The Most Revolutionary Act

Uncensored updates on world events, economics, the environment and medicine

The Most Revolutionary Act
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About stuartbramhall

Retired child and adolescent psychiatrist and American expatriate in New Zealand. In 2002, I made the difficult decision to close my 25-year Seattle practice after 15 years of covert FBI harassment. I describe the unrelenting phone harassment, illegal break-ins and six attempts on my life in my 2010 book The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee.

Why Vaccine Research Is Really Just Bioweapons Research

the wuhan cover-up book cover with bioweapon vaccine bottles

By Debbie Lerman
Brownstone Institute

A new review of “The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. highlights how COVID-19 emerged from the convergence of military, intelligence, corporate and global interests deeply invested in risky bioweapons research branded as “pandemic preparedness.”

The Wuhan Cover-Up: And The Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race” is a crucial book for understanding how the COVID-19 catastrophe happened.

I would even go so far as to argue that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new book is the most important COVID-19 chronicle to date, although it ends at the beginning of 2020 before most of us were even aware that a “novel coronavirus” was circulating among us.

The book explains the CAUSES of the global disaster, which all happened before March 2020. Everything after that are the downstream EFFECTS of what “The Wuhan Cover-Up” exposes.

[…]

Putting Covid in the biowarfare context

Interestingly, in the publicity blurb on the book and interviews about it, RFK Jr. focuses on “the etiology of the gain-of-function research” and everything that led up to a virus being engineered in a U.S.-funded lab in Wuhan by a group of Chinese and Western scientists.

At the core of this story is RFK Jr.’s desire to warn readers about the dangers of gain-of-function research, which he shows in the book to be irrefutably a biowarfare — not a public health — endeavor.

But in the process of constructing the argument and supplying the proof for his dire warning, and for his assertion that this type of research should be stopped immediately and forever, RFK Jr. provides what I find to be an even more compelling story.

The story in “The Wuhan Cover-Up” that interests me is the rise of the biowarfare-industrial-complex — the global behemoth comprising military/intelligence alliances, Big Pharma, Big Tech, academic and medical institutions and non-governmental organizations, or NGOs — that both created the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 and ran the global response to it.

In this article, I will highlight key parts of “The Wuhan Cover-Up” that pertain to this storyline — which I believe are downplayed in its publicity materials and are one of the main reasons it has been practically banned from polite society: The book has been so heavily censored that I cannot find a single actual review on Google.

Newsweek reported that independent bookstores do not want to carry it.

A lot of the censorship has to do with mainstream animosity toward RFK Jr.’s presidential campaign. However the explosive content of the book, as reviewed in this article, is also likely a factor.

Top-level summary of the rise of the biowarfare industrial complex, as told by RFK Jr.

  • The biowarfare industry started to grow after WWII when Western intelligence agencies imported Japanese and German scientists to help develop weapons against Communist enemies. This was, in fact, the first task of the newly formed CIA [Central Intelligence Agency].
  • After 9/11, funding for bioweapons research exploded, and so did the power and reach of the military and intelligence agencies in charge of such research. The research, presented to the public as “pandemic preparedness and response (PPR),” encompassed mostly attempts to engineer deadly pathogens and simultaneously to create countermeasures to them, predominantly vaccines.
  • So much money was pouring into PPR/bioweapons research that the public health agencies and academic institutions involved in government research all became dependent on it — or, perhaps more accurately, addicted to the money and power this type of research bestowed.

Multinational public-private partnerships and “non-governmental organizations” (e.g., the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust) were created to fund and promote the need for such research.

  • In the fall of 2019, an engineered pathogen from one of the bioweapons labs in China found its way into the population. All the military, intelligence and public health officials from China, the U.S., the U.K. and other countries, with their pharma and academic partners, conspired to cover up the lab leak, while simultaneously preparing to unleash their countermeasures on the world.

How the nature of biowarfare research has not changed

As RFK Jr. tells it, the history of today’s biowarfare industry starts after WWII, when German and Japanese scientists were secretly repatriated to assist the intelligence community and military in developing chemical and biological weapons programs.

It is no coincidence, he argues, that many sinister features of those earlier programs carried forward to the present.

These features include:

  • Tight alliances with the pharmaceutical industry and the media.
  • The complicity of academia and medical schools.
  • The co-opting of journals.
  • Intense secrecy.
  • Pervasive experimentation on human subjects.
  • Liberal use of the word “volunteers.”
  • Open-air testing on large unwilling populations.
  • Ethical elasticity.
  • The normalization of lies.
  • The use of microbiology to alter and weaponize bugs.
  • The use of vaccine development as a mask for bioweapons research.
  • The corruption of the entire medical establishment.

Even just this list is enough to explain what happened with COVID-19: Take all these ingredients, add billions of dollars and multinational public-private partnerships involving top research institutions and thousands of scientists, and how could you not get a global disaster?

Deep CIA-biowarfare ties

“The Wuhan Cover-Up” spends a lot of time documenting the correspondence between the rise of the CIA and the emergence of the modern biowarfare program.

[…]

Shockingly broad participation by academics and scientists

Because the biosecurity agenda — which focuses on biochemical and medical research — is so central to foreign policy and national security, it controls large swaths of research funding.

[…]

Bioweapons research = vaccine research

Another crucial idea bearing on our understanding of the COVID-19 response is that vaccine research is a primary concern for the biowarfare-industrial complex, although it is publicly presented as a public health endeavor.

[…]

Moreover, because vaccine research funding goes to both biodefense and public health agencies, they have become inextricably linked:

[…]

From an obsession of U.S. national security to a tool of globalism

As RFK Jr. writes, after 9/11, Islamic terrorism became the focus of U.S. national defense. After the anthrax attacks, the focus of antiterrorist activities coalesced around the need to predict, prevent and create countermeasures to biological terrorism:

[…]

China becomes a dominant biowarfare research player

Concurrently, China’s leaders were working on a mission to make China a world leader in science, research and innovation.

According to “The Wuhan Cover-Up,” the Chinese have been using the West’s march toward globalism to infiltrate “Western academia, businesses, media, cultural groups, and government agencies that speak the language of cooperation, globalism, and public health.”

As part of their infiltration process, the Chinese lavished funding on Western research institutions and scientific publishing houses. And because biomedical/biowarfare research was so central to Western governments and research institutions, the Chinese were able to eventually dominate that space as well.

Thus, the book explains, China was able to “co-opt U.S. academic institutions and U.S. public health agencies into performing backdoor bioweapons research for the Chinese military.”

Why would the U.S. do bioweapons research in/for China?

This is, perhaps, the most oft-raised question in response to the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was an engineered bioweapon from a lab funded by the Chinese military, the U.S. and other Western governments.

[…]

For its part, the U.S. intelligence community has all kinds of reasons — all ultimately geared toward increasing its own power and influence — to engage in sensitive scientific research projects with the Chinese:

“The deliberate transfer of our superior bioweapons knowledge to the Chinese — a potential enemy — makes little sense to citizens who think in terms of conventional rivalries between nations.

“Espionage was clearly among the complex motivations for the US intelligence community supporting Chinese bioweapons research in China.

“Knowing what the Chinese are up to is the mission of the US intelligence community. But quietly sharing cutting-edge technologies may also serve institutional self-interest.

“After all, the intelligence community expands its power by reporting the enemy’s expanding capabilities; more frightening capabilities abroad justify increased budgets and increased power at home.”

Bioweapons expert Boyle is quoted stating that:

“Opportunities to expand institutional power and corporate profits always seem to trump patriotism and duty within the CIA’s bioweapons teams. Patriotism is a polite fiction among the bioweapons set.”

RFK Jr. adds that the public health agencies, which are heavily involved in and funded by biowarfare research, share the CIA’s self-interested non-patriotism:

“NIH [National Institutes of Health] and NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] operate under the same perverse incentives that drive destructive conduct across the whole bioweapons field.”

A convergence of personal, political, financial and global interests

In the final chapters of “The Wuhan Cover-Up,” RFK Jr. focuses on several key figures in the biowarfare-industrial-complex, including Dr. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust (now at the WHO), Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH and Bill Gates.

RFK Jr. uses these figures to show how the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from the toxic stew of ethically compromised biowarfare research standards; military, intelligence, public health and academic institutions/organizations dependent on biowarfare funding; the involvement of China and global interests in the booming business of “pandemic preparedness and response;” and, of course, the endless pursuit of political power and personal enrichment.

Here’s a great summary of how they all came together, through personal and institutional greed and power-mongering, to unleash the COVID-19 catastrophe on the world:

“The evidence suggests that instead of relentlessly protecting public health, Farrar exploited the pandemic to promote the venal financial agendas of his WEF [World Economic Forum] patrons, to transform Western democracies into surveillance states, to expand his personal power and paycheck, and to pander to high-level Chinese officials.

“Achieving these objectives required Farrar to hide [Covid’s] laboratory origins, a project in which he enlisted a cadre of his medical cartel cronies — those who, thanks to years of funding by Fauci, Farrar, and Gates, now occupy the highest echelons of virology in academia, the regulatory agencies, and pharmaceutical companies.”

If for nothing else, I would recommend adding “The Wuhan Cover-Up” to your library as an invaluable resource on leading figures, organizations and power brokers involved in the biowarfare-industrial complex.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/rfk-jr-wuhan-cover-up-vaccine-research-bioweapons-covid/<

Pentagon issued ‘COVID-19 Research’ contract 3 months before COVID known to exist: Fauci/Moderna had vaccine ready in Dec 2019

The Expose The discovery of a contract awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense to Labyrinth Global Health for “COVID-19 Research” in November 2019 has raised questions about the permanent U.S. Government’s knowledge of the novel coronavirus. The contract was part of a larger project for a “Biological threat reduction program in Ukraine,” suggesting the permanent U.S. Government was at the very least aware of the alleged virus before it spread through Wuhan, China in December 2019. But the findings also suggest the permanent U.S. Government may have had a hand in the creation of this alleged virus in Biolabs through Gain of Function Research overseen by Dr Anthony Fauci. This would explain why they knew the name of the novel coronavirus disease three months prior to the World Health Organization officially naming it Covid-19 in February 2020. And it may also explain why Moderna and Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) had a confidentiality agreement for an mRNA Coronavirus vaccine candidate in early December 2019, which was developed and jointly owned by Moderna and Fauci’s NIAID. The U.S. Government’s “USA Spending” website reveals that it had spent a staggering $4.04 trillion “in response to COVID-19”. A deeper look at the website’s “Award Search” feature uncovers a contract awarded by the Department of Defense to Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp. for “Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services” on September 20, 2012. A closer examination of the contract’s “Sub-Awards” tab reveals 115 transactions with recipients and brief descriptions, the majority of which are mundane items like “laboratory equipment for Kyiv” and “office furniture for Kyiv.” There is, however, among the 115 transactions listed in the “Sub-Awards” tab of a contract awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense to Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp. one transaction that stands out: An award to Labyrinth Global Health INC for “SME Manuscript Documentation and COVID-19 Research.” While it is not surprising to see an award for COVID-19 research during a pandemic, the fact that the contract was awarded on November 12, 2019, at least one month before the alleged emergence of the novel coronavirus and three months before it was officially named Covid-19, raises questions about the government’s knowledge of the virus. Furthermore, the contract was instructed to take place in Ukraine, as was the entire contract awarded to Black & Veatch Special Projects Corp. These findings suggest potential U.S. Government involvement in the creation and spread of the virus. In September 2012, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) within the US Department of Defense awarded a contract to a global engineering, procurement, and construction company specializing in infrastructure development. The contract was for a Biological threat reduction program in Ukraine, and concluded in October 2020. While the details are unclear, it is known that $21.7 million of the $116.6 million contract was spent on this program. It is puzzling why the DOD would contract a company specializing in infrastructure development for a biological threat reduction program. Furthermore, it is intriguing that both the DOD and the contracting company subsequently paid Labyrinth Global Health INC to conduct COVID-19 research in Ukraine prior to the emergence of the novel coronavirus and before it was officially named Covid-19. These events raise questions about the nature of the biological threat reduction program and its potential connection to the alleged COVID-19 pandemic. And the discovery of a contract awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense for Covid-19 research in November 2019 suggests that the U.S Government either knew the virus existed naturally or was involved in constructing it in a lab. This theory is supported by evidence that the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Moderna had a coronavirus candidate in December 2019. A confidentiality agreement reveals that NIAID and Moderna agreed to transfer “mRNA coronavirus vaccine candidates” to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on December 12, 2019. The material transfer agreement was signed the December 12th 2019 by Ralph Baric, PhD, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and then signed by Jacqueline Quay, Director of Licensing and Innovation Support at the University of North Carolina on December 16th 2019. The agreement was also signed by two representatives of the NIAID, one of whom was Amy F. Petrik PhD, a technology transfer specialist who signed the agreement on December 12th 2019 at 8:05 am. The other signatory was Barney Graham MD PhD, an investigator for the NIAID, however, this signature was not dated. The final signatories on the agreement were Sunny Himansu, Moderna’s Investigator, and Shaun Ryan, Moderna’s Deputy General Counsel. Both signatures were made on December 17th 2019. All of these signatures were made prior to the general public having any knowledge of the alleged emergence of the novel coronavirus. A vaccine candidate that was funded by Bill Gates and his Foundation. Moderna confirmed in 2016 that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had granted them $20 million to support their “initial project related to the evaluation of antibody combinations in a preclinical setting as well as the conduct of a first-in-human Phase 1 clinical trial of a potential mRNA medicine”.
But Moderna also revealed that the framework agreement they made with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation could bring the total funding up to $100 million for “follow-on projects” that are proposed to and approved by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation up to 2022. And the terms of this agreement stipulate that Moderna are obliged to grant the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation certain non-exclusive licenses. A Non-Exclusive Licence grants the licensee the right to use the intellectual property, but means that the licensor remains free to exploit the same intellectual property and to allow any number of other licensees to also exploit the same intellectual property. Therefore under the terms of the agreement made with Moderna, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have now been granted a non-exclusive license to the Moderna mRNA Covid-19 injection, and are therefore profiting from its use.

Are Fauci, Gates & Moderna responsible for the COVID Pandemic?

It wasn’t until December 31st 2019 that the World Health Organisation (WHO) became aware of an alleged cluster of viral pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China. But even at this point, they had not determined that an alleged new coronavirus was to blame, instead stating the pneumonia was of “unknown cause”.
It was not until January 9th 2020 that the WHO reported that Chinese authorities had determined the outbreak was due to a novel coronavirus which later became known as SARS-CoV-2 with the alleged resultant disease dubbed COVID-19. So why was an v transferred to the University of North Carolina on December 12th 2019? The same Moderna that have had an mRNA coronavirus vaccine authorised for emergency use only in both the United Kingdom and the United States to allegedly combat Covid-19. What did Moderna, Fauci & Bill Gates know that we didn’t? In 2019 there was not any singular coronavirus posing a threat to humanity which would warrant a vaccine. […] Via https://expose-news.com/2024/02/21/caught-red-handed-fauci-gates-moderna-responsible-for-covid-pndemic/  

Amalgam Dental Fillings Expose Pregnant Women to Harmful Mercury Vapor Levels

Even one amalgam dental filling may expose pregnant women and their offspring to dangerous levels of mercury vapor, according to a study published this month in Human & Experimental Toxicology.

Even one amalgam dental filling exposes pregnant women to potentially harmful mercury vapor levels compared with women with no fillings — and multiple fillings increase exposures and risks proportionally, according to a paper published Feb. 5 in Human & Experimental Toxicology.

All pregnant women with one or more fillings exceed at least one published “safe” exposure limit for mercury vapor.

Dental amalgam fillings are made from a mixture of mercury and other metals. Mercury — the silvery substance inside old-fashioned mercury thermometers — is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature.

Like all other liquids, mercury evaporates, turning from liquid to gas. Inhaling mercury vapor is a significant source of mercury exposure.

Other sources include fish and seafood, industrial processes and products, including mining, and mercury-containing products like thermometers.

Vaccines are another source of mercury exposure. Many seasonal influenza vaccines contain thimerosal, an organic mercury preservative that negatively affects several organs, particularly the nervous system.

Thimerosal was an ingredient in many childhood vaccines but was removed from those products in 2001. However, it is still present in flu vaccines administered to children and pregnant women.

The more fillings, the higher the exposure

Lead researcher Dr. Mark Geier, an advocate for mercury-free pharmaceuticals, tapped into data on 1,665,890 pregnant women from the 2015-2020 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

Of those, 606,840 had at least one dental amalgam filling and 1,059,050 did not.

Pregnancy was determined during the NHANES intake exam through a rapid pregnancy test and a confirmatory clinical-grade blood test for human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone released during early pregnancy. The number of amalgam dental fillings was noted through a standard dental examination.

By measuring mercury levels in the study subjects’ urine and their daily urine output, the authors calculated each subject’s daily mercury exposure from inhaling mercury vapor released from their fillings.

They expressed these values as micrograms of mercury per kilogram of body weight per day (µg of Hg/kg/day), which is how regulators and agencies express toxic metal exposures.

Geier then compared calculated daily mercury exposures to “safe” exposure limits from four government agencies and one other study (Richardson et al.). Those results are summarized in Table 5 from the study.

Credit: David A. Geier and Mark R. Geier

Table 5 lists exposure limits by increasing stringency, with the highest U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) exposure limit at the top and California’s standard, which is almost tenfold lower, at the bottom.

Boosting already-suspect mercury levels

Table 2 in the study shows that even women without fillings experience mercury exposure, which must arise from sources other than dental fillings. Mercury levels for women with and without fillings were 0.99 µg and 0.41 µg of Hg/kg/day, respectively.

Table 2’s second key takeaway is that exposure through fillings, when combined with exposures from non-amalgam sources, “promotes” many women with low-level non-dental mercury exposure into high-exposure categories.

For example, column 2 in Table 5 indicates that 28% of all pregnant women exceed daily mercury exposure levels, according to the least-stringent EPA standard, while 36% exceed California’s strict standard.

But for women with fillings 77% — more than double — exceed the EPA standard and 100% (nearly 3 times) fall short of California regulations.

California’s standards are so strict that, according to Geier, pregnant women with just one filling “would have to weigh more than 100 Kg [220 lbs] to not receive a Hg vapor dose from their amalgam not in excess of the most restrictive California EPA Hg vapor safety limit.”

Geier also reported that the more fillings a pregnant woman had, the higher the mercury levels in her urine. To quantify this value Geier calculated a “β-coefficient” which relates the number of fillings to excreted mercury levels.

Among pregnant women, this relationship was highly statistically significant and likely clinically significant as well. Interestingly, Geier wrote, that the β-coefficient or sensitivity to the number of fillings was double what he had found in a previous study on mercury exposure in adults.

Geier wrote:

“This difference may indicate that pregnancy status has an important physiological impact on increasing exposure/distribution of Hg vapor from amalgams. More American pregnant women exceeded the US EPA Hg vapor safety limit (30% vs 10%) and the US ATSDR Hg vapor safety limit (32% vs 21%) in this study as compared to American adults in our previous study.”

Unsafe at any exposure level?

Interest in prenatal mercury exposure is a hot-button issue, with more than 200 papers on the subject between 2019 and the present. Some studies show adverse effects but only at high exposure levels, while others show modest or no effect at typical exposure levels.

Assessing the effects of mercury exposure during pregnancy comes down to whether maternal exposures transfer to the fetus and what levels of fetal exposure are safe.

The first issue is not in dispute, as mercury crosses both the placental and blood-brain barrier, which is one of the body’s critical lines of defense. So it’s known that maternal exposures will involve fetuses.

Also well established are the harms of high exposures, particularly of inhaled mercury, which include damage to the lungs. Because mercury vapor easily passes from the lungs to the bloodstream, exposure eventually harms the nervous system, kidneys, liver and immune system.

The issue comes down to whether babies can tolerate agency-recommended exposure levels and whether safe fetal exposure levels exist at all.

This question is more difficult to answer than one might think, as many exposure studies report no apparent harm from low-level exposures, even during pregnancy.

For example, one study found that total maternal exposure during gestation did not affect a child’s performance in math and science. Another found the “association between mercury and neurodevelopment was weak.” And another study “did not identify strong evidence that mercury exposure leads to impaired prenatal growth.”

However, other studies reported harms. One found a negative association between exposure and growth — the more mercury, the less growth. Another showed harms to both male and female reproductive function.

And another noted that for prenatal exposures “while the mother’s symptoms usually improved, the damage to the fetal nervous system appears to be permanent.”

The simplest answer is that mercury is highly toxic and “there is no known safe level of exposure. Ideally, neither children nor adults should have any mercury in their bodies because it provides no physiological benefit.”

A more nuanced view is that the effects of mercury exposure are linear for a wide range of harms, with higher exposure always leading to greater harm — the corollary being that lower exposures may lead to less severe injury but lead to injury nevertheless.

As one study author put it: “The available literature indicates a linear relationship with mercury levels and IQ deficit, and therefore a safe limit of mercury cannot be calculated.”

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/amalgam-dental-fillings-pregnant-women-mercury-vapor/

Over 90% of French Citizens Support Farmers

French farmers stand next to a fire as they settle to a new place to block the road, to get closer to Rungis wholesale food market, during a protest on the A6 highway near Chilly-Mazarin, south of Paris. - Sputnik International, 1920, 22.02.2024

Sputnik

PARIS – The farmers’ protests that have erupted in France have the support of 91% of the French, and the majority of them believe that President Emmanuel Macron and his government are not handling the crisis well, an Odoxa-Backbone Consulting poll for Le Figaro newspaper showed on Wednesday.

The overwhelming majority of the French, or 91%, support the protests, 85% of citizens hold the government responsible for the crisis, 90% of respondents believe that the European Union is to blame for the crisis, and 92% of those polled blame big retailers.

Moreover, 70% of the French believe that the measures proposed by the government are insufficient, and 77% of respondents said Macron and his cabinet are “reacting poorly” to the crisis.

The French also opposed “punitive ecology” and condemned harsh environmental protection measures that harm farmers.

Ahead of the Paris International Agricultural Show, which opens on Saturday, French farmers continue to stage protest actions, dumping manure, hay and tires on highways and in cities.

Farmers in France have been protesting heavily since January, blocking highways and dumping manure and waste in front of government buildings across the country, with rallies subsiding somewhat in recent weeks. The farmers demand recognition of the importance of their profession and denounce the government’s agricultural policies, which they say make them noncompetitive.

In particular, they oppose the import of cheap agricultural products, restrictions on the use of water for irrigation, and the increase in diesel fuel prices, as well as restrictive measures to protect the environment and the growing financial burden.

French farmers are among those protesting all over Europe. Farmers in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Poland, Romania and the Netherlands are also pushing back against various environmental policies that they see as detrimental to their interests, especially in the face of high inflation and competition from imports.

[…]

Via https://sputnikglobe.com/20240222/over-90-of-french-citizens-support-farmers-protests—poll-1116911268.html

Manufacturing Consent: The Border Fiasco and the “Smart Wall”

Whitney Webb

The political response to the crisis at the southern border continues to advance the bipartisan “smart wall,” having been backed by Trump and Biden alike. This bipartisan consensus reaches far beyond the US, as much of the world is similarly speeding along in implementing “digital borders.”

The disastrous situation at the US-Mexico border is, and has been, intentionally produced. Throughout the last several administrations, regardless of campaign and other public rhetoric, the porous nature of the border has remained unresolved. On several occasions, the situation as it has developed has been blamed largely on incompetence and government inefficiency. Though some administrations have been tougher than others in regards to terrestrial migration (under some metrics), the US-Mexico border has not been sealed off so to force entrants to cross through officially recognized and managed ports of entry.

Under the current administration, it has been pointedly obvious that even the sections of the border that do contain physical barriers are being dismantled on purpose, all the while illegal crossings have risen to unprecedented levels. Whatever the motives for this deliberate policy on the part of the Biden administration, the end result has been the widespread characterization of the crisis as an “invasion,” priming the voter bloc usually most concerned with border security – the American Right – for military-style “solutions.”

While the justifications for the frenzied media coverage are based on the actual reality that the border is indeed highly insecure (and has been for some time), the policy responses from American politicians reveal that there is a bipartisan consensus about what must be done. Tellingly, the same “solution” is also being quietly rolled out at all American ports of entry that are not currently being “overrun”, such as airports. That solution, of course, is biometric surveillance, enabled by AI, facial recognition/biometrics and autonomous devices.

This “solution” is not just being implemented throughout the United States as an alleged means of thwarting migrants, it is also being rapidly implemented throughout the world in apparent lockstep. The reasons for the unspoken, but obvious, global consistency in implementing invasive, biometric surveillance is due to the fulfillment of global policy agendas, ratified by nearly every country in the world, that seek both to restrict the extent of people’s freedom of movement and to surveil people’s movements (and much, much more) through the global implementation of digital identity. Those policy agendas include mainly the UN’s Agenda 2030 or Sustainable Development Goals, specifically SDG 16, as well as Interpol’s Global Policing Goals.

While the American Right has been rather outspoken in its rejection of the UN’s Agenda 2030, and the digital ID project at large, the distress over the border situation is being used to manufacture consent among this specific group for “solutions” that are focused on expanding surveillance and biometric collection as opposed to the implementation of physical barriers.

The Virtual Wall

The Hawaiian shirt-wearing inventor of the VR headset Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey, has become the face of America’s “virtual border wall.” Luckey, the brain behind the defense tech firm Anduril, is a long-time associate of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, with Luckey having met Thiel at 19 when Luckey presided over his first company Oculus Rift, which was later sold to Facebook. Thiel was then on Facebook’s board and was also instrumental in the rise of the social media company. Luckey’s Anduril is also backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund and another Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, is also an Anduril investor.

Anduril is one of the main beneficiaries of government contracts to build autonomous surveillance towers along the US-Mexico border, which are now also being rolled out along the US-Canada border. As a consequence, they are likely to be among the beneficiaries of the Senate’s current proposal for “border security,” which sets aside $170 million for additional towers to be build.

Under the Trump and now Biden administrations, Luckey has been vocal about how Anduril will create “a digital wall that is not a barrier so much as a web of all-seeing eyes, with intelligence to know what it sees.” As noted by WIRED in 2018, Luckey and Anduril has long been pitching its technology “as a complement to – or substitute for – much of [then] President Trump’s promised physical wall.”and detect illegal border crossings, but also automatically designate those illegal crossers a “threat level” as well as predict “illegal border activities” before they occur. Like Anduril, it relied on surveillance towers and a litany of sensors spread throughout the environment. The program, though shuttered by DHS in 2011, never actually ended, as the DHS report announcing the “end” of SBInet stated the following:

DHS is currently developing a comprehensive border technology deployment plan that will build upon successful technology currently deployed and provide the optimum mix of proven surveillance technologies by sector. Where appropriate, this technology plan will also include elements of the former SBInet program that have proven successful.

Just like Anduril’s marketing strategy, SBInet was pitched as a cheaper, more cost-effective and “faster” means of securing the border than the construction of physical barriers. Anduril has openly laid out its strategy to avoid the pitfalls of SBInet; whereas SBInet was doomed to fail by hiring incompetent contractors to build and sell the system to the government, Anduril plans to own the system it builds and lease it to the government, which – according to Trae Stephens – “creates an incentive to keep development costs low.” Despite claims it is “low” cost, since 2017, massive DHS contracts have been given to Anduril to fulfill many of the original ambitions of the SBInet project and, despite the construction of hundreds of towers and millions spent, the border remains more insecure than ever.

One of Anduril’s earliest advocates was Congressman Will Hurd, a former officer in the CIA’s clandestine operations division who now represents Texas in the House of Representatives. With Hurd’s help, Anduril was able to place their first prototypes for the “virtual wall” on the border-adjacent private property of an anonymous rancher. Custom and Border Protection (CBP) then conducted their first official pilot of Anduril towers in 2018, leading to the Trump administration’s approval to deploy Anduril’s towers along the entirety of the south-western border in 2020. That approval saw Anduril awarded a five-year and still-ongoing contract and also saw the contract designated a “program of record,” meaning it is deemed essential enough to be a dedicated item in the DHS budget.

Trump, in the latter years of his presidential term, began to embrace the type of virtual wall that Anduril would enable even more so than the physical barrier he had campaigned on. In January 2019, for example, Trump stated “The walls we are building are not medieval walls. They are smart walls designed to meet the needs of frontline border agents.” The “smart walls”, Trump went on to say, would include “sensors, monitors and cutting-edge technology.”

Under the Biden administration, Anduril’s star has continued to rise. This is partially due to the millions the company has spent lobbying Congress, but also facilitated by the long-standing bipartisan love affair with building a “smart wall” on the Southern border. CBP was given millions for autonomous surveillance towers along the border in the 2021 US Citizenship Act and then again in the 2022 omnibus bill, with millions more granted last year. The lion-share of that money is destined for Anduril’s coffers. This year, if the Senate’s bipartisan “border security” efforts are any indication, Anduril stands to gain even more contracts to build ever more autonomous towers, which are now accompanied by autonomous drones and other connected devices. Luckey, despite Anduril’s claims that there will always be human oversight of its products, has stated that his vision for the future of warfare that Anduril is helping to build will soon result in humans playing ever more insignificant roles.

[…]

Via https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/02/investigative-reports/manufacturing-consent-the-border-fiasco-and-the-smart-wall/

1793: The France Revolution Enters Its Reign of Terror

Episode 28: Terror is the Order of the Day

Living the French Revolution and Age of Napoleon

Dr Suzanne M Desan

Film Review

With Robespierre as president, in 1793 the primary concern of the Sans-culottes (see French Revolution: Foreign Invasion Triggers Insurrection and Abolition of the Monarchy) who dominated France’s National Convention was grain-hoarding counterrevolutionaries who were driving up the price of grain. The solution they found  was to enact repressive laws resulting in a chaotic ten-month period which came to be  known as “The Reign of Terror.”

  • In April 1793, the Convention suspended democratic politics in the authority of a war cabinet known as the Committee of Public Safety. They went on to grant the Committee power to arrest, try and execute so-called traitors and enemies of “the Revolution.”
  • In September 1793, the Committee passed the Law of Suspects, requiring every commune in France to set up a surveillance committee to identify and arrest subjects.
  • In October 1793, the Convention suspended the constitution (for the duration of the war), granted the Committee the authority to oversee the French army, supervise the economy (it would set price controls on 39 commodities) mobilize manpower and supplies for the army and appoint national agents to influence provincial politics.

Robespierre, the most prominent member of the Public Safety Committee (and for many months at its helm) served as the public face of the decision to save the Revolution by terrorizing the French population.

Over the next ten months, he oversaw

  • the execution of 300 Marseilles citizens after French troops crushed the rebellion there.
  • the trial and execution of Marie Antoinette.
  • the trial and execution of 22 Girondins (revolutionaries who supported a constitutional monarchy)

Most of the terror victims were in the provinces. At the end of ten months, 16.594 total had been guillotined, 2600 of them Parisians.

31 departments had fewer than 10 executions, 10 had none at all.

The Committee of Public Safety made an example of rebellious Federalists in Lyons, putting 1900 to death (some by guillotine and some by cannon).

The worst was in Nantes, where 2000 prisoners from the Vendée uprising were drowned in the Loire River.*


*The official responsible was eventually guillotined himself for cruelty.

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

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/149323/149377

House COVID panel leader threatens to subpoena government health agency for lack of cooperation

FILE - Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, speaks during a House Select Subcommittee hearing on the Coronavirus pandemic investigation of the origins of COVID-19, April 18, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. Wenstrup, who leads the House GOP's investigation of the origins of COVID-19, says he won't seek reelection next year. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, speaks during a House Select Subcommittee hearing on the Coronavirus pandemic investigation of the origins of COVID-19, April 18, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Nathaniel Wexel

The chair of the House panel investigating the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to subpoena Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials Friday over a lack of cooperation with the committee’s investigation unless they answer another round of specific questions.

In a letter sent to HHS Assistant Secretary for Legislation Melanie Egorin, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) expressed frustration with Egorin’s recent public testimony and what he said was a persistent lack of cooperation from the agency on producing documents related to the virus’s origins, vaccine messaging and policies about COVID closures.

Egorin repeatedly insisted during a hearing late last month that HHS has cooperated with the panel and has produced thousands of pages of documents in response to the panel’s requests.

But Wenstrup in the letter accused HHS officials of “dragging their feet” on responding to more than a dozen specific requests. He and other Republicans on the panel have said the documents are either heavily redacted or completely irrelevant.

“We know, for a fact, that the Department is currently withholding critical documents. The Department’s failure to provide the requested documents is unacceptable,” Wenstrup wrote.

If the agency doesn’t respond to the latest requests for information in a way that Wenstrup finds satisfactory, he said the panel “will evaluate the use of the compulsory process to obtain the testimony of Department employees who know the answers to these questions.”

Yet panel Democrats have said Wenstrup’s efforts are aimed at further politicizing the pandemic and portraying the Biden administration in a negative light rather than trying to resolve any real problems or challenges. During Egorin’s hearing, ranking member Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) noted agency officials sat for more than 80 hours of transcribed interviews.

As part of its investigation, Wenstrup’s panel has also heard closed-door testimony from the nation’s former top infectious diseases doctor, Anthony Fauci, and the former National Institutes of Health director, Francis Collins.

Fauci is expected to testify publicly later this year.

[…]

Via https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4473457-house-covid-panel-leader-threatens-to-subpoena-hhs-for-lack-of-cooperation/

EPA Illegally Hid Health, Safety Data on PFAS Found in Millions of Plastic Containers

By Shannon Kelleher

The New Lede

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Center for Environmental Health last week sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for allegedly withholding data on toxic “forever chemicals” in high-density polyethylene plastic containers.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is breaking the law by concealing health and safety data about a class of toxic chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) found in millions of plastic containers, two environmental advocacy groups allege.

The agency is refusing to turn over data on toxic PFAS in high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic containers produced by the company Inhance Technologies, citing “confidential business information.”

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Center for Environmental Health have been seeking data held by the EPA about the company and its containers through a 2023 Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA request.

But the agency has redacted and withheld key information, the groups allege.

They filed a lawsuit against the EPA on Feb.15 claiming the agency is violating the Toxic Substances Control Act by refusing to provide the requested data for public scrutiny.

“The cloak of confidential business information cannot be used to hide health and safety studies as EPA is currently doing,” Colleen Teubner, a PEER lawyer, said in a press release. “By sitting on this critical information, EPA is advancing the private interests of a corporate violator and shirking its public health responsibilities.”

The groups sent a demand letter to the EPA in November 2023, arguing that the agency “has no statutory basis” for its refusal to turn over information.

Last year, the EPA ordered Inhance to stop making plastic containers that contain PFAS following legal pressure from PEER and the Center for Environmental Health. That order is set to go into effect Feb. 28.

PFAS should not be in the plastic containers people use every day, period,” Michal Freedhoff, assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said in a statement released on Dec. 1, 2023, when EPA issued the order.

Inhance is the only U.S. company that manufactures its containers using a type of fluorination process that results in the formation of toxic PFAS chemicals.

Thirteen PFAS chemicals have been identified in Inhance’s containers, including perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, which was recently classified as carcinogenic to humans by an international cancer research organization.

The company manufactures about 200 million containers using the fluorination process each year.

PFAS do not break down naturally and are found in the blood of 97% of Americans.

The chemicals have been linked to many health problems, including thyroid problems and liver, kidney and testicular cancer.

Studies have demonstrated that PFAS in the walls of HDPE containers, which are used for packaging everything from food products to cleaning supplies to cosmetics, leach into their contents, unwittingly exposing consumers to PFAS in products they use every day.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/pfas-epa-health-safety-data-plastic-containers/

Julian Assange too ill to attend as court hears of ‘breathtaking’ plot to poison him

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gestures from the window of a prison van as he is driven into Southwark Crown Court in London on May 1, 2019, before being sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for breaching his bail conditions in 2012. A British judge on Wednesday sentenced WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to 50 weeks in prison for breaching his bail conditions in 2012. Assange took refuge in Ecuador's London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden and was only arrested last month after Ecuador withdrew his asylum status. (Photo by Daniel LEAL / AFP)

By Riley Stuart, ABC News

RNZ

Outside, supporters chanted his name and held placards bearing his face, while inside, lawyers told the overflowing courtroom of a “truly breathtaking” plot to poison him.

But Julian Assange was not there to witness any of it.

The Australian did not appear as his last-ditch attempt to avoid extradition from Britain to the United States got underway Tuesday at London’s Royal Courts of Justice.

Assange – who is being held across town at HM Prison Belmarsh, and faces a slew of espionage charges in America – had been given permission to attend the hearing in person.

However, when proceedings began, his barrister Edward Fitzgerald KC told the court the WikiLeaks founder was too ill to come, or even listen in via video link from jail.

Assange’s wife, Stella, last week described the 52-year-old’s health as “in decline, physically and mentally”.

Outside court, Rebecca Vincent, a director at Reporters Without Borders, said she was “concerned” by Assange’s inability to appear in court, and that when she last saw him in jail on 16 January, he was “unwell and in pain”.

His legal options in the UK are running out.

Assange, 52, is asking the High Court of England and Wales permission to appeal a decision that would see him handed to American authorities.

He is facing extradition to the US, where he has been charged with 18 criminal offences, including obtaining, receiving and disclosing classified information.

The charges relate to material published on Assange’s WikiLeaks website in 2010.

That information – given to him by soldier-turned-whistleblower Chelsea Manning – detailed evidence of, amongst other things, war crimes committed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Assange was living in the United Kingdom at the time of publication, and this hearing represents his final legal avenue in that jurisdiction to avoid the extradition.

If he is successful, he will remain is custody while the High Court hears an appeal at a later date.

If he is not, Assange could try and take his case to the European Court of Human Rights – although legally, it would be possible for British authorities to send him to the US before that.

He could face 175 years in custody if convicted on the charges in America.

‘Murderous sketches and plans’

Fitzgerald KC on Tuesday told the court all the information his client had published was in the public interest and that the offences Assange had been charged with were political, something which would make him exempt from extradition under the treaty that exists between the UK and US.

He said Assange had effectively become the “spokesperson for a global political movement against the United States”, which amounted to being “almost like an opposition party”.

Fitzgerald told the court the “revelations” Assange had published changed government policy in the US.

The court heard arguments from Assange’s legal team on Tuesday, before lawyers for the US state their case on Wednesday.

Another of Assange’s barristers, Mark Summers KC, took aim at the District Judge at Westminster Magistrates Court, who had in 2021 thrown out most of his legal team’s attempts to block the extradition.

Summers KC on Tuesday told the court there were several “red flags” the previous judge should have considered, including a “truly breathtaking” CIA plot to poison or kidnap his client.

The barrister pointed out that, while the plan was presented as evidence at the time of Assange’s hearing in January 2021, more details had emerged in a news story published by Yahoo later that year.

“Whatever her reasons for not considering the evidence of the plot to kidnap or poison the defendant, there is compelling evidence now in existence that the plot was real,” Summers KC told the court.

The lawyer told the court that the news story had detailed how “murderous sketches, plans and options” were requested by, and presented to, then-US president Donald Trump in 2017.

“This extraordinary plan only fell away when the UK authorities weren’t terribly keen on renditions or the potential for a shootout in the streets of London,” he said.

Assange has been behind bars since April 2019 when London’s Metropolitan Police arrested him inside the Embassy of Ecuador, on Kings Cross Road, where he had resided for almost seven years while claiming political asylum.

His legal team argue the US Espionage Act 1917, under which 17 of Assange’s 18 charges fall, has never been used to prosecute publishers before.

They also argue extraditing Assange, who is not an American citizen and was not living or working in the US at the time of the alleged offences, would represent an unbridled extension of Washington’s judicial reach.

Outside court, Stella Assange described her husband as a political prisoner who’s life was at risk.

“He should never be extradited to the United States,” she said.

“He would never be safe. The United States plotted to murder my husband.”

The Australian government and opposition are both against the extradition, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last week telling federal parliament he wanted the process resolved “amicably”.

Manning was released from custody in 2017 after having her 35-year prison sentence commuted to seven years by then-US President Barack Obama.

The hearing continues.

[…]

Via https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/509738/julian-assange-too-ill-to-attend-as-court-hears-of-breathtaking-plot-to-poison-him

Wall Street Journal tells financially struggling readers to “skip breakfast” to fight food inflation

Wall Street Journal tells financially struggling readers to “skip breakfast” to fight food inflation
Dr Eddy Betterman

So-called “Bidenomics” is wildly unpopular with Americans who are largely unpleased with all the inflation and stagnant or falling wages that are part and parcel of the Biden regime’s “economic recovery” plan for the country. The Wall Street Journal‘s Gabriel T. Rubin, however, seems to think Bidenomics is just great, and is urging all Americans who are displeased with it to “skip breakfast” if they are having trouble making ends meet.

In a piece entitled “To Save Money, Maybe You Should Skip Breakfast,” Rubin suggests that “bad weather and disease outbreaks” are mostly to blame for sharp price increases, as are “continued effects from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

Rubin fails to mention anything about the large cash infusions the United States continues to send to Ukraine and Israel as contributing to inflation, nor does he mention anything about the private Federal Reserve central banking cartel and its money-printing presses diluting and weakening the buying power of the failing U.S. dollar.

(Related: American hunger continues to soar as Bidenomics makes food too expensive for many families to afford – but there’s plenty of money for Ukraine and Israel!)

The Atlantic: “Inflation Is Your Fault”

Even more disturbing is a headline written by The Atlantic‘s Annie Lowrey that blames American consumers themselves for steadily rising inflation.

“Inflation Is Your Fault,” reads Lowrey’s headline, followed by a bizarre and non-sensical sub-headline:

“If people are so mad about high prices, why do they keep buying so many expensive things?”

Demonstrating her financial illiteracy without shame, Lowrey attempts to make the case that Americans are driving inflation because of their continued purchases of essentials, which are now much more expensive than they were prior to the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) “pandemic.”

“Inflation stings most if you earn less than $300K,” also claimed Bloomberg Opinion in an X post that also contains the following recommendations for how to overcome it:

“Here’s how to deal:

Take the bus

Don’t buy in bulk

Try lentils instead of meat

Nobody said this would be fun”

Keep in mind that the Biden regime continues to claim that there is now “lower inflation” than there was previously, even though prices continue to rise sky-high with seemingly no end in sight.

The Atlantic pointing fingers at consumers for inflation, Bloomberg advising readers to eat lentils, and WSJ suggesting skipping breakfast are all indicators of the U.S. economy’s distress, in stark contrast to the White House’s continuous assurances that everything is fine,” reports Zero Hedge about the insanity being pushed on Americans right now.

In the comments, someone joked that one great way to save a few extra bucks is to cancel your subscriptions to The AtlanticBloomberg and The Wall Street Journal.

“Or maybe the WSJ could try eating an appendage,” said another. “With luck, it’ll be the last time they put their foot in their mouth.”

“I skip reading the WSJ at breakfast every morning to save money,” joked someone else.

Another wrote that these types of headlines and recommendations are eerily similar to those that ran in the Soviet Union right before it collapsed.

“The hollowed-out dead economy that only worked for the communists and the propaganda,” this person added. “Especially the propaganda.”

“Instead, we need to hang all globalists waging war against farming and fertilizer, natural gas and coal and livestock, and poisoning the air and dimming the sun,” suggested another reader about how to rid the country of inflation and other societal problems. “Let’s start there.”

Still another wrote that the only people in America who are not suffering from inflation, besides the uber-rich, of course, are the illegal alien invaders who are getting everything for “free” from U.S. taxpayers.

The latest news about America’s race to the bottom can be found at Collapse.news.

[…]

Via https://dreddymd.com/2024/02/21/wsj-tells-financially-struggling-readers-skip-breakfast/