BREAKING: LEAKED audio of Columbia University vice president Gerry Rosberg unable to respond when asked if Palestinians are human. He stated that this question was “intimidating”. Acknowledging that Palestinians are human is “intimidating rhetoric” to Columbia admin. pic.twitter.com/T1U2qrOQls
— Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (@ColumbiaSJP) March 12, 2024
antiwar | More than 400 US officials from 40 government agencies have sent a letter to President Biden criticizing his unconditional support for Israel’s war in Gaza in the latest example of dissent from within the US government.
“We call on President Biden to urgently demand a ceasefire; and to
call for de-escalation of the current conflict by securing the immediate
release of the Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinians;
the restoration of water, fuel, electricity and other basic services;
and the passage of adequate humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip,” the
letter reads.
According to The New York Times, the majority of the
signatories to the letter are political appointees who work throughout
the government, including in the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the
National Security Council. Some signatories helped get Biden elected
and said they were worried his support for the onslaught on Gaza was
opposed by many Democratic voters.
The letter says that the “overwhelming majority of Americans support a ceasefire,” citing a poll from Data For Progress
that found 66% of voters believe the US should push for a ceasefire,
including 80% of Democrats. “Furthermore, Americans do not want the US
military to be drawn into another costly and senseless war in the Middle
East,” the letter says.
President Biden and his top aides have called for “pauses” in the
fighting but refuse to use the term “ceasefire,” demonstrating that they
are committed to continuing support for the Israeli war, which has
killed at least 11,000 Palestinians, including over 4,500 children.
Since October 7, the US has shipped weapons to Israel on a near-daily
basis and is providing special operations support, including surveillance drone flights over Gaza.
Besides the new letter, Biden’s full-throated support for the brutal
war has drawn three dissent memos from State Department employees and an
open letter signed by more than 1,000 employees of the US Agency for
International Development (USAID).
sputnik | Asked whether there should be a ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, US President Joe Biden said in an interview for CBS that Israel has to go after Hamas and called them a “bunch of cowards.” “Israel is going after a group of people who have engaged in barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust. And so, I think Israel has to respond. They have to go after Hamas. Hamas is a bunch of cowards. They’re hiding behind the civilians,” Biden said. Gaza is a small, densely populated 140.9 square meter area with over 2 million people. Travel in and out of Gaza is heavily controlled by Israeli forces. Biden emphasized that Hamas needs to be “eliminated entirely.” Biden also said that he is in talks with Egypt and Israel about the establishment of a humanitarian corridor in the area.
“We’re also talking to Egyptians whether there is an outlet to get these children and women out of that area at this moment. But it’s hard,” Biden said in the interview. The US President also responded “yes” when asked if he supported humanitarian aid being sent to Gaza, something Israel has been blocking, including food, water and electricity, though Israel announced on Sunday that some water services had been turned back on. At least 13 Americans have been missing since Hamas’ attack, and 30 Americans have been confirmed dead. Biden said that the US is trying every avenue they have to see its remaining citizens returned safely but would not provide details. The interviewer noted that Biden had called the missing Americans’ families and spoke to them on Zoom.
While Biden consistently stressed throughout the interview that the United States supports Israel in their fight against Hamas, he suggested that they do not attempt to occupy Gaza. “I think it’d be a big mistake. Look, what happened in Gaza, in my view, Hamas and the extreme elements of Hamas don’t represent all the Palestinian people. And I think that … It would be a mistake … for Israel to occupy … Gaza again,” Biden said. Biden added that he does not think committing American troops will be necessary in the conflict. The President stressed that he still supports a two-state solution in the area, which has long been the official US policy, but said that right now is not the time to press for it. He also said that the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia is not dead because of the conflict. “The Saudis, and the Emiratis, and other Arab nations understand that their security and stability is enhanced if there’s normalization of relations with Israel,” Biden said. “It’s just going to take time to get done.”
Biden also addressed the conflict in Ukraine, saying that the United States can handle both it and Israel at the same time. “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history– not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.” The United States has provided at least $111 billion to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s special operation. Earlier this month, an additional $24 billion in aid was blocked by a group of House Republicans. That debate resulted in the ousting of House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Congress is now frozen until a new speaker is elected. The White House has continued to ask Congress for aid for both Ukraine and Israel. When asked if the situation in Congress threatens world security, Biden responded “yes,” putting the blame on “MAGA Republicans.”
theatlantic | Hamas’s surprise attack on
Israel has laid bare an uncomfortable truth: The fearsome reputation of
the Israeli military, like that of Israeli intelligence services, may be
overdue for a revision.
Israel
has an excellent air force and elite special-operations units, but its
conventional line units—made up mostly of conscripts—are neither
particularly well trained nor well disciplined by American standards.
These units are still demonstrably superior to those of Israel’s
adversaries from wars gone by, such as Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. But
today Israel faces highly disciplined and motivated nonstate foes in
southern Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, and its military does
not seem to have a clear advantage over them at the unit level.
The
United States provides Israel roughly $3.8 billion a year in military
assistance. (Last year, only Ukraine received more.) That money allows
Israel to purchase expensive weaponry, such as F-35 aircraft, that it
would otherwise struggle to afford. The two countries review and agree
on the amount of aid every 10 years; when we signed our most recent
memorandum of understanding with Israel, in 2016, I was the Pentagon’s
senior representative, taking part in several months of negotiations in
Washington, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. I had a chance to look under the
hood of the Israeli military, and I came away hugely impressed with the
Israeli officers with whom I worked. But I was also frankly worried
about what the next war might look like.
Even
then, Israeli military officials knew that the country was vulnerable
to infiltration operations, such as the one Hamas has just executed.
They judged Hezbollah likely to consider such tactics in any new clash.
Hamas itself had pulled off a similar operation in 2006, albeit on a
much smaller scale, when it kidnapped the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit,
whom it held captive for more than five years. Israel knew that more of
these kinds of attacks were coming, and yet somehow, it was caught
completely off guard when they did.
The
intelligence failure—which you can be sure Israelis will carefully
review—does not surprise me. Few Americans fully appreciate the trauma
that the Second Intifada, from 2000 to 2005, left behind. Israelis built
walls, both physical and mental, between themselves and their Arab
neighbors. I remember asking multiple Israelis in Jerusalem for
directions to Ramallah, a Palestinian city roughly 12 miles away, in
2009. None of them had any idea how to get there. The Palestinians were
both out of sight and out of mind, and after the ordeal of the preceding
years, that was precisely where many Israelis wanted them. But the
Palestinians never actually went anywhere. This lack of intimacy,
together with Hamas’s expulsion of other Palestinian factions from Gaza
in 2007, has surely hindered Israel’s ability to understand what is
going on inside Gaza.
More
worrying, and more structural, are the complacency and lack of
discipline that not only cost Israel in the opening stages of this new
war but will likely continue to do so. I spent almost three years in
Lebanon in the mid-2000s and wrote a doctoral dissertation on
Hezbollah’s evolution as a fighting force. The few Hezbollah fighters I
met in those days struck me, for the most part, as motivated, well
trained, and disciplined. Those who fought in the 2006 war with Israel
retained a certain amount of wary respect for the U.S. military but held
their Israeli adversaries in contempt. They had seen Israeli soldiers
in action—and had not been impressed.
Israel does an excellent job—arguably better than the U.S. military—of learning from its tactical and operational failures.
But the country’s semiprofessional military relies heavily on
conscripts and reservists, which places it at a disadvantage in many
respects. Full-time, professional militaries can dedicate themselves to
rehearsing collective tasks that high-intensity combat situations often
require: reacting to ambushes, conducting raids, incorporating artillery
and airpower into maneuvers. Conscript militaries, by contrast, are
forever bringing on and training new people. The turnover is often too
high to allow units to develop proficiency in the most complicated
military tasks.
Israel’s
conventional forces, moreover, seem to spend less time rehearsing
combined arms operations than they do policing the occupied territories.
Indeed, what few active-duty battalions Israel has appear to have been
deployed away from the south and to the West Bank to safeguard settlers
during the holiday. Such policing operations, in addition to pulling
needed units away from other priorities, are poor practice for more
high-intensity combat.
Many
Israelis in uniform look unkempt and even slovenly, which can be
somewhat charming—the contrast with, say, a U.S. Marine can be stark—but
the closer one looks, the more one wonders if such appearances betray a
certain nonchalance about the profession of arms. In nearly every war
Israel has fought since 1967—1973 and 2006 come most immediately to
mind—Israel’s armed forces have been slow out of the starting blocks.
Discipline is another issue: In 2006, Hezbollah was able to locate
Israeli positions by intercepting Israeli reservists calling home on
their mobile phones.
Forbes | UFO fever has been sweeping through the internet in the wake of
explosive claims made by “UFO whistleblower” David Grusch, a former
military intelligence official and Air Force veteran who says the U.S.
government is in possession of alien spacecraft.
Grusch recently appeared on NewsNation to elaborate on his claims, interviewed by journalist Ross Coulthart.
The past few years have seen the fringe beliefs of UFO enthusiasts spread from The Joe Rogan Experience to the New York Times and the Guardian, imbuing UFO mythology with a newfound sense of legitimacy.
During his NewsNation interview, Grusch offered no evidence for his
extraordinary claims, but said that his information comes from “several
sources.” Grusch confirmed that he had not personally seen any of the
alleged alien spacecraft, but has seen “some interesting photos” and
“read some very interesting reports.”
UFO skeptic Mick West released an excellent response video
to Grusch’s interview that delves into the details of his claims.
Notably, many of Grusch’s claims contain illogical assumptions,
popularized by science fiction tropes.
While science fiction can offer a glimpse into an imagined future,
the genre often reflects the cultural anxieties and technological
limitations of the time period in which it is conceived.
What are Grusch’s claims?
Grusch claims that the United States is in possession of multiple
“vehicles” or “spacecraft” constructed by a "non-human intelligence" and
that their existence is being concealed from the public.
Grusch says that these spacecraft have “either landed or crashed” on
Earth, and that both the U.S. government and defense contractors are
currently working to reverse-engineer the technology.
Extraordinarily, Grusch even claimed that some of the vehicles
contained the bodies of pilots, and that some of the spacecraft were
“very large, like a football field kinda size.”
Grusch stated that the vehicles were not “necessarily
extraterrestrial,” and speculated that they might come from another
dimension, stating, “as somebody who studied physics, where maybe
they’re coming from a different physical dimension, as described in
quantum mechanics.”
Grusch described the vehicles as being composed of “extremely
strange, heavy, atomic metal, you know, high up at the periodic table,
arrangements that we don’t understand.”
Grusch hinted that some of the alien beings were malevolent, and had
even killed humans. Grusch also implied that there is some kind of
secret agreement between the government and aliens, and that people have
been murdered to protect the secret.
Grusch claimed that he was taking “great personal risk and obvious professional risk” by speaking to the media.
NewAtlas | OpenAI's humble, free-to-use chatbot has made it clear: life will never be the same after ChatGPT.
We are witnessing a revolution. After the stunning debut of OpenAI's Dall-E 2 image generator
last year, the company opened its natural language generator up to the
public at the end of November last year. Since then, it's spread like
wildfire, amassing more than 100 million users in its first two months,
making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history and the buzzword of the year.
There
had been thousands of AI chatbots before, but never one like this. Here
was an artificial intelligence trained on hundreds of billions of
words; it has read billions of books, billions of web pages, billions of
Wikipedia entries – so it's ingested a broad and detailed snapshot of
the entirety of human knowledge up until around June 2021, the cutoff
point for the dataset on which its underlying GPT 3.5 language model has
been trained.
Beyond being handed this priceless treasure trove of knowledge,
ChatGPT has been trained in the art of interaction using untold numbers
of written human conversations, and guided by human supervisors to
improve the quality of what it writes.
The results are
staggering. ChatGPT writes as well as, or (let's face it) better than,
most humans. This overgrown autocomplete button can generate
authoritative-sounding prose on nearly any topic in a matter of
milliseconds, of such quality that it's often extremely difficult to
distinguish from a human writer. It formulates arguments that seem
well-researched, and builds key points toward a conclusion. Its
paragraphs feel organic, structured, logically connected and human
enough to earn my grudging respect.
The
striking thing about the reaction to ChatGPT is not just the number of
people who are blown away by it, but who they are. These are not people
who get excited by every shiny new thing. Clearly something big is
happening.
It remembers your entire conversation
and clarifies or elaborates on points if you ask it to. And if what it
writes isn't up to scratch, you can click a button for a complete
re-write that'll tackle your prompt again from a fresh angle, or ask for
specific changes to particular sections or approaches.
It costs you nothing. It'll write in any style you want, taking any
angle you want, on nearly any topic you want, for exactly as many words
as you want. It produces enormous volumes of text in seconds. It's not
precious about being edited, it doesn't get sick, or need to pick its
kids up from school, or try to sneak in fart jokes, or turn up to work
hungover, or make publishers quietly wonder exactly how much
self-pleasuring they're paying people for in a remote work model.
Little wonder that websites like CNET, Buzzfeed
and others are starting the process of replacing their human writers
with ChatGPT prompt-wranglers – although there's icebergs in the water
for these early adopters, since the technology still gets things
flat-out wrong sometimes, and sounds confident and authoritative enough
in the process that even teams of fact-checking sub-editors can't stop
it from publishing "rampant factual errors and apparent plagiarism," as well as outdated information.
Despite these slight drawbacks, the dollar rules
supreme, and there has never been a content-hose like this before.
Indeed, it seems the main thing standing between large swaths of the
publishing industry and widespread instant adoption of ChatGPT as a
high-volume, low-cost author is the fear that Google might figure out how to detect AI-generated text and start penalizing offenders by tanking their search ratings.
Just
in case anyone's wondering, we don't use it here at New Atlas, and have
no plans to start – but we'd be fools not to see the writing on the
wall. This genie is well and truly out of the bottle, and it won't take
long before it can fact-check itself and improve its accuracy. It's not
immediately obvious how AI-generated text can reliably be detected at
this point. So enjoy your local human writers while you still can ...
And throw us $20 on an ad-free subscription if you want to help keep the doors open!
Its work certainly doesn't have to be dry and (seemingly) factual,
either. ChatGPT has more than a passing understanding of more creative
forms of writing as well, and will happily generate fiction too. It'll
pump out custom bedtime stories for your kids, or complex
choose-your-own-adventure experiences, or role-playing games about
anything you like, or teen fiction, or screenplays, or comedy routines.
kanekoa |The real person who was the benefactor to, and the boss of,
Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, at the Ukrainian gas
company Burisma Holdings, was not the CEO of Burisma Holdings, Mykola
Zlochevsky, but it was instead Ihor Kolomoysky, who was part of the newly installed Ukrainian Government, which the Obama Administration itself had actually just installed in Ukraine, in what the head of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor correctly called “the most blatant coup in history.”
Shortly after the Obama Administration’s Ukrainian coup, on March 2, 2014, Kolomoysky, who supported Yanukovych’s overthrow, was appointed the governor of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Hunter Biden, with no experience in the industry or region, would join Kolomoysky’s Burisma Holdings two months later, on May 12, 2014.
A 2012 study of Burisma Holdings done in Ukraine by the AntiCorruption Action Centre (ANTAC), an investigative nonprofit co-funded by American billionaire George Soros and the U.S. State Department, found that the true owner of Burisma Holdings was none other than Ukrainian billionaire-oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky.
The
study, which was funded to dig up the corruption of Ukrainian President
Viktor Yanukovych, instead found that Ihor Kolomoysky “managed to seize
the largest reserves of natural gas in Ukraine.”
Burisma Holdings
changed owners in 2011 when it was taken over by an off-shore Cyprus
enterprise called Brociti Investments Ltd, and subsequently, moved
addresses under the same roof as Ukrnaftoburinnya and Esko-Pivnich, two
Ukrainian gas companies which happened to be also owned by Kolomoysky
through off-shore entities in the British Virgin Islands.
Oleh
Kanivets, who worked as CEO of Ukrnaftoburinnya, confirmed Kolomoysky as
the owner of Burisma Holding in the 2012 report saying, “The Privat
Group is the immediate owner. This company was founded by Mykola
Zlochevsky some time ago, but he later sold his shares to the Privat
Group.”
In other words, Hunter Biden’s boss and benefactor at
Burisma Holdings is the same Ukrainian billionaire-oligarch who also
claimed the position of boss and benefactor over Volodymyr Zelensky
before he became Ukraine’s president.
Kolomoysky Owns 1+1 Media Group
Kolmoysky, who currently holds a net worth of $1.8 billion,
making him the 1750th richest person in the world, owns holdings in
metal, petroleum, and the media sector, where he has had a long history
with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
For years, Zelensky’s company produced shows for Kolmoysky’s TV network, 1+1 Media Group,
one of the largest media conglomerates in Ukraine. Zelensky achieved
national fame, portraying a president on a hit television sitcom called Servant of the People, which was broadcasted on a channel owned by Kolmoysky.
In 2019, Kolmoysky’s media channels gave a big boost to Zelensky’s presidential campaign, while Kolmoysky even provided security, lawyers, and vehicles
for Zelensky during his campaign. Kolmoysky’s bodyguard and lawyer
accompanied Zelensky on the campaign trail as Zelensky was chauffeured
around in a Range Rover owned by one of Kolmoysky’s companies.
The Pandora Papers showed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his TV production partners were beneficiaries of a web of offshore firms
created in 2012, the same year Zelensky’s production company entered
into a deal with Kolomoysky’s media group, which allegedly received $41
million in funds from Kolomoysky’s Privatbank.
Zelensky’s political rival, President Petro Poroshenko, commented
on their connection during the campaign trail, “Fate intended to put
me together with Kolomoyskiy’s puppet in the second round of the
elections.”
After Zelensky’s victory, Kolomoysky, who
had spent the last few years living between Israel and Switzerland,
returned to Ukraine to keep up his relationship with the new president, nominating over 30-lawmakers to Zelensky’s newly established party and maintaining influence with many of them in parliament.
amidwesterndoctor |This is a supplemental addition to my previous piece.
I would strongly encourage you to read that article before reading this
one as this one goes into more tangential and complex points that
supplement the original, but many of you may find very insightful. Many
of the concepts here also appear to apply to the COVID immunizations,
however for length considerations, I will omit most of those connections
and leave you to draw your own conclusions. All of the books I cited
here can be easily found on Amazon and often as PDFs, but I avoided
linking to them here and supporting Amazon. Lastly, as I did not want to
further delay publication, a significant number of minor edits will
occur in the next few days.
I did not expect to attract the viewership the original article received, or the follow-up by larger media outlets (Steve Kirsch’s newsletter, the Kate Daley show and mercola.com)
and am sincerely grateful for your support, and those parties in
particular in spreading this message. As I now have many readers, I
will try to produce quality content as my time permits (with work and
all), as I want it to be worth your time to read what I produce. For
the time being I will focus on interesting bits of medical history (the
next piece will be interesting lessons from the 1918 influenza I applied
to my treatment of COVID).
Additionally, since my last publication a reader notified me of a short book written in 1889 and viewable online which concisely provides evidence for many of the points covered in Dissolving Illusions,
such as the lack of efficacy from the vaccination, the diseases
associated with its administration, the distortion of data used by
government officials to claim benefit rather than harm, and false claim
it reduced death in hospitals.
To be complete and
illustrate the observed effects of the smallpox vaccines, this article
is a bit longer than the previous. I could have cited significantly
more resources, but I aimed to cover one text that was representative
from each major school of thought at the time. Its sections are as
follows:
-Introduction -General Smallpox Observations -Allopathy -Naturopathy -Homeopathy -Osteopathy -Traditional Chinese Medicine -Modern Research
libertarianinstitute | Are Biden’s off-the-cuff-and-wall remarks signs of dementia? Or are
they just the Bidenesque “Kinsley gaffes” we’ve become accustomed to? (A
Kinsley gaffe occurs when someone important speaks his mind when he or
his handlers know he shouldn’t.)
By now, Biden’s irresponsibly provocative remarks have made the rounds. He has said
that Russia’s use of chemical weapons in Ukraine would bring a NATO
response, but left the nature of the response vague. His administration
seems to be shying away from explicitly declaring “red lines.”
And yet, when ABC News asked
Biden, “If chemical weapons were used in Ukraine could that trigger a
military response from NATO?” Biden responded, “It would trigger a response in kind. Whether or not — you’re asking whether NATO would cross — we’d make that decision at the time.” (Emphasis added.)
Say what? Response in kind? Does that mean he might order a chemical-weapons counterattack?
As others have pointed out, even a de facto red line is an invitation
for a false-flag attack in which a Ukrainian group, hoping to bring
NATO into the fight, would use chemical weapons while making the
perpetrator appear to be Russian. This sort of thing seems likely to have happened in Syria.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Vlodomyr Zelensky is still lobbying
for even more NATO intervention (in addition to arms and sanctions) in
the form of a no-fly zone, which is now called “close the sky.” The
shameless public appeal includes this video,
with the lyric “If you don’t close the sky/I will die.” The lyricist
neglected to point out that if the sky is closed and the U.S. Air Force
shoots down a Russian jet, we all could die in a nuclear exchange.
Biden still says no to closing the sky, but if he started saying the opposite, who’d be surprised?
As everyone knows, while abroad Biden also seemed to call for
regime change in Russia with this ad-lib: “For God’s sake, this man
cannot remain in power.” History teaches that implied policies such as
that do not facilitate ceasefires and peace. The Gaffer-in-Chief and his people tried to walk it back,
but the attempts were lame. “I was expressing the moral outrage that I
feel,” he said while insisting he wasn’t walking back his statement,
“and I make no apologies for it.” (American presidents are always
morally outraged whenever countries they don’t like do what the U.S.
government regularly does.)
A White House official dutifully insisted that what his boss meant
“was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors
or the region. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime
change.” If you buy that, they have a bridge you might be interested in.
thebulletin | “There is no place that still has any of the sort of infrastructure
for researching or producing biological weapons,” Pope said. “Scientists
being scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these strain
collections in some of these laboratories still have pathogen strains
that go all the way back to the origins of that program.”
The program is encouraging host countries to reduce the scope of
their pathogen holdings to as small of a collection as necessary for
legitimate scientific research, Pope said.
“What we have today and what these countries maintain are small
amounts of various pathogens that by and large are things that are
collected out of their environment that they need for research to be
able to legitimately surveil disease and develop vaccines against,” he
said.
This work, Pope said, continued in Ukraine until recently. “They have
more pathogens in more places than we recommend,” he said. The program
had been helping Ukrainian researchers sift through their frozen
pathogen collections, with the goal of persuading the Ukrainians to
preserve their genetic information of samples via sequencing before
destroying the live samples.
Pope said his program had been close to an agreement with the
Ukrainians on consolidating samples, but the invasion has now made that
project uncertain. “All of that, obviously, has been derailed here with
the recent events,” he said.
The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, Pope said Thursday, has not
had contact with biosafety staff at the labs in Ukraine since the
Russian invasion. Phone lines have been jammed in Ukraine, he said, and
“I don’t know what kind of contact we will have in these labs in the
near future.”
Some Ukrainian labs, like the Ukrainian Ministry of Health’s Public
Health Center, Pope said, are major facilities, others small. Some are
new, while others date back to the Soviet-era and the country’s
bioweapons program.
The US government has worked with 26 facilities in Ukraine. Before
the invasion, the program provided direct material support to six
Ukrainian labs. The program also provides biosafety and scientific
mentorship training to Ministry of Health personnel throughout the
country.
greenwald | The neocon official long in charge of U.S. policy in Ukraine
testified on Monday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and
strongly suggested that such claims are, at least in part, true.
Yesterday afternoon, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL),
hoping to debunk growing claims that there are chemical weapons labs in
Ukraine, smugly asked Nuland: “Does Ukraine have chemical or biological
weapons?”
Rubio undoubtedly expected a flat denial by Nuland,
thus providing further "proof” that such speculation is dastardly Fake
News emanating from the Kremlin, the CCP and QAnon. Instead, Nuland did
something completely uncharacteristic for her, for neocons, and for
senior U.S. foreign policy officials: for some reason, she told a
version of the truth. Her answer visibly stunned Rubio, who — as soon as
he realized the damage she was doing to the U.S. messaging campaign by
telling the truth — interrupted her and demanded that she instead affirm
that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone should be “100%
sure” that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life raft, Nuland
told Rubio he was right.
But Rubio's clean-up act came too late.
When asked whether Ukraine possesses “chemical or biological weapons,”
Nuland did not deny this: at all. She instead — with palpable
pen-twirling discomfort and in halting speech, a glaring contrast to her
normally cocky style of speaking in obfuscatory State Department
officialese — acknowledged: “uh, Ukraine has, uh, biological research
facilities.” Any hope to depict such "facilities” as benign or banal was
immediately destroyed by the warning she quickly added: “we are now in
fact quite concerned that Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking
to, uh, gain control of [those labs], so we are working with the
Ukrainiahhhns [sic] on how they can prevent any of those research
materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they
approach” — [interruption by Sen. Rubio]:
Nuland's bizarre admission that “Ukraine has biological research
facilities” that are dangerous enough to warrant concern that they could
fall into Russian hands ironically constituted more decisive evidence
of the existence of such programs in Ukraine than what was offered in
2002 and 2003 to corroborate U.S. allegations about Saddam's chemical
and biological programs in Iraq. An actual against-interest confession
from a top U.S. official under oath is clearly more significant than
Colin Powell's holding up some test tube with an unknown substance
inside while he pointed to grainy satellite images that nobody could
decipher.
It should go without saying that the existence of a
Ukrainian biological “research” program does not justify an invasion by
Russia, let alone an attack as comprehensive and devastating as the one
unfolding: no more than the existence of a similar biological program
under Saddam would have rendered the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq
justifiable. But Nuland's confession does shed critical light on several
important issues and raises vital questions that deserve answers.
Any
attempt to claim that Ukraine's biological facilities are just benign
and standard medical labs is negated by Nuland's explicitly grave
concern that “Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of” those
facilities and that the U.S. Government therefore is, right this minute,
“working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those
research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.”
veteranstoday | I have often reported that the U.S., more specifically the Pentagon,
operates several bioweapons labs in Ukraine. The last time I reported on
this was on January 27. The U.S. has always refused international
inspections of its labs, so no one knows what they are researching in
these labs. But we can assume that Russian special forces will take a
closer look at these labs in the coming days.
And this seems to be exactly a can of worms. A tweet was published on
Twitter about this and the user was immediately blocked. I won’t go
into the content of the tweet, which can still be found in an Internet
archive. If you are interested, you can view it here [1].
My point is that Twitter was so quick to delete a tweet and its
author merely because he pointed out that there are U.S. bioweapons labs
in Ukraine and that it looks like their capture is one of the important
targets of the Russian military operation.
The US Army regularly produces deadly viruses, bacteria, and toxins
in direct violation of the UN Convention on the prohibition of
Biological Weapons. Hundreds of thousands of unwitting people are
systematically exposed to dangerous pathogens and other incurable
diseases.
Biowarfare scientists using diplomatic cover test man-made viruses at
Pentagon bio laboratories in 25 countries across the world. These US
bio-laboratories are funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency
(DTRA) under a $ 2.1 billion military program–
Cooperative Biological Engagement Program (CBEP) and are located in
former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle
East, South East Asia, and Africa.
Biowarfare scientists under diplomatic cover
Among the set of bilateral agreements between the US and Ukraine is
the establishment of the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU)
– an International organization funded mainly by the US government
which has been accorded diplomatic status.
The STCU officially supports
projects of scientists previously involved in the Soviet biological
weapons program. Over the past 20 years the STCU has invested over $285 million in
funding and managing some 1,850 projects of scientists who previously
worked on the development of weapons of mass destruction.
The US personnel in Ukraine work under diplomatic cover.
364 Ukrainians died from Swine Flu
One of the Pentagon laboratories is located in Kharkiv, where in
January 2016 at least 20 Ukrainian soldiers died from Flu-like virus in
just two days with 200 more being hospitalized. The Ukrainian government
did not report on the dead Ukrainian soldiers in Kharkiv.
As of March 2016, 364 deaths have been reported across Ukraine (81.3 %
caused by Swine Flu A (H1N1) pdm09 – the same strain which caused the
world pandemic in 2009).
NYTimes | It has not been uncommon, in recent years, to hear Americans worry about the advent of a new civil war.
“Is Civil War Ahead?” The New Yorker asked last month. “Is America heading to civil war or secession?” CNN
wondered on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Last
week, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois told “The View” that “we
have to recognize” the possibility of a civil war. “I don’t think it’s
too far of a bridge to think that’s a possibility,” he said.
This isn’t just the media or the political class; it’s public opinion too. In a 2019 survey
for the Georgetown Institute of Politics, the average respondent said
that the United States was two-thirds of the way toward the “edge of a
civil war.” In a recent poll
conducted by the Institute of Politics at Harvard, 35 percent of
voting-age Americans under 30 placed the odds of a second civil war at
50 percent or higher.
And in a result
that says something about the divisions at hand, 52 percent of Trump
voters and 41 percent of Biden voters said that they at least “somewhat
agree” that it’s time to split the country, with either red or blue
states leaving the union and forming their own country, according to a survey conducted by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia (where I am a visiting scholar).
Several
related forces are fueling this anxiety, from deepening partisan
polarization and our winner-take-all politics to our sharp division
across lines of identity, culture and geography. There is the fact that
this country is saturated with guns, as well as the reality that many
Americans fear demographic change to the point that they’re willing to
do pretty much anything to stop it. There is also the issue of Donald
Trump, his strongest supporters and their effort to overturn the results
of the 2020 presidential election. Americans feel
farther apart than at any point in recent memory, and as a result, many
Americans fear the prospect of organized political violence well beyond
what we saw on Jan. 6, 2021.
There
is, however, a serious problem with this narrative: The Civil War we
fought in the 19th century was not sparked by division qua division.
cbc | "Chief Sloly and the Ottawa Police Service have been working,
with our policing partners, around the clock for three weeks to end this
illegal occupation of our city," the statement said.
"This
unprecedented situation, well beyond the experience of any municipal
policing body in Canada, has put tremendous strain on all our officers."
The
statement said the Ottawa Police Service is working with the OPP and
RCMP to establish a joint incident command that it says will see more
resources and expertise made available to help end what many are calling
the occupation of the nation's capital.
"In
future there will be an opportunity for a full review of the operation,
but right now it is time to work together with our partners and focus
on ending this illegal occupation," the statement said.
OPS media relations told CBC News no one was available for an interview.
The Globe and Mail recently
noted that while Sloly has faced criticism for his handling of some
issues, he was not known in policing circles as someone quick to resort
to heavy-handed measures.
During a special meeting of the Ottawa
Police Services Board Friday, police board chair Coun. Diane Deans
defended Sloly's response to the crisis, saying that despite requests
for help issued to the province and the federal government the OPS still
did not have the resources it needed to end the occupation of the
city.
The Ottawa Police Service is "working tirelessly with the
resources they have and there has been some progress. There have been
over 1,700 tickets issued, there have been at least 25 arrests, police
have been working to seize fuel, they've made progress on clamping down
on the encampment at Coventry Rd. and in Confederation Park, but it's
not enough," Deans said at the meeting.
"We do not have the resource requirement that we have asked for at this point."
Deans
declined an interview request from CBC News Monday when asked about
specific allegations related to Sloly's behaviour as chief of police.
NYTimes | The
mayor of San Francisco on Friday made a sharp break with the liberal
conventions that have guided her city for decades, declaring a state of
emergency in one of its most crime-infested neighborhoods.
Mayor
London Breed’s announcement came just days after she emphasized the
need for the police to clean up what she has described as “nasty
streets.” At a news conference at City Hall, steps away from where drug
dealers openly peddle fentanyl and methamphetamines, she said, “We are
in a crisis and we need to respond accordingly.” She added, “Too many
people are dying in this city, too many people are sprawled on our
streets.”
The neighborhood, the
Tenderloin, has been ground zero for drug dealing, overdose deaths and
homelessness for years. But Ms. Breed said in an interview that she
reached her “breaking point” in recent weeks after meeting with families
with children who live in the Tenderloin and said they felt constantly
threatened.
Her actions and
startlingly blunt language were a marked change in tone and policy in a
city that has been polarized over homeless encampments and open-air drug
use. Elected as a liberal Democrat, she spoke this week about “a reign
of criminals,” trash strewn across neighborhoods full of “feces and
urine,” and shoplifting at high-end stores that she called “mass looting
events.”
Joe
D’Alessandro, president and chief executive of the San Francisco
tourism bureau, said the city had an image problem and praised the mayor
for addressing it.
“We are excited
and enthusiastic to see some significant steps to make San Francisco a
safer city,” he said. “People are just fed up with some of the stuff
they’ve seen and want to see some action.”
The announcement of a state of emergency specifically targeted the drug overdose crisis: More than twice as many people died of drug overdoses
in San Francisco last year as died from the coronavirus. But Friday’s
announcement is part of a broader, aggressive push to crack down on drug
dealing and improve conditions. In practical terms, Ms. Breed said the
city would no longer tolerate illicit drug users in the streets — giving
them a choice between treatment or arrest.
nakedcapitalism | “We’ll have to involve our instruments of National Security.” This is mere question begging. Surely the intelligence agencies are not the only
state organs capable of prediction and analysis? (To be fair, I can
understand why one might wish to fall back on one of the few
institutions in our sclerotic state that actually does function, rather like calling in the Army to handle nursing home staffing or container jams.)
In its zeal to identify bin Laden or his family, the CIA used a sham
hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA in the neighborhood where
he was hiding. The effort apparently failed, but the violation of trust
threatens to set back global public health efforts by decades.
It is hard enough to distribute, for example, polio vaccines to
children in desperately poor, politically unstable regions that are rife
with 10-year-old rumors that the medicine is a Western plot to
sterilize girls—false assertions that have long since been repudiated by
the Nigerian religious leaders who first promoted them. Now along come
numerous credible reports of a vaccination campaign that is part of a
CIA plot—one the U.S. has not denied.
The deadly consequences have already begun. Villagers along the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border chased off legitimate vaccine workers,
accusing them of being spies. Taliban commanders banned polio
vaccinations in parts of Pakistan, specifically citing the bin Laden
ruse as justification. Then, last December, nine vaccine workers were
murdered in Pakistan, eventually prompting the United Nations to
withdraw its vaccination teams. Two months later gunmen killed 10 polio
workers in Nigeria—a sign that the violence against vaccinators may be
spreading.
Such attacks could not come at a worse time. The global polio
campaign has entered what should be its final stages. The number of
cases has dropped from 350,000 in 1988 to 650 in 2011. The disease
spreads naturally in only three countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan and
Nigeria—down from more than 125 countries a quarter of a century ago.
Disrupting or postponing vaccination efforts could fan a resurgence of
polio around the world.
The distrust sowed by the sham campaign in Pakistan could conceivably
postpone polio eradication for 20 years, leading to 100,000 more cases
that might otherwise not have occurred, says Leslie F. Roberts of
Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “Forevermore,
people would say this disease, this crippled child is because the U.S.
was so crazy to get Osama bin Laden,” he argues.
100,000 crippled children because CIA operatives hijacked a public
health effort, good job. Gottlieb is, of course, aware of this episode.
His idea is that if the public health people are “at the table” good
things will happen. Perhaps the Norms Fairy will intervene, I don’t
know. Page 370:
nature | These jokers created some super-covid from the worst strains of
existing covid variants. (Gain of Function Research) It’s
virological and immunological <s>dual use bioweapons</s> research. Hope none gets out of the NYC lab where they created it over a year ago.
They then tested antibodies created from a natural Covid-19
infection - and - antibodies created by someone with an mRNA vaccine against
this “gain of function” super strain of Covid-19. The super Covid was
resistant to both types of antibodies. However, antibodies
from someone who both was infected and recovered from a Covid-19
infection AND received an mRNA vaccination defeated the super strain of
Covid-19.
The number and variability of the neutralizing epitopes targeted by
polyclonal antibodies in SARS-CoV-2 convalescent and vaccinated
individuals are key determinants of neutralization breadth and the
genetic barrier to viral escape1–4. Using HIV-1 pseudotypes and plasma-selection experiments with vesicular stomatitis virus/SARS-CoV-2 chimeras5,
we show that multiple neutralizing epitopes, within and outside the
receptor binding domain (RBD), are variably targeted by human polyclonal
antibodies. Antibody targets coincide with spike sequences that are
enriched for diversity in natural SARS-CoV-2 populations. By combining
plasma-selected spike substitutions, we generated synthetic ‘polymutant’
spike protein pseudotypes that resisted polyclonal antibody
neutralization to a similar degree as circulating variants of concern
(VOC). By aggregating VOC-associated and antibody-selected spike
substitutions into a single polymutant spike protein, we show that 20
naturally occurring mutations in SARS-CoV-2 spike are sufficient to
generate pseudotypes with near-complete resistance to the polyclonal
neutralizing antibodies generated by convalescents or mRNA vaccine
recipients. Strikingly, however, plasma from individuals who had been
infected and subsequently received mRNA vaccination, neutralized
pseudotypes bearing this highly resistant SARS-CoV-2 polymutant spike,
or diverse sarbecovirus spike proteins. Thus, optimally elicited human
polyclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 should be resilient to
substantial future SARS-CoV-2 variation and may confer protection
against potential future sarbecovirus pandemics.
emilyposts |A year ago, I would have tried to convince people that the FDA was the gold standard for COVID pharmaceuticals.
Now, I see that the
agency needs to fail in order for it to be forced to make radical
changes so that the public can trust that the label “approved by the
FDA” means its safe.
Compounding the problem is that the
FDA’s credibility gap has created a vacuum in which conspiracy theories
and misinformation grow quickly. The result is many people don’t believe
that the vaccine was actually approved. They don’t trust that it is
safe to be vaccinated. They don’t even know who runs the FDA.
Had
the FDA made the vaccines authorization and later approval process easy
to understand by the public, this mess of vaccine distrust would not
have happened. But the FDA refuses to work in public, deliver information in terms we all understand or even show their faces.
And all this could have been avoided if the FDA press office didn’t operate like the Cold War Kremlin. I tried to turn that ship around last year and was thrown overboard for the effort.
My FDA Assignment
I was hired at the FDA during the pandemic
because the Commissioner, Dr. Stephen Hahn, needed someone skilled at
handling the press in a crisis at the highest levels of government.
I
was a spokesman for Capitol Hill leadership during 9/11 and a press
secretary at the State Department during the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
The strategic communications needed for COVID was no different than the wars.
The FDA needed to get as much information as allowed out to the public
as quickly as possible and be accessible to reporters 24/7.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...