Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 466
January 24, 2023
Trouble in Paradise: Mutiny at the World Economic Forum
Tony Blair meme. Photo supplied
FreeWest Media
Klaus Schwab has been at the helm of the World Economic Forum for more than half a century. Recently, there has been strong criticism against him coming from his own ranks.
On this issue, a group of current and former WEF staff contacted the British newspaper The Guardian. They complained that the 84-year-old Schwab acted on his own and surrounded himself with “nobodies” who were incapable of leading the organisation he founded in the early 1970s.He was in no way accountable to people inside and outside the organisation, said the anonymous group. “We are reluctant to go public, as Klaus has many connections and can make our lives very difficult, even if we leave the WEF,” it said.
The WEF staff group said it posted a critical piece on LinkedIn, but it was removed at the request of the World Economic Forum, something the organisation denied.
The piece included a statement that WEF leader Klaus “was a law unto himself” and that the board was an “adder’s nest”. Staff expected the board members to clash once Klaus dies. The WEF’s nepotistic governing statutes guarantee members of the Schwab family a position of authority in the organization. The Schwabs also hold a veto over whether WEF can be shut down.
As it stands, Schwab’s daughter is a trustee, his son is a member of the managing board, and his wife runs a foundation closely connected to WEF.
Schwab “has a god complex, and thinks he’s in the fittest 0.1 percent. But no one is immortal,” an American veteran of 20 Davos conferences told Politico.
The 29 sources Politico had contacted, including WEF corporate strategic partners, current and former staffers and members of the forum’s committees and communities almost all feared repercussions from talking to the media about Schwab’s reign.
British former prime minister and architect of the Iraq war, Tony Blair has been tipped as a possible successor to Schwab.
[…]
Via https://freewestmedia.com/2023/01/23/trouble-in-paradise-mutiny-at-the-wef/
January 23, 2023
New York Post: End Persecution of Unvaccinated New Yorkers Like Me
Yasmina Palumba
New York Post
It’s little wonder “gaslighting” was Merriam-Webster’s 2022 word of the year. In New York City, gaslighting is the modus operandi of elected officials who proudly raise a fist for social justice but continue to deny citizens the most basic human rights when it comes to vaccines.
Unlike almost anywhere else in the country, unvaccinated parents here are still denied entry to their children’s public schools, and unvaccinated 2020 heroes are still fired, prohibited from working as educators, health-care workers, firefighters or any of the other essential jobs they fulfilled during the height of the pandemic.
This scandalous injustice persists despite a state-court ruling in October that also declared the city’s vaccine mandates arbitrary and capricious. The ruling cited CDC guidelines and the state Constitution, which says: “No person shall be denied the equal protection of the laws of this state or any subdivision thereof.” Mayor Eric Adams filed an appeal the very next day.
There are thousands of these unvaccinated, de facto second-class citizens, though many have now forgotten about them. Not even Thursday’s $250 million city workers’ lawsuit to end the mandates garnered much attention. Why the apathy?
Even now, when the majority of New Yorkers have declined a booster, acknowledging the inhumane treatment of the unvaccinated would require acceptance that we as a society allowed our elected officials to unleash these immoral mandates and launch a historic assault on civil rights. We did this to our friends, family, colleagues and neighbors.
As an unvaccinated New Yorker, I experienced the consequences of this groupthink firsthand. For months I was barred from cafes, theaters and museums with my children. Most painfully, I was kept from my daughter’s school spring concert and made to stand outside in the schoolyard and watch through an open back door.
In 2020 I was an essential food-industry worker, and, like many, I contracted COVID well before vaccines were available. After an uncomplicated recovery, I dared to wonder if I needed the experimental vaccine at all, then still in short supply for the vulnerable and only recently authorized for emergency use. After all, Dr. Anthony Fauci himself stated in 2004, “the most potent vaccination is getting infected yourself.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention seemed to have no answers about natural immunity. Instead, we had to turn to other countries for information. In August 2021, Israel published a large-scale study showing that, indeed, immunity offered by natural infection far surpassed that offered by vaccines alone.
Incredibly, the groundbreaking study went ignored by both the CDC and New York City. Operation Gaslight was already in effect as a giddy Mayor Bill de Blasio forged ahead with his “Key to NYC,” the vaccine-passport template for the nation.
Lacking any basis in science, the “Key to NYC” became a cynical exercise in testing the public’s appetite for authoritarianism. Instead of riots in the street, blue posters denying entry to the unvaccinated plastered windows overnight. Some took glee in shunning and shaming fellow citizens, and the ugly fact that these mandates disproportionately affected low-income and minority communities went largely overlooked.
The pandemic revealed just how exploitable fear is. To this day I’m appalled at how few people stopped to question the validity of mandates or the unimaginable psychological and economical harms they might cause. In August, almost a year after the Israeli study on natural immunity was published, the CDC finally updated its COVID guidelines to no longer recommend that COVID-prevention measures be based on vaccination status. Yet Mayor Adams has yet to let them go.
What can we do when elected officials continue to gaslight with a brazen disregard for our civil rights? An arduous course of action is to take them to court. Many are doing just that. But it takes years and funds most do not have.
Alternately, we can refuse to comply. Like the uneven enforcement of the now-defunct private-sector mandate, it’s common knowledge among parents that some schools have, in good conscience, stopped enforcing these mandates. The courage of these principals should inspire brave action in all of us.
What do you think? Post a comment.
For those who mistakenly supported COVID vaccine mandates, now is the time to make amends. Call your City Council member, email the mayor, speak up to any institution still requiring proof of vaccination and demand a restoration of civil rights for New Yorkers. Let’s make “accountability” Merriam-Webster’s 2023 word of the year.
[…]
Via https://nypost.com/2023/01/20/end-the-persecution-of-unvaccinated-new-yorkers/
Wall Street Journal Slams Vaccine Makers, Federal Agencies for Pushing Boosters
The Wall Street Journal Sunday took vaccine makers and federal agencies to task for pushing the bivalent COVID-19 boosters without having any data to demonstrate that they are either safe or effective. Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it is eyeing changes to the booster program.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Sunday took vaccine makers and federal agencies to task for pushing the bivalent COVID-19 boosters without having any data to demonstrate that they are either safe or effective.In an op-ed, Allysia Finley, a WSJ editorial board member, said people shouldn’t be surprised by the “deceptive advertising” touting the boosters on radio stations across the country, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“Federal agencies took the unprecedented step of ordering vaccine makers to produce them and recommending them without data supporting their safety or efficacy,” she wrote.
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) posted a briefing document indicating it wants to change the COVID-19 vaccine protocols by simplifying the composition of the vaccines, the immunization schedule and decisions about how the vaccines are updated.
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) is scheduled to meet on Thursday to discuss the future of COVID-19 vaccine regimens, and will be asked to vote on whether they recommend parts of the FDA’s plan.
Finley: 3 problems with ‘tweaking’ mRNA vaccines
According to Finley, the idea behind the mRNA technology was that vaccine makers could quickly “tweak” the genetic sequences in the vaccines to target new variants. The bivalent vaccines targeted a combination of the original Wuhan strain and the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron variants.
But, she wrote, three major scientific problems have emerged. First, the virus evolves faster than the vaccines can be updated.
Second, the vaccines have “hard-wired” people’s immune systems against the original strain, so they “churn out fewer antibodies that neutralize variants targeted by updated vaccines.”
Third, the antibodies that are produced wane quickly — within just a few months.
Finley outlined several recent studies as evidence, beginning with two studies in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) showing that bivalent boosters did not produce significantly more neutralizing antibodies against the BA.4 and BA.5 variants than the original boosters.
The authors hypothesized that immune imprinting “may pose a greater challenge than is currently appreciated for inducing robust immunity against SARS-CoV-2 variants,” Finley explained.
In other words, a person’s first exposure to a virus shapes the outcome of subsequent exposures to antigenically related strains.
That means people who received the original vaccine were “primed” to respond to the Wuhan strain and “mounted an inferior antibody response to other variants,” as University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. Paul Offit explained in a NEJM article.
The findings contradict press releases from Pfizer and Moderna claiming the bivalent vaccines produced a response to the Omicron variants that was 4 to 6 times better than that of the original boosters.
Neither vaccine maker conducted randomized trials. Instead, “the vaccine makers designed their studies to get the results they wanted,” Finley said.
They did this by testing the original and bivalent boosters at different times during the Omicron surges and by testing for antibodies at different time intervals for the two boosters, which allowed them to select for data that backed their claims.
Despite the flawed studies, “public-health authorities didn’t raise an eyebrow,” Finley said, “but why would they? They have a vested interest in promoting the bivalents.”
In June 2022, the FDA told the vaccine makers to update the boosters against BA.4 and BA.5. They then rushed to authorize the bivalent boosters before clinical data were available, as The Defender reported.
CDC recommended bivalent boosters without clinical trial data
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also recommended the bivalents without any clinical trials.
Vaccine makers could have performed small randomized trials by the end of last September, but instead, public health officials rushed the vaccines, according to Finley.
“And now we know why,” she wrote.
In November, the CDC published a study finding that at peak efficacy — which waned quickly — the bivalents were only 22% to 43% effective against infection.
Another CDC study in December reported the bivalent booster showed high efficacy against hospitalization among boosted seniors relative to seniors who were unvaccinated or had the original booster.
But neither study controlled for confounding factors. And many experts, Finley said, “after zealously promoting the bivalents,” have criticized the studies.
Even the FDA seems to be backpedaling on its claims, she said.
“There’s a growing consensus that we need better vaccines and treatments to protect those still at risk. But we also need honest public-health leaders,” Finley concluded.
This wasn’t the first time Finley wrote an op-ed critical of the COVID-19 vaccines. In July 2022, she questioned the rush to approve the shots for toddlers. And earlier this month, she detailed evidence suggesting the COVID-19 vaccines may be fueling new variants.
FDA admits data on boosters ‘complicated,’ but plans to recommend yearly boosters
According to the FDA, only approximately 16% of eligible Americans over the age of 5 have received the bivalent booster.
The agency’s new briefing document said there are now “multiple studies describing neutralizing antibody responses” to the bivalent boosters.
Conceding many of the points Finley made, the agency said:
“Interpreting the data from these studies is complicated because of the limited sample size, the variability in the assays used and the status of assay qualification, the populations tested, and the intervals between vaccination and serum collection.”
It added, “Their [the boosters] deployment has been associated with significant implementation complexities.”
Despite this, the FDA concluded, “Both of the bivalent mRNA vaccines have been demonstrated to produce improved neutralizing antibody responses to the BA.5, BQ.1.1, and XBB variants as compared to the original vaccines.”
Yet, the report urged a shift in vaccine composition and delivery to “reduce complexity” in the process.
The new plan will recommend one yearly booster shot, although it recommends two doses of the shot for very young children and the elderly.
The FDA said it expects to assess the evolution of COVID-19 annually to determine which strains to vaccinate for, a process they likened to the one followed for the flu vaccine.
Experts, including Dr. Vinay Prasad, have already raised concerns about this approach, arguing that the vaccines will “always be chasing the last variant.”
Dr. Céline Gounder, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, today told NPR, “It’s unclear whether updating the booster formulations and repeatedly boosting people is the most effective approach to controlling COVID at this stage.”
“I’d like to see some data on the effect of dosing interval, at least observational data,” said Dr. Eric Rubin, one of the FDA advisers and editor-in-chief of the NEJM told The New York Times. “And going forward, I’d like to see data collected to try to tell if we’re doing the right thing.”
Despite conceding the failures of existing data, the documents don’t address the question of new randomized trials, existing and widespread concerns about vaccine side effects or the fact that the vaccines do not stop the spread of disease.
[…]
Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/wsj-covid-booster-fda/
A Circuitous Path to NATO Disarmament
“Weapons are the way to peace,” quoth NATO secretary general Stoltenberg at the Davos conference, advocating for more weapons to be sent to the rapidly failing Nazi dictatorship in Kiev.
Those who know and love old Jens probably heard this and clapped their hands in joy—”Yay, more weapons!”—whereas I, having long ago concluded that he is a cross between a Doltenberg and a Stultenberg, was loathe to admit that for once he spoke the absolute, unadulterated truth: funneling all of NATO’s weapons (except the nuclear ones, of course) to the hapless Ukrainians would be most conducive to not just ridding the world of these terrible weapons but also eliminating the remnants of Ukrainian Nazis and whatever foreign mercenaries and NATO special forces are embedded in their midst.
This was a bit of a surprise: here I was comfortably assuming that Stolt is like a clock that had its face bashed into tiny pieces with a sledgehammer—correct zero times a day—and here is Stolt the Dolt suddenly ringing the bell on time and the correct number of times! Well, let us mark this as the exception that proves the rule. Please let me explain why I think that weapons are indeed the way to peace.
There is a Russian system ironically called Penicillin (its technical designation is 1B75). It was first put together and tested a few years ago, but only now has it been produced in enough numbers to saturate the entire Russian frontline in the former Ukraine, producing good results. It is a combined optical, acoustic and seismic system that pinpoints the locations of all artillery and missile launches in a 25km radius within 5 seconds and automatically transmits their target and trajectory information to Russian artillery and air defense systems within a 40km radius. It is a passive system: it merely listens and cannot be pinpointed for targeting. It is easy to hide: it is mounted on a sporty Kamaz-6350 8×8 truck and can be hidden in any gully or patch of woods. It can operate unattended for long periods of time.
The Ukrainians have been given a few targeting systems too, but these are all active systems that shine a radar beam on whatever it is they are tracking, thus informing Russian passive radar systems of their exact locations; they don’t survive for long.
Whenever the Ukrainians launch a missile (excluding small stuff like mortars), the Russians immediately know both the launch site and the trajectory. The missile is then precisely targeted and destroyed by Russian air defense while the launcher is precisely targeted and destroyed using artillery before it has a chance to move. This puts the Ukrainians, already at a disadvantage in the number of artillery pieces and starved of ordnance, at an even greater disadvantage.Once Ukrainian artillery and rocket systems are disabled, the Russians take their sweet time blowing up Ukrainian trenches and bunkers. Once they are reasonably convinced that there is no more fight left in whoever is left alive on the Ukrainian side, they move in their infantry and mop up. And then the front advances a few kilometers to the west.
his balance of power results in Ukrainian casualties in the high hundreds to low thousands per day while casualties on the Russian side are becoming increasingly rare thanks to the unhurried meticulousness with which the Russians perform what has become a routine, repetitive chore.
The Russian defense establishment is cranked up to full speed working three shifts and there are no longer any shortages of anything that the Russian military needs. To plug in a specific example, Putin recently stated on camera that Russia is currently manufacturing more air defense missiles than the rest of the world combined.
Meanwhile, it is no secret that NATO is many years behind in replenishing the supplies it has sold or donated to the Ukrainians so far. There is a very good reason for this difference: in the West, weapons are manufactured by defense contractors, which are for-profit private companies. When they don’t have orders, as they do during extended periods of peacetime, they scale back their operations and lay off technical staff; then, a decade or more later, when a huge new order suddenly arrives, they aren’t able to fill it quickly—or at all. In Russia, the defense establishment is fully owned by the government and kept operational at all times.It thus stands to reason that the Russians don’t need to do much more than they are doing now: blowing up everything that the
Ukrainians manage to bring to the front and killing anything that moves on the Ukrainian side of it; moving the front westward a few kilometers a day; and perfecting their weapons and their strategies in preparation for any future conflict.
Since the start of the hot phase of the conflict 11 months ago, the Russians have destroyed the Ukrainian armed forces not once but twice: once with its old contingent and Soviet-era weapons, and once with a hastily drafted contingent and Soviet-era weapons donated from throughout the former East Bloc, and it is now busy destroying Ukrainian armed forces 3.0 armed with NATO weapons and with lots of Polish, Romanian, American and assorted other mercenaries.
The end result of this, to be achieved perhaps during the summer of 2023, perhaps closer to autumn, should be as follows:
• The Ukraine free of both Soviet-era and NATO weapons
• The Ukraine purged of almost all Ukrainian Nazis
• NATO armories largely depleted after sending much of their war materiel to the Ukraine
At that point, Russia should be in a position to offer peace—on its own terms. These terms have been known for an entire year now and haven’t changed except for a few details. In the main, Russia would like NATO to scale back to its 1997 borders, leaving Eastern Europe demilitarized and neutral.
What’s changed is that Russia would like some additional pieces of the former Ukraine for itself: Zaporozhye, Kherson…I am guessing that this list will come to include Nikolaev and Odessa, and perhaps Dnepropetrovsk and Kharkov. Russian control over some sensitive Ukrainian nuclear and hydroelectric installations (all of them built by the Russians) would be nice too, just for the sake of security.
[…]Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/c8f141f4-431e-4e0b-b013-7b8eec634d62Where Did All the Workers Go?
By Brett Swanson
Brownstone Institute
In a November 30, 2022, speech on “Inflation and the Labor Market,” Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell blamed most of the 3.5 million estimated shortfall in the US labor force on premature retirements. He also blamed a large portion – between 280,000 and 680,000 – on “long Covid.” In a footnote, however, Powell acknowledged a far more somber factor: an estimated 400,000 unexpected deaths among working age people.
It’s easy to blame these deaths on Covid-19. The virus is of course one significant cause. But it’s not nearly the only cause, especially among young and middle-age workers. We need better government data transparency to make a full assessment. Until then, we can proceed with others who track mortality for a living – life insurance companies.
The Great Divide – 2020 vs. 2021In 2020, Covid-19 took many lives, even among select groups of middle-age people, specifically those with comorbidities such as diabetes. In 2020, Covid did not take very many lives of healthy young and middle-age people – for example, the types of people who are employed at large and mid-size companies and who have group life insurance. As you can see in the chart below, group life insurance benefit payments in 2020 were barely higher than in 2018.
In 2021, however, group life payments exploded by 20.7 percent over the five year average and by 15 percent over the acute pandemic year of 2020. Why would healthy young and middle-age people suddenly begin dying in large numbers in 2021 when they’d navigated 2020 with relative success?
Especially when we consider that in 2021, the US administered 520 million Covid-19 vaccine doses. Shouldn’t healthy people employed in good jobs with good benefits, now protected with vaccines, have fared better in 2021 than in 2020? Surely, overdoses and suicides have risen in recent years. But those causes of death are less prominent among the group life cohorts in general, and the latest data confirm these were not drivers of the group life surge. Curiously, two of the largest spikes in 2021 came from deadly automobile accidents and non-automobile accidents.
Millennial MortalityLet’s look at a few of these young adult age groups in more detail. In the charts below, we’ve broken out total all-cause deaths into three groups – 30-34, 35-39, and 40-44. Eyeballing the age group charts alone shows that factors other than Covid-19 itself must have driven large portions of the mortality spike in young and middle-age workers. (We are using official statistics, which likely overstate Covid mortality and understate non-Covid mortality. It’s the best we’ve got for now.)
The most important overall point is that 2021 was far worse for young and middle-age people than 2020.Another key point is that 2022 was also worse than 2020, though not as bad as 2021.Mortality rates in 2022 were still dramatically higher than the pre-pandemic baseline.
In the three charts above, we estimate 2022* total deaths because November and December are still provisional and subject to upward revisions. We’ve made what we believe are reasonable projections. The % change figures are relative to the 2018-19 average. These are absolute numbers not adjusted for population growth or cohort size.Covid-19 hit hard in 2020, especially for the old, vulnerable, and comorbid. In other words, Covid-19 took many of the most unhealthy from us in 2020. In principle, therefore, a smaller number unhealthy people might have been susceptible to Covid-19 in 2021 and 2022. High mortality years are often followed by low mortality years. After two successive high mortality years, the third year is even more likely to be low-mortality. For 2022 to be as bad, or somewhat worse, than 2020, is thus a big surprise. Last year’s milder Omicron variants make 2022’s stubbornly high mortality rate even more baffling.
All-cause mortality is crucial to understand whether public health policies are working. All-cause numbers can also help expose faulty reasoning when overly narrow, overly complicated, or overly clever analyses miss or hide important signals. For example, an analysis which purported to show lockdowns reduced Covid deaths but which neglected to show other deaths rose even more, would not reflect the totality of the policy’s effects. Likewise, a chemotherapy which shrinks tumors but kills patients may be successful in its narrow task yet fail the larger mission. Most analysts and health authorities studiously ignored all-cause over the last three years. The all-cause figures above show our Covid policies were far from successful.
For other purposes, however, it’s helpful and even necessary to drill down on specific causes. Important signals can also be lost in large groupings – Simpson’s paradox, for example, is a common statistical illusion. (Few have dug deeper, with as much specificity, as John Beaudoin, an engineer from Massachusetts who gained access to his state’s digital death records for the last eight years. He shows that specific causes of death spike and fall at important moments and periods. CDC data is not organized with such granularity. More on Beaudoin’s analysis in coming weeks…)
We know that recent years saw an upswing in drug overdoses and suicides, which accelerated with the pandemic lockdowns. Although these troubling trends cannot explain the enormous and unprecedented all-cause mortality seen above, we should attempt to account for them. Likewise, although Covid-19 did not cause all these record deaths, it was a significant factor.
Employment AberrationSo we dig deeper. If we remove both Covid-19 and unnatural deaths (homicide, suicide, overdose, etc.), we see a dramatic spike of natural, non-Covid-19 deaths among working age people beginning in the spring and summer of 2021. The CDC then stopped publishing the detailed data breaking out these particular categories.
But we know this trend continued. In fact, it got much worse. The life insurance companies told us so. On a December 30, 2021, videoconference with the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, OneAmerica CEO Scott Davison reported with shock:
“And what we saw just in third quarter, we’re seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic.”
“40% is just unheard of.”
“It may not all be COVID on their death certificate, but deaths are up just huge, huge numbers.”
Several months later, Lincoln National reported its 2021 payouts were $1.4 billion, versus $548 million in 2020, a 164 percent rise.
As you will remember seeing in our three all-cause charts, August, September, and October of 2021 showed a gigantic upward bubble – the worst ever period of concentrated young and middle-age deaths, at least in modern times.
Heart attacks, strokes, pulmonary embolisms, accidents, and many seemingly-inexplicable sudden deaths, which continued into 2022, and now in 2023. Here is the Society of Actuaries November 2022 update, which goes through June 2022.
Source: Society of Actuaries, Group Life Covid-19 Mortality Survey Report, November 2022.It’s true that the late summer and fall period of 2021 coincided with the Delta wave in the US, which was more infectious and appeared to be more pathogenic than previous variants. (We’ve suggested the mass vaccination programs may have, by exerting extreme evolutionary pressure, driven convergence onto more infectious, vaccine-evading variants. Brand new research just published in the New England Journal of Medicine continues to bolster our escape variant thesis: Substantial Neutralization Escape by SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variants BQ.1.1 and XBB.1.)
[…]
On the other hand, the group life insurance data show vaccinated groups may have suffered the worse outcomes. By August, most large and mid-size companies and organizations across the country had vaccine mandates, and most employees complied. Yet these workers suffered extraordinary – indeed, totally unprecedented death rates – in 2021, especially the second half of 2021.
Source: Society of Actuaries, Group Life Covid-19 Mortality Survey Report, November 2022.Ed Dowd, a former BlackRock portfolio manager, points to a crucial peculiarity in his book Cause Unknown. Employed people with group life insurance policies are far healthier than their overall population cohort. They typically die at a significantly lower rate, just 30-40 percent of the overall population. This is an iron actuarial law. In 2021, however, as you can see in the chart directly above, these employed Americans died at excess rates far higher than their larger pool of less healthy peers.
We could also point to fast-rising disability as a key factor in the worker shortage. Fed chair Powell blames it on long Covid. Once again, however, the timing doesn’t fit that story very well.
To overgeneralize:
In 2020, the vulnerable died of Covid at unusually high rates. In 2021 and 2022, Covid continued its assault, but the young, middle-aged, and healthy also died in aberrantly high numbers of something else.
These patterns are repeating across the high-income developed world – Germany, the UK, Japan, South Korea, Australia.
[…]
Via https://brownstone.org/articles/where-did-all-the-workers-go/
Saudi Crown Prince defies the US policy against Syria
MBS with Russian president Vladimir Putin (left) in Moscow, 14 June 2018. Photo credit: Kremlin.ru
Steven Sahioune
Free West Media
In November 2022, Saudi Arabia formally changed its stance on Syria. Saudi Arabia is the political powerhouse of the Middle East, and often shares positions on foreign policy and international issues with the UAE, which has previously re-opened their embassy in Damascus.
“The kingdom is keen to maintain Syria’s security and stability and supports all efforts aimed at finding a political solution to the Syrian crisis,” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan told the November Arab League summit in Algeria.
Syria was suspended from the Arab League in 2011 following the outbreak of conflict instigated by the US, and portrayed in western media as a popular uprising of pro-democracy protesters.
Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said, “The developments in Syria still require a pioneering Arab effort. It is necessary to show flexibility from all parties so that the economic collapse and political blockage can be dispelled. Syria must engage in its natural Arab environment.”
The next Arab League summit will be held in Saudi Arabia, and there is a possibility of Syria once again taking its seat at the round table.
On January 16, the Syrian Foreign Ministry agreed to resume imports from Saudi Arabia after over a decade of strained relations, and Syria planned to import 10,000 tons of white sugar. This development signals a new beginning between the two countries.
Saudi and the Syrian tribesThe Arab tribes in the north east of Syria have traditionally had strong ties with Saudi Arabia, and have received support from the kingdom. The tribes have opposed the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Arab villages which the US-led YPG militia has conducted for years. Even though Saudi Arabia has been viewed as a US ally in the past, this has changed since the US military has supported the Marxist YPG who have oppressed Syrians who are not Kurdish.
The US occupied oil wells in north east Syria may come under attack by Arab tribes who are demanding their homes, farms and businesses back from the US-supported YPG. Some analysts foresee the US troops pulling out of Syria after the Kurds find a political solution with Damascus.
Turkey and Syria repair relationshipTurkey and Syria have begun steps to repair their relationship, which ended after Turkey supported the US-NATO attack on Syria for regime change, and hosted the CIA operations room funneling weapons and terrorists into Syria, under the Obama administration.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recently order the withdrawal of Turkish troops from Syria to begin to repair the relationship.
Russia is brokering the reconciliation between Erdogan and Assad, which began with the Moscow hosted meeting of the three defense ministers, and a meeting between the three foreign ministers is upcoming.
The developments between Turkey and Syria are being watched by Iran. Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said his country was “happy with the dialogue taking place between Syria and Turkey.” Amirabdollahian will travel to Damascus on Saturday for talks with Syrian Foreign Minister Mekdad.
Iran is looking to establish a new role in the recovery process in Syria. President Ebrahim Raisi will visit both Turkey and Syria soon, his first visit to Turkey since taking office two years ago. While analysts see Saudi Arabia and Iran as antagonists, some feel the kingdom will ultimately realize they have to work with Iran in Syria and Lebanon. Iran is part of the region and can’t be excluded from the geo-political sphere.
Saudi Arabian reformsSaudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) said on April 27, 2021 that the country was undergoing a sweeping reform which would restructure the role of religion in Saudi politics and society. The process began a few years before he became crown prince, but under his leadership it has accelerated. Islamic institutions in the Kingdom have seen changes in procedure, personnel, and jurisdiction. All of these reforms are in line with the future vision of the country.
Some analysts feel the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s eventually gave rise to support for domestic religious institutions, and eventually led to funding of religious activities abroad, while religious leaders at home wielded power over public policy.
[…]
MBSThe Crown Prince is young and has new ideas. He is instituting sweeping reforms to the society which have included more rights and freedoms for women. He has championed projects to place Saudi Arabia as a tourist destination, year round golf and soccer venue, and encouraged cultural arts such as musical productions. MBS is breaking the mold: no longer will Saudi Arabia be a breeding ground for Radical Islam.
Extremist preachersSaudi Arabia had hosted many extremist preachers. Some were featured on satellite TV channels located in Saudi Arabia, and others were local preachers, authors, or scholars. Some had traveled abroad preaching in pulpits and exporting their hatred and sectarian bigotry.
One of the most famous preachers was Muhammed Al-Arifi, who has had an electronic surveillance device attached to him by Saudi intelligence agents, after they seized all of his social media accounts. His last tweet is said to be on May 6, 2019, when he had 20 million followers, and 24 million likes on Facebook, which ranked him as tenth in the Arab world and in the Middle East. The kingdom is shutting down clerics who are extreme.
In 2014, Great Britain banned Arifi from entering the UK following reports that was involved in radicalizing three young British citizens who went to Syria as terrorists.
A YouTube video in 2013 showed Arifi preaching in Egypt and prophesying the coming of the Islamic State. Egyptian TV reported Arifi meeting with the former Muslim Brotherhood prime minister Hisham Qandil in his office.
Arifi is best remembered for his statement on the media Al Jazeera in which he called for jihad in Syria and supported Al Qaeda.
Adnan al-Arour is another extremist preacher who had appeared regularly on two Saudi-owned Salafist satellite channels. Arour was originally from Syria before settling in Saudi Arabia, and in the early days of the Syrian conflict he would stand up on camera, shake his finger, and called for his followers to ‘grind the flesh’ of an Islamic minority sect in Syria and ‘feed it to the dogs’.
These extremist preachers made it clear that the battles being waged in Syria had nothing to do with freedom or democracy, which the western media was pushing as the goal. The truth was the conflict in Syria was a US-NATO attack for regime change and utilized terrorists following Radical Islam, who fought a sectarian war with the goal of establishing an Islamic State in Syria.
[…]
Saudi role in the Syrian warSaudi Arabia played a huge role in the large-scale supply of weapons and ammunition to various terrorist groups in Syria during the Syrian conflict. Weapons purchased in Croatia were funneled through Jordan to the border town of Deraa, the epi-center of the Syrian conflict.
At the height of Saudi involvement in Syria, the kingdom had their own militia in Syria under the command of Zahran Alloush. The Jaysh al-Islam are remembered for parading women in cages through the Damascus countryside prior to massacring them.
In summer 2017, US President Donald Trump shut down the CIA operation ‘Timber Sycamore’ which had been arming the terrorists fighting in Syria. About the same time, Saudi Arabia cut off support to the Syrian opposition, which was the political arm of the terrorists.
[…]
Via https://freewestmedia.com/2023/01/22/saudi-crown-prince-defies-the-us-policy-against-syria/
BlackRock: Waging Economic Warfare Against Humanity
By Colin Todhunter
Global Research
Why is much modern food of inferior quality? Why is health suffering and smallholder farmers who feed most of the world being forced out of agriculture?
Mainly because of the mindset of the likes of Larry Fink of BlackRock – the world’s biggest asset management firm – and the economic system they profit from and promote.
In 2011, Fink said agricultural and water investments would be the best performers over the next 10 years.
“Go long agriculture and water and go to the beach.”
Unsurprisingly then, just three years later, in 2014, the Oakland Institute found that institutional investors, including hedge funds, private equity and pension funds, were capitalising on global farmland as a new and highly desirable asset class.
Funds tend to invest for a 10-15-year period, resulting in good returns for investors but often cause long-term environmental and social devastation. They undermine local and regional food security through buying up land and entrenching an industrial, export-oriented model of agriculture.
In September 2020, Grain.org showed that private equity funds – pools of money that use pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals – were being injected into the agriculture sector throughout the world.
This money was being used to lease or buy up farms on the cheap and aggregate them into large-scale, US-style grain and soybean concerns. Offshore tax havens and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development had targeted Ukraine in particular.
Western agribusiness had been coveting Ukraine’s agriculture sector for quite some time. That country contains one third of all arable land in Europe. A 2015 article by Oriental Review noted that, since the mid-90s, Ukrainian-Americans at the helm of the US-Ukraine Business Council have been instrumental in encouraging the foreign control of Ukrainian agriculture.
In November 2013, the Ukrainian Agrarian Confederation drafted a legal amendment that would benefit global agribusiness producers by allowing the widespread use of genetically modified seeds.
In June 2020, the IMF approved an 18-month, strings-attached $5 billion loan programme with Ukraine.
Even before the conflict, the World Bank incorporated measures relating to the sale of public agricultural land as conditions in a $350 million Development Policy Loan (COVID ‘relief package’) to Ukraine. This included a required ‘prior action’ to “enable the sale of agricultural land and the use of land as collateral.”
It is interesting to note that Larry Fink and BlackRock are to ‘coordinate’ investment in ‘rebuilding’ Ukraine.
[…]
With more than $813.5 billion invested in arms manufacturing companies, BlackRock is in a win-win situation – profiting from both destruction and reconstruction.
[…]
Back in 2010, the farmlandgrab.org website reported that BlackRock’s global agriculture fund would target (invest in) companies involved with agriculture-related chemical products, equipment and infrastructure, as well as soft commodities and food, biofuels, forestry, agricultural sciences and arable land.
According to research by Global Witness, it has since indirectly profited from human rights and environmental abuses through investing in banks notorious for financing harmful palm oil firms (see the article The true price of palm oil, 2021).
Blackrock’s Global Consumer Staples exchange rated fund (ETF), which was launched in 2006 and, according to the article The rise of financial investment and common ownership in global agrifood firms (Review of International Political Economy, 2019), has:Behind “The Great Reset” and “The Green Pass” Is Big Finance: Plan for Power Consolidation and Social Control: Manlio Dinucci
[…]
BlackRock et al are heavily invested in the success of the prevailing globalised system of food and agriculture.
They profit from an inherently predatory system that – focusing on the agrifood sector alone – has been responsible for, among other things, the displacement of indigenous systems of production, the impoverishment of many farmers worldwide, the destruction of rural communities and cultures, poor-quality food and illness, less diverse diets, ecological destruction and the proletarianization of independent producers.
Due to their size, according to journalist Ernst Wolff, BlackRock and its counterpart Vanguard exert control over governments and important institutions like the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Federal Reserve. BlackRock and Vanguard have more financial assets than the ECB and the Fed combined.
BlackRock currently has $10 trillion in assets under its management and to underline the influence of the firm, Fink himself is a billionaire who sits on the board of the World Economic Forum and the powerful and highly influential Council for Foreign Relations, often referred to as the shadow government of the US – the real power behind the throne.
Researcher William Engdahl says that since 1988 the company has put itself in a position to de facto control the Federal Reserve, most Wall Street mega-banks, including Goldman Sachs, the Davos World Economic Forum Great Reset and now the Biden Administration.
Engdahl describes how former top people at BlackRock are now in key government positions, running economic policy for the Biden administration, and that the firm is steering the ‘great reset’ and the global ‘green’ agenda.
Fink recently eulogised about the future of food and ‘coded’ seeds that would produce their own fertiliser. He says this is “amazing technology”. This technology is years away and whether it can deliver on what he says is another thing.
More likely, it will be a great investment opportunity that is par for the course as far as genetically modified organisms in agriculture are concerned: a failure to deliver on its inflated false promises. And even if it does eventually deliver, a whole host of ‘hidden costs’ (health, social, ecological, etc) will probably emerge.
[…]
But why should Fink care about these ‘hidden costs’, not least the health impacts?
Well, actually, he probably does – with his eye on investments in ‘healthcare’ and Big Pharma. BlackRock’s investments support and profit from industrial agriculture as well as the hidden costs.
Poor health is good for business (for example, see on the BlackRock website BlackRock on healthcare investment opportunities amid Covid-19). Scroll through BlackRock’s website and it soon becomes clear that it sees the healthcare sector as a strong long-term bet.
And for good reason. For instance, increased consumption of ultra-processed foods (UPFs) was associated with more than 10% of all-cause premature, preventable deaths in Brazil in 2019 according to a recent peer-reviewed study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The findings are significant not only for Brazil but more so for high income countries such as the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, where UPFs account for more than half of total calorific intake. Brazilians consume far less of these products than countries with high incomes. This means the estimated impact would be even higher in richer nations.
Due to corporate influence over trade deals, governments and the WTO, transnational food retail and food processing companies continue to colonise markets around the world and push UPFs.
In Mexico, global agrifood companies have taken over food distribution channels, replacing local foods with cheap processed items. In Europe, more than half the population of the European Union is overweight or obese, with the poor especially reliant on high-calorie, poor nutrient quality food items.
[…]
In India, for example, the now-repealed three farm laws of 2020 would have provided huge investment opportunities for the likes of BlackRock. These three laws – imperialism in all but name – represented a capitulation to the needs of foreign agribusiness and asset managers who require access to India’s farmland.
[…]
This has been a key driving force behind the modern food system that sees around a billion people experiencing malnutrition in a world of food abundance. That is not by accident but by design – inherent to a system that privileges corporate profit ahead of human need.
[…]
Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/hard-edged-rock-waging-economic-warfare-humanity/5805466
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
By Francis When
Harper Collins (2004)
Book Review
I found this book by British journalist Francis Wheen extremely disappointing. After finishing it, I was still unclear what it was about until I read the author interviews at the back of the book. Wheen’s goal, apparently, is to demonstrate that “rational thought is in retreat.” However I remain baffled why he traces the problem back to 1979, the year Ayatollah Khomeini instituted a strict Islamic Republic in Iran (in March) and Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of Great Britain (in May).
I was also confused by Wheen’s humorous writing style. It seems to me a logical persuasive style would be far more effective in making the case that society has abandoned rational thought. Instead the book is filled with with flip one liners as Wheen slags off a host of modern leaders and opinion makers for their irrational behavior.
Wheen starts with the premise that one of the Enlightenment’s major achievements was replacing the superstitious religiosity of the Middle Ages with rational thought and science, opening the door to potential continuous improvement in the quality of human life. Yet ever since 1979, he maintains, the world has gone backwards and become more superstitious and irrational.
Coming in for particular ridicule and scorn are
New Age spiritualityDeepak ChopraNancy Reagan (for consulting an astrologist regarding her husband’s political decisions)post-structuralistsadvocates of intelligent designAl Gore (for asserting the natural world can’t be understood without reference to God and God’s creation)non-judgementalismcorporate executives and Wall Street analysts who consult Tarot cards and horoscopesMargaret Thatcher and Cherie Blair (for consulting Ayurveda practitioners)the neologist jargon of corporate and government consultants (including words like “re-engineering,” “downsizing,” benchmarking,” and “demassing”)the late Queen (for using homeopathic remedies)the late princess Diana (for seeing a specialist in reflexology)New Labor (for adopting policies indistinguishable from those of Margaret Thatcher)John Pilger (for opposing the UN military occupation of East Timor)Thierry Meyssan (for his best-selling August 2002 book challenging the official 9-11 narrative)Noam Chomsky (for opposing Clinton’s war crimes in Yugoslavia)Carter and Reagan (for claiming to have seen UFO’s)the 36% of Americans who believe in telepathythe Daily Mail (for writing too many articles about Atlantis, Nostradamas, the Knights Templar and the Ark of the Covenant).For me the most valuable parts of this book concerned his critique of US economic and foreign policy. He presents a very coherent history of the disconnect between Wall Street share values and corporate profitability that began in the 1980s (around the same time US manufacturers began shutting down factories and moving them overseas) and reached its apex with the dotcom boom and the Enron (and WorldCom, Tyco and Global Crossing) scandal in the early 2000s. He also questions the ability of the IMF, WTO and World Bank have so much power, particularly over Third World countries, yet operate with no vestige of public scrutiny or accountability. Also coming in for heavy criticism are the treaties the US imposes on developing countries forbidding them to subsidize developing industries (in contrast to the US, which heavily subsidized their early radios, telegraph, radio and Internet).
Unfortunately Wheen seems unaware of his own irrational biases when it comes to Western medicine, which he claims limits itself to treatments proven in double blind controlled studies. None of the 13 or so vaccines on the childhood immunization schedule has ever been subjected to double blind controlled studies (nor any of the Covid vaccines). At the same time, treatments such as Ayurvedic medicine and acupuncture, acupressure and reflexology (which he ridicules) are based on 3,000 years of empirical observation, which was so highly valued by Wheen’s Enlightenment heroes Bacon, Locke and Hume.
January 22, 2023
Elon Musk: “I Felt Like I Was Dying” After 2nd mRNA Jab
Blogging Hounds
Elon Musk admitted on Twitter that he felt like he was dying after taking the second experimental mRNA vaccine.
Elon also admitted his young cousin had myocarditis following the vaccine and was taken to the hospital.
Elon posted this on Twitter in response to Scott Adams:
()
How do we interpret this? https://t.co/QtLFpactc2
— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) January 20, 2023
Syrian Security Eliminates CIA’s Top ISIS Commander
By Arabi Souri
Syrian security in Daraa province delivered a new blow to the CIA’s efforts to destabilize the country by eliminating one of the most wanted top commanders of the US-sponsored ISIS terrorists in the southwest of the country.CIA’s asset
Muhammad Ali Al-Shaghouri, nicknamed Abu Omar Al-Shaghouri, a top commander of ISIS (ISIL – Daesh) was killed along with two of his bodyguards in his home in the town of Muzayrib in the western countryside of Daraa province, Syrian official media reported and locals confirmed the news.Syrian security was notified by activists of the presence of Al-Shaghouri in his house near the preparatory (junior high) school in the town of Muzayrib to the west of Daraa city, a swift plan was devised and within a very short period of time the house was stormed and the terrorist was killed when trying to fight back, local sources told Syria News.
CIA asset Al-Shaghouri was responsible for a series of assassinations of notables, policemen, and soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army in his region, he was receiving top support from the US illegal military base in Al Tanf area, with other support from Israel, Jordan, and Qatar throughout the past 3 years.He managed to flee from the city of Tafas when the Syrian Army liberated it back in January 2021 with the help of his handlers and remained wanted by Syrian law enforcement and the Syrian Army’s intelligence units.
[…]
The Most Revolutionary Act
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