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Confucianism in the Early Han Empire

Episode 11: Contact with the West – the Early Han

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

Dr Craig Benjamin (2013)

Film Review

The first Han emperor Gaozu moved the capitol to Changon after a popular uprising destroyed the Qin capitol Xianyang. Later Han emperors would move it east to Lyoyang.

Ruling a vast empire stretching from Vietnam in the north to Korea in the south and west into Central Asia, Gaozu employed a bureaucracy of highly educated Confucian and Daoist scholars. In the year 2 AD census, the Han empire registered 80 commanderies,* 10 kingdoms and 1,587 prefectures (which were further subdivided into wards).

Immensely popular for reducing taxes on the peasants, the first Han emperor adopted Confucianism as official government policy in 140 BC. The last Han emperor Wudi would found a Confucian academy to educate government officials and initiate the world’s first civil service exam.

The Han Dynasty continued the harsh criminal penalties enacted under the Qin Dynasty and forced all subjects to register locally for conscription for military service and imperial construction crews. To finance his numerous military campaigns, Wudi began minting coins, confiscating lands he had gifted to his nobles and increasing taxes on business activity. This income supplemented growing revenues from the government monopoly on the highly lucrative salt and iron industries.

Wudi is also remembered for dispatching the famous Han envoy Zhang Qian to Central Asia to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi nomads against the aggressive Xiongu nomads to the north of China. The international contacts Zhang Qian initiated would lead to the development of the first Silk Road.

Eventually the fiscal stress caused by Wudi’s military expansionism led to marked peasant unrest and the downfall of the East Han Dynasty in 9 AD. Daoist scholars particularly expressed harsh criticism of corrupt government policies (eg government monopolies in critical industries, incessant wars of conquest and the growing power of palace eunuchs).

One of Wudi’s court officials Wang Mang seized power in 9 AD, declaring the short-lived Xin Dynasty. Wang was immensely popular with Chinese peasants for apportioning land to them under the communal “well field system”** and for establishing grain reserves to stabilize widely fluctuating grain prices.

Wang was overthrown in 23 AD by a group of nobles who resented his favoritism towards the peasants.

The Xin Dynasty was replaced by the East Han Dynasty, which ruled for nearly two centuries. Eunuchs were incredibly powerful under the East Han Dynasty and frequently arrested Confucian scholars for protesting government corruption.

Meanwhile Daoist principles of equal rights and land distribution spread throughout the peasantry, leading to the Yellow Turban Rebellion (184 – 204 AD). As the Han Dynasty collapsed, power eventually fell into the hands of local governments and warlords.

*Provincial regions with decentralized administrative structures

**In the well–field system, one unit of land was divided among eight peasant families. A shared field was surrounded by eight fields, each worked by an individual family. The field in the center was worked jointly by the families for their noble lord.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5808608/5808632

Fauci’s Covid Disater: A Summary

By Ian Miller

Brownstone Institute

News that Dr. Anthony Fauci is finally leaving his post after what seemed like an endless reign at the helm of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases should be a time for celebration.

But it’s not.

Fauci has caused such tremendous damage throughout the past few years that it’s almost impossible to comprehend.

In nearly every area of life in the United States, as well as in many other parts of the world, Fauci’s influence has been a key contributor to massive amounts of human suffering.

Fauci inexplicably had particular ire for children.

Long after it was abundantly clear that closing schools had no significant health benefit, Fauci continued to support shutdowns and restrictions on normal life for millions of children at little to no risk from the virus.

His capacity for outright political advocacy and activism has been breathtaking to behold and contributed to the extreme collapse of trust in public health “experts” and authorities.

So it seems worth revisiting some of the greatest hits of Fauci’s reign of incompetence.

Unmasked is entirely reader supported. Paid subscriptions allow the work to continue in this format, and any readership is greatly appreciated.

Masks

Perhaps one of Fauci’s biggest and most dramatic failings has been on masks.

Early on, he famously opined on 60 Minutes that he was confident that masks didn’t work, that they might only block “a droplet or two,” but didn’t provide the protection people thought they did.

He then confirmed the same information to people privately asking for advice on whether they should wear masks when traveling.

He later absurdly claimed that his initial comments were made out of a desire to protect supply for healthcare workers. Except, of course, healthcare workers would never wear the types of cloth masking that Fauci and his allies at the CDC were recommending.

Not to mention that his claim is made even more ridiculous by the fact that he told people privately not to wear masks.

Had he believed they worked but wanted to protect limited availabilities, he could have easily told those who asked to wear a mask without jeopardizing any large scale supply for hospital workers.

Of course, that’s not what he did.

His claim that masking would lower transmission and would demonstrate clearly beneficial results compared to areas that didn’t mask has been proven false repeatedly:

Well after it had been confirmed, by copious amounts of data, that masks don’t work, Fauci continued to advocate for universal masking.

Even today, he’s remained completely steadfast that masks work, despite the conclusive evidence to the contrary.

Recently, after his incessant mask-wearing was completely ineffective at preventing him from being infected with the virus, Fauci continued to recommend people wear masks while lying about their effectiveness, saying they were “recommending people when they are in indoor congregate settings to wear a mask.”

“Those are simple, doable things that can help prevent us from having even more of a problem than we’re having right now.”

Just like the mask mandates during winter 2021-2022 were able to prevent the spread of the virus, right?

Lockdowns

The incomprehensible amount of lying that Fauci has done over the past few years extends past masks to lockdowns and business closures and capacity restrictions.

Fauci now claims that he never said to lock down the country.

Except, of course, that’s exactly what he said on the record in 2020:

In September of 2020, Fauci claimed that states like Florida that reopened were “asking for trouble,” while praising New York for having one of the “best” responses.

Almost immediately afterwards, hospitalizations in California and New York shot past Florida with businesses closed, capacity restricted, and universal masking.

His bewildering lack of awareness is bad enough, but even as late as 2021, long after lockdowns and business closures were disproven, he continued to suggest that areas that reopened were engaging in extremely risky behavior by going against his dictates.

The headline of a story out of Jacksonville in April 2021 read: “Fauci: Opening Florida for business as COVID-19 variants surge a ‘risky proposition.’”

Just a few months prior to this remark, he had pointedly criticized Florida for reopening, only to see other states that followed his advice have significantly worse results.

You’d think that being proven wrong would create some humility, uncertainty, and willingness to admit mistakes.

But that’s not what Dr. Fauci does.

Instead, he doubled down, and said that Florida reopening in April 2021, months after vaccines had been available, was “risky.”

Except that California reported significantly higher rates of age-adjusted COVID mortality than Florida for all of the first and second quarters of 2021, with mask mandates and capacity limits for part of that time frame:

He pulled the same thing nationally, claiming inaccurately that the country would risk a new surge due to “relaxed” restrictions and new variants:

Remember too that Fauci claims to be the singular representative of “science.” If this is what “science” is, it clearly doesn’t deserve the respect it’s been given.

Of course, even into this year, Fauci is defending his recommendations, all evidence to the contrary, while denying that lockdowns, which permanently harmed tens of millions of people, didn’t irreparably damage anyone:

Children

Perhaps Fauci’s most damaging recommendations were related to schools.

Jordan Schachtel compiled perhaps the best timeline of his advocacy to keep schools closed or excuse those who wanted to keep them closed.

In his capacity as a masking fanatic, Fauci’s also promoted school masking, saying children over 2 should be forced to mask in school if local officials decided it was necessary.

No matter how many times masking in schools is disproven, he’ll never admit these statements were baseless nonsense.

Between school closures and forced masking, the damage he’s caused to children is quite literally incalculable.

Vaccinations

There’s also his incomparable track record of inaccuracies on what the vaccines would do.

Among many other issues, his prediction that reaching certain levels of vaccination would eliminate the potential for future surges was, like everything else he’s done, almost immediately proven wrong.

His failures in this area are endless.

Obviously this is nowhere close to a comprehensive list of the incomprehensible stupidity that Fauci’s demonstrated over the past few years. A full list would require a book, or several books to chronicle.

His incompetence, hubris, awe-inspiring ego and commitment to being wrong in every possible circumstance is quite literally incomparable.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/faucis-covid-disaster-a-summary/

US Army Paying Hefty Price to Steal Syria’s Oil

By Arabi Souri

Syria

The US Army came under escalated attacks recently in Syria, the Pentagon claims they maintain less than a thousand of their troops in Syrian territories to combat ISIS, former US officials say they lied about that number and about that mission.

Recently, there were a series of rocket attacks against the US Army in the Al Omar field, the largest oil field in Syria, and in Conoco field, the largest gas field in Syria, both in the province of Deir Ezzor in northern Syria. These attacks come after several attacks against the US military base in Al Tanf in the southeastern Syrian desert on the border junction between Syria, Jordan, and Iraq.

The following report explains more:

The US army steals 60,000 oil barrels a day from the Syrian oil fields, smuggle them into neighboring Iraq and from there they either go to Israel via Turkey or are refined and given to ISIS terrorists in wartorn Iraq. In exchange for that oil, the US deploys thousands of troops in Syria and logistic support in neighboring countries at a huge cost shouldered by the US taxpayers. Needless to say, the USA is the world’s largest producer of oil with over 14 million barrels per day, they do not need those 60k barrels.

The US Army occupies oil and gas fields and has established illegal military bases in strategic locations in Syria to disrupt any connection between Syria and Iraq, the US operations in Syria are illegal as they have not obtained the consent of the Syrian government who, on the contrary, calls them occupation forces, they also have not obtained a mandate from the United Nations Security Council to override Syria’s sovereignty.

If you believe the US army fights ISIS (ISIL – Daesh) or any other formation of Al Qaeda, do contact me in private, I’d like to sell you an acre of land on Mars accessible after 60 years from now.

[…]

Via https://arabisouri.wordpress.com/2022/08/28/the-us-army-is-paying-a-hefty-price-to-steal-syrias-oil/

Silenced healthcare workers speak out publicly for the first time

By Steve Kirsch

I created a form to ask healthcare workers to speak anonymously about what they are seeing.

Here’s what they said in their own words.

Here is a quick summary of some of the things they said:

They are afraid to come out publicly due to intimidation tactics such as loss of job and/or license to practice medicine.Unvaccinated healthcare workers are extremely upset with the medical community. They feel they have been treated unfairly.It is the vaccinated workers who are getting sick with COVID, but it is the unvaccinated who are punished with constant testing, restrictions, and threats of losing their jobs.The COVID shots are a disaster. Even for the elderly which is supposed to be the most compelling use case, death rates in elderly homes went up by a factor of 5 after the shots rolled out. Each time the shots are given, the deaths spike. Nobody is talking publicly about this. It’s not allowed.“I have a patient who owns an adult care home that gave vaccinations to their six adult clients. They all died within a week.”Doctors are seeing rates of injury and death increase dramatically in all ages of people. The injuries are only happening to the vaccinated. There is no doubt that this is happening but many doctors have so much cognitive dissonance that they don’t see it.One nurse with 23 years of experience says she’s never heard of anyone under 20 dying from cardiac issues until the vaccines rolled out. Now she knows of around 30 deaths.“I have been a nurse for 36 years. I have NEVER witnessed people in their 20s and 30s having strokes, atrial fibrillation, or cardiomyopathies until the Covid vaccines. I work in cardiology. When I mention that someone should look at the vaccines as a possible reason, I am immediately silenced and told, “It is NOT from the vaccine.””Doctors aren’t recording vaccination status in the medical records so that all the deaths are attributed to the unvaccinated.Doctors are deliberately ignoring the possibility that the vaccines could be the cause of all the elevated events. The events are simply all unexplained.Many doctors have either quit or will quit.Some doctors and nurses at top institutions such as Mass General Hospital have falsified vaccine cards. They publicly toe the line and encourage their patients to take the shot knowing full well it is deadly. They value their job more than the lives of their patients. The important thing is they are risking 10 years in jail for doing this. These highly respected medical workers are telling the world that these COVID shots are so dangerous that they are willing to risk 10 years in prison to avoid taking the shot. That’s the message America needs to hear. And if Biden were an honest President, he would call for full amnesty and protection from retaliation for all these cases if people admitted publicly they did this. He’d be amazed at the number of responses he’d get. But he won’t do that because it would be too embarrassing for his administration.Things don’t seem to be getting any better.The medical examiners all over the world are not doing the proper tests during an autopsy to detect a vaccine-related death. Without doing the necessary tests, it is very hard to make an association. There isn’t a single “guidance” document from any medical authority anywhere in the world to do these tests on people who die within 3 months of their last COVID vaccination. This is why no associations are found: they aren’t looking and it is deliberate. The mainstream press doesn’t call them out on this either.Doctors are being forced to take other vaccines so the hospital can meet their quota. This was admitted to them.“I’m sorry I don’t have more definite data. I am a dermatology physician assistant. In the past year, I have seen more new onset cancers (brain, kidney, ureter, leukemia) than I have in the past 12 years of seeing patients.”The document paints a very troubling picture of healthcare in America

It is very difficult to read that document and come away thinking that everything is working fine.

If you read the document and think everything is just fine, it means one or more of the following is true:

You work in the White HouseYou work at the CDC, FDA, or NIHYou are a member of Congress or are a staff member for a member of Congress (Ron Johnson and his staff are excluded)You work in the mainstream mediaYou are a top executive at a mainstream social media companyYou work in the mainstream medical community (doctor or academic)You are a miserable excuse for a human beingYou are an exemplary blue-pilled individual; you are just the type of citizen that your government wants to have

[…]

Via https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/silenced-healthcare-workers-speak

Julian Assange Files Appeal

TIME Magazine – Political Prisoner of the Year – 12.27.2021

By Lee Heidhues 8.26.2022

Julian Assange has been been persecuted by the Brits and the Americans long enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment_and_arrest_of_Julian_Assange

The Wikileaks Whistleblower who exposed American  human rights abuses in Afghanistan and Iraq performed a heroic public service.

Assange has been under house arrest, first in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, and for three years in a British prison while his fight against extradition continues.

This is a human rights violation of the first order. The American government needs to stand down and let Julian Assange, now 51, get on with his life.

Excerpted from The Guardian 8.26.2022 (https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/aug/27/julian-assange-files-appeal-against-us-extradition)

The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has previously stated “enough is enough” regarding Assange’s ongoing detention.

Lawyers for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange have filed an appeal against his extradition to the US, as the United Nations human rights chief lends support to the Australian’s cause.

Assange, 51, has been indicted on 17 espionage charges in the US and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of military and diplomatic documents leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.

The Guardian – Massive leak of secret files exposes true Afghan war

WikiLeaks says Assange’s legal team filed “perfected grounds of appeal” in the UK’s high court against the US and the UK home secretary, Priti Patel, who approved his extradition in June.

Assange’s lawyers argue he is “being prosecuted and punished for his political opinions”.

His wife said the prosecution was unlawful. “Overwhelming evidence has emerged proving that the US prosecution against my husband is a criminal abuse,” Stella Assange said on Twitter on Saturday.

“The high court judges will now decide whether Julian is given the opportunity to put the case against the US before open court, and in full, at the appeal.”

Assange remains in London’s Belmarsh prison, where he has been in detention since April 2019.

A UK judge blocked his extradition last year but the US government successfully appealed in the high court.

Julian Assange – Continuing subject of American DOJ harassment sits in a British Court

The appeal comes after the UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, met with Assange’s lawyers and his wife in Geneva.

Advocacy group the Assange Defence Committee told AAP they detailed to her his deteriorating health, with the Australian publisher suffering a mini-stroke recently.

TIME Magazine – December 13, 2010

Via https://leesperspective.com/2022/08/26/criminal-abuse-doj-needs-to-stop-harassment-julian-assange-files-appeal/

 

Normalisation of “minor attracted persons” by WHO education recommendations

By vanessa beeley

The Great Reset and the growing effort to ‘destigmatize’ pedophilia

The West has normalised war, terrorism, Nazism, Fascism, mass surveillance, zero health sovereignty, lockdown, poverty and now comes the destigmatization of pedophilia via the WHO/Agenda 2030 sexuality education recommendations.

UKC News 26th August with Mike Robinson, Vanessa Beeley, Patrick Henningsen, Mark Anderson, Iain Davies.

[…]Via https://beeley.substack.com/p/normalisation-of-minor-attracted

The Qin and the First Emperor of China

Episode 10: The Qin and the First Emperor of China

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

Dr Craig Benjamin (2013)

Film Review

By 221 BC, the kingdom of Qin (pronounced Ch’in – source of the country name China) had sufficient military prowess* to defeat all rival kingdoms and declare their king (Qin Shi Huangdi)  the first Chinese emperor.

In his eleven years of rule, he enacted many reforms to further consolidate his power. He began by moving the nobility of the former rival kingdoms to the Qin and replacing their old fiefdoms with 36 provinces run by hand-picked administrators. Qin Shi Huangdi also abolished feudalism, allowing peasants to own their own land ensuring the legal code no longer favored the nobility.

In addition to harsh punishments for criminal acts (see Great Ideas of the Zhou: Legaism), there were also harsh penalties for possessing weapons, criticizing the emperor or expressing viewpoints that disagreed with Legalist principles (ie Confucianism or Daoism). In total, 460 Confucian and Daoist scholars were ultimately buried alive while multiple copies Confucian and Daoist texts were burned.

The first emperor also introduced Xiaozuan, a new style of writing, as well as new systems of weights, currency and measurement, declaring it an act of treason not to use them.

Despite being allowed to own property, the lives of peasants improved little, owing to forced conscription to work on the Great Wall** and the emperor’s tomb.

Qin Shi Huangdi’s tomb is best known for the thousands of life size terracotta warriors discovered inside. Tomb construction began 24 years before Qin declared himself emperor and ended with his death in 210 BC. In addition to roughly 700,000 men who died during its construction, all surviving laborers were killed to keep the location secret.

The Qin was the shortest dynasty in Chinese history. After the emperor’s death in 210 BC,*** a deadly civil war broke out in the Qin court. By 206 BC, the power struggle was complicated by a popular revolt. When a group of peasants conscripted to work on the Great Wall were delayed by rain, they became outlaws instead of facing likely execution. The tied turned when Qin generals defected to join growing numbers of peasants fed up with brutal conscription laws.

Lui Bagb, a minor local official from the Han kingdom (who became an outlaw to escape execution when prisoners he was escorting to work on the tomb escaped) ultimately declared himself the Han king. On assuming power, he renamed himself Gaozu and established the Han Dynasty.

*The Qin acquired major military advantage over their rivals through large stockpiles of iron weapons and trained horse archers (thanks to repeated confrontations with nomad horse archers – see Intertwined Role of Steppes Nomads and Early Chinese Civilization)

**Begun as rammed earth wall (to help prevent nomadic raids from the steppes) during the Zhou dynasty, under the Qin Dynasty was fortified with granite. The project took 10 years to complete and nearly one million men died during construction.

***Obsessed with his search for immortality, Qin Shi Huangdi most likely died of mercury poison from one of the tonics his doctors prescribed to help him live forever.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/5808608/5808630

Jared Kushner and The Mystery of America’s First Pandemic Lockdown

By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Brownstone Institute

The possibility of US lockdowns – never attempted on this scale in the history of pandemics – was already in the air in early March 2020. The theory of lockdown had been floating around for 15 years but now China was first to try it, and claim enormous success, however fraudulently.

Incredibly, the US was set to try it out too but getting Trump on board was going to take some doing. The federal government had the quarantine power since 1944. That much we knew. But just how expansive could its exercise be? Would they dare quarantine the well with the sick? How far would this go?

Thanks to several journalistic accounts, we have a better idea of what went on in the White House before the dreadful March 16, 2020, press conference of Donald Trump, Anthony Fauci, and Deborah Birx in which the lockdowns were announced. Along with that came a flier with tiny print about which the ever-trusting Trump apparently knew nothing: “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

Read those words again. Has anything like this ever been issued by any government in the history of the world, before China did it? I cannot think of a case. It shuts not only the places where people do “congregate” but also everywhere where they might congregate. Churches. AA meetings. Civic clubs. Libraries. Museums. Homes! And this happened under Trump’s watch right here in the US! There ought to be a word to describe something more extreme than totalitarian.

There were a number of people in Trump’s circle in those days who proved panicked and confused enough to embrace the idea. But who precisely wrote those words in the sheet handed out to reporters?

We cannot say for sure but Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner played an important role. He had enlisted two close friends from college to help: Nat Turner and Adam Boehler. Both were graduates from the Wharton School, like Trump. Jared somehow believed that they knew something about pandemics because they worked in health-care delivery. So he called them.

Boehler headed the $60 billion US International Development Finance Corporation and still does. It’s one of those many agencies that throws contracts and cash to big shots within industry. Before that job, he was head of Landmark Health delivery services, which means that he knew business and finance, not public health. He is among those high-finance execs who were drawn to healthcare not for the science but for the money.

As for Turner, he is a serial entrepreneur who got his start selling snakes from his parents’ garage. Truly. He founded an ad agency that he eventually sold to Google 10 years ago, Invite Media, for more than $70 million. His company Flatiron – oncology-related electronic record software – sold to Roche in 2018 for $1.9 billion. His page at the Wharton School describes him as “Young, Entrepreneurial and Google-Owned.” He is now a billionaire investor at an implausibly young age.

And Google-owned! 

The book Nightmare Scenario (2021) explains what happened next. On March 13, 2020:

Boehler and Turner burrowed into a room in the basement of the West Wing and started calling people who grasped both the scale of the crisis but also the politics. Over that weekend, they put together recommendations and then circulated them with Birx and Fauci. The guidelines were refined further before being presented to Trump in the Oval Office. They wanted to recommend shutting down in-person education at schools. Closing indoor dining at restaurants and bars. Canceling travel.

Birx and Fauci saw the guidelines as a crucial pause that would buy them some time to better understand the pandemic. Shutting down flights was not enough, they said; more would have to be done. …. Boehler, Kushner, Birx, Fauci, and other aides presented Trump with the recommendations several days later, anxious over what he might say. Kushner had been preparing Trump for the possibility that they were going to need to take more “draconian” actions.

This account was not speculative. Kushner himself in his new book tells a very similar story.

[…]

Why not call, oh, for example, a public health scientist? Someone with some expertise in viruses? A medical doctor? Universities are packed with them. Someone, anyone, with actual knowledge and experience? Nope. It was entirely a crony operation, privileged fools about to take over the private lives of hundreds of millions of people.

 

Let’s just stop right there and consider this realization. Oh, they needed guidelines for the rest of us to follow, for reasons of politics and public relations. After all, they are surely the masters of the craft. Continuing:

Given that people across the country were confused and concerned, Birx and Fauci had been discussing the need for a unified set of federal standards to help Americans understand what they should do to keep themselves safe and slow the spread of the virus. They insisted that these guidelines would help prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. Despite all the talk over the past week, no one had taken steps to produce a document. When Nat Turner flagged the issue,

Again, let’s stop the tape there. Nat Turner pointed out that no one had yet issued any orders? Good call, dude. Someone needs to get right on that. Just open up a Google doc and get to work on writing a central plan for the whole country. You have a two-hour deadline.

I asked him to coordinate with Derek Lyons to produce a draft and encouraged him to call Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the FDA and a renowned public health expert [and Pfizer board member]. I had been trying to persuade Gottlieb to come back into government for a short-term stint to help us better organize our response and support our effort to develop a vaccine.

When we called Gottlieb, he was grateful that we were preparing guidelines. “They should go a little bit further than you are comfortable with,” he said. “When you feel like you are doing more than you should, that is a sign that you are doing them right.”

Look, this whole scene truly just boggles the mind. Phone calls. Rushed documents. Friends of friends. Pharma executives. People in the know!

The result was a document that shut down the US and the world, all banged out by rank amateurs with ungodly privilege, with nary a thought of asking disinterested experts. Whatever they typed would affect the lives of 333 million people coast to coast. Did they think about that? Did they even care? Did the even once think about people not of their class and pedigree?

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/jared-kushner-and-the-mystery-of-the-first-us-lockdown/

How Big Pharma Controls the Science

Image via 123RF

By Arjun WaliaThe PuleIn BriefThe Facts:A new analysis found that 81% of authors whose work appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association, failed to disclose payments as required.The researchers found 118 authors who received a total of $7.48 million.The majority of drug studies are funded by the pharmaceutical company, authored by employees of the company and researchers who accepted payments from the company.Reflect On:In the US, pharmaceutical companies represent the largest lobbying entity. They give twice to congress than the next biggest lobbying entity, which is oil and gas.Just imagine the power they exercise over both republicans and democrats, the medical industry and academic institutions.

[…]

“Trust the science” is a slogan we’ve heard for the past two years, but science calling into question claims from companies like Pfizer and Moderna regarding their COVID products was ignored, censored and ridiculed. This is the complete opposite of science, and anybody who is a student of science knows that the science is never “settled” and always questionable.

Even the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ) was subjected to censorship and Facebook “fact checking” for sharing a story that uncovered significant fraud during Pfizer’s COVID vaccine clinical trials. The BMJ responded and referred to these fact-checkers as incompetent.

In a transparent world, this type of news and information would be at the forefront of big media, but it’s not. As a result, those who are not diving deep and doing their ‘own research’ have been unaware of some very significant information that may change their perception of what’s happening.

A New Analysis

Concerns over conflicts of interest in the medical field is nothing new, but the issue has become quite extreme. For example, a recent analysis in preprint form published last January found that 81 percent of authors whose work appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) – two of the most influential medical journals – failed to disclose payments they received.

The analysis looked at 31 research articles that were published in both of the journals in 2017. The researchers found 118 authors who received a total of $7.48 million. OpenPayments, a U.S. government database where drug makers must report payments to physicians and other health care providers, was used to collect this data. The 23 researchers that received the largest payments received a total of $6.32 million.

It’s important to note that many consider these companies to be akin to criminal organizations operating under the guise of goodwill. For example. Pfizer has been assessed billions in criminal convictions, civil penalties and jury awards. They’ve set records for both total penalties and criminal fines.

In 2012, the NEJM published 73 articles on original studies of new drugs, which represented drugs approved by the FDA since 2000. It was found that 82 percent of them had been funded by the pharmaceutical company selling the product, and 68 percent of them had authors who were employees of that company. Finally, it was found that 50 percent had lead researchers who accepted money from a drug company.

Arnold Seymour Relman (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor in Chief of the NEJM co authored a paper with Marcia Angell, another long time Editor in Chief of the NEJM about how the drug industry distorts medicine and politics. In it, he stated the following,

“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.”

Arnold Seymour Relman (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor in Chief of the NEJM

What’s disturbing is that this type of activity has cost many lives. For example, a 2006 report by GlaxoSmithKline in the NEJM concluded that Avandia was a great drug for treating diabetes. At the time, the senior vice president of the company Lawson Macartney stated the following in a news release;

“We now have clear evidence from a large international study that the initial use of (Avandia) is more effective than standard therapies.”

The trial used to approve the drug had been funded by GlaxoSmithKline, and each of the eleven authors had received money from the company. Four were employees and held company stock. The other seven were academics who had received grants or consultant fees from the firm.

The drug had been estimated to cause approximately 80,000 heart attacks and deaths, a safety signal that at the time of approval should have been quite clear. This risk was something most likely ignored given he history of these corporations, but we can’t say for sure.

A NEJM study in 2007 linked Avandia to a 43% increased risk of heart attacks, and a 64% increased risk of death from heart disease. Avandia is still FDA approved and available in the U.S.

According to 2013 research conducted at the University of Arizona College of Law, even when pharma companies aren’t directly funding the research, company stockholders, consultants, directors and officers are almost always involved in conducting them.

Furthermore, Big Pharma knows citizens are ‘hip’ to this type of thing, this is why they hire doctors to write “science” instead of a company representative. It’s called “ghostwriting.” This practice started in the ’50s and ’60s when tobacco executives were trying to shut down scientists and doctors claiming their products were causing cancer. In fact, doctors used to prescribe cigarettes while all of this was going on, not knowing that they were actually harmful. Evidence suggests the corporations already knew about this harm.*

[…]

Via https://thepulse.one/2022/03/10/new-analysis-reveals-how-much-big-pharma-controls-the-science/

*Journalist George Seldes reported on the 1938 John Hopkins study showing heavy smoking reduced life span in 1941. See http://muckrakerfarm.com/1941/01/george-seldes-tobacco-1940-1950/

 

GOP Demands FBI Agents Be Grilled On False Biden Family ‘Russian Disinformation’ Assertions

NWO Report

Posted BY: Steve Watson

Republicans in the Senate are demanding that two FBI agents be questioned under oath about their role in a shady briefing about ‘Russian disinformation’ that took place in August 2020 as the GOP attempted to investigate Biden family dealings.

Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) sent a letter to the two FBI agents Thursday, charging that their briefing at the time was “unnecessary and was only done because of pressure from our Democratic colleagues, including Democratic Leadership, to falsely attack our Biden investigation as advancing Russian disinformation.”

The agents are named in the letter as Nikki Floris, the intelligence analyst in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office’s intelligence division, and Bradley Benavides, the deputy assistant director of the FBI Washington Field Office’s counterintelligence division.

The Senators further state that “Although you stated that the FBI didn’t intend to ‘interfere’ in our investigation, the practical effect of such an unnecessary briefing and the subsequent leaks relating to it created interference, which frustrated and obstructed congressional oversight efforts.”

Grassley and Johnson further note “We also made clear our concern that the briefing would be subject to a leak that would shed a false light on the focus of our investigation,” and cited a Washington Post story they claim “did exactly that.”

The Senators say that they have been repeatedly ignored by the FBI after requesting “relevant records relating to what happened at the briefing,” adding that it “casts further doubt on the true purpose for the briefing.”

The Republicans also note that “Whistleblowers have recently alleged that in August 2020, the same month you provided the briefing to us, FBI officials initiated a scheme to downplay derogatory information on Hunter Biden for the purpose of shutting down investigative activity relating to his potential criminal exposure by labeling it disinformation.”

The letter continues, “Whistleblowers have also alleged that local FBI leadership instructed employees not to look at the Hunter Biden laptop immediately after the FBI had obtained it” in 2019.

As The Washington Examiner notes, the whistleblower has alleged that the Feds ‘slow walked’ the Hunter Biden investigation in an attempt not to have any affect on the 2020 election.

As we have repeatedly highlighted, the Hunter Biden laptop story was falsely labeled as ‘Russian disinformation’ by intelligence officials, and was subsequently censored by social media companies when broken by the New York Post. Twitter even locked the Post out of the platform, as well as anyone else who attempted to share the story.

Now, Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that the FBI informed his company that ‘Russian disinformation’ was coming relating to the Biden family, which led directly to Facebook throttling the story.

Senators Grassley and Johnson have also demanded that the DOJ and FBI launch a new extensive investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop, given the new details that have come to light.

[…]

Via https://nworeport.me/2022/08/26/gop-demands-fbi-agents-be-grilled-on-false-biden-family-russian-disinformation-assertions/