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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct21/China-crash10-21.html

Will China Pop the Global Everything Bubble? Yes

That China faces structural problems is well-recognized. The list of articles in the August issue of Foreign Affairs dedicated to China reflects this:

Xi's Gamble: the Race to Consolidate Power and Stave Off Disaster

China's Economic Reckoning: The Price of Failed Reforms

The Robber Barons of Beijing: Can China Survive its Gilded Age?

Life of the Party: How Secure Is the CCP? (Chinese Communist Party)

These are thorny, difficult issues: a demographic cliff resulting from the one-child policy, soaring wealth-income inequality, pervasive corruption, public health issues (diabesity, etc.), environmental damage and a slowing economy.

What the conventional analysts do not fully grasp, in my view, are 1) the existential threat to the CCP and China's economy posed by its unprecedented, metastasizing credit-asset bubble and 2) its incipient energy crisis.

As I explained in a recent blog post, What's Really Going On in China?, the CCP and the government informally institutionalized moral hazard (the disconnection of risk and consequence) as a core economic policy.

Every financial loss, no matter how risky or debt-ridden, was covered by the state (via bail-out, refinancing debt, new loans, etc.) as a "cost of rapid development," a reflection of the view that some inefficiency and waste was inevitable in the rapid development of industry, housing, infrastructure and a consumer economy.

What China's leaders did not fully understand was this implicit guarantee of bail-outs--the equivalent of "The Fed has our backs"--incentivized debt-funded speculation as the lowest-risk, highest-return "investment," especially when compared to low-profit, risky investments in low-margin export industries. (Recall the average profit margins of Chinese exporting enterprises is 1% to 3%.)

This is the hidden driver of China's sagging productivity and economy: debt in all sectors is skyrocketing to fund speculation, not productivity.

This institutionalization of moral hazard has incentivized the least productive and highest-risk gambles--not just for large conglomerates like EverGrande, but for middle-class households who've invested in the shadow-banking system (unregulated private-sector pools of capital lent out to risky borrowers at high rates of interest) and bought second, third and fourth "investment" flats.

The contradictions in this mass investing of savings in empty condos are systemic and dangerous: 1) once a flat is rented, it loses value due to being "used" and 2) the vast majority of the market for "investment" flats is illiquid, as most new buyers want a new flat, not an old one, so the market for old flats is extremely thin outside the most desirable inner rings of Beijing and Shanghai.

This mass investment in illiquid empty flats has generated social and financial perversities: now that flats in desirable areas cost 30-40 times an average white-collar salary, young people must vacuum up the entire extended family's savings in order to afford a flat. Those young men who are unable to buy a flat find their marriages prospects are dismal.

One result of the marriage of state control and private-sector Wild-West speculation is a truly vast wealth-income divide that is bound up with corruption in a mutually reinforcing feedback: the richer you become, the closer to power you get, and vice versa.

Since China's informal shadow-banking system is opaque even to state regulators, it's quite possible that China's leaders do not have a full grasp of the extent of systemic risk bound up in the excesses of shadow banking. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld's famous dictum, this is an unknown unknown for China's policy makers.

This truly monumental accumulation of debt and speculation is now an existential threat to the Party on two levels:

1) since all bubbles pop regardless of any other conditions, when this bubble pops, the economic blow will be severe enough to threaten the Party's control of the economy

2) the crushing of phantom wealth will cause people to seek a scapegoat, and the Party is Target #1 since it coddled the well-connected and wealthy but did not protect the 99% from the dire consequences of the bubble bursting.

Having engineered the bubble's expansion by creating mountains of debt and implicit promises of bail-outs, the CCP and government have backed themselves into a corner: there is no pain-free way to deflate a speculative bubble of such astounding proportions.

Considering the life history of President Xi (especially his first-hand experience of the Cultural Revolution 1966-1976), his writings and his consolidation of power, it is very clear to me that Xi understands the bubble is close to escaping his control and so time is short and the policy options are limited to triage, that is, saving the healthiest and letting Nature take care of those closest to expiring.

I also see evidence that Xi grasps the absolute need to break the near-universal confidence that the state will bail out everyone who borrows and speculates so wildly that their gambles go bad.

The general assumption is that "China can't afford to let Evergrande fail" because this enormous conglomerate will obviously topple many dominoes, generating great financial pain.

I think the that President Xi's view is the opposite: "we can't afford to bail out Evergrande" because that would open the floodgates of moral hazard that Xi is trying to close.

The state bailing out private-sector gamblers (and state-owned enterprises) is what led to the massive moral hazard-debt bubble that Xi is determined to pop now while he still can control the process.

In other words, President Xi understands this is the do-or-die moment to regain control of an out-of-control moral hazard driven financial bubble, and the only way to do so is to push the losses onto everyone with exposure, the driver being the stark choice to either regain control by popping the bubble now or letting it expand and implode in an uncontrolled (and hence Party-threatening) fashion.

Xi concluded that the first step to being able to push the losses onto everyone with exposure to speculative bets was to consolidate power to such a degree that the usual self-interested factions that would use their power to evade the consequences could be forced to accept their share of the losses.

Given the history and structure of the Party, this required Xi to extend his control to levels not seen since Deng or Mao.

In my view, Xi correctly concluded the hour was getting late and the institutional resistance to the end of the implicit promises of state bailouts and endless debt expansion could only be overcome if his political power was near-absolute.

The popping of moral hazard and the debt-speculation bubble are necessary to preserve CCP and state power; half-measures that protected corrupt cronies would only increase the public's outrage when the bubble finally burst.

In this light, Xi's multi-year campaign against the most visible corruption and his recent touting of "common prosperity" have set the stage for his forcing the end of moral hazard and the controlled demolition of the excesses of debt and speculation that have harmed the economy and threatened the control of the CCP.

Now comes the grand ironies. China's ability to generate stupendous amounts of new debt basically bailed out the global economy in 2008-09, 2015-16 and 2020. Yes, the Federal Reserve bailed out the global banking sector (to the tune of $16 trillion in backstops and credit lines) in 2008-09 and inflated a speculative bubble in the U.S. by creating $3.5 trillion in quantitative easing, but China's expansion of debt was an equally important source of global demand, which is what stopped global economies from sinking into recession.

The cost of these "saves" were not understood at the time: the elevation of moral hazard to quasi-religious status in the U.S. and China and the expansion of debt-funded speculative bubbles to unprecedented heights.

There are only two policy options:

1) Grasp the nettle and refuse to bail out debt-funded speculative excesses, thereby popping the Everything Bubble, or

2) play the game of keeping the bubble expanding until it implodes on its own, an end-game made inevitable by the systemic instabilities intrinsic to bubbles.

Xi has correctly chosen Policy #1, and to do so has positioned the Party as the defender of the people, i.e. anti-corruption, shackling the Big Tech billionaires like Jack Ma, and announcing that the state will not bail out EverGrande.

The Federal Reserve and the political leadership of the U.S. have foolishly chosen Policy #2, inflating the bubble while letting the consequences of this moral hazard bubble--wealth-income inequality and corruption--explode higher, fatally undermining the credibility of both the Fed and America's political class.

As the supply chain disruptions have revealed, the global economy and financial system are tightly bound systems, and as such are extraordinarily exposed to the risks of cascading collapses as key nodes become chokepoints or break down.

While the Federal Reserve prints trillions to further inflate the bubble, the global energy shortages are already crippling key sectors in the economies of China and the EU. Reality is about to intrude on the Fed's fantasy that speculative bubbles can remain disconnected from the real-world economy forever.

In summary: the popping of the global Everything Bubble is not Xi's goal; it is the inevitable second-order effect (collateral damage) of China's debt-speculation bubble popping.

Given the tightly-bound financial system, the collapse of EverGrande is far more the story of dominoes toppling rather than direct losses: it's not the direct losses that will bring down the global financial system, it's the dominoes toppling as those who take the direct losses implode and become insolvent, missing their loan/bond payments, being unable to meet their counterparty obligations, and so on.

The consensus in the West is that China cannot afford to let its bubble pop because the pain will be so severe. Those who believe this have a poor grasp of Chinese history, especially in the 20th century.

If crashing China's bubble is the nuclear option, Xi has reason to be confident he can push the pain level to 11 and most will accept it, and those who don't will join Jack Ma in forced retirement.

I reckon Xi views ending moral hazard and popping the bubble in China as a situation that will only get worse the longer he puts it off.

The grand irony now is that rather than saving the global economy by expanding its own debt bubble, China will pop the global Everything Bubble. To state the obvious, being a linchpin in the global economy makes China a consequential domino. Anyone who thinks the Fed's speculative bubble in the U.S. can magically become immune to the collapse of tightly-bound dominoes is indulging in magical thinking.

China's extreme excesses of debt and speculation are already unraveling, and Xi is backed into a corner. There is no cost-free escape, only triage, and Xi has charted a path to preserve the Party's control by forcing everyone with exposure to absorb the inevitable losses when unprecedented bubbles pop.

The line of toppling dominoes extends around the entire global economy and financial system. Plan accordingly.

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http://edwardcurtin.com/the-masquerade/

The Masquerade

“They didn’t act like people and they didn’t act like actors.  It’s hard to explain.”

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951

There’s a reason that Catcher in the Rye, published 70 years ago, has become such an iconic book, praised and condemned in equal measure. It is because it is about lying, phoniness, acting, Hollywood, theater, plagiarism, and at its core, a society of liars.  Actors in a masquerade willing to don masks and face other faces with the veiled glances of the defeated.  It is about the massive social confusion that entered American life in an intense way following World War II, a world of propaganda and performance.  Although the book seems to be directed at adolescents, it is for adults, and while annoying many of them with its adolescent lingo, it cuts to the heart of our current life-the-movie society.  Adults have become kids, and Holden Caulfield knew that they would.  Or were.  Maybe he wanted it.  We now live in a society of costumed children, asking to be tricked.

“If you want to know the truth,” Holden keeps repeating, knowing that most people don’t, since they prefer the Show.

It is also a fall book with echoes of falling leaves in a dying land.  Football and war, Halloween and all souls drifting down in the crepuscular light of late October and the coming November remembrance of Veteran’s Day, once called Armistice Day, when the mad slow action film of WW I, the war to end all wars with millions dead in rat infested trenches, is commemorated, as if anything has changed and such memories are not secret celebrations of the heroic sacrifices the gullible make for their masters.  War is a racket; the ultimate racket.

Liam Clancy reminds us of this truth regarding the “Great” War and all the others that have followed. Millions of deaths brought on by lying government bastards.  Actors in the mass masquerade.

But it goes deeper than lying leaders.  For lying is the leading cause of living death in the USA, and the pharmaceutical companies have no prescription for it.  If they did, and if they cared, which they don’t, they would have manufactured such a drug long ago.   It would have killed them of course, but since their business is profits not suicide, they don their masks of solicitude and bank the spoils, while producing poison to shoot people with.

The great English writer, D. H. Lawrence, warned us long ago to not let the living-dead eat us up.  Yet we are still being devoured by a refusal that knows no name since it is not just them but us – victims and executioners, both in a mutual deadly game.

Death is a big hit, as everyone knows. It fascinates far more than does life.  One glance at the mass media will confirm that.  Fear, death, and disaster are the daily menu, interspersed with kitsch uplift. Propaganda feeds on it.  Up down all around spin that wheel and rattle your brains.

But the ghosts of fall remind us to beware of this necrophilia.  The dead return and wander among us, masked children wandering through the streets looking for handouts.  Adults laughing those tight grim laughs.  How cute!

Nietzsche said that “all things are entangled, ensnared, and enamored.”  I find this especially true during the autumnal season, especially the Halloween weekend of ghosts, death, and masks.  It is enchanting and disturbing if you give it thought.  Its symbolism explains the Covid propaganda and panic more than a thousand factual articles. It explains the warfare state and adults’ refusal to defiantly oppose it.  It explains the nihilistic underpinning of society and children’s fears and wishes to use a magic wand to change the world to one that celebrates life not death. That is the true treat that their unconscious playacting requests.  But the candy the adults give them conceals the poison the adults can’t face.  The poison that they have ingested.

I think of how all persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask.  Another Latin word, larva, occurs to me, it too meaning mask, ghost, or evil spirit.  The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating through our days, swirling like dead leaves in the wind.

While etymology might seem arcane, I think it offers us a portal into our lives, not just personally, but politically and culturally as well. Word usage is at the heart of linguistic mind control, and we are in a world where the minders of the public’s mind have become adept at fashioning language to their devious ends.  Orwell predicted this in Nineteen Eighty-Four with his explanation of Newsspeak:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.  It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least as far as thought is dependent on words.

A quick check of the latest dictionary updates will corroborate Orwell’s point about the future dictionary when Newspeak has been fully established, the meaning of words will be so changed that anything can mean anything, even its opposite.

Shakespeare, the ultimate wordsmith, was right, of course, to tell us that “all the world’s a stage,” though I would disagree with the bard that we are “merely” players.  It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor’s show and tell.  But who are we behind the masks?  Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks’ mouth holes (the per-sona: Latin, to sound through)?

Halloween.  The children play at scaring and being scared.  Death walks among them and they scream with glee.  The play is on. The grim reaper walks up and down the street. Treats greet them.  The costumes are ingenious; the masks, wild.  It’s all great fun, the candy sweet.  So what’s the trick?  When does the performance end?

As Halloween ends, the saints come marching in followed by all the souls.  The Days of the Dead.  Spirits.  Ghosts walk the streets.  Dead leaves fall.  The dead are everywhere, swirling through the air, drifting.  We are surrounded by them.  We are them.  Until.

Until when?  Perhaps not until we dead awaken and see through the charade of social life and realize the masked performers are not just the deadly politicians and celebrities, not only the professional actors and the corporate media performers, but us.

And while these days of the dead and children’s games can bring us to wonder whether we act like people or actors – “even if it’s hard to explain” – whether behind the double masks we realize we can be genuine actors if we go deep enough, the celebration of Veterans/Armistice/Remembrance Day a few days later should  emphatically remind us of the Masters of War and the need to see through their masks, as Bob Dylan tells us.  The evil performers who “play with my world like it’s your little toy” with their endless lies.

Norman O. Brown so well describes our stage set:

Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again.  All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.

It seems to me that Albert Camus was right, and that we should aspire to be neither victims nor executioners.  To do so will take a serious reevaluation of the roles we play in the ongoing national tragedy of lie piled upon lie in aggressive wars around the world and in election farces that perpetuate them.  The leading actors we elect are our responsibility.  We produce and maintain them.  They are our mirror images; we are theirs.  It is the danse macabre, a last tango in the land of bad actors, our two-faced show.  This masquerade ball that passes for political reality is infiltrated by the ghosts of all those victims we have murdered around the wide world.  We may choose not to see them, but they are lurking in the shadowy corners.  And they will haunt us until we make amends.

“Do you not know there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask?” warned Kierkegaard.  “Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked?  Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this?  Or are you not terrified by it?”

“Whenever I take up a newspaper,” Ibsen added, “I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.”

Yet the children and the eloquent voices of the genuine actors I have so liberally quoted here remind us of what is possible if we chase the light and stop the masquerade.  That would be cause for a real holiday celebration.

....

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/you-know-what-they-sayin/

You Know What They Sayin’?

Do you marvel, as I do, at this malignant hive organism — arguably worse than the Covid-19 chimera virus — that calls itself “Joe Biden”? The personage of that name is a mere effigy, of course, like one of those grotesque mummies hoisted above the mob in a religious procession from some primitive cannibal kingdom. It’s the mob itself that actually matters, though, the twerking parade of Woke-Progressive Democrats, because it is bent absolutely on rooting out, punishing, and torturing its perceived enemies, which in this case are about half the people in the country. That’s really all it seeks to do. It has never been about anything else, because, get this: the Woke mob is insane.

But now this other half of the country has raised a war cry, “Let’s go Brandon,” in objection. In case anyone does not know what the phrase means, peruse the actual lyrics from one of four rap chants topping the Apple music charts right now: this ditty by entertainer Loza Alexander:

Let’s go, Brandon (fuck Joe Biden)
(Let’s go, Brandon, fuck Joe Biden) you know what they sayin’, hoe
Let’s go, Brandon (fuck Joe Biden)
(Let’s go, Brandon, fuck Joe Biden) you know what they sayin’, hoe

Is that too subtle for anyone? Do you catch the drift? (Know what they sayin’?) The sentiment is timelier and apparently more popular than “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was in 1963. America has had enough of the Woke religious cult and its cavalcade of depravities. America is about to bum-rush the darn thing, seize the ghastly mummy from its skull-bedecked palanquin, and knock the living sawdust out of it.

Doings in the Loudoun County, VA, school board lately became the rectified essence of the wild, irresponsible, Woke derangement overtaking the land. The board authorized a sex education booklet that instructed teenage boys how to perform oral sex on each other — with explicit illustrations of one boy on his knees servicing another boy standing — while the board backed the sowing of maximum gender confusion among high schoolers who, under the best conditions, have a tough time adjusting to the hormonal storms of adolescence… all in the name of promoting a Woke brownie-point-collecting exercise called “Pride Week.”

And guess what? The parents of Loudoun County began to object to this… meshugas. And then the school board proceeded to squash and evade their objections, and even enlisted that degenerate troll Attorney General Merrick Garland to intimidate objecting parents with the FBI and federal writs against “domestic terrorism.” For his trouble, Mr. Garland was unmasked as a prevaricating tool in a US Senate hearing this week, nicely captured by the TV cameras so the citizenry could see him in weaselly operation.

It also came out that twice this fall a teenage boy wearing a skirt — ostensibly gender-confused in exactly the way promoted by the school board — committed two rapes of teenage girls in the girls’ bathrooms of two Loudoun County schools, to which he was granted access as someone pretending to bethink himself a girl — though it turned out he knew quite well how to deploy his male generative organ. The crimes were reported to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office and shared with the County School Superintendent, who covered it up… not a smooth move, as things turned out, because now the country can see exactly how criminally dishonest the Wokesters are.

And as all this rolled out, Woke-Progressive Democratic candidate for Governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, made the supernaturally doltish utterance that “parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach.” His campaign even put out roadside signs under his name repeating the statement-of-principle, in case anyone missed it. The result: McAuliffe dropped about eight points almost overnight in the polls. The voters are about to pop him out of the political universe like a watermelon seed between their fingers.

Meanwhile, the mummy known as “Joe Biden” has ventured abroad, first to Rome to be feted, his handlers thought, by the Pope. But his excellency Pope Francis ordered the TV cameras turned off, apparently unwilling to be seen consorting with the inanimate, disintegrating graven image of a US president — anymore than he would want to be caught conversing with a statue of the Medici Pope Leo X in his Vatican garden.

Also meanwhile, the stage managers back at the White House, Chief of Staff Ron Klain and Susan Rice, shadowy Director of the Domestic Policy Council, floated an initiative to give half-a-million dollars to each family member of children and parents who had gotten separated while attempting to enter the US illegally. That ought to warm the hearts of US citizens thrown out of their jobs and their livelihoods for demurring to take a vaccine that doesn’t work and which causes havoc in the organs, blood vessels, and immune systems of many who have taken it — against a disease the engineering of which was paid for by their own tax dollars.

Now, cue the Mother of all Migrant Caravans marching north to the wide-open US / Mexican border — because “Joe Biden” wants it that way — just what millions of broke, thrown-out-of-work, soon to freeze and starve US citizens will be treated to watch on their flat-screens before the cable service is switched off for non-payment. “Joe Biden” just wants to rub their faces in it, or rather the folks behind him pulling his strings want to do that. Maybe the time has come to cut “Joe Biden’s” strings. And just maybe it’s time to put an end to the Woke march through our history.

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https://scheerpost.com/2021/10/28/hedges-the-most-important-battle-for-press-freedom-in-our-time/

The Most Important Battle for Press Freedom in Our Time

For the past two days, I have been watching the extradition hearing for Julian Assange via video link from London. The United States is appealing a lower court ruling that denied the US request to extradite Assange not, unfortunately, because in the eyes of the court he is innocent of a crime, but because, as Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January concluded, Assange’s precarious psychological state would deteriorate given the “harsh conditions” of the inhumane US prison system, “causing him to commit suicide.” The United States has charged Assange with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of trying to hack into a government computer, charges that could see him imprisoned for 175 years. 

Assange, with long white hair, appeared on screen the first day from the video conference room in HM Prison Belmarsh. He was wearing a white shirt with an untied tie around his neck. He looked gaunt and tired. He did not appear in court, the judges explained, because he was receiving a “high dose of medication.” On the second day he was apparently not present in the prison’s video conference room.

Assange is being extradited because his organization WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs in October 2010, which documented numerous US war crimes — including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the Collateral murder video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to US checkpoints. He is also being targeted by US authorities for other leaks, especially those that exposed  the hacking tools used by the CIA known as Vault 7, which enables the spy agency to compromise cars, smart TVs, web browsers and the operating systems of most smart phones, as well as operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux.  

If Assange is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material, it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting, allowing the government to use the Espionage Act to charge any reporter who possesses classified documents, and any whistleblower who leaks classified information.

If the appeal by the United States is accepted Assange will be retried in London. The ruling on the appeal is not expected until at least January.

Assange’s September 2020 trial painfully exposed how vulnerable he has become after 12 years of detention, including seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He has in the past attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. He suffers from hallucinations and depression, takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. After he was observed pacing his cell until he collapsed, punching himself in the face and banging his head against the wall he was transferred for several months to the medical wing of the Belmarsh prison. Prison authorities found “half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day.”

James Lewis, the lawyer for the United States, attempted to discredit the detailed and disturbing medical and psychological reports on Assange presented to the court in September 2020, painting him instead as a liar and malingerer. He excoriated the decision of Judge Baraitser to bar extradition, questioned her competence, and breezily dismissed the mountains of evidence that high-security prisoners in the United States, like Assange, subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), and held in virtual isolation in supermax prisons, suffer psychological distress. He charged Dr. Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, who examined Assange and testified for the defense, with deception for “concealing” that Assange fathered two children with his fiancée Stella Morris while in refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He said that, should the Australian government request Assange, he could serve his prison time in Australia, his home country, after his appeals had been exhausted, but stopped short of promising that Assange would not be held in isolation or subject to SAMs.

The authority repeatedly cited by Lewis to describe the conditions under which Assange will be held and tried in the United States was Gordon Kromberg, the Assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Kromberg is the government’s grand inquisitor in cases of terrorism and national security. He has expressed open contempt for Muslims and Islam and decried what he calls “the Islamization of the American justice system.” He oversaw the 9-year persecution of the Palestinian activist and academic Dr. Sami Al-Arian and at one point refused his request to postpone a court date during the religious holiday of Ramadan. “They can kill each other during Ramadan, they can appear before the grand jury. All they can’t do is eat before sunset,” Kromberg said in a 2006 conversation, according to an affidavit filed by one of Arian’s attorneys, Jack Fernandez. 

Kromberg criticized Daniel Hale, the former Air Force analyst who recently was sentenced to 45 months in a supermax prison for leaking information about the indiscriminate killings of civilians by drones, saying Hale had not contributed to public debate, but had “endanger[ed] the people doing the fight.” He ordered Chelsea Manning jailed after she refused to testify in front of a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Manning attempted to commit suicide in March 2020 while being held in the Virginia jail.

Having covered the case of Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was arrested in London in 2006, I have a good idea of what waits Assange if he is extradited. Hashmi also was held in Belmarsh and extradited in 2007 to the United States where he spent three years in solitary confinement under SAMs. His “crime” was that an acquaintance who stayed in his apartment with him while he was a graduate student in London had raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks in luggage at the apartment. The acquaintance planned to deliver the items to al-Qaida. But I doubt the government was concerned with waterproof socks being shipped to Pakistan. The reason, I suspect, Hashmi was targeted was because, like the Palestinian activist Dr. Sami Al-Arian, and like Assange, he was fearless and zealous in his defense of those being bombed, shot, terrorized and killed throughout the Muslim world while he was a student at Brooklyn College. 

Hashmi was deeply religious, and some of his views, including his praise of the Afghan resistance, were controversial, but he had a right to express these sentiments. More important, he had a right to expect freedom from persecution and imprisonment because of his opinions, just as Assange should have the freedom, like any publisher, to inform the public about the inner workings of power. Facing the possibility of a 70-year sentence in prison and having already spent four years in jail, much of it in solitary confinement, Hashmi accepted a plea bargain on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism. Judge Loretta Preska, who sentenced the hacker Jeremy Hammond and human rights attorney Steven Donziger, gave him the maximum 15-year sentence. Hashmi was held for nine years in Guantanamo-like conditions in the supermax ADX [Administrative Maximum] facility in Florence, Colorado, where Assange, if found guilty in an American court, will almost certainly be imprisoned. Hashmi was released in 2019.

The pre-trial detention conditions Hashmi endured were designed to break him. He was electronically monitored 24-hours a day. He could only receive or send mail with his immediate family. He was prohibited from speaking with other prisoners through the walls. He was forbidden from taking part in group prayer. He was permitted one hour of exercise a day, in a solitary cage without fresh air. He has unable to see most of the evidence used to indict him which was classified under the Classified Information Procedures Act, enacted to prevent US intelligence officers under prosecution from threatening to reveal state secrets to manipulate the legal proceedings. The harsh conditions eroded his physical and psychological health. When he appeared in the final court proceeding to accept a guilty plea he was in a near catatonic state, clearly unable to follow the proceedings around him.

If the government will go to this length to persecute someone who was alleged to have been involved in sending waterproof socks to al-Qaida, what can we expect the government to do to Assange?

A society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice. The battle for Assange’s liberty has always been much more than the persecution of a publisher. It is the most important battle for press freedom of our era. And if we lose this battle, it will be devastating, not only for Assange and his family, but for us.

Tyrannies invert the rule of law. They turn the law into an instrument of injustice. They cloak their crimes in a faux legality. They use the decorum of the courts and trials, to mask their criminality. Those, such as Assange, who expose that criminality to the public are dangerous, for without the pretext of legitimacy the tyranny loses credibility and has nothing left in its arsenal but fear, coercion and violence. The long campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of inverted totalitarianism, a form of totalitarianism that maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations and the security and surveillance state.

There is no legal basis to hold Assange in prison. There is no legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the US Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers as they discussed his defense. This fact alone invalidated the trial. Assange is being held in a high security prison so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, has testified, continue the degrading abuse and torture it hopes will lead to his psychological if not physical disintegration.The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious courtiers in the media, are guilty of egregious crimes. Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins of the media landscape. Prove this truth, as Assange, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden have by allowing us to peer into the inner workings of power, and you are hunted down and persecuted.

Assange’s “crime” is that he exposed the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians. He exposed the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 and 89, at Guantánamo. He exposed that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered US diplomats to spy on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and other U.N. representatives from China, France, Russia, and the UK, spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and personal passwords, part of the long pattern of illegal surveillance that included the eavesdropping on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. He exposed that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA orchestrated the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya, replacing it with a murderous and corrupt military regime. He exposed that George W. Bush, Barack Obama and General David Petraeus prosecuted a war in Iraq that under post-Nuremberg laws is defined as a criminal war of aggression, a war crime, which authorized hundreds of targeted assassinations, including those of US citizens in Yemen. He exposed that the United States secretly launched missile, bomb, and drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians. He exposed that Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $657,000 to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe, and that she privately assured corporate leaders she would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and reform. He exposed the internal campaign to discredit and destroy British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by members of his own party. He exposed how the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency permits the wholesale government surveillance of our televisions, computers, smartphones and anti-virus software, allowing the government to record and store our conversations, images and private text messages, even from encrypted apps.

He exposed the truth. He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption and mendacity that defines the global ruling elite. And for these truths alone he is guilty.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/international-alert-message-about-covid-19-united-health-professionals/5737680

International Alert Message about COVID-19. United Health Professionals

The lockdown « a global scientific fraud of unprecedented proportions

We are health professionals of the international collective : United Health Professionals, composed of more than 1,500 members (including professors of medicine, intensive care physicians and infectious disease specialists) from different countries of Europe, Africa, America, Asia and Oceania and, on August 26, 2020, we addressed to governments and citizens of countries around the world an alert message regarding the COVID outbreak.

First, let’s start with the conclusions of the 2010 report of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the management of the H1N1 epidemic : 

« The Parliamentary Assembly is alarmed about the way in which the H1N1 influenza pandemic has been handled, ot only by the World Health Organization (WHO) but also by the competent health authorities at the level of the European Union and at national level. It is particularly troubled by some of the consequences of decisions taken and advice given leading to distortion of priorities of public health services across Europe, waste of large sums of public money and also unjustified scares and fears about health risks…grave shortcomings have been identified regarding the transparency of decision-making processes relating to the pandemic which have generated concerns about the possible influence of the pharmaceutical industry on some of the major decisions….unregulated or secret lobbying may be a danger and can undermine democratic principles and good governance ».

Know that the same mistakes made in the H1N1 epidemic are being repeated today in the COVID epidemic. You are the victims of the biggest health scam of the 21st century regarding the real danger of the virus, the measures to be taken, the figures, the tests and the treatments, and this was done with the same techniques of manipulation used during the epidemic of H1N1 or the Iraq war. Experts, professors of medicine as well as scientific and medical collectives began to alert others of this as early as March 2020.

The countries of the world (except rare cases like : Sweden, Belarus or Tanzania), without thinking, have only imitated and blindly followed others.

This epidemic is amplified, dramatized and instrumentalised by criminals who take advantage of it to achieve economic, political and ideological goals and agendas that are harmful to humanity and we will prove this to you. You must stop this global scam quickly (because it is a serious danger to your people and your country in terms of : health, economy, education, ecology and human rights) by immediately taking the following actions :

1-Lift all restrictions 

Remove the following illegal, non-scientific and non-sanitary measures : lockdown, mandatory face masks for healthy subjects, social distancing of one or two meters. These crazy and stupid measures are heresies invented in 2020 that do not exist in medicine or public health and they are not based on any scientific evidence.

This is not how we manage an outbreak :

– « The world went mad » with coronavirus lockdowns which « fly in the face of what is known about handling virus pandemics » (Dr Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, June 24, 2020).

– « The infection fatality rate seems to be about the same as for influenza, but we have never introduced these drastic measures before, when we had influenza pandemics. And we cannot live with them for years to come » (Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, December 1, 2020).

– « The decision of lockdown as the decision of wearing masks…are not based on scientific data…» (Prof. Didier Raoult, June 24, 2020).

– « The natural history of the virus [the coronavirus] is not influenced by social measures [lockdown, face masks, closure of restaurants, curfew, etc.]…The lockdown did not trigger the decrease in cases…As for the closure of restaurants which had very strict health protocols in place…of course, I have no way of defending it…it has not influenced the epidemic at all…The lockdown has not changed anything…» (Prof. Philippe Parola, December 3, 2020).

– « There is no scientific evidence to support the disastrous two-metre rule. Poor quality research is being used to justify a policy with enormous consequences for us all » (Professors Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, June 19, 2020).

– « Grotesque, absurd and very dangerous measures…a horrible impact on the world economy…self- destruction and collective suicide… » (Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, March 2020. He also sent, at the time, a letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel).

In addition, these tyrannical measures violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its articles: 3, 5, 9, 12, 13, 17, 18, 20, 26, 27, 28, 30 and the UNICEF Convention on the Rights of the Child in its articles : 28, 29, 32, 37.

– « When the state knows best and violates human rights, we are on a dangerous course. The pandemic has led to the violation of basic human rights…There has not been the slightest ethical analysis of whether this was justified. It is not» (Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, December 4, 2020).

Forcing non-sick people to wear masks is not only a heresy but it is also harmful to health as well as to ecology and is a form of mistreatment :

– « Dictatorship of masks totally unfounded » (Prof. Christian Perronne, September 22, 2020).

– « The curfew…was used during the German occupation when the militia and the Gestapo went to the houses. And now we’ll have the police making visits to see if there are more than six people at the table ! What is this madness ?! » (Prof. Christian Perronne, October 15, 2020).

– « Every winter in Paris, the ICU beds are totally saturated. We transfer patients…every winter, in normal circumstances » (Prof. Bruno Mégarbane, anesthesiologist and intensive care physician, September 27, 2020)

 « In neither of the 2 waves… all the ICU were not saturated, it is false ! » (Prof. Michaël Peyromaure, January 18, 2021)

2-Open up economy, schools, universities, air transport and hospital units.

3-Exclude your experts and advisers who have links or conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies

The 2010 report of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the management of the H1N1 epidemic also said :

« The Assembly calls on public health authorities at international, European and national level -and notably WHO-…to ensure that all persons subject to conflicts of interest are excluded from sensitive decision-making processes ».

Countries’ experts who pushed for these totally heretical measures are either followers, ignorant or corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry.

4-Require an international and independent investigation and that those responsible for this scam be tried

On October 1st, 2020, German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich announced that an international network of lawyers will argue the biggest fraud case ever :

« The anti-corona measures have caused and continue to cause such devastating damage to the world’s population’s health and economy that the crimes committed by (…) the WHO must be legally qualified as actual crimes against humanity as defined in section 7 of the international criminal code ».

He said also that this must be called « a corona scandal and those responsible for it must be criminally prosecuted and sued for civil damages ». The investigation must focus, among others, on Bruce Aylward (WHO) and Neil Ferguson (ICL).

-On January 10, 2021 : A letter relayed by The Sun and written by lawyers, a member of Parliament, human rights activists and a former US Air Force general was addressed to the FBI and MI-5 along with security services in Canada, Germany and Australia, where the authors say :

« We are writing this letter to request that a federal investigation be commenced and/or expedited regarding the scientific debate on major policy decisions during the COVID-19 crisis. In the course of our work, we have identified issues of a potentially criminal nature and believe this investigation necessary to ensure the interests of the public have been properly represented by those promoting certain pandemic policies ».

The letter call which was « deliberately promulgated…to impoverish the nations who implemented it »

Rare countries like Sweden, Tanzania or Belarus -which can be congratulated- have refused the lockdown and have not blindly followed others and if we apply the reasoning of the lockdown defenders, the outcome must be a massacre or the saturation of their hospital system. Is this the case in these three countries ?

The answer is of course : no. Moreover, on September 15, 2020, The BMJ published an article entitled :

« COVID-19 : How does Belarus have one of the lowest death rates in Europe ? ».

These three countries are living proof of the lockdown scam and since this reality might wake up public opinion and people see that they have been lied to, a corrupt press has been spreading, from the beginning, articles and even fake news, against Sweden and Belarus.

The famous international slogan:

« Stay home, save lives » was a pure lie. On the contrary, the lockdown not only killed many people but also destroyed physical and mental health, economy, education and other aspects of life. For example, the lockdown in the USA has killed thousands of Alzheimer’s patients who have also died far from their families. In the United Kingdom : the lockdown killed 21,000 people.

The effects of the lockdown « have been absolutely deleterious. They did not save the lives they had announced they could be able to save…It is a weapon of mass destruction and we see its health…social…economic effects…which form the real second wave » (Prof. Jean-François Toussaint, September 24, 2020).

– « This country is making a dramatic mistake…What are we going to suggest ? That everyone stay locked up all his life because there are viruses outside ?! You’re all crazy, you’ve become all nuts !…we are setting the planet on fire » (Prof. Didier Raoult, October 27, 2020).

– « It is a big delirium but which is instrumentalised by big pharma and also politicians…It is a fear organized for political and economic reasons » (Prof. Christian Perronne, August 31, 2020).

– « It is just a global scam to make huge profits, bail out the banks and meanwhile ruin the middle classes in the name of an epidemic…made destructive by liberticidal, allegedly health measures » (Dr Nicole Delépine, December 18, 2020).

– « We have medical evidences that this is a scam » (Dr Heiko Schöning, July 2020).

– « Think about these two questions :…Is the coronavirus man-made ?…Have they tried to use this viral disease or this psychosis for their own ends & interests ?» (Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus). –

« There is utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians. It’s outrageous. This is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public….it should be known as nothing more than a bad flu season. this is not Ebola. It’s not SARS » (Dr Roger Hodkinson, November 13, 2020).

5-No longer blindly follow the recommendations of the WHO and require that it be totally reformed

An investigation carried out in 2016 (WHO in the clutches of lobbyists) showed an edifying radiography of the WHO ; a weakened structure subject to multiple conflicts of interest. This investigation has shown how private interests dominate public health in the WHO. Another investigation (Trust WHO) also revealed these serious anomalies.

6-Use the recognized measures for the management of epidemics 

Such as recommendations of hand washing, sneeze or cough into the elbow, use a mask but only for patients and healthcare professionals (in specific situations), isolation of the sick, etc. The severity of an epidemic is assessed by the case fatality rate (CFR), among other things. However, the latter is very low (0.03-0.05%) and there is therefore no justification for taking measures that are not only disproportionate but also unscientific.

7-Make the media aware of their responsabilities 

The media must, for example, stop talking about the coronavirus.

8-Remove the requirement for tests

The people who push for mandatory testing are defrauding governments and pursuing only economic goals. Nothing in this coronavirus (which is a benign virus and with a low CFR) justifies it. The flu infects one billion people each year, far more than SARS-CoV-2, spreads faster and has more populations at risk than this coronavirus and yet no test is required for travel. This is why Professor Didier Raoult called « a delirium » the claim that it is a serious illness and said, on August 19, 2020, that « it is not worse than the flu ».

– « The infection fatality rate for this new coronavirus is likely to be in the same ballpark as seasonal influenza » (Prof. John Ioannidis, April 17, 2020).

– « Reassure the large majority of the population that their risk of dying or getting severe disease from COVID-19 is very low » (Prof. John Ioannidis, April 22, 2020).

– « Do you realize ? Today, we are destroying the economy whereas finally the figures are comparable with those we experienced with the flu ! » (Prof. Christian Perronne, October 25, 2020).

9-Stop the vaccination campaigns and refuse the scam of the pseudo-health passport which is in reality a politico-commercial project 

– « We don’t need it [the vaccine] at all…All this is about purely commercial goals » (Prof. Christian Perronne, June 16, 2020).

– « It is an old marketing principle of pharmaceutical companies : if they want to sell their product well, consumers must be afraid and see it as their salvation. So, we create a psychosis so that consumers crack up and rush on the vaccine in question » (Prof. Peter Schönhöfer).

– « As a doctor, I do not hesitate to anticipate the decisions of the government ; we must not only refuse these vaccines [against COVID-19], but we must also denounce and condemn the purely mercantile approach and the abject cynicism which guided their production » (Dr Pierre Cave, August 7, 2020).

– The COVID vaccine is « so, so unnecessary » (Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, December 2, 2020).

– « I have never seen in the history of medicine that we urgently develop vaccines to vaccinate millions, billions of individuals for a virus that no longer kills except people at risk that we can identify, that we can treat…I have never seen a vaccine coming out after 2 months !…it takes years ! » (Prof. Christian Perronne, December 2, 2020).

– « We’re going too fast. If there was an emergency,…if today COVID-19 kills 50% of people, I will say let’s take risks…but here we have a virus that kills 0,05% and we will take all the risks ! I know there are billions behind this…Be carefull, this is very dangerous ! » (Prof. Christian Perronne, December 2, 2020).

To the question : « We do not need a general vaccine for the whole humanity with 0.05% deaths ? », Professor Christian Perronne replied : « It’s obvious ! ».

-In November 30, 2020 : Professor Christian Perronne wrote a letter in which he alerted on the danger of the vaccines based on genetic engineering :

« The people who promote these gene therapies, falsely called “vaccines”, are sorcerer’s apprentices and take…the citizens of the world for guinea pigs ».

-On October 19, 2020, in a correspondence to the journal The Lancet, scientists expressed concerns and warned :

« we are concerned that use of an Ad5 vector for immunisation against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) could similarly increase the risk of HIV-1 acquisition among men who receive the vaccine ».

-If people accept the COVID-19 vaccine, it will be :

« a mistake because we risk having absolutely unpredictable effects : for example, cancers…We are playing the total sorcerer’s apprentice…Man must not serve as a guinea pig, children must not serve as guinea pigs, it is absolutely unethical. There must not be deaths from vaccines » (Prof. Luc Montagnier, Virologist and Nobel Prize in Medicine, December 17, 2020.

-In Switzerland, a group of 700 doctors and health professionals called on January 15, 2021 for stopping the vaccination campaign

– « I think it’s [the COVID vaccine] downright dangerous. And I warn you, if you go along these lines, you are going to go to your doom » (Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, December 2, 2020).

-On December 30, 2020 : Réaction 19 (a French association founded by lawyers with nearly 60,000 members) informed, in a press release, that it has filed a complaint concerning the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna “vaccines” for : deliberately endangering the life of others, aggravated deception, abuse of weakness and aggravated extortion.

-Recently, several Members of the European Parliament have alerted the population because they are forbidden to consult the contracts signed with pharmaceutical laboratories. This opacity is a proof that there are compromising things they want to hide. Michèle Rivasi, a Member of the European Parliament, even lodged a complaint5. As a reminder6: in 2009, Pfizer was fined $ 2.3 billion, the largest fine ever imposed by the courts of the United States on a pharmaceutical group. It was found guilty of fraudulent commercial practices.

In 2010, AstraZeneca was fined 520 million euros for recommending unauthorized use of a drug. In 2011, Merck payed a fine of $ 628.36 million to resolve allegations of off-label marketing and false statements about the cardiovascular safety of a drug.

In 2013, a fine of 1.62 billion euros was imposed on Johnson & Johnson to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from allegations relating to the prescription of three drugs including promotion for uses not approved as safe and effective by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and payment of kickbacks to physicians and to the nation’s largest long-term care pharmacy provider.

You must stop this global scam where the politico-economic (even ideological) agendas of criminals are to COVID what the Iraq war was to the attacks of September 11th, 2001 (here’s a reminder of the scam of the Iraq war.

These criminals manipulate the countries of the world and want to make the epidemic last as long as possible to achieve their goals when the COVID epidemic should have been declared over at a certain period of the past year ; indeed, in medicine, the epidemic threshold from which the beginning and the end of an epidemic are declared is between 150 and 200 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. The Tanzanian president is one of the few presidents who understood this because he declared on June 8, 2020 that the COVID epidemic was over in his country.

« The epidemic is over ! » (Professor Yoram Lass, July 2, 2020)7.

In this epidemic, the danger is not the coronavirus but the people who instrumentalise it and who are the real virus to fight.

The virus is completely innocent of what is happening (impoverishment, job losses, suicides, deaths, economic recession, unemployment, etc.) and the real culprits are those who have pushed the world to use these measures and the governments that continue to implement these measures despite alerts and warnings.

« The World Bank has just estimated that the corona pandemic has caused an increase of about 100 million people living in extreme poverty. This is not because of COVID-19. It is because of the draconian measures we have introduced » (Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, December 1, 2020).

The discrepancy and disproportion between the level of dangerousness of the virus and the magnitude of the measures taken (which are moreover totally heretical) are so obvious that it inevitably leads to the conclusion that there are other objectives behind. You have to be really blind or naive not to see it.

With these measures which have nothing to do with medicine or science, governments are not fighting the dangers of the virus but are fighting the basic rights of their people and destroying their health, economy, education, ecology, culture and other aspects of life.

« We have been living a kind of delirium from the start…We live in a world which is crazy :…the conditions that have been taken to fight this disease are conditions from another century…it is not even the level of the Middle Ages ! » (Prof. Didier Raoult, December 7, 2020).

On December 28, 2020, Randy Hillier, a Canadian MP, wrote this message on Twitter along with the hashtags : #We Are Living A Lie and #No More Lockdowns : « The lies and deceptions of Covid are over. How & why so many allowed themselves to be deceived will take years to uncover ».

It is not because the majority of countries are doing the same thing that it means that it is good or that it is the right thing to do. The number is not a criterion for knowing whether or not countries are right to apply these measures. On the contrary, many historical examples show that the majority is often wrong ; Iraq war (rare countries like France did not follow and were right), H1N1 (rare countries like Poland did not follow and were right), World War II, etc.

The charge of conspiracy theories is the response of those who have no arguments and a technique of mass manipulation because all what has been reported in this letter does not consist of theories but of truths and statements made by eminent experts including Nobel laureates for medicine.

This letter will be kept as proof that your government has been alerted. Everything must return immediately to normal and this global hostage-taking must stop because you have known that you have been the victims of the biggest health scam of the 21th century.

Please, don’t make the mistake of underestimating our letter or ignoring it. Here are 2 examples of what happens when a government makes this mistake :

Despite warnings from several experts about the danger of Dengvaxia (dengue vaccine), the Philippine government decided in 2016 to launch a vaccination campaign that ended later in a public scandal. According to the office of the prosecutor Persida Acosta, 500 children died as a result of this vaccine and several thousand are sick.

According to the prosecutor, the responsibilities are shared between the laboratory which sold “a dangerous vaccine” and the government which set up a “massive and indiscriminate” vaccination campaign, in deplorable conditions. This vaccine, however, promised to be a planetary triumph ; in 2015, Sanofi confirmed with great fanfare the marketing of a revolutionary dengue vaccine. It was a world first, the product of twenty years of research and 1,5 billion euros of investment.

Yet from the beginning, voices raised in the scientific community : Doctor Antonio Dans tried to warn about the inconclusive results of the first clinical trials. In the USA, Professor Scott Halstead, a world renowned specialist in the disease, even sent a video broadcasted in the Senate of the country to urge to suspend the vaccination program. The former health minister of the country has been charged in this scandal. « It’s the lure of profit that killed these children », said prosecutor Persida Acosta.

The second example is the scandal of the H1N1 vaccine which was bought by several countries despite alerts from Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, the chairman of the Health Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, who in a motion for a recommendation entitled « Faked Pandemics – a threat for health » said : « In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide.

They have made them squander tight health care resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the risk of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines ». He was totally right because, later, in Europe alone the vaccine made 1,500 victims of narcolepsy including 80% of children, so much so that on November 24, 2013, the Swedish Minister of Social Affairs, Göran Hägglund, said he was ready to publicly apologize to the victims of the swine flu vaccine.

We cannot tell you everything in this letter, that is why you must consult the following documents very carefully because everything you have been told is detailed and argued there, and because you will discover other things that you do not know and by which you will be even shocked :

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/10/28/the-assange-persecution-is-western-savagery-at-its-most-transparent/

The Assange Persecution Is Western Savagery At Its Most Transparent

The first day of the US appeal of the Julian Assange extradition case saw grown adults arguing in a court of law that the US government could guarantee that it would not treat the WikiLeaks founder as cruelly as it treats its other prisoners.

I wish I was kidding.

In their write-up on Wednesday’s proceedings, The Dissenter’s Kevin Gosztola and Mohamed Elmaazi report that the prosecution argued that “the High Court should accept the appeal on the basis that the U.S. government offered ‘assurances’ that Assange won’t be subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) or incarcerated in ADX Florence, a super-maximum prison in Colorado.”

What this means is that in order to overturn the January extradition ruling which judge Vanessa Baraitser denied on the basis that the notoriously draconian US prison system is too cruel to guarantee Assange’s health and safety, the prosecution has established as one of their grounds for appeal the claim that they can offer “assurances” that they would not inflict some of their most brutal measures upon him. These would include the aforementioned Special Administrative Measures, wherein prisoners are so isolated that they effectively disappear off the face of the earth, or sending him to ADX Florence, where all prisoners are kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day.

What’s ridiculous about these “assurances”, apart from the obvious, is that within its own legal argument the US government reserves the right to reverse those assurances at any time and impose SAMs or maximum security imprisonment upon Assange if it deems them necessary. As Amnesty International explains:

“They say: we guarantee that he won’t be held in a maximum security facility and he will not be subjected to Special Administrative Measures and he will get healthcare. But if he does something that we don’t like, we reserve the right to not guarantee him, we reserve the right to put him in a maximum security facility, we reserve the right to offer him Special Administrative Measures. Those are not assurances at all. It is not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise.”

So the prosecution’s legal argument here is essentially “We promise we won’t treat Assange as cruelly as we treat our other prisoners, unless we decide we really want to.”

This is not just a reflection on the weakness of the extradition appeal, it’s a reflection on the savagery of all the so-called free democracies that have involved themselves in this case.

This same prosecution argued that Assange should not be denied US extradition from the UK on humanitarian grounds as in the case of activist Lauri Love because Love suffered from both physical and psychological ailments while Assange’s ailments are only psychological. They stood before the court and made this argument even as Assange was visibly pained and unwell in his video appearance from Belmarsh, which he was only able to attend intermittently due to his frail condition.

“For my newspaper, I have worked as media partner of WikiLeaks since 2009,” tweeted journalist Stefania Maurizi who attended the hearing via video link. “I have seen Julian Assange in all sorts of situations, but I have never ever seen him so unwell and so dangerously thin.”

So they’re just openly brutalizing a journalist for exposing US war crimes, while arguing that they can be trusted to treat him humanely and give him a fair trial if granted extradition. This after it has already been confirmed that the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate him during the Trump administration, after we learned that the prosecution relied on false testimony from a convicted child molester and diagnosed sociopath, after it was revealed that the CIA spied on Assange and his lawyers in the Ecuadorian embassy, and after intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein famously died under highly suspicious circumstances in a US prison cell.

The worst atrocities in history have all been legal. All the worst examples of genocide, slavery, tyranny and bloodshed have been allowed or actively facilitated by the state. The persecution of Assange is geared toward entering the imprisonment of journalists into this category.

The goal is to set a legal precedent which allows journalists who expose the crimes of the powerful to be persecuted not covertly as is normally done in “free democracies”, but right out in the open. To tell journalists “We’ll just throw you in prison if you cross us.”

What makes this precedent uniquely dangerous is that it is not just threatening to imprison American journalists who expose US crimes, but any journalist anywhere in the world. This is an Australian journalist in the process of being extradited from the UK for publishing facts about US war crimes in the nations it has invaded. The aim is to set up a system where anyone in the US-aligned world can be funneled into its prison system for publishing inconvenient facts.

This is the savagery of the western world at its most transparent. It’s not the greatest evil the US-centralized empire has perpetrated; that distinction would certainly be reserved for  its acts of mass military slaughter that it has been inflicting upon our species with impunity for generations. But it’s the most brazen. The most overt. It’s the most powerful part of the most depraved power structure on earth looking us all right in the eyes and telling us exactly what it is.

And if we can really look at this beast and what it is doing right now, really see it with eyes wide open, it reveals far more about those who rule over us than anything any journalist has ever exposed.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-pandemic-cult/5741954

COVID-19: Pandemic? Or Cult?

For the overwhelming majority of people, COVID-19 is a religion. On faith, they blindly accept that SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19. On faith they believe that COVID-19 PCR, antigen and antibody tests are accurate. On faith they believe that vaccines using an experimental mRNA technology never before used on humans, developed in less than a year instead of the normal 5-10 years to evaluate the long-term effects on people’s health, are safe and effective.

On faith they believe that draconian measures, like mask mandates and global lockdowns that have destroyed lives, economies, and trampled centuries of cherished civil liberties will protect them. On faith they believe that doctors, scientists, politicians, public health bureaucrats, and the mainstream media are telling them the truth about COVID-19.

Having faith in yourself is one thing. But placing your faith in some institution like the World Health Organization or in some person because they’re a doctor, scientist, president, king, queen, prime minster, governor, mayor, or a celebrity is giving away your power.

Consider these facts:

Lockdowns Don’t Work

Image on the right: File photo from the Times of India

In January, 2020 CNN reported the following statement from Anthony Fauci, Director of NIAD (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), regarding lockdowns: “That’s something that I don’t think we could possibly do in the United States, I can’t imagine shutting down New York or Los Angeles…” Fauci went on to say that the effectiveness of lockdowns “…is really open to question because historically when you shut things down it doesn’t have a major effect.”

Fauci’s back then statement, unlike his later flip-flops, was based on established science. For example, in a January 2020 article, NPR reported on “quarantine use—and abuse—over the ages.” Among the many examples cited was the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Liberia decided to isolate a neighborhood for 21 days which only lasted 10 days due to public protests. Sierra Leone imposed a three day quarantine or stay-at-home order. Doctors Without Borders which played an important role in the fight against Ebola had this to say about such actions:

“It has been our experience that lockdowns and quarantines do not help control Ebola, as they end up driving people underground and jeopardizing the trust between people and health providers.”

A May, 2020 article in AIER (AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR ECONOMIC RESEARCH) reported on what the New York Times reported on in February 2006. The U.S. Government under George W. Bush decided to resurrect authoritarian strategies to control pandemics which on April 5, 2020 ABC News reported: “…formed the foundation for the national response to the coronavirus pandemic underway right now.”

Bush’s dumb strategy was concocted by some computer science programmers and a small group of public health bureaucrats. Lucky for us, it got sidetracked by other crises engineered by his incompetent and corrupt administration.

In response to Bush’s pandemic plan, Dr. Donald A. Henderson (1928-2016), former Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health along with three other experts, took immediate action. They wrote a scientific paper entitled: “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza” published in BIOSECURITY AND BIOTERRORISM which lays out in no uncertain terms that there is no basis for social distancing, prohibiting social gatherings, school closures, masks, and quarantining large groups of people, and that such measures would have serious and considerable adverse consequences. Their conclusion:

“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”

Numerous recent studies such as here, here, and here confirm the aforementioned findings.

This is an additional one:

EClinical Medicine (published by The Lancet) July 2020 study: “A country level analysis measuring the impact of government actions, country preparedness and socioeconomic factors on COVID-19 mortality and related health outcomes”

Results: “…government actions such as border closures, full lockdowns, and a high rate of COVID-19 testing were not associated with statistically significant reductions in the number of critical cases or overall mortality.”

Masks Don’t Work

Surgical masks have been around since the late 1890s and are used in operating rooms to prevent droplets from the surgeon’s mouth and nose from going into a patient’s open wound. They also protect the operating room team from sprays and splashes from the patient. The operating room is a controlled sterile environment. Temperature and humidity levels are set to ensure maximum comfort and ability to breathe with the masks on.

N95 masks or respirators were originally designed for industrial use. Construction workers, Miners, and painters made use of them. Eventually, they were used in clinical settings originally for protection against Tuberculosis which is a bacterial disease.

Neither N95 masks nor surgical masks were designed for protection against viruses. Even most of the boxes the masks come in say that they won’t protect you from COVID-19 or other viruses. Yet, in spite of what it says on the box, we are told to wear them.

There are two kinds of scientific research: observational and experimental.

Observational science which involves statistical correlations or epidemiology, mathematical computer models, asking people how they feel under certain conditions, etc. can be summed up in one word: Speculation.

Experimental science where you test, measure, and examine an actual something, such as randomized controlled designs, testing what’s going on in a person’s body while they are wearing or doing something, testing a drug, nutritional supplement, or an actual piece of equipment to see how well it performs can be summed up with this one word: Verification.

Most of the evidence touting that masks work are observational studies which are weak science. And they are cherry-picking the data because there are also plenty of observational studies that show masks don’t work against viral diseases. All that these type of epidemiological studies show are correlations between masks, and COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and death numbers. But correlation doesn’t prove causation.

Another type of weak science are mechanistic studies that show the percentage of respiratory droplets that various types of masks stop. This means nothing unless they test for actual viral or aerosol particles because as stated in a 2006 study published in the American Journal of Infection Control, a June 2020 study published in AIP physics and Fluids, and the CDC’s February 2021 double masking study, plenty of infectious viral or potentially infectious aerosol particles will still go around and through any type of mask. A 2009 Wageningen University study in The Netherlands also demonstrates this. So, claiming that masks are 80%, 90%, or even 99% effective is really saying that they are 0% effective.

Bottom line: the only studies that really matter are Randomized Controlled trials (RCTs) with verified outcomes which test the masks on humans. And every RCT ever done over the past 75 years has shown that N95 masks, surgical masks, and cloth masks are useless against preventing viral diseases. Dr. Denis Rancourt, PhD summed it up best in his ResearchGate Study, “Masks Don’t Work:” (Page 4)

“No RCT study with verified outcome shows a benefit for HCW” (healthcare workers) “or community members in households to wearing a mask or respirator. There is no such study. There are no exceptions.”

There are also a number of studies that show wearing a mask isn’t a small thing to ask. Masks are extremely damaging to health in numerous ways. And do you really need science to tell you that your nose and mouth weren’t meant to be obstructed?

Masks cause oxygen deprivation and increase CO2 levels in the blood by forcing the wearer to breathe in their own toxins that they exhale. This damages their tissues and internal organs and weakens the immune system. Masks collect and are a breeding ground for all sorts of pathogenic microbes because they create a warm moist environment on the face and dryness in the mouth which promotes the growth of bacteria that cause periodontal diseases like tooth decay and gingivitis which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. Dentists are calling this mask-mouth.Masks contain nano plastic particles that can be inhaled deep into the lungs. A growing body of evidence shows that these particles can be harmful. Depriving the body of oxygen also increases the risk for cancer. Masks also cause facial lesions (WHO “Interim Guidance” pages 4 & 8).

Last September, PA Governor Tom Wolf and state legislator Wendy Ullman at a press conference forgot that the podium mic was turned on and admitted that masks are “political theater.” And they laughed about it. How many other government officials I wonder are laughing at us behind our backs?

Sadly, most people don’t know that the joke is on them and will continue to walk around with masks on their faces and their heads up their ass until the voice of authority tells them not to.

COVID-19 Vaccines Don’t Prevent COVID-19 and Could Be Dangerous

The purpose of a vaccine is to prevent a person from getting whatever disease that they’re being vaccinated for, thus, preventing them from infecting others. We constantly hear the mantra that as many people as possible need to get vaccinated in order to achieve “herd immunity.” There is only one problem: COVID-19 vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission of SARS-CoV-2. In other words, you can still get COVID-19 even if you get vaccinated. Hugh! Say what?

In an October, 2020 article, Peter Doshi, Associate Editor of the British Medical Journal, one of the most respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, reported that Tal Zaks, chief medical officer at Moderna, explained the following about the Phase III vaccine trials regarding if their vaccine will stop people from infecting each other with the COVID-19 virus:

“Our trial will not demonstrate prevention of transmission. Because in order to do that you have to swab people twice a week for very long periods, and that becomes operationally untenable.”

Anthony Fauci echoed Zaks’ words in an interview at Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit last October when he explained that “Early COVID-19 vaccines will only prevent symptoms, not block the virus.”

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine said in an NPR interview that “…one out of every 20 people who get the vaccine could still get moderate to severe infection.”

In a March, 2021 interview (last page), Offit also said that he considers masks and social distancing to be more effective than the vaccines. Nevertheless, Offit did get one of the COVID-19 vaccines.

A January 2021 article in Healthline News reported that because people can still spread and develop COVID-19 after getting a vaccine, experts like Fauci and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) are telling them that they still have to wear masks, frequently wash their hands, and practice social distancing. Some experts cited in the article actually advised people who got vaccinated to act as if they never got the vaccine.

Excuse me for being a party pooper. I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade. But what’s the point in getting a vaccine that doesn’t vaccinate you???

And what does it mean when we are told that the COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective? A follow up article to Peter Doshi’s report, also in the British Medical Journal, points out that none of the COVID-19 vaccine trials are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcomes such as hospitalizations, intensive care use, or deaths. All they are evaluating is mild, not severe disease. The article also points out that the frail elderly are way under-represented in the vaccine trials which provides no basis that the vaccines will reduce hospitalization or mortality as this is the group most likely to die. Children, pregnant women, and immunocompromised people have largely been excluded from the trials as well.

A big problem with the COVID-19 vaccines in use made by Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, etc, is that there is no way to know what the long-term side effects will be nor even how many people will suffer permanent injury and die from taking them.

A February 12, 2021 article in the New York Times reported that the safety monitoring system that is supposed to monitor any dangerous reactions to the COVID-19 vaccines “won’t be capable of analyzing safety data for weeks or months, according to numerous federal health experts,” and that “For now federal regulators are counting on a patchwork of existing programs that they acknowledge are inadequate.”

According to VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System), a national vaccine safety surveillance system run by the CDC and the FDA that tracks injuries and deaths caused by vaccines, as of 3-19-2021, there have been 44,606 recorded adverse events that include 2,050 deaths following injections with COVID-19 vaccines. On its home page VAERS explains that it’s a passive reporting system that relies on individuals to send in reports of their experiences to the CDC and FDA. It is not designed to determine if a vaccine caused a health problem.

Reports of injuries and deaths from COVID vaccines are being reported all over the world. For example, last March, The Sun reported that 21 countries, Italy, Germany, France, Slovenia, Cyprus, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Austria, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Thailand have suspended the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine due to reports of people developing severe blood clots days or weeks after being vaccinated.

Vaccine companies are immune from liability for any injuries or deaths caused by their vaccines. Instead, victims have to file a claim with either the VICP (National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program) or the CICP (Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program) which deals with pandemics. In other words, we the tax payers have to foot the bill for any mess caused by the vaccine manufacturers. And as reported by CNBC last March, the CICP rejects over 90% of the claims filed. So, good luck on collecting. The VICP, created in 1986, rejects about two thirds of all claims (reported in Science Magazine 2017). I think it’s time to do away with this practice and hold the vaccine companies accountable for their actions not only financially, but criminally as well.

Another problem with COVID-19 vaccines are mutations. On March 30, 2021, CNBC reported that according to experts in 28 countries coronavirus mutations could render current vaccines ineffective within a year. They claim that the only way to counteract this is to vaccinate everyone as quickly as possible. But the article points out that there are already mutant strains out there so the proverbial cat is out of the bag.

Viruses naturally mutate anyway and, according to a February, 2020 report in the peer-review journal Nature, are nothing to be concerned about even in the case of SARS-CoV-2. Because, as the article explains, such mutations “rarely impact outbreaks dramatically” and will not likely result in more deaths so the “spectre” of a “super killer virus” is baseless. And since the article also points out that mutations in RNA coronaviruses viruses accumulate during every copying cycle and can occur within a matter of hours in a single infected host, there is no need to vaccinate the entire world as quickly as possible. But the article explains that because the word mutation invokes science fiction models of doom and gloom “it is unsurprising that during a real-life outbreak, journalists and scientists are sometimes predisposed to draw upon these fictional views.”

In an 11-13-2020 editorial, Kamran Abbassi MD, Executive Editor of the British Medical Journal explained that journalists and scientists are more likely drawing on something else:

“Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed a state of corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency…Globally, people, policies, and procurement are being corrupted by political and commercial agendas.”

Dr. Abbassi further explained:

“The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines. Government appointees are able to ignore or cherry pick science—another form of misuse—and indulge in anti-competitive practices that favour their own products and those of friends and associates.”

He concluded:

“Politicization of science was enthusiastically deployed by some of history’s worst autocrats and dictators, and it is now commonplace in democracies. The medical-political complex tends towards suppression of science to aggrandize and enrich those in power. And, as the powerful become more successful, richer, and further and further intoxicated with power, the inconvenient truths of science are suppressed. When good science is suppressed, people die.”

The Illogic of It All

Nothing that we are being told about COVID-19 makes any sense.

We are told that the flu has virtually disappeared which is being attributed to masks and social distancing. Yet, Biden, Fauci, and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky are cackling that COVID-19 cases are once again on the rise in 21 states that include New York, New Jersey, and Michigan which have some of the strictest mask mandates that have been in place for a year. But since Texas got rid of its mask mandate COVID-19 cases have dropped and are not the rise. How does one explain this?

In the case of the Flu, let’s apply Occam’s razor or the simplest most logical explanation. COVID-19 has the same symptoms as the flu. So, based on symptoms alone it is impossible to tell which is which. Thus, the flu is being relabeled COVID-19 along with pneumonia, bronchitis, other coronaviruses, as well as a bunch of other diseases that are being used to grossly inflate the death numbers. In fact, the CDC website (see “Comorbidities and other conditions”) admits that only 6% of all COVID-19 deaths were due to COVID-19 and that on average all of the other deaths had “4.0 additional conditions or causes per death.”

All of this hysteria about rising COVID cases is mainly based on PCR tests that can be manipulated by adjusting the cycles. On a panel discussion last year, Anthony Fauci explained that running the PCR test at 35 cycles or more will give you a false positive. Yet, the FDA website (see page 36) shows that PCR tests are being run at 40 cycles. Yale New Haven Hospital on page 4 of their report also points out that PCR tests are usually run at 40 cycles and that the cycle threshold used “is never included in the results sent to clinicians.”

Here’s a nifty experiment that I wish someone would do. Since it’s impossible to tell the difference between COVID-19 and the flu based on symptoms alone (CDC website under “How do I know if I have flu?”), take a few thousand people who test positive for COVID-19 and also test them for the flu. If a high percentage of them test positive for both conditions how would they know who has what? Because, contrary to what one CDC web page says, that COVID-19 “seems to cause more serious illness in some people,” another CDC web page says that the flu also can cause all sorts of health complications including damage to the heart, lungs and kidneys. In other words, anything COVID-19 can do the flu can do because COVID-19 is the flu.,,,,

,,,,The primary weapon being used to bludgeon us into accepting the COVID-19 narrative is fear. Submission is fear. A frightened animal is a dangerous animal. Like all apes, we are territorial social animals. Anyone who doesn’t accept the fear narrative and pay homage to the microbial hobgoblin by wearing a mask, getting vaccinated, and engaging in other useless rituals is an outsider, an enemy.....