep seeing, usually from Americans, that goes something like this: “What do I care about Israel and Hamas? It’s none of our business and we should stay out of it.” This comment is born of the misunderstanding that people want the US to meddle in middle eastern affairs to stop the slaughter in Gaza, which is a notion many Americans reflexively oppose these days because they have learned that US “humanitarian interventions” in that region are consistently disastrous and often very costly. But that isn’t what’s being called for. What’s being called for is for the US to STOP intervening in Israel and Gaza — to END an intervention that is ALREADY taking place. The US has been pouring billions of dollars of weaponry into Israel every year for many years now, and has sent a whole lot more since October 7 to assist the Israeli butchery that’s been happening in Gaza. If the US ceased supporting Israel’s violence in Gaza, that violence would necessarily be forced to end. As a retired Israeli major general named Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate in November, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.” If you don’t want your government engaging in foreign conflicts and intervening in foreign affairs, then you should oppose the US-backed massacres in Gaza, because that’s exactly what it is. The anti-interventionist position for an American to have is to demand that the Biden administration stop actively facilitating this mass atrocity. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/many-say-they-want-peace-when-what https://thealtworld.com/caitlin_johnston/many-say-they-want-peace-when-what-they-really-want-is-obedience
    THEALTWORLD.COM
    Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is Obedience: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix - TheAltWorld
    "Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable."
    Angry
    1
    0 Comments 0 Shares 7213 Views
  • Bibi Rejects Palestinian Statehood, Biden Says Bombing Yemen Doesn't Work But Will Continue Anyway
    Caitlin Johnstone

    Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):



    Benjamin Netanyahu said he opposes Palestinian statehood and that Israel must control everything from the river to the sea on the same day Joe Biden said the repeated bombing of Yemen isn’t deterring Ansarallah but they’re going to keep bombing anyway.

    “In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan River,” Netanyahu told the press on Thursday, saying he has made this position clear to the White House.

    Asked by the press on Thursday if the strikes against the Houthis are working, Biden replied “Well, when you say ‘working’ — are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.”

    An unusually honest day for empire managers.



    Zionism does not work. It was tried, and it turns out it doesn’t work. If the forced existence of your artificial ethnostate requires ceaseless war and the periodic massacring of large numbers of children, then your plan for your artificial ethnostate isn’t working out and a new plan is needed.



    Talking about October 7 without talking about the mountains of Israeli abuses which gave rise to it is the same as lying.



    Normal person: It’s bad to massacre tens of thousands of civilians.

    Crazy person: Oh so you’re saying you hate Jews then. You’re saying Jews shouldn’t defend themselves. You want all the Jews to die so there won’t be any more Jews because you hate Jews. Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews.



    Israel apologists would have you believe there’s been a sudden worldwide emergence of “Hamas supporters” everywhere rather than a normal and entirely predictable worldwide opposition to genocide.



    A lot of the footage of explosions in Gaza we’ve been seeing are not from airstrikes but detonations of explosives planted in the buildings. We’re watching the controlled demolition of an entire civilization.


    https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1747734676800684361


    Once it was accepted that a Jewish ethnostate dropped on top of an already existing country was not only necessary but so necessary that any and all means must be used to maintain it, atrocities were inevitable. A one-way track to genocide and ethnic cleansing was already set.



    When I look at this awful trainwreck of a world we’re leaving to younger generations it infuriates me that older generations are constantly bitching at them. How can we have any attitude toward the young but total bare-hearted contrition? We should be on our knees begging them to forgive us for having failed them so spectacularly, but instead we’ve got the gall to wag our fingers at them and lecture them about pronouns and TikTok.

    “Hurr, durr, they look at their smartphones too much and they don’t know how to change a tire and they use they/them pronouns!” Shut up you fucking wanker. You burnt up their biosphere you piece of shit. You’re tossing them from the womb into a dying world of war and chaos and injustice and exploitation and you have the temerity to tell them they’re doing it wrong? Fuck you.

    I hope they ignore us, personally. I hope they keep rewriting the rules of this dogshit society we’re leaving them and knocking down every pillar of our culture. Everything we older generations have done has taken our world to the brink of environmental collapse and nuclear brinkmanship, so I hope they keep shrugging off the old rules of this profoundly sick civilization and trying new things and blazing new trails in the hope of steering clear of the disaster we placed on their horizon.

    We shouldn’t be mocking and lecturing them, we should be humbly apologizing and trying to learn from them and help them. We are failures. They are humanity’s last and only hope.

    To the young: I am so, so sorry, from the very bottom of my heart. I hope you succeed in clawing your way out of the madness your predecessors left you in and create a healthy world, a healthy world which will look nothing like the one we made for you. I am on your side, whatever you need.



    Israel has lost the argument. The western empire has lost the argument. The mass media have lost the argument. Mainstream western culture has lost the argument. Capitalism has lost the argument. Our systems have failed us as massively as anything can fail. Time for something new.

    _______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.


    Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/bibi-rejects-palestinian-statehood?utm_medium=ios
    Bibi Rejects Palestinian Statehood, Biden Says Bombing Yemen Doesn't Work But Will Continue Anyway Caitlin Johnstone Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): Benjamin Netanyahu said he opposes Palestinian statehood and that Israel must control everything from the river to the sea on the same day Joe Biden said the repeated bombing of Yemen isn’t deterring Ansarallah but they’re going to keep bombing anyway. “In any future arrangement … Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan River,” Netanyahu told the press on Thursday, saying he has made this position clear to the White House. Asked by the press on Thursday if the strikes against the Houthis are working, Biden replied “Well, when you say ‘working’ — are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” An unusually honest day for empire managers. ❖ Zionism does not work. It was tried, and it turns out it doesn’t work. If the forced existence of your artificial ethnostate requires ceaseless war and the periodic massacring of large numbers of children, then your plan for your artificial ethnostate isn’t working out and a new plan is needed. ❖ Talking about October 7 without talking about the mountains of Israeli abuses which gave rise to it is the same as lying. ❖ Normal person: It’s bad to massacre tens of thousands of civilians. Crazy person: Oh so you’re saying you hate Jews then. You’re saying Jews shouldn’t defend themselves. You want all the Jews to die so there won’t be any more Jews because you hate Jews. Jews Jews Jews Jews Jews. ❖ Israel apologists would have you believe there’s been a sudden worldwide emergence of “Hamas supporters” everywhere rather than a normal and entirely predictable worldwide opposition to genocide. ❖ A lot of the footage of explosions in Gaza we’ve been seeing are not from airstrikes but detonations of explosives planted in the buildings. We’re watching the controlled demolition of an entire civilization. https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1747734676800684361 ❖ Once it was accepted that a Jewish ethnostate dropped on top of an already existing country was not only necessary but so necessary that any and all means must be used to maintain it, atrocities were inevitable. A one-way track to genocide and ethnic cleansing was already set. ❖ When I look at this awful trainwreck of a world we’re leaving to younger generations it infuriates me that older generations are constantly bitching at them. How can we have any attitude toward the young but total bare-hearted contrition? We should be on our knees begging them to forgive us for having failed them so spectacularly, but instead we’ve got the gall to wag our fingers at them and lecture them about pronouns and TikTok. “Hurr, durr, they look at their smartphones too much and they don’t know how to change a tire and they use they/them pronouns!” Shut up you fucking wanker. You burnt up their biosphere you piece of shit. You’re tossing them from the womb into a dying world of war and chaos and injustice and exploitation and you have the temerity to tell them they’re doing it wrong? Fuck you. I hope they ignore us, personally. I hope they keep rewriting the rules of this dogshit society we’re leaving them and knocking down every pillar of our culture. Everything we older generations have done has taken our world to the brink of environmental collapse and nuclear brinkmanship, so I hope they keep shrugging off the old rules of this profoundly sick civilization and trying new things and blazing new trails in the hope of steering clear of the disaster we placed on their horizon. We shouldn’t be mocking and lecturing them, we should be humbly apologizing and trying to learn from them and help them. We are failures. They are humanity’s last and only hope. To the young: I am so, so sorry, from the very bottom of my heart. I hope you succeed in clawing your way out of the madness your predecessors left you in and create a healthy world, a healthy world which will look nothing like the one we made for you. I am on your side, whatever you need. ❖ Israel has lost the argument. The western empire has lost the argument. The mass media have lost the argument. Mainstream western culture has lost the argument. Capitalism has lost the argument. Our systems have failed us as massively as anything can fail. Time for something new. _______________ My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley. Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/bibi-rejects-palestinian-statehood?utm_medium=ios
    WWW.CAITLINJOHNST.ONE
    Bibi Rejects Palestinian Statehood, Biden Says Bombing Yemen Doesn't Work But Will Continue Anyway
    Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): Benjamin Netanyahu said he opposes Palestinian statehood and that Israel must control everything from the river to the sea on the same day Joe Biden said the repeated bombing of Yemen isn’t deterring Ansarallah but they’re going to keep bombing anyway.
    0 Comments 0 Shares 5808 Views
  • The Year that Expertise Collapsed
    Jeffrey A. Tucker
    Getting sick and getting well is part of the human experience at all times in all places. As with other phenomena of human existence, that suggests there is a great deal of embedded knowledge on the topic woven into the fabric of our lives. We aren’t born knowing but we come to know: from our moms and dads, experience of siblings and others, from our own experience, and from medical professionals who deal with the problem daily.

    In a healthy and functioning society, the path toward maintaining personal and public health becomes embedded in the cultural firmament, just like manners, belief systems, and value preferences. It’s not necessary that we think about it constantly; instead it becomes a habit, with much of the knowledge tacit; that is, deployed daily but rarely with full cognizance.

    We could know for certain that there had been a change in the matrix in March 2020 because, seemingly out of nowhere, all of this knowledge was deemed wrong. A new gaggle of experts was in charge, one day to the next. Suddenly, they were everywhere. They were on TV, quoted by all the newspapers, amplified on social media, and on the phone constantly with local officials instructing them on how they must shut down the schools, businesses, playgrounds, churches, and civic gatherings.

    The message was always the same. This time is completely different from anything in our experience or in any previous experience. This time we must adopt a totally new and completely untested paradigm. It comes from models that high-level scientists have deemed correct. It comes from labs. It comes from “germ games” of which none of us are part. If we dare to reject the new teachings for the old, we are doing it wrong. We are the malicious ones. We deserve ridicule, cancellation, silencing, exclusion, and worse.

    It felt like a coup d’etat of sorts. It certainly was an intellectual coup. All wisdom of the past, even that known by public health only months earlier, was deleted from public spaces. Dissent was silenced. Corporate media was absolutely united in celebrating the greatness of people like Fauci, who spoke in strangely circuitous ways that contradicted everything we thought we knew.

    It was exceedingly strange because the people we thought might have stood up to the flash imposition of tyranny somehow vanished. We could hardly meet with others at all, if only to share intuitions that something was wrong. “Social distancing” was more than a method to “slow the spread;” it amounted to comprehensive control of the public mind too.

    The experts instructing us spoke with astonishing certainty about precisely how society should be managed in a pandemic. There were scientific papers, tens of thousands of them, and the storm of credentials was everywhere and out of control. Unless you had a university or lab affiliation and unless you had multiple high-level degrees attached to your name, you could not get a hearing. Folk wisdom was out of the question, even basic things like “sun and outdoors are good for respiratory infections.” Even popular understanding of natural immunity came in for hard ridicule.

    Later it turned out that even top credentialed experts would not be taken seriously if they had the wrong views. This is when the racket became incredibly obvious. It was never really about genuine knowledge. It was about compliance and echoing the approved line. It’s astonishing how many people went along, even with the stupidest of the mandates, such as the distancing stickers everywhere, the ubiquity of Plexiglas, and the dirty masks on every face which were somehow believed to keep people healthy.

    Once the contrary studies started coming out, we would share them and get shouted down. The comment sections of the studies started to be raided by partisan experts who would hone in on small issues and problems and demand and obtain takedowns. Then the contrarian expert would get doxxed, his dean notified, and the faculty turned against the person, lest the department risk funding from Big Pharma or Fauci in the future.

    All the while, we kept thinking that there must be some rationale behind all this madness. It never emerged. It was all intimidation and belligerence and nothing more – arbitrary diktat by big shots who were pretending the entire time.

    The lockdowners and shot mandators were never intellectually serious people. They never much thought about the implications or ramifications of what they were doing. They were just wrecking things mostly for pecuniary gain, job protection, and career advancement, plus it was fun to be in charge. It’s not much more complicated than that.

    In other words, we’ve gradually come to realize that our worst fears were true. All these experts were and are fakes. There have been some hints along the way, such as when North Carolina Health Director Mandy Cohen (now head of the CDC) reported that she and her colleagues were burning up the phone lines to decide whether people should be allowed to participate in sports.

    “She was like, are you gonna let them have professional football?” she said. “And I was like, no. And she’s like, OK neither are we.”

    Another candid moment came five months ago, only recently unearthed by X, when NIH head Francis Collins admitted that he and his colleagues attached “zero value” to whether and to what extent they were disrupting lives, wrecking the economy, and destroying education for kids. He actually said this.

    As it turns out, these experts who ruled our lives, and still do to a great extent, were never what they claimed to be, and never actually possessed knowledge that was superior to what existed within the cultural firmament of society. Instead, all they really had was power and a grand opportunity to play dictator.

    It’s astonishing, truly, and worthy of deep study, when you consider the extent to which and for how long this class of people were able to maintain the illusion of consensus within their ranks. They bamboozled the media all over the world. They tricked vast swaths of the population. They bent all social media algorithms to reflect their views and priorities.

    One explanation comes down to the money trail. That’s a powerful explanation. But it is not the whole of it. Behind the illusion was a terrifying intellectual isolation in which all these people found themselves. They never really encountered people who disagreed. Indeed, part of the way these people had come to conceive of their jobs was to master the art of knowing what to think and when and how. It’s part of the job training to enter the class of experts: mastering the skill of echoing the opinions of others.

    Discovering this to be true is alarming for anyone who holds to older ideals of how intellectual society should conduct itself. We like to imagine that there is a constant clash of ideas, a burning desire to get to the truth, a love of knowledge and data, a passion for gaining a better understanding. That requires, above all else, an openness of mind and a willingness to listen. All of this was overtly and explicitly shut down in March 2020 but it was made easier because all the mechanisms were already in place.

    One of the best books of our time is Tom Harrington’s The Treason of the Experts, published by Brownstone. There is simply not in the present era a more insightful investigation and deconstruction of the sociological sickness of the expert class. Every page is on fire with insight and observation about the intellectual juntas that attempt to rule the public mind in today’s world. It’s a terrifying look at how wildly wrong everything has gone in the world of ideas. A great followup volume is Ramesh Thakur’s Our Enemy, the Government, which reveals all the ways in which the new scientists who were ruling the world weren’t scientific at all.

    Brownstone was born in the midst of the worst of this world. We set out to create something different, not a bubble of ideological/partisan attachment or an enforcement organ of the proper way to think about all issues. Instead, we sought to become a genuine society of thinkers united in a principled attachment to freedom but hugely diverse in specialization and philosophical outlook. It’s one of the few centers where there is genuine interdisciplinary engagement and openness to new perspectives and outlook. All of this is essential to the life of the mind and yet nearly absent in academia, media, and government today.

    We’ve put together a fascinating model for retreats. We choose a comfortable venue where the food and drink are provided and the living quarters are excellent, and bring together 40 or so top experts to present a set of ideas to the whole group. Each speaker gets 15 minutes and that is followed by 15 minutes of engagement from everyone present. Then we go to the next speaker. This goes on all day and the evenings are spent in casual conversation. As the organizer, Brownstone does not pick topics or speakers but rather allows the flow of ideas to emerge organically. This goes on for two and a half days. There is no set agenda, no mandated takeaways, no required action items. There is only unconstrained idea generation and sharing.

    There is a reason why there is such a clamor to attend. It’s the creation of something that all these wonderful people – each person a dissident in his own field – had hoped to encounter in professional life but the reality was always elusive. It’s only three days so hardly Ancient Greece or Vienna in the interwar years but it is an excellent start, and hugely productive and uplifting. It’s amazing what can happen when you combine intelligence, erudition, open minds, and sincere sharing of ideas. From the point of view of government, huge corporations, academia, and all the architects of today’s world of ideas, this is precisely what they do not want.

    The difference between 2023 and, say, five years ago, is that the expertise racket is now out in the open. Vast swaths of society decided to trust the experts for a time. They deployed every power of the state, along with all affiliated institutions in the pseudo-private sector, to browbeat and manipulate the people into panicked compliance with preposterous antics that never had any hope of mitigating disease.

    Look where that got us. The experts have been fully discredited. Is it any wonder that ever more people are skeptical of the same gang’s claims about climate change, diversity, immigration, inflation, education, gender transitions, or anything else pushed today by elite minds? Mass compliance has been replaced by mass incredulity. Trust will not likely return in our lifetimes.

    There is, further, a reason why hardly anyone is surprised that the president of Harvard stands accused of rampant plagiarism or that election officials are deploying sneaky forms of lawfare to keep political renegades off the ballot or that money launderers for the administrative state are getting away with rampant fraud. Graft, kickbacks, bribery, misappropriation, nepotism, favoritism, and outright corruption rule the day in all elite circles.

    In a few weeks, we are going to hear from Anthony Fauci, who will be grilled by a House of Representatives committee on exactly how he claimed to be so sure that there was no lab leak stemming from gain-of-function research being done at a US-baked lab in Wuhan. We’ll see how much attention this testimony gets but, truly, does anyone really believe that he is going to be honest and forthcoming? It is pretty much a consensus these days that he has been up to no good. If he is “the science,” science itself is in grave trouble.

    What a contrast to just a few years ago when Fauci-themed shirts and coffee mugs were big-selling items. He claimed to be the science, and science did rally behind him as if he had all the answers, even though what he advocated contradicted every bit of common wisdom that has always been practiced in every civilized society.

    Three years ago, the expert class went out on the farthest limb one can imagine, daring to replace all social knowledge and embedded cultural experience with their off-the-cuff rationalism and scientistic razzmatazz that ended up serving the industrial interests of large-scale exploiters in tech, media, and pharma. We live in the midst of the rubble they created. It’s no wonder they have been completely discredited.

    To replace them – and this is a long-term strategy and one that unfolds gradually with bold efforts such as that undertaken by Brownstone Institute – we need a new and serious effort to rebuild serious thought based on honesty, sincere engagement across ideological lines, and a genuine commitment to truth and freedom. We have that opportunity right now, and we dare not decline to take up the task with every sense of urgency and passion. As always, your support of our work is greatly appreciated.

    Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
    For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author.

    Author

    Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

    View all posts
    Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work.

    https://brownstone.org/articles/the-year-that-expertise-collapsed/
    The Year that Expertise Collapsed Jeffrey A. Tucker Getting sick and getting well is part of the human experience at all times in all places. As with other phenomena of human existence, that suggests there is a great deal of embedded knowledge on the topic woven into the fabric of our lives. We aren’t born knowing but we come to know: from our moms and dads, experience of siblings and others, from our own experience, and from medical professionals who deal with the problem daily. In a healthy and functioning society, the path toward maintaining personal and public health becomes embedded in the cultural firmament, just like manners, belief systems, and value preferences. It’s not necessary that we think about it constantly; instead it becomes a habit, with much of the knowledge tacit; that is, deployed daily but rarely with full cognizance. We could know for certain that there had been a change in the matrix in March 2020 because, seemingly out of nowhere, all of this knowledge was deemed wrong. A new gaggle of experts was in charge, one day to the next. Suddenly, they were everywhere. They were on TV, quoted by all the newspapers, amplified on social media, and on the phone constantly with local officials instructing them on how they must shut down the schools, businesses, playgrounds, churches, and civic gatherings. The message was always the same. This time is completely different from anything in our experience or in any previous experience. This time we must adopt a totally new and completely untested paradigm. It comes from models that high-level scientists have deemed correct. It comes from labs. It comes from “germ games” of which none of us are part. If we dare to reject the new teachings for the old, we are doing it wrong. We are the malicious ones. We deserve ridicule, cancellation, silencing, exclusion, and worse. It felt like a coup d’etat of sorts. It certainly was an intellectual coup. All wisdom of the past, even that known by public health only months earlier, was deleted from public spaces. Dissent was silenced. Corporate media was absolutely united in celebrating the greatness of people like Fauci, who spoke in strangely circuitous ways that contradicted everything we thought we knew. It was exceedingly strange because the people we thought might have stood up to the flash imposition of tyranny somehow vanished. We could hardly meet with others at all, if only to share intuitions that something was wrong. “Social distancing” was more than a method to “slow the spread;” it amounted to comprehensive control of the public mind too. The experts instructing us spoke with astonishing certainty about precisely how society should be managed in a pandemic. There were scientific papers, tens of thousands of them, and the storm of credentials was everywhere and out of control. Unless you had a university or lab affiliation and unless you had multiple high-level degrees attached to your name, you could not get a hearing. Folk wisdom was out of the question, even basic things like “sun and outdoors are good for respiratory infections.” Even popular understanding of natural immunity came in for hard ridicule. Later it turned out that even top credentialed experts would not be taken seriously if they had the wrong views. This is when the racket became incredibly obvious. It was never really about genuine knowledge. It was about compliance and echoing the approved line. It’s astonishing how many people went along, even with the stupidest of the mandates, such as the distancing stickers everywhere, the ubiquity of Plexiglas, and the dirty masks on every face which were somehow believed to keep people healthy. Once the contrary studies started coming out, we would share them and get shouted down. The comment sections of the studies started to be raided by partisan experts who would hone in on small issues and problems and demand and obtain takedowns. Then the contrarian expert would get doxxed, his dean notified, and the faculty turned against the person, lest the department risk funding from Big Pharma or Fauci in the future. All the while, we kept thinking that there must be some rationale behind all this madness. It never emerged. It was all intimidation and belligerence and nothing more – arbitrary diktat by big shots who were pretending the entire time. The lockdowners and shot mandators were never intellectually serious people. They never much thought about the implications or ramifications of what they were doing. They were just wrecking things mostly for pecuniary gain, job protection, and career advancement, plus it was fun to be in charge. It’s not much more complicated than that. In other words, we’ve gradually come to realize that our worst fears were true. All these experts were and are fakes. There have been some hints along the way, such as when North Carolina Health Director Mandy Cohen (now head of the CDC) reported that she and her colleagues were burning up the phone lines to decide whether people should be allowed to participate in sports. “She was like, are you gonna let them have professional football?” she said. “And I was like, no. And she’s like, OK neither are we.” Another candid moment came five months ago, only recently unearthed by X, when NIH head Francis Collins admitted that he and his colleagues attached “zero value” to whether and to what extent they were disrupting lives, wrecking the economy, and destroying education for kids. He actually said this. As it turns out, these experts who ruled our lives, and still do to a great extent, were never what they claimed to be, and never actually possessed knowledge that was superior to what existed within the cultural firmament of society. Instead, all they really had was power and a grand opportunity to play dictator. It’s astonishing, truly, and worthy of deep study, when you consider the extent to which and for how long this class of people were able to maintain the illusion of consensus within their ranks. They bamboozled the media all over the world. They tricked vast swaths of the population. They bent all social media algorithms to reflect their views and priorities. One explanation comes down to the money trail. That’s a powerful explanation. But it is not the whole of it. Behind the illusion was a terrifying intellectual isolation in which all these people found themselves. They never really encountered people who disagreed. Indeed, part of the way these people had come to conceive of their jobs was to master the art of knowing what to think and when and how. It’s part of the job training to enter the class of experts: mastering the skill of echoing the opinions of others. Discovering this to be true is alarming for anyone who holds to older ideals of how intellectual society should conduct itself. We like to imagine that there is a constant clash of ideas, a burning desire to get to the truth, a love of knowledge and data, a passion for gaining a better understanding. That requires, above all else, an openness of mind and a willingness to listen. All of this was overtly and explicitly shut down in March 2020 but it was made easier because all the mechanisms were already in place. One of the best books of our time is Tom Harrington’s The Treason of the Experts, published by Brownstone. There is simply not in the present era a more insightful investigation and deconstruction of the sociological sickness of the expert class. Every page is on fire with insight and observation about the intellectual juntas that attempt to rule the public mind in today’s world. It’s a terrifying look at how wildly wrong everything has gone in the world of ideas. A great followup volume is Ramesh Thakur’s Our Enemy, the Government, which reveals all the ways in which the new scientists who were ruling the world weren’t scientific at all. Brownstone was born in the midst of the worst of this world. We set out to create something different, not a bubble of ideological/partisan attachment or an enforcement organ of the proper way to think about all issues. Instead, we sought to become a genuine society of thinkers united in a principled attachment to freedom but hugely diverse in specialization and philosophical outlook. It’s one of the few centers where there is genuine interdisciplinary engagement and openness to new perspectives and outlook. All of this is essential to the life of the mind and yet nearly absent in academia, media, and government today. We’ve put together a fascinating model for retreats. We choose a comfortable venue where the food and drink are provided and the living quarters are excellent, and bring together 40 or so top experts to present a set of ideas to the whole group. Each speaker gets 15 minutes and that is followed by 15 minutes of engagement from everyone present. Then we go to the next speaker. This goes on all day and the evenings are spent in casual conversation. As the organizer, Brownstone does not pick topics or speakers but rather allows the flow of ideas to emerge organically. This goes on for two and a half days. There is no set agenda, no mandated takeaways, no required action items. There is only unconstrained idea generation and sharing. There is a reason why there is such a clamor to attend. It’s the creation of something that all these wonderful people – each person a dissident in his own field – had hoped to encounter in professional life but the reality was always elusive. It’s only three days so hardly Ancient Greece or Vienna in the interwar years but it is an excellent start, and hugely productive and uplifting. It’s amazing what can happen when you combine intelligence, erudition, open minds, and sincere sharing of ideas. From the point of view of government, huge corporations, academia, and all the architects of today’s world of ideas, this is precisely what they do not want. The difference between 2023 and, say, five years ago, is that the expertise racket is now out in the open. Vast swaths of society decided to trust the experts for a time. They deployed every power of the state, along with all affiliated institutions in the pseudo-private sector, to browbeat and manipulate the people into panicked compliance with preposterous antics that never had any hope of mitigating disease. Look where that got us. The experts have been fully discredited. Is it any wonder that ever more people are skeptical of the same gang’s claims about climate change, diversity, immigration, inflation, education, gender transitions, or anything else pushed today by elite minds? Mass compliance has been replaced by mass incredulity. Trust will not likely return in our lifetimes. There is, further, a reason why hardly anyone is surprised that the president of Harvard stands accused of rampant plagiarism or that election officials are deploying sneaky forms of lawfare to keep political renegades off the ballot or that money launderers for the administrative state are getting away with rampant fraud. Graft, kickbacks, bribery, misappropriation, nepotism, favoritism, and outright corruption rule the day in all elite circles. In a few weeks, we are going to hear from Anthony Fauci, who will be grilled by a House of Representatives committee on exactly how he claimed to be so sure that there was no lab leak stemming from gain-of-function research being done at a US-baked lab in Wuhan. We’ll see how much attention this testimony gets but, truly, does anyone really believe that he is going to be honest and forthcoming? It is pretty much a consensus these days that he has been up to no good. If he is “the science,” science itself is in grave trouble. What a contrast to just a few years ago when Fauci-themed shirts and coffee mugs were big-selling items. He claimed to be the science, and science did rally behind him as if he had all the answers, even though what he advocated contradicted every bit of common wisdom that has always been practiced in every civilized society. Three years ago, the expert class went out on the farthest limb one can imagine, daring to replace all social knowledge and embedded cultural experience with their off-the-cuff rationalism and scientistic razzmatazz that ended up serving the industrial interests of large-scale exploiters in tech, media, and pharma. We live in the midst of the rubble they created. It’s no wonder they have been completely discredited. To replace them – and this is a long-term strategy and one that unfolds gradually with bold efforts such as that undertaken by Brownstone Institute – we need a new and serious effort to rebuild serious thought based on honesty, sincere engagement across ideological lines, and a genuine commitment to truth and freedom. We have that opportunity right now, and we dare not decline to take up the task with every sense of urgency and passion. As always, your support of our work is greatly appreciated. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone Institute Article and Author. Author Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. View all posts Your financial backing of Brownstone Institute goes to support writers, lawyers, scientists, economists, and other people of courage who have been professionally purged and displaced during the upheaval of our times. You can help get the truth out through their ongoing work. https://brownstone.org/articles/the-year-that-expertise-collapsed/
    BROWNSTONE.ORG
    The Year that Expertise Collapsed ⋆ Brownstone Institute
    To replace the expert class, we need a new and serious effort to rebuild serious thought based on honesty, sincere engagement across ideological lines, and a genuine commitment to truth and freedom. We have that opportunity right now, and we dare not decline to take up the task with every sense of urgency and passion. As always, your support of our work is greatly appreciated.
    1 Comments 0 Shares 24586 Views
  • The Matrix is Collapsing





    https://rumble.com/v40q89m-the-matrix-is-collapsing.html
    The Matrix is Collapsing https://rumble.com/v40q89m-the-matrix-is-collapsing.html
    0 Comments 0 Shares 312 Views
  • Glitch in the Matrix: The planes bound for the #COP28 Climate Change Summit to talk to you about global warming have been frozen in Munich, Germany.
    Glitch in the Matrix: The planes bound for the #COP28 Climate Change Summit to talk to you about global warming have been frozen in Munich, Germany.
    Like
    1
    0 Comments 0 Shares 1452 Views 1
  • Russia's public pivot to Palestine
    As the west's support for Israel's Gaza war becomes indefensible, Moscow aligns itself with the global majority in defense of Palestine.


    The complex, nuanced issue of Russia’s geopolitical neutrality in the Israel-Palestine tragedy was finally clarified last week, in no uncertain terms.

    Exhibit A is Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing - in person, on 30 October - his country's Security Council, top government officials, and heads of security agencies.

    Among other notables, his audience included Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Speaker of the Duma Vyacheslav Volodin; Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov; and Director of SVR (foreign intel) Sergei Narishkin.

    Putin took no time to cut to the chase detailing the official stand of the Russian Federation in the current geopolitical incandescence of two intertwined wars, Ukraine and Israel-Palestine. This was addressed as much to his high-profile audience as to the political leadership of the western Hegemon."

    "There is no justification for the terrible events taking place in Gaza now, where hundreds of thousands of innocent people are being killed indiscriminately, without having anywhere to flee or hide from the bombing. When you see blood-stained children, dead children, the suffering of women and old people, when you see medics killed, of course, it makes you clench your fists as tears well in your eyes.”

    The US-led coalition of chaos

    Then came a preview of the context: “We must clearly understand who in reality is behind the tragedy of peoples in the Middle East and in other regions around the world, who has been organizing this lethal chaos and who benefits from it.”

    In no uncertain terms, Putin described “the current ruling elites in the United States and its satellites” as “the main beneficiaries of the global instability that they use to extract their bloody rent. Their strategy is also clear. The United States as a global superpower is becoming weaker and is losing its position, and everyone sees and understands this, even judging by the trends in the world economy.”

    The Russian president made a direct connection between the American drive to extend “its global dictatorship” and the policy obsession with promoting non-stop chaos: “This chaos will help it contain and destabilize its rivals or, as they put it, their geopolitical opponents, among which they also rank our country, which in reality are new global growth centers and sovereign independent countries who are unwilling to kowtow and play the role of servants.”

    Crucially, Putin made a point to “repeat again” to both his internal and Global South audiences that, “the ruling elites of the United States and its satellites are behind the tragedy of the Palestinians, the massacre in the Middle East in general, the conflict in Ukraine, and many other conflicts in the world – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and so on.”

    It is a vitally important point. By conflating the perpetrators of the Ukraine conflict and the war on Gaza - “the United States and its satellites” - the Russian president has effectively lumped Israel in with the western Hegemon and its agenda of “chaos.”

    Moscow aligns with the real ‘international community’

    Essentially, what this tells us is that the Russian Federation unequivocally aligns itself with the overwhelming majority of Global South/Global Majority public opinion – from the Arab world to all the lands of Islam and beyond, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

    Interestingly, Moscow aligns with the analyses by Iranian Leader Ayatollah Khamenei – a strategic partner of Russia - and Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, in his searing, sophisticated, Sun-Tzu tinged address this past Friday, on “the spider that is trying to entangle the entire planet and the whole world in its cobweb.”

    Exhibit B on Russia’s official position, specifically on Israel-Palestine, came from Russia's permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, at a special UN General Assembly session on Palestine two days after Putin’s address.

    Nebenzya made it abundantly clear that Israel, as an occupying power, does not have “the right for self-defense” – a fact supported by a UN International Court consultative ruling way back in 2004.

    At the time, the court also established, in a 14 out of 15 judicial vote, that Israel’s construction of a massive wall in occupied Palestine, including East Jerusalem, was against international law.

    Nebenzya, in legal terms, nullified the endlessly evoked “right to self-defense” argument brandished by Tel Aviv and the whole NATO galaxy. The Hegemon, Tel Aviv’s protector, recently vetoed Brazil’s draft humanitarian UN Security Council just because it did not mention Israel’s “right to self-defense.”

    Even as he underscored that Moscow does recognize Israel’s right to ensure its security, Nebenzya stressed this right “could be fully guaranteed only in case of a fair resolution of the Palestinian problem based on recognized UN Security Council resolutions."

    The record shows that Israel does not respect any UN Security Council resolution on Palestine.

    Lavrov’s priorities in occupied-Palestine

    Exhibit C on Russia’s stand regarding Israel/Palestine was provided by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in a press conference with Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sabah Al-Sabah, two days after Nebenzya’s intervention at the UN.

    Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s priorities already stressed by Putin and Nebenzya: an urgent ceasefire, humanitarian corridors, and a return to the table to negotiate “an independent Palestinian state, as envisaged by the UN Security Council within the 1967 borders, which would coexist in peace and security with Israel.”

    Lavrov stressed once again that several US-Israeli diversionary tactics are being employed “aimed at delaying (if not burying) the UN Security Council's decision to establish a Palestinian state.”

    This, says the Russian foreign minister, implies condemning the Palestinians “to an eternal existence without rights. This will ensure neither peace nor security in the region, it will only drive the conflict deeper. And you won't be able to drive it deep. The next ‘grapes of wrath’ will be sown, which will quickly ‘sprout.’”

    Lavrov’s analysis, as much as Putin’s, converges with Khamenei’s and Nasrallah’s: “This is not about Gaza, but about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The State of Palestine is an integral part of that solution.”

    Russia is sowing the seeds to exercise the role of trusted mediator for all parties in Israel/Palestine – a role totally unsuitable for the Hegemon, especially after the tacit approval of the current Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

    It’s all here, clearly formulated by Lavrov: “It will be fundamentally important for us to know the unanimous opinion of the Arab world.” That is a message specifically targeting Sunni regimes vassalized by Washington. Then, when they get their act together, “we will support the Arab solution to this very difficult issue.”

    Multipolarity's prerequisite: Peace in Palestine

    Examined together, Exhibits A, B, and C show how Moscow is way ahead of the game. The overall message – which is being minutely decoded all across the Global South/Global Majority – is that even considering non-stop Empire of Chaos gambits, the immutable, exclusionist Zionist Project is now dead on arrival.

    The least bad solution so far is the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative - subscribed by everyone from the lands of Islam to Russia, Iran, and China: an independent Palestinian state, back to the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

    The problem is how to convince out-of-control Zionism to back off. Imperative facts on the ground would have to include severing the Washington-Tel Aviv weaponized/securitized umbilical cord - and expelling from the geopolitical spectrum the neocon Christian Zionist matrix in the US, which happens to be deeply entrenched in silos across the Deep State.

    Both of these imperatives are impossibilities – in short, medium, and even long term.

    Meanwhile, a simple look at the map shows that for all practical purposes, the two-state solution - from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip - is dead. It may be heart-wrenching for the leaders of multipolarity to admit it. It will take some time, and shifting of public discourse, to recognize that the only viable solution is supreme anathema for the Zionist Project: a one-state with Jews and Arabs living together in peace.

    All that brings us to a stark formulation: without a just solution for Palestine, tangible peace across the emerging multipolarity spectrum remains unattainable. The current enabled horror in Gaza shows that peace continues not to be a priority for the Empire of Chaos, and it will take a Russia - with perhaps a China - to shift the game.
    Russia's public pivot to Palestine As the west's support for Israel's Gaza war becomes indefensible, Moscow aligns itself with the global majority in defense of Palestine. The complex, nuanced issue of Russia’s geopolitical neutrality in the Israel-Palestine tragedy was finally clarified last week, in no uncertain terms. Exhibit A is Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing - in person, on 30 October - his country's Security Council, top government officials, and heads of security agencies. Among other notables, his audience included Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Speaker of the Duma Vyacheslav Volodin; Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov; and Director of SVR (foreign intel) Sergei Narishkin. Putin took no time to cut to the chase detailing the official stand of the Russian Federation in the current geopolitical incandescence of two intertwined wars, Ukraine and Israel-Palestine. This was addressed as much to his high-profile audience as to the political leadership of the western Hegemon." "There is no justification for the terrible events taking place in Gaza now, where hundreds of thousands of innocent people are being killed indiscriminately, without having anywhere to flee or hide from the bombing. When you see blood-stained children, dead children, the suffering of women and old people, when you see medics killed, of course, it makes you clench your fists as tears well in your eyes.” The US-led coalition of chaos Then came a preview of the context: “We must clearly understand who in reality is behind the tragedy of peoples in the Middle East and in other regions around the world, who has been organizing this lethal chaos and who benefits from it.” In no uncertain terms, Putin described “the current ruling elites in the United States and its satellites” as “the main beneficiaries of the global instability that they use to extract their bloody rent. Their strategy is also clear. The United States as a global superpower is becoming weaker and is losing its position, and everyone sees and understands this, even judging by the trends in the world economy.” The Russian president made a direct connection between the American drive to extend “its global dictatorship” and the policy obsession with promoting non-stop chaos: “This chaos will help it contain and destabilize its rivals or, as they put it, their geopolitical opponents, among which they also rank our country, which in reality are new global growth centers and sovereign independent countries who are unwilling to kowtow and play the role of servants.” Crucially, Putin made a point to “repeat again” to both his internal and Global South audiences that, “the ruling elites of the United States and its satellites are behind the tragedy of the Palestinians, the massacre in the Middle East in general, the conflict in Ukraine, and many other conflicts in the world – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and so on.” It is a vitally important point. By conflating the perpetrators of the Ukraine conflict and the war on Gaza - “the United States and its satellites” - the Russian president has effectively lumped Israel in with the western Hegemon and its agenda of “chaos.” Moscow aligns with the real ‘international community’ Essentially, what this tells us is that the Russian Federation unequivocally aligns itself with the overwhelming majority of Global South/Global Majority public opinion – from the Arab world to all the lands of Islam and beyond, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Interestingly, Moscow aligns with the analyses by Iranian Leader Ayatollah Khamenei – a strategic partner of Russia - and Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, in his searing, sophisticated, Sun-Tzu tinged address this past Friday, on “the spider that is trying to entangle the entire planet and the whole world in its cobweb.” Exhibit B on Russia’s official position, specifically on Israel-Palestine, came from Russia's permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, at a special UN General Assembly session on Palestine two days after Putin’s address. Nebenzya made it abundantly clear that Israel, as an occupying power, does not have “the right for self-defense” – a fact supported by a UN International Court consultative ruling way back in 2004. At the time, the court also established, in a 14 out of 15 judicial vote, that Israel’s construction of a massive wall in occupied Palestine, including East Jerusalem, was against international law. Nebenzya, in legal terms, nullified the endlessly evoked “right to self-defense” argument brandished by Tel Aviv and the whole NATO galaxy. The Hegemon, Tel Aviv’s protector, recently vetoed Brazil’s draft humanitarian UN Security Council just because it did not mention Israel’s “right to self-defense.” Even as he underscored that Moscow does recognize Israel’s right to ensure its security, Nebenzya stressed this right “could be fully guaranteed only in case of a fair resolution of the Palestinian problem based on recognized UN Security Council resolutions." The record shows that Israel does not respect any UN Security Council resolution on Palestine. Lavrov’s priorities in occupied-Palestine Exhibit C on Russia’s stand regarding Israel/Palestine was provided by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in a press conference with Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sabah Al-Sabah, two days after Nebenzya’s intervention at the UN. Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s priorities already stressed by Putin and Nebenzya: an urgent ceasefire, humanitarian corridors, and a return to the table to negotiate “an independent Palestinian state, as envisaged by the UN Security Council within the 1967 borders, which would coexist in peace and security with Israel.” Lavrov stressed once again that several US-Israeli diversionary tactics are being employed “aimed at delaying (if not burying) the UN Security Council's decision to establish a Palestinian state.” This, says the Russian foreign minister, implies condemning the Palestinians “to an eternal existence without rights. This will ensure neither peace nor security in the region, it will only drive the conflict deeper. And you won't be able to drive it deep. The next ‘grapes of wrath’ will be sown, which will quickly ‘sprout.’” Lavrov’s analysis, as much as Putin’s, converges with Khamenei’s and Nasrallah’s: “This is not about Gaza, but about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The State of Palestine is an integral part of that solution.” Russia is sowing the seeds to exercise the role of trusted mediator for all parties in Israel/Palestine – a role totally unsuitable for the Hegemon, especially after the tacit approval of the current Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It’s all here, clearly formulated by Lavrov: “It will be fundamentally important for us to know the unanimous opinion of the Arab world.” That is a message specifically targeting Sunni regimes vassalized by Washington. Then, when they get their act together, “we will support the Arab solution to this very difficult issue.” Multipolarity's prerequisite: Peace in Palestine Examined together, Exhibits A, B, and C show how Moscow is way ahead of the game. The overall message – which is being minutely decoded all across the Global South/Global Majority – is that even considering non-stop Empire of Chaos gambits, the immutable, exclusionist Zionist Project is now dead on arrival. The least bad solution so far is the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative - subscribed by everyone from the lands of Islam to Russia, Iran, and China: an independent Palestinian state, back to the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The problem is how to convince out-of-control Zionism to back off. Imperative facts on the ground would have to include severing the Washington-Tel Aviv weaponized/securitized umbilical cord - and expelling from the geopolitical spectrum the neocon Christian Zionist matrix in the US, which happens to be deeply entrenched in silos across the Deep State. Both of these imperatives are impossibilities – in short, medium, and even long term. Meanwhile, a simple look at the map shows that for all practical purposes, the two-state solution - from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip - is dead. It may be heart-wrenching for the leaders of multipolarity to admit it. It will take some time, and shifting of public discourse, to recognize that the only viable solution is supreme anathema for the Zionist Project: a one-state with Jews and Arabs living together in peace. All that brings us to a stark formulation: without a just solution for Palestine, tangible peace across the emerging multipolarity spectrum remains unattainable. The current enabled horror in Gaza shows that peace continues not to be a priority for the Empire of Chaos, and it will take a Russia - with perhaps a China - to shift the game.
    0 Comments 0 Shares 7275 Views
  • https://new.thecradle.co/articles/russias-public-pivot-to-palestine

    Pay very close attention.

    Repercussions will be immense.

    Exhibits A, B and C: Putin, Nebenzya and Lavrov.


    Russia's public pivot to Palestine
    As the west's support for Israel's Gaza war becomes indefensible, Moscow aligns itself with the global majority in defense of Palestine.


    The complex, nuanced issue of Russia’s geopolitical neutrality in the Israel-Palestine tragedy was finally clarified last week, in no uncertain terms.

    Exhibit A is Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing - in person, on 30 October - his country's Security Council, top government officials, and heads of security agencies.

    Among other notables, his audience included Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Speaker of the Duma Vyacheslav Volodin; Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov; and Director of SVR (foreign intel) Sergei Narishkin.

    Putin took no time to cut to the chase detailing the official stand of the Russian Federation in the current geopolitical incandescence of two intertwined wars, Ukraine and Israel-Palestine. This was addressed as much to his high-profile audience as to the political leadership of the western Hegemon."

    "There is no justification for the terrible events taking place in Gaza now, where hundreds of thousands of innocent people are being killed indiscriminately, without having anywhere to flee or hide from the bombing. When you see blood-stained children, dead children, the suffering of women and old people, when you see medics killed, of course, it makes you clench your fists as tears well in your eyes.”

    The US-led coalition of chaos

    Then came a preview of the context: “We must clearly understand who in reality is behind the tragedy of peoples in the Middle East and in other regions around the world, who has been organizing this lethal chaos and who benefits from it.”

    In no uncertain terms, Putin described “the current ruling elites in the United States and its satellites” as “the main beneficiaries of the global instability that they use to extract their bloody rent. Their strategy is also clear. The United States as a global superpower is becoming weaker and is losing its position, and everyone sees and understands this, even judging by the trends in the world economy.”

    The Russian president made a direct connection between the American drive to extend “its global dictatorship” and the policy obsession with promoting non-stop chaos: “This chaos will help it contain and destabilize its rivals or, as they put it, their geopolitical opponents, among which they also rank our country, which in reality are new global growth centers and sovereign independent countries who are unwilling to kowtow and play the role of servants.”

    Crucially, Putin made a point to “repeat again” to both his internal and Global South audiences that, “the ruling elites of the United States and its satellites are behind the tragedy of the Palestinians, the massacre in the Middle East in general, the conflict in Ukraine, and many other conflicts in the world – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and so on.”

    It is a vitally important point. By conflating the perpetrators of the Ukraine conflict and the war on Gaza - “the United States and its satellites” - the Russian president has effectively lumped Israel in with the western Hegemon and its agenda of “chaos.”

    Moscow aligns with the real ‘international community’

    Essentially, what this tells us is that the Russian Federation unequivocally aligns itself with the overwhelming majority of Global South/Global Majority public opinion – from the Arab world to all the lands of Islam and beyond, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

    Interestingly, Moscow aligns with the analyses by Iranian Leader Ayatollah Khamenei – a strategic partner of Russia - and Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, in his searing, sophisticated, Sun-Tzu tinged address this past Friday, on “the spider that is trying to entangle the entire planet and the whole world in its cobweb.”

    Exhibit B on Russia’s official position, specifically on Israel-Palestine, came from Russia's permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, at a special UN General Assembly session on Palestine two days after Putin’s address.

    Nebenzya made it abundantly clear that Israel, as an occupying power, does not have “the right for self-defense” – a fact supported by a UN International Court consultative ruling way back in 2004.

    At the time, the court also established, in a 14 out of 15 judicial vote, that Israel’s construction of a massive wall in occupied Palestine, including East Jerusalem, was against international law.

    Nebenzya, in legal terms, nullified the endlessly evoked “right to self-defense” argument brandished by Tel Aviv and the whole NATO galaxy. The Hegemon, Tel Aviv’s protector, recently vetoed Brazil’s draft humanitarian UN Security Council just because it did not mention Israel’s “right to self-defense.”

    Even as he underscored that Moscow does recognize Israel’s right to ensure its security, Nebenzya stressed this right “could be fully guaranteed only in case of a fair resolution of the Palestinian problem based on recognized UN Security Council resolutions."

    The record shows that Israel does not respect any UN Security Council resolution on Palestine.

    Lavrov’s priorities in occupied-Palestine

    Exhibit C on Russia’s stand regarding Israel/Palestine was provided by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in a press conference with Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sabah Al-Sabah, two days after Nebenzya’s intervention at the UN.

    Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s priorities already stressed by Putin and Nebenzya: an urgent ceasefire, humanitarian corridors, and a return to the table to negotiate “an independent Palestinian state, as envisaged by the UN Security Council within the 1967 borders, which would coexist in peace and security with Israel.”

    Lavrov stressed once again that several US-Israeli diversionary tactics are being employed “aimed at delaying (if not burying) the UN Security Council's decision to establish a Palestinian state.”

    This, says the Russian foreign minister, implies condemning the Palestinians “to an eternal existence without rights. This will ensure neither peace nor security in the region, it will only drive the conflict deeper. And you won't be able to drive it deep. The next ‘grapes of wrath’ will be sown, which will quickly ‘sprout.’”

    Lavrov’s analysis, as much as Putin’s, converges with Khamenei’s and Nasrallah’s: “This is not about Gaza, but about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The State of Palestine is an integral part of that solution.”

    Russia is sowing the seeds to exercise the role of trusted mediator for all parties in Israel/Palestine – a role totally unsuitable for the Hegemon, especially after the tacit approval of the current Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

    It’s all here, clearly formulated by Lavrov: “It will be fundamentally important for us to know the unanimous opinion of the Arab world.” That is a message specifically targeting Sunni regimes vassalized by Washington. Then, when they get their act together, “we will support the Arab solution to this very difficult issue.”

    Multipolarity's prerequisite: Peace in Palestine

    Examined together, Exhibits A, B, and C show how Moscow is way ahead of the game. The overall message – which is being minutely decoded all across the Global South/Global Majority – is that even considering non-stop Empire of Chaos gambits, the immutable, exclusionist Zionist Project is now dead on arrival.

    The least bad solution so far is the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative - subscribed by everyone from the lands of Islam to Russia, Iran, and China: an independent Palestinian state, back to the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

    The problem is how to convince out-of-control Zionism to back off. Imperative facts on the ground would have to include severing the Washington-Tel Aviv weaponized/securitized umbilical cord - and expelling from the geopolitical spectrum the neocon Christian Zionist matrix in the US, which happens to be deeply entrenched in silos across the Deep State.

    Both of these imperatives are impossibilities – in short, medium, and even long term.

    Meanwhile, a simple look at the map shows that for all practical purposes, the two-state solution - from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip - is dead. It may be heart-wrenching for the leaders of multipolarity to admit it. It will take some time, and shifting of public discourse, to recognize that the only viable solution is supreme anathema for the Zionist Project: a one-state with Jews and Arabs living together in peace.

    All that brings us to a stark formulation: without a just solution for Palestine, tangible peace across the emerging multipolarity spectrum remains unattainable. The current enabled horror in Gaza shows that peace continues not to be a priority for the Empire of Chaos, and it will take a Russia - with perhaps a China - to shift the game.
    https://new.thecradle.co/articles/russias-public-pivot-to-palestine Pay very close attention. Repercussions will be immense. Exhibits A, B and C: Putin, Nebenzya and Lavrov. Russia's public pivot to Palestine As the west's support for Israel's Gaza war becomes indefensible, Moscow aligns itself with the global majority in defense of Palestine. The complex, nuanced issue of Russia’s geopolitical neutrality in the Israel-Palestine tragedy was finally clarified last week, in no uncertain terms. Exhibit A is Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing - in person, on 30 October - his country's Security Council, top government officials, and heads of security agencies. Among other notables, his audience included Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Speaker of the Duma Vyacheslav Volodin; Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov; and Director of SVR (foreign intel) Sergei Narishkin. Putin took no time to cut to the chase detailing the official stand of the Russian Federation in the current geopolitical incandescence of two intertwined wars, Ukraine and Israel-Palestine. This was addressed as much to his high-profile audience as to the political leadership of the western Hegemon." "There is no justification for the terrible events taking place in Gaza now, where hundreds of thousands of innocent people are being killed indiscriminately, without having anywhere to flee or hide from the bombing. When you see blood-stained children, dead children, the suffering of women and old people, when you see medics killed, of course, it makes you clench your fists as tears well in your eyes.” The US-led coalition of chaos Then came a preview of the context: “We must clearly understand who in reality is behind the tragedy of peoples in the Middle East and in other regions around the world, who has been organizing this lethal chaos and who benefits from it.” In no uncertain terms, Putin described “the current ruling elites in the United States and its satellites” as “the main beneficiaries of the global instability that they use to extract their bloody rent. Their strategy is also clear. The United States as a global superpower is becoming weaker and is losing its position, and everyone sees and understands this, even judging by the trends in the world economy.” The Russian president made a direct connection between the American drive to extend “its global dictatorship” and the policy obsession with promoting non-stop chaos: “This chaos will help it contain and destabilize its rivals or, as they put it, their geopolitical opponents, among which they also rank our country, which in reality are new global growth centers and sovereign independent countries who are unwilling to kowtow and play the role of servants.” Crucially, Putin made a point to “repeat again” to both his internal and Global South audiences that, “the ruling elites of the United States and its satellites are behind the tragedy of the Palestinians, the massacre in the Middle East in general, the conflict in Ukraine, and many other conflicts in the world – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and so on.” It is a vitally important point. By conflating the perpetrators of the Ukraine conflict and the war on Gaza - “the United States and its satellites” - the Russian president has effectively lumped Israel in with the western Hegemon and its agenda of “chaos.” Moscow aligns with the real ‘international community’ Essentially, what this tells us is that the Russian Federation unequivocally aligns itself with the overwhelming majority of Global South/Global Majority public opinion – from the Arab world to all the lands of Islam and beyond, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Interestingly, Moscow aligns with the analyses by Iranian Leader Ayatollah Khamenei – a strategic partner of Russia - and Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, in his searing, sophisticated, Sun-Tzu tinged address this past Friday, on “the spider that is trying to entangle the entire planet and the whole world in its cobweb.” Exhibit B on Russia’s official position, specifically on Israel-Palestine, came from Russia's permanent representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, at a special UN General Assembly session on Palestine two days after Putin’s address. Nebenzya made it abundantly clear that Israel, as an occupying power, does not have “the right for self-defense” – a fact supported by a UN International Court consultative ruling way back in 2004. At the time, the court also established, in a 14 out of 15 judicial vote, that Israel’s construction of a massive wall in occupied Palestine, including East Jerusalem, was against international law. Nebenzya, in legal terms, nullified the endlessly evoked “right to self-defense” argument brandished by Tel Aviv and the whole NATO galaxy. The Hegemon, Tel Aviv’s protector, recently vetoed Brazil’s draft humanitarian UN Security Council just because it did not mention Israel’s “right to self-defense.” Even as he underscored that Moscow does recognize Israel’s right to ensure its security, Nebenzya stressed this right “could be fully guaranteed only in case of a fair resolution of the Palestinian problem based on recognized UN Security Council resolutions." The record shows that Israel does not respect any UN Security Council resolution on Palestine. Lavrov’s priorities in occupied-Palestine Exhibit C on Russia’s stand regarding Israel/Palestine was provided by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in a press conference with Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sabah Al-Sabah, two days after Nebenzya’s intervention at the UN. Lavrov reiterated Moscow’s priorities already stressed by Putin and Nebenzya: an urgent ceasefire, humanitarian corridors, and a return to the table to negotiate “an independent Palestinian state, as envisaged by the UN Security Council within the 1967 borders, which would coexist in peace and security with Israel.” Lavrov stressed once again that several US-Israeli diversionary tactics are being employed “aimed at delaying (if not burying) the UN Security Council's decision to establish a Palestinian state.” This, says the Russian foreign minister, implies condemning the Palestinians “to an eternal existence without rights. This will ensure neither peace nor security in the region, it will only drive the conflict deeper. And you won't be able to drive it deep. The next ‘grapes of wrath’ will be sown, which will quickly ‘sprout.’” Lavrov’s analysis, as much as Putin’s, converges with Khamenei’s and Nasrallah’s: “This is not about Gaza, but about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The State of Palestine is an integral part of that solution.” Russia is sowing the seeds to exercise the role of trusted mediator for all parties in Israel/Palestine – a role totally unsuitable for the Hegemon, especially after the tacit approval of the current Israeli ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It’s all here, clearly formulated by Lavrov: “It will be fundamentally important for us to know the unanimous opinion of the Arab world.” That is a message specifically targeting Sunni regimes vassalized by Washington. Then, when they get their act together, “we will support the Arab solution to this very difficult issue.” Multipolarity's prerequisite: Peace in Palestine Examined together, Exhibits A, B, and C show how Moscow is way ahead of the game. The overall message – which is being minutely decoded all across the Global South/Global Majority – is that even considering non-stop Empire of Chaos gambits, the immutable, exclusionist Zionist Project is now dead on arrival. The least bad solution so far is the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative - subscribed by everyone from the lands of Islam to Russia, Iran, and China: an independent Palestinian state, back to the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The problem is how to convince out-of-control Zionism to back off. Imperative facts on the ground would have to include severing the Washington-Tel Aviv weaponized/securitized umbilical cord - and expelling from the geopolitical spectrum the neocon Christian Zionist matrix in the US, which happens to be deeply entrenched in silos across the Deep State. Both of these imperatives are impossibilities – in short, medium, and even long term. Meanwhile, a simple look at the map shows that for all practical purposes, the two-state solution - from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip - is dead. It may be heart-wrenching for the leaders of multipolarity to admit it. It will take some time, and shifting of public discourse, to recognize that the only viable solution is supreme anathema for the Zionist Project: a one-state with Jews and Arabs living together in peace. All that brings us to a stark formulation: without a just solution for Palestine, tangible peace across the emerging multipolarity spectrum remains unattainable. The current enabled horror in Gaza shows that peace continues not to be a priority for the Empire of Chaos, and it will take a Russia - with perhaps a China - to shift the game.
    NEW.THECRADLE.CO
    Russia's public pivot to Palestine
    As the west's support for Israel's Gaza war becomes indefensible, Moscow aligns itself with the global majority in defense of Palestine.
    0 Comments 0 Shares 6921 Views
  • Glitch in the Matrix: A man who perceives himself as a woman gets angry because the artificial intelligence knows that he is not a woman.
    Glitch in the Matrix: A man who perceives himself as a woman gets angry because the artificial intelligence knows that he is not a woman.
    0 Comments 0 Shares 493 Views 0
  • ARE WE ALL JUST LIVING THE DEMUERGE FREEMASON JESUIT MATRIX SCRIPT 4 NEW WORLD ORDER
    https://www.bitchute.com/video/JS2g5oKztClL/
    ARE WE ALL JUST LIVING THE DEMUERGE FREEMASON JESUIT MATRIX SCRIPT 4 NEW WORLD ORDER https://www.bitchute.com/video/JS2g5oKztClL/
    Like
    1
    0 Comments 0 Shares 662 Views
  • Top 10 melhores filmes sobre inteligência artificial
    .
    O tema Inteligência Artificial (IA) tem ganhado muita força nesta nova onda de inovação, trazendo grandes mudanças na maneira como pessoas e empresas se relacionam com as máquinas, com a tecnologia, e com o funcionamento das coisas. Cada vez mais, vemos aspectos da ficção científica literária e cinematográfica ganhando vida e fazendo parte de nosso dia a dia, na nossa vida pessoal e nas empresas.
    .
    A inteligência artificial se refere a uma inteligência similar à humana, exibida por máquinas, aparatos e mecanismos tecnológicos, robôs, gadgets, computadores, sistemas ou softwares. Representa hoje um grande campo de estudo acadêmico, com destaque nas principais universidades e empresas de tecnologia do mundo.
    .
    Alguns pesquisadores e livros didáticos definem o campo como "o estudo e projeto de agentes inteligentes", onde um agente inteligente é um sistema que percebe seu ambiente e toma atitudes que maximizam suas chances de sucesso. John McCarthy, quem cunhou o termo em 1956, a define como "a ciência e engenharia de produzir máquinas inteligentes".
    .
    É uma área de pesquisa da computação dedicada a buscar métodos ou dispositivos que possuam ou multipliquem a capacidade racional do ser humano de resolver problemas, pensar ou, de forma ampla, ser inteligente. Também pode ser definida como o ramo da ciência da computação que se ocupa do comportamento inteligente. Um estudo de como fazer os computadores realizarem coisas que, atualmente, os humanos fazem melhor.
    .
    O desenvolvimento da área começou após a Segunda Guerra Mundial, com o artigo "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" do matemático inglês Alan Turing, e alguns dos seus principais idealizadores foram cientistas como Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, John McCarthy, Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts e Marvin Minsky, entre outros.
    .
    Top 10 – Melhores Filmes sobre Inteligência Artificial
    .
    1) 2001 - Uma Odisseia no Espaço (1968)
    2) Blade Runner: O Caçador de Androides (1982)
    3) Matrix (1999)
    4) A. I. - Inteligência Artificial (2001)
    5) Ex Machina (2015)
    6) Lucy 2014
    7) Her (2013)
    8) O Exterminador do Futuro 1 2 3 4 e 5
    9) O Fantasma do Futuro (1995)
    10) Lunar (2009)
    .
    #Ia #Ai #inteligênciaArtificial #filme #movie #cinema #tv
    #14deAbrilde2023 #alepdias #somee #someeofficial #ficçãoCientifica #fantasia #Hive.
    Top 10 melhores filmes sobre inteligência artificial . O tema Inteligência Artificial (IA) tem ganhado muita força nesta nova onda de inovação, trazendo grandes mudanças na maneira como pessoas e empresas se relacionam com as máquinas, com a tecnologia, e com o funcionamento das coisas. Cada vez mais, vemos aspectos da ficção científica literária e cinematográfica ganhando vida e fazendo parte de nosso dia a dia, na nossa vida pessoal e nas empresas. . A inteligência artificial se refere a uma inteligência similar à humana, exibida por máquinas, aparatos e mecanismos tecnológicos, robôs, gadgets, computadores, sistemas ou softwares. Representa hoje um grande campo de estudo acadêmico, com destaque nas principais universidades e empresas de tecnologia do mundo. . Alguns pesquisadores e livros didáticos definem o campo como "o estudo e projeto de agentes inteligentes", onde um agente inteligente é um sistema que percebe seu ambiente e toma atitudes que maximizam suas chances de sucesso. John McCarthy, quem cunhou o termo em 1956, a define como "a ciência e engenharia de produzir máquinas inteligentes". . É uma área de pesquisa da computação dedicada a buscar métodos ou dispositivos que possuam ou multipliquem a capacidade racional do ser humano de resolver problemas, pensar ou, de forma ampla, ser inteligente. Também pode ser definida como o ramo da ciência da computação que se ocupa do comportamento inteligente. Um estudo de como fazer os computadores realizarem coisas que, atualmente, os humanos fazem melhor. . O desenvolvimento da área começou após a Segunda Guerra Mundial, com o artigo "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" do matemático inglês Alan Turing, e alguns dos seus principais idealizadores foram cientistas como Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, John McCarthy, Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts e Marvin Minsky, entre outros. . Top 10 – Melhores Filmes sobre Inteligência Artificial . 1) 2001 - Uma Odisseia no Espaço (1968) 2) Blade Runner: O Caçador de Androides (1982) 3) Matrix (1999) 4) A. I. - Inteligência Artificial (2001) 5) Ex Machina (2015) 6) Lucy 2014 7) Her (2013) 8) O Exterminador do Futuro 1 2 3 4 e 5 9) O Fantasma do Futuro (1995) 10) Lunar (2009) . #Ia #Ai #inteligênciaArtificial #filme #movie #cinema #tv #14deAbrilde2023 #alepdias #somee #someeofficial #ficçãoCientifica #fantasia #Hive.
    Like
    7
    0 Comments 0 Shares 10639 Views
More Results