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WHO Claims Coronavirus Is In Some Ways Worse Than Spanish Flu … Which Killed Tens of Millions

March 5, 2020

WHO Claims Coronavirus Is In Some Ways Worse Than Spanish Flu … Which Killed Tens of Millions

Many experts claim that the fear of Coronavirus is overblown.  And that morality might actually be decreasing. 

On the other hand, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced yesterday that the mortality rate from the Wuhan Coronavirus (formally known as 2019 nCoV) is 3.4% globally.

The Spanish Flu of 1918 – which killed between tens of millions of people – had a lower mortality rate, estimated by the WHO as between 2 and 3%.

But surely, you say, the Coronavirus is not as contagious as the Spanish Flu …

Unfortunately, it’s more contagious.  The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy notes:

The novel coronavirus has an R0 of 2.2, meaning each case patient could infect more than 2 other people. If accurate, this makes the 2019 nCoV more infectious than the 1918 influenza pandemic virus, which had an R0 of Based on calculations, the authors of the larger study estimate the novel coronavirus has an R0 of 2.2, meaning each case patient could infect more than 2 other people. If accurate, this makes the 2019 nCoV more infectious than the 1918 influenza pandemic virus, which had an R0 of 1.80 ….

WHO says that the R0 of Coronavirus in China was initially between 2 and 2.5.< But scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory said that the R0 for the Coronavirus is actually between 4.7 to 6.6 (although that number drops to between 2.3 and 3 after quarantines and social distancing are implemented).

According to the Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and others, Coronavirus can be spread even when people have no symptoms. On the one hand, this is bad news, as it is very hard to screen and locate carriers when they are symptom-free or have only mild, cold or flu-like symptoms.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Would Iran Attack the Saudis NOW?

September 16, 2019

Why Would Iran Attack the Saudis NOW?

U.S. officials claim that the attacks against Saudi oil facilities were launched from Iranian soil.

Are they right?

We have no idea at this point, as the U.S. government hasn’t released any evidence.

But given that the U.S. and 23 other countries have ADMITTED to carrying out false flag attacks before – including – it’s worth asking whether Iran or another country had more to gain from this attack …

Indeed, U.S. officials have admitted to twice carrying out false flag attacks intended to frame Iran and justify regime change:

(1) The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

(2) CIA agents and documents admit that the agency gave Iran plans for building nuclear weapons … so it could frame Iran for trying to build the bomb.

And neocons have been planning on further regime change in Iran for more than 25 years.

So it’s worth questioning this, at least in the absence of real evidence.  This is especially true because – until a couple of days ago – it seemed like the U.S. and Iran were moving towards diplomatic talks.

And Trump just fired the head “bomb Iran” cheerleader, John Bolton. So the odds of a peaceful solution to tensions with Iran seemed higher than they had been in years

So why would the Iranians “torpedo” the momentum towards diplomacy, and hand the U.S. a casus belli on a silver platter?

Why now?

Of course, the Houthis have claimed responsibility for the attack, while the Iranians have denied it.    But the U.S. isn’t paying any attention to their statements.

It’s possible it really was the Iranians … but given the history of fake “justifications” for war (like Iraq), it’s worth asking questions.

⚑alse ⚑lag Terror

August 30, 2019

⚑alse ⚑lag Terror

After thousands of hours of research (and hundreds of hours since my last post), I have found many new instances of government admissions of false flag terror.

At the suggestion of a former high-level American intelligence officer, I’ve written the first-ever book focusing exclusively on ADMITTED false flag attacks: 

The countries which I document to have carried out false flags are incredibly diverse – from virtually every part of the globe – including (in alphabetical order):

  1. Algeria
  2. Britain 
  3. Burma (Myanmar)
  4. Canada
  5. Colombia
  6. Egypt
  7. France
  8. Germany
  9. India
  10. Indonesia
  11. Israel
  12. Italy
  13. Japan
  14. Kuwait
  15. Macedonia
  16. Mexico
  17. Russia
  18. Rwanda
  19. Saudi Arabia
  20. South Africa
  21. Turkey
  22. Ukraine
  23. United States
  24. Venezuela

Here are a few of my newly-discovered admissions:

⚑   The use of provocateurs was so widespread in Tsarist Russia that the chief of Russia’s secret police unit admitted: [i]

“Without good provocateurs it is not possible to make a career.”

⚑   For example, a police director admitted that a prominent anti-government leader who carried out a series of assassinations of high-profile government personnel – including the Russian Minister of the Interior and the Governor of Moscow – was actually a provocatuer paid substantial sums of money by the secret police.[ii]

⚑   Another prominent anti-government assassin also admitted to being a police provocateur.[iii]

⚑   And a CIA report provided a third example:[iv]

[A] notorious provocation occurred in Paris in 1890, when Arkadiy Harting (a.k.a. Abraham Gekel’man or Landezen) organized a well-armed team of bombthrowers and then betrayed them to the Paris police. These heavily publicized arrests helped persuade the French public of the dangers posed by Russian revolutionaries in France. 

A former Okhrana officer identified Harting as a police agent, and confirmed his role in the provocation.[v]

***

⚑   The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) – an official South African government commission set up to investigate war crimes – found that, in 1989, a South African policeman:[i]

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Read THIS Before Cheering the Next War

June 23, 2019

Read THIS Before Cheering the Next War

Truth Is the First Casualty of War

Over two thousand years ago, the Greek writer Aeschylus said:

In war, truth is the first casualty.

That quote could be read to mean that – once a war starts – then truth goes out the window …

In reality, however, wars are often planned for political reasons (having to do with money, resources or other goals which may have nothing to do with directly protecting one’s country or people) and then false intelligence is created to “justify” the start of the war.

Britain’s MI5 intelligence service explained about the claimed justifications for the Iraq War:

The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.

9/11 Commission Co-Chair and 34-year veteran Congressman Lee Hamilton, who served on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, said:

My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence.

Or as newsman Tom Brokaw put it:

All wars are based on propaganda.

Because war not only kills, maims and displaces a lot of innocent people, but is also bad for the economyand destroys the environment (and puts out a lot of carbon dioxide), we passionately believe that people need to understand a little history so that the same mistakes are not repeated, and disastrous wars are avoided when they are not necessary to actually defend ourselves.

And because we believe that the Constitutional right to peacefully assemble and speak out is a large part of what makes us great, we will also put a spotlight on those who are trying to shut down our First Amendment rights … and how they’re doing it.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Where Will You Be Seated at the Banquet of Consequences?

January 11, 2019

The Banquet of Consequences is being laid out, and so the question is: where will you be seated? The answer depends on two dynamics I’ve mentioned many times: what types of capital you own and the asymmetries of our economy.

One set of asymmetries is the result of the system isn’t broken, it’s fixed, i.e. rigged to favor the few at the expense of the many. There are many manifestations of neofeudal asymmetry that divides neatly into two classes and two systems, the nobility and the serfs.

A rich kid caught with drugs gets a wrist-slap, a poor kid gets a tenner in the Drug Gulag.

Upper-middle class households are tax-donkeys, paying high taxes and getting few deductions, while mega-wealthy corporations and financiers enjoy offshore tax shelters of the kind exposed by the Panama Papers.

The stock market operators use high-frequency trading to front-run the market and generate profits that are inaccessible to serfs with retail trading accounts.

And so on. Given that the nobility control the machinery of governance (so-called democracy), there’s no way for commoners to influence the neofeudal cartel-state asymmetries short of shutting down the entire system.

Which leaves the asymmetries created by the dynamics of the 4th Industrial Revolution in which new technologies and business models are destabilizing every sector of the old economy.

The core dynamic here is value flows to what’s scarce and in demand. The asymmetric returns on capital and labor are the direct result of what’s scarce and what’s not scarce and what’s in demand and what’s not in demand.

Ordinary labor and college diplomas are not scarce and therefore command very little premium. Ordinary capital is also not scarce, and hence the low yield on ordinary capital.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Earth Over the Brink

December 5, 2018

Earth Over the Brink

Glacier National Park is drip drip dripping into a puddle.

People and companies and governments are cutting down trees to burn them to save the planet from global warming, mixing the sacrificial trees with oh-so-clean coal, and in Detroit with tires, and in North Carolina with chicken shit.

Others are hacking down old forests to grow marijuana where it’s least likely to be found: another great benefit of drug prohibition.

Over 95% of California’s wild game was mercilessly slaughtered between 1865 and 1890.

Ted Turner is liberating the remnants of the bison in the American West on the model of the liberation of Baghdad: they end up $18 a plate.

Ranchers are luring wolves with sheep carcasses and tracking wolves’ radio collars like a Saudi hit squad tracking a journalist, before playing American Sniper.

Endangered species are being hunted just as viciously by lobbyists.

Pine beetles, not planted by the nefarious Chinese, but by the warming temperature understood by the national jackass in chief to be a Chinese lie, are costing such magnificent creatures as the grizzly bears the pine nuts they need. Nuts. Giant grizzly bears need little nuts, while puny humans devastate the planet raising livestock to feed their appetite for bloody flesh.

Water is rapidly being drained away from the ground and from the rivers to produce the bloody-flesh junk-food.

People are putting their bodies in the tops of trees, facing chain saws and sleep-deprivation that lead to plummeting.

People are swinging from the rafters of auditoriums and clinging to the outsides of buildings to break through the corporatespeak.

Trees and boats and houses are being sent flying in vicious storms; city blocks are being obliterated with only indirect assistance from the Pentagon.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Russia Responds to Ukraine’s Provocation and How Martial Law Affects Minsk II

November 30, 2018

Russia Responds to Ukraine’s Provocation and How Martial Law Affects Minsk II

Short Interview with Russian UN Deputy Permanent Rep  Dimitry Polanskiy about the Kerch incident and how Ukraine’s declaring Martial Law affects Donbass.

On November 25, 2018, Russian border patrol intercepted three Ukrainian warships on course for the Kerch bridge. Ignoring previous agreements, Ukraine did not tell Russia or schedule transit through the shallow water strait.

Commercial and state traffic have to schedule traversing the narrow channel because it handles traffic from one direction at a time. This is most important for vessels with a deeper draft because water depth is shallow going through.

A vessel’s draft is the distance from the waterline to the bottom of the hull. This determines the minimum depth needed for the vessel to safely navigate shallow water such as the Kerch Strait. The strait can hold a vessel with an eight-meter (26 ft) draft as long as pilot assistance is used.

According to Ukraine’s version of the Kerch incident, three warships were going from the port of Odessa to the port of Mariupol and Russia shot at and captured the vessels that were innocently traveling from port to port.

The Daily Signal reported “On Sunday, Europe’s two largest standing armies went to the precipice of a major war.

That day, Russian military forces attacked and captured three Ukrainian navy vessels that were transiting through the Russian-controlled Kerch Strait on their way from Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa to Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov.

“This attack, of course, is not accidental. This is clearly an element planned by Russians in the escalation of the situation in the waters of the Sea of Azov, which has been lasting for several months. And I’m sure this is still not a culmination,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Monday in remarks posted to his administration’s website.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Open Letter to Senator Bernie Sanders

November 28, 2018

Open Letter to Senator Bernie Sanders

On Wednesday, November 28, 2018, over 100 U.S. scholars, intellectuals, and activists published the open letter to Senator Bernie Sanders below and invited others to add their names to it. Sanders was working to force a new Senate vote on ending, or at least reducing, U.S. participation in the war on Yemen. Signers of the letter below wished to encourage such steps and, in fact, to urge Sanders toward far greater opposition to militarism and support for peace.

On Tuesday, Senator Sanders had published a new book, Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance. The book contains 38 sections, of which one addresses foreign policy but lays out no concrete proposals. On Tuesday evening Sanders spoke for an hour at George Washington University, aired live on C-Span 2. He discussed a variety of topics, but never mentioned foreign policy — until a questioner asked him for a progressive foreign policy, and Senator Sanders gave a 2-minute response focused on Yemen, for which he received possibly the loudest applause of the evening.

Read the letter and add your name: https://worldbeyondwar.org/bernie

Text of the Letter:

We write to you as U.S. residents with great respect for your domestic policies.

We support the position of more than 25,000 people who signed a petition during your presidential campaign urging you to take on militarism.

We believe that Dr. King was correct to assert that racism, extreme materialism, and militarism needed to be challenged together rather than separately, and that this remains true.

We believe this is not only practical advice, but a moral imperative, and — not coincidentally — good electoral politics.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Debunking One “Global Cooling” Argument

November 21, 2018

Debunking One “Global Cooling” Argument

Preface: Our approach is to build bridges in the climate debate (see the postscript, below).  But one of our duties as investigative journalists is to debunk unscientific claims, from whichever side they come from. This article helps to debunk one particular recent claim about global cooling.

Numerous websites have claimed that a new scientific paper by a high-level NASA scientist proves that the Earth is entering into a planetary cooling period.

Specifically, the paper says that reduced solar activity will likely lead to a substantial cooling in the Earth’s thermosphere … a layer of the atmosphere high above the Earth.

Should run out and buy warmer clothes?

Even though I studied environmental science at a good university as an undergraduate, I had no idea whether a cooling thermosphere would mean:

(1) It will get cooler down here on the surface of the Earth (the bottom portion of the atmospheric layer called the “troposphere”)

(2) There is no correlation

or

(3) As one wannabe “expert” proclaimed on the Internet, a cooler thermosphere will lead to a warmer climate on the surface

So Washington’s Blog asked one of the co-authors of the study, Dr. James Russell to help us understand what the study means …

Russell is a Professor of Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and Co-Director of the Center for Atmospheric Sciences at Hampton University in Virginia. He received his PhD in “aeronomy” – the physics and chemistry of the upper atmosphere of planets – from the University of Michigan, and served as head of the Chemistry and Dynamics Branch and the Theoretical Studies Branch in the NASA Langley Atmospheric Sciences Division.

Dr. Russell told us:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why This Planet Is Becoming Uninhabitable

November 18, 2018

Why This Planet Is Becoming Uninhabitable

And Even Trump Now Acknowledges that Man-Made Global Warming Spells Doom

There are now overt indications that this planet is becoming uninhabitable. Not only are increasing numbers of humans migrating from near the Equator, northward toward nations that have more temperate climates, but also there are stronger and more frequent hurricanes and longer droughts and spreading desertification and larger and more frequent forest fires, all of which are lowering agricultural productivity in the global-overheating areas from which these migrants are coming. This is forcing billions of people to relocate from rural farming southern regions into big cities, and ultimately toward the cooler climates of the more-polar regions, as the large central Equatorial belt of our increasingly hot planet becomes less and less inhabitable for more and more of the people who are so unfortunate as to be still living there. Thus, instead of food being grown in that broad Equatorial belt where the Earth is fat and large, it’s increasingly being grown near the narrow, tiny, polar region. Agriculture is moving northward, and, as it does so, it will be occupying a band too small to feed the world. Agriculture is thus being severely threatened worldwide by global heating. Starvation will consequently soar, as this planet increasingly burns.

The inhabitable portion of this planet is shrinking, decade-by-decade, and especially century-by-century. A reasonable expectation would be that the grandchildren of today’s generation will routinely fight each other for food.

The Trump Administration finally now publicly accepts that all these things will happen, and sooner than scientists had been predicting even as recently as only a decade ago. But this Presidential Administration is determined to do nothing about it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trump Quietly Orders Elimination of Assange

November 17, 2018

Trump Quietly Orders Elimination of Assange

On June 28th, the Washington Examiner headlined “Pence pressed Ecuadorian president on country’s protection of Julian Assange” and reported that “Vice President Mike Pence discussed the asylum status of Julian Assange during a meeting with Ecuador’s leader on Thursday, following pressure from Senate Democrats who have voiced concerns over the country’s protection of the WikiLeaks founder.” Pence had been given this assignment by U.S. President Donald Trump. The following day, the Examiner bannered “Mike Pence raises Julian Assange case with Ecuadorean president, White House confirms” and reported that the White House had told the newspaper, “They agreed to remain in close coordination on potential next steps going forward.”

On August 24th, a court-filing by Kellen S. Dwyer, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Alexandria Division of the Eastern District of Virginia, stated: “Due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure [than sealing the case, hiding it from the public] is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged. … This motion and the proposed order would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.” That filing was discovered by Seamus Hughes, a terrorism expert at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. On November 15th, he posted an excerpt of it on Twitter, just hours after the Wall Street Journal had reported on the same day that the Justice Department was preparing to prosecute Assange. However, now that we know “the fact that Assange has been charged” and that the U.S. Government is simply waiting “until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter,” …

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Else You Can Do

November 7, 2018

What Else You Can Do

You’ve been radically misled to believe that the only thing, or the most important thing, or one of the super important things you can do is vote. Voting in a functioning democracy would be a fairly important thing to do, but wouldn’t somehow eliminate the thousands of important things that would also need doing. Voting in a broken democracy is a mildly important thing to do, for the reasons you know by heart, but also for this reason: Seeing so many people so eager to do something alerts everyone else to the fact that you give a damn.

“I’ve been waiting two years to do something!” This remark, common on Tuesday, must sound joyous to many ears. But if you study history and notice that change comes primarily from organizing, educating, protesting, marching, disrupting, disobeying, and creating things anew, and if you’ve spent the past many years trying to get more people to do those things, then all the “All I can do is vote, oh helpless me” comments may have you pulling your hair out.

There are circumstances in which you can do very little. We are moving in that direction. But we are not there. We are still able to speak, write, assemble, and agitate — and vote. I have to think that more of us would do more if we recognized the gravity of the situation. The planet’s climate can no longer be saved, but the agony can be slowed and eased. Nuclear apocalypse is closer than ever before, but can be averted. Fascism can be undone, but not without actions that extend far beyond voting.

I’m not against elections.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Regulating Apocalypse

October 31, 2018

Regulating Apocalypse

“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good!”
“Don’t be such a purist!”
“Be strategic!”
“Do what’s possible!”
“You can’t deny reality / human nature / religious text.”

The phrases used to oppose proposals for major change haven’t changed much for centuries, in both meanings of that phrase. No doubt these sayings sound better in certain circumstances than others, depending on the details. But in general, I find that they sound worse since the status quo locked in the climate collapse, and since the risk of nuclear catastrophe reached it’s current record high and rapidly climbing position.

I’ve just read a new book called War, Law, and Humanity by James Crossland that looks at efforts to regulate or end war from the 1850s up through the beginning of the 1900s. One strain of thought was that war needed to be eliminated and replaced with nonviolent arbitration. Another was that war needed to be regulated, doctors and nurses admitted onto battlefields, standards upheld for the treatment of prisoners, particular weapons banned, etc. The peace advocates were mocked as dreamers. The humanizers were the “realists.”

One must now write history from a nonexistent future. History cannot actually judge anything or anyone because it will not exist any longer in the brains of any living homo sapiens. But we can, pre-extinction, imagine our way forward and look back. If we end in nuclear holocaust, will those who tried to end war still have been silly dreamers? Or will world government or mandatory arbitration or disarmament sound slightly less goofy if the alternative that peace advocates identified for many decades as apocalypse turns out to be apocalypse?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

There Is No Good Kind of Nationalism

October 25, 2018

There Is No Good Kind of Nationalism

Trump is for nationalism. So the “Resistance” is predictably for . . . wait for it . . . the right kind of nationalism — or nationalism worn properly, as The Week advises. The problem isn’t nationalism, The Hill informs us, it’s phony nationalism and spurious nationalism, or as the Washington Post explains along with CNN, the problem is actually white nationalism. Of course, white nationalism is a problem, but not just because it’s white — also because of the nationalism. Unless you read Esquire which comes up with the oh-so-novel pronouncement that nationalism is indeed bad, but patriotism is good.

Excuse me. I’m sorry. This is why the Resistance doesn’t resist. This is why people offering flags and manure win. The loyal opposition is offering smaller flags, manure, and air fresheners.

What’s wrong with nationalism, you ask. Can’t I love a location? Can’t I care for my loved ones? Must I hate babies and apple pie? What is wrong with you?

Well, if you love your town why not try out townism? Does your town have a flag? An anthem? Can you perform the proper rituals? Why not? You’re not a traitor, are you? Did Putin hire you to tear up treaties with Russia, and sanction Russia, and take over markets from . . . oh, forget it.

Do you love your state? Your region? Your continent? Well why aren’t you insisting on all of those isms? I’ll tell you why. Because they aren’t needed. It’s not that they aren’t needed because those levels of collective identity aren’t associated with war machines. Rather it is that nationalism consists of association with a war machine, identification with that war machine, and belief that you and your war machine are superior to others.

Well, can’t that be a harmless private matter?

Some have seriously tried to make that case, and I’ve found it completely unconvincing.[i]

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Nobody to Vote For

October 21, 2018

Nobody to Vote For

When I say there is nobody to vote for, I don’t just mean the familiar complaint that the candidates may be different shades of evil but are all too evil to support, that the earth’s climate does not recover one iota because some even worse policy has been averted, that sadistic bombings and humanitarian bombings actually look identical. I do mean all of that. But I also mean that candidates are campaigning as and being presented as nothing, as empty figures with no positions on anything.

What is the most common foreign policy position on the websites of Democratic candidates for U.S. Congress? Quick! It’s not hard! You got it? You’re wrong. It was a trick question. Most of their websites do not admit to the existence of 96% of humanity in any way shape or form — although one can infer that the world must exist, because so many of them express such deep love for veterans.

Numerous resources claim to fill the gap, but like private weather profiteers regurgitating federal data, they mostly just pick out bits of the almost nothing coming from the candidates and re-package it as Useful Voter Information. The Campus Election Engagement Project has nothing on Virginia’s Fifth District Congressional race, and on the Virginia race for U.S. Senate it has next to nothing.  In a nod to the existence of the earth, it tells us the candidates’ positions on the Iran nuclear agreement, plus three questions on the environment. But the fact that one of the two candidates’ whole schtick is hatred of immigrants, glorification of racism, and fascistic devotion to Trump doesn’t come up in the predictable policy questions. Nor does the duplicity of the other guy’s constant support for presidential war-making, while claiming to oppose it, make the cut.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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