The current focus of this post relates to the Coronavirus chaos, vaccines and implications. Note: Many more articles follow these latest nine.

• Looks Like Sweden Was Right After All  By Mike Whitney, via Unz Review, 12 July 2020
• A stock-take of New Zealand’s management of Covid-19  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZ Centre for Political Research, 10 July 2020
• Read it and weep. Sorry tale of a Covid catastrophe  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 6 July 2020
• The Brave New Normal  By CJ Hopkins, anti-empire.com, 2 July 2020
• The lockdown is causing so many deaths  Interview with Dr Malcolm Kendrick, Spiked Online, 27 June 2020
• Coronavirus. Too many ‘experts’ were crying wolf over COVID-19  By Judith Sloan, The Australian, 25 June 2020
• Coronavirus – how the US took leave of its senses  From HumansAreFree, 21 June 2020
• Doug Casey on How Fake Science is Used as Propaganda  By Doug Casey, Internationalman.com, 18 June 2020
• Coronavirus. Inflated pandemic estimates weaken climate forecasts  By Adam Creighton, The Australian, 17 June 2020

Looks Like Sweden Was Right After All

 

Looks Like Sweden Was Right After All  By Mike Whitney, via Unz Review, 12 July 2020

 Why is the media so fixated on Sweden’s coronavirus policy? What difference does it make?

Sweden settled on a policy that they thought was both sustainable and would save as many lives as possible. They weren’t trying to ‘show anyone up’ or ‘prove how smart they were’. They simply took a more traditionalist approach that avoided a full-scale lockdown. That’s all.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? And that’s why Sweden has been so harshly criticized in the media, because they refused to do what everyone else was doing. They refused to adopt a policy that elites now universally support, a policy that scares people into cowering submission. The Swedish model is a threat to that approach because it allows people to maintain their personal freedom even in the midst of a global pandemic. Ruling class elites don’t want that, that is not in their interests. What they want is for the people to meekly accept the rules and conditions that lead to their eventual enslavement. That’s the real objective, complete social control, saving lives has nothing to do with it. Sweden opposed that approach which is why Sweden has to be destroyed. It’s that simple.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with Sweden’s fatality rate, which is higher than some and lower than others. (Sweden has 543 deaths per million, which means roughly 1 death in every 2,000 people.) But like every other country, the vast majority of Swedish fatalities are among people 70 years and older with underlying health conditions. (“90% of the country’s deaths have been among those over 70.”) Sweden was not successful in protecting the people in its elderly care facilities, so large numbers of them were wiped out following the outbreak. Sweden failed in that regard and they’ve admitted they failed. Even so, the failures of implementation do not imply that the policy is wrong. Quite the contrary. Sweden settled on a sustainable policy, that keeps the economy running, preserves an atmosphere of normality, and exposes its young, low-risk people to the infection, thus, moving the population closer to the ultimate goal of “herd immunity”.

[ZH: in Sweden (pop. 10.25m) – where there was no lockdown, huge international criticism of its strategy, and one of the highest fatalities per head in the world – only 70 people under 49 years old have died of Covid-19, out of 5,482 total virus deaths (1.3%) so far. For context, average annual deaths in Sweden over the last 5 years for under-49-year-olds have been 3,417.  ]

Presently, Sweden is very close to reaching herd immunity which is a condition in which the majority have developed antibodies that will help to fend-off similar sars-covid infections in the future. Absent a vaccine, herd immunity is the best that can be hoped for. It ensures that future outbreaks will be less disruptive and less lethal. Take a look at this excerpt from an article at the Off-Guardian which helps to explain what’s really going on:

“Sweden’s health minister understood that the only chance to beat COVID-19 was to get the Swedish population to a Herd Immunity Threshold against COVID-19, and that’s exactly what they have done…

The Herd Immunity Threshold (“HIT”) for COVID-19 is between 10-20%

This fact gets less press than any other. Most people understand the basic concept of herd immunity and the math behind it. In the early days, some public health officials speculated that COVID-19’s HIT was 70%. Obviously, the difference between a HIT of 70% and a HIT of 10-20% is dramatic, and the lower the HIT, the quicker a virus will burn out as it loses the ability to infect more people, which is exactly what COVID-19 is doing everywhere, including the U.S, which is why the death curve above looks the way it looks.

Scientists from Oxford, Virginia Tech, and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, all recently explained the HIT of COVID-19 in this paper:

We searched the literature for estimates of individual variation in propensity to acquire or transmit COVID-19 or other infectious diseases and overlaid the findings as vertical lines in Figure 3. Most CV estimates are comprised between 2 and 4, a range where naturally acquired immunity to SARS-CoV-2 may place populations over the herd immunity threshold once as few as 10-20% of its individuals are immune….

Naturally acquired herd immunity to COVID-19 combined with earnest protection of the vulnerable elderly – especially nursing home and assisted living facility residents — is an eminently reasonable and practical alternative to the dubious panacea of mass compulsory vaccination against the virus.

This strategy was successfully implemented in Malmo, Sweden, which had few COVID-19 deaths by assiduously protecting its elder care homes, while “schools remained open, residents carried on drinking in bars and cafes, and the doors of hairdressers and gyms were open throughout.

One of the most vocal members of the scientific community discussing COVID-19’s HIT is Stanford’s Nobel-laureate Dr. Michael Levitt. Back on May 4, he gave this great interview to the Stanford Daily where he advocated for Sweden’s approach of letting COVID-19 spread naturally through the community until you arrive at HIT. He stated:

If Sweden stops at about 5,000 or 6,000 deaths, we will know that they’ve reached herd immunity, and we didn’t need to do any kind of lockdown. My own feeling is that it will probably stop because of herd immunity. COVID is serious, it’s at least a serious flu. But it’s not going to destroy humanity as people thought.

Guess what? That’s exactly what happened. As of today, 7 weeks after his prediction, Sweden has 5,550 deaths. In this graph, you can see that deaths in Sweden PEAKED when the HIT was halfway to its peak (roughly 7.3%) and by the time the virus hit 14% it was nearly extinguished.”

(“Second wave? Not even close“, JB Handley, The Off-Guardian)

In other words, Sweden is rapidly approaching the endgame which means that restrictions can be dropped entirely and normal life can resume. They will have maintained their dignity and freedom while the rest of the world hid under their beds for months on end. They won’t have to reopen their primary schools because they never shut them down to begin with. Numerous reports indicate that young children are neither at risk nor do they pass the virus to others. Most Americans don’t know this because the propaganda media has omitted the news from their coverage. Here’s a clip from the National Review which helps to explain:

Kari Stefansson, CEO of the Icelandic company deCODE genetics in Reykjavík, studied the spread of COVID-19 in Iceland with Iceland’s Directorate of Health and the National University Hospital. His project has tested 36,500 people; as of this writing,

Children under 10 are less likely to get infected than adults and if they get infected, they are less likely to get seriously ill. What is interesting is that even if children do get infected, they are less likely to transmit the disease to others than adults. We have not found a single instance of a child infecting parents.”

(“Icelandic Study: ‘We Have Not Found a Single Instance of a Child Infecting Parents.’“, National Review)

This is just one of many similar reports from around the world. Most of the schools in Europe have already reopened and lifted restrictions on distancing and masks. Meanwhile, in the US, the reopening of schools has become another contentious political issue pitting Trump against his Democrat adversaries who are willing to sacrifice the lives of schoolchildren to prevent the president from being reelected. It’s a cynical-counterproductive approach that reveals the vindictiveness of the people who support it. In an election year, everything is politics. (Watch Tucker Carlson’s short segment on “Kids cannot afford to stay locked down.“)

Here’s a question for you: Have you ever wondered why the virus sweeps through the population and then seemingly dissipates and dies out? In fact, the virus doesn’t simply die-out, it runs out of people to infect. But how can that be when only 1 of 7 people will ever contract the virus?

The answer is immunity, either natural immunity or built up immunity from other Sars-Covid exposure. Here’s more from the Off Guardian piece:

“Scientists are now showing evidence that up to 81% of us can mount a strong response to COVID-19 without ever having been exposed to it before:

Cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 T-cell epitopes revealed preexisting T-cell responses in 81% of unexposed individuals, and validation of similarity to common cold human coronaviruses provided a functional basis for postulated heterologous immunity.

This alone could explain WHY the Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT) is so much lower for COVID-19 than some scientists thought originally, when the number being talked about was closer to 70%. Many of us have always been immune!“

(“Second wave? Not even close”, JB Handley, The Off-Guardian)

What does it mean?

It means that Fauci and the idiots in the media have been lying to us the whole time. It means that Covid-19 is not a totally new virus for which humans have no natural immunity or built-in protection. Covid is a derivative of other infections which is why the death toll isn’t alot higher. Check this out from the BBC:

“People testing negative for coronavirus antibodies may still have some immunity, a study has suggested. For every person testing positive for antibodies, two were found to have specific T-cells which identify and destroy infected cells. This was seen even in people who had mild or symptomless cases of Covid-19..

This could mean a wider group have some level of immunity to Covid-19 than antibody testing figures, like those published as part of the UK Office for National Statistics Infection Survey, suggest…..And these people should be protected if they are exposed to the virus for a second time.”

(“Coronavirus: Immunity may be more widespread than tests suggest“, BBC)

Now, I realize that there’s some dispute about immunity, but there shouldn’t be. If you contract the virus, you either won’t get it again or you’ll get a much milder case. And if immunity doesn’t exist, then we’re crazy to waste our time trying to develop a vaccine, right?

What the science tells us is that immunity does exist and the reason the vast majority of people didn’t get the infection— is not because they locked themselves indoors and hid behind the sofa– but because they already have partial immunity either from their genetic makeup or from previous exposure to Sars-CoV-2 which was identified in 2002.

It’s worth repeating that the reason everyone was so scared about Covid originally was because it was hyped as a “novel virus”, completely new with no known cure or natural protection. That was a lie that was propagated by Fauci and his dissembling Vaccine Mafia, all of who are responsible for the vast destruction to the US economy, the unprecedented spike in unemployment, and the obliteration of tens of thousands of small businesses.

As the author points out, we should have known from the incident on the Diamond Princess (Cruise Liner) that immunity was far more widespread than previously thought. Readers might recall that only 17% of the people on board tested Covid-positive, “despite an ideal environment for mass spread, implying 83% of the people were somehow protected from the new virus.”

Think about that for a minute. All of the passengers were 60 years old or older, but only 17% caught the virus. Why?

Immunity, that’s why. What else could it be? Cross immunity, natural immunity, or SARS-CoV-2 T-cell immunity. Whatever you want to call it, it exists and it explains why the vast majority of people will not get the highly-contagious Covid no matter what they do.

It’s also worth pointing out that even according to the CDC’s own statistics, the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is a mere 0.26% whereas “According to the latest immunological and serological studies, the overall lethality of Covid-19 (IFR) is about 0.1% and thus in the range of a strong seasonal influenza (flu).” (“Facts about Covid-19”, Swiss Policy Research)

Bottom of Form

So the death rate is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in every 500 (who contract the virus) to 1 in every 1,000. How can any rational person shut down a $21 trillion economy and order 340 million people into quarantine, based on the fact that 1 in every thousand people (mostly old and infirm) might die from an infection?? That was a act of pure, unalloyed Madness for which the American people will pay dearly for years to come. Once again, the US response was crafted by people who were promoting their own narrow political, social and economic agenda, not acting in the interests of the American people. We should expect more from our leaders than this.

So what does all of this say about the sharp spike in Covid positive cases in the south and the chances of a “second wave”?

There’s not going to be a second wave (The massive BLM protests in NY city has not produced any uptick in deaths, because NY has already achieved herd immunity. In contrast, Florida will undoubtedly experience more fatalities because it has not yet reached HIT or the Herd Immunity Threshold. Cases are increasing because younger- low-risk people are circulating more freely and because testing has increased by many orders of magnitude. At the same time, deaths continue to go down.

On Wednesday, US new cases rose to an eye-watering 62,000 in one day while deaths are down 75% from the April peak. This shouldn’t come as a surprise because the pattern has been the same as in countries around the world. The trajectory of infections was mapped out long ago by UK epidemiologist and statistician, William Farr. Take a look:

“Farr shows us that once peak infection has been reached then it will roughly follow the same symmetrical pattern on the downward slope. However, under testing and variations in testing regimes means we have no way of knowing when the peak of infections occurred. In this situation, we should use the data on deaths to predict the peak. There is a predicted time lag from infection to COVID deaths of approximately 21 to 28 days.

Once peak deaths have been reached we should be working on the assumption that the infection has already started falling in the same progressive steps. …

Farr, also illustrated that those who are the most ‘mortal die out’, and in a pandemic are those in most need of shielding….(So, Farr saw the wisdom of the Swedish approach a full 180 years ago!)

In the midst of a pandemic, it is easy to forget Farr’s Law, and think the number infected will just keep rising, it will not. Just as quick as measures were introduced to prevent the spread of infection we need to recognize the point at which to open up society and also the special measures due to ‘density’ that require special considerations. But most of all we must remember the message Farr left us: what goes up must come down.”

(“COVID-19: William Farr’s way out of the Pandemic”, The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine)

What this tells us is that the fatality rate is a more reliable barometer of what is taking place than the spike in new cases. And what the death rates signals is that the virus is on its last legs. We are not seeing the onset of a second wave, but the gradual ending of the first. Also, the fact that tens of thousands of young people are contracting Covid-19 without experiencing any pain or discomfort, confirms that immunity is widespread. This is a very positive development.

Here’s how Dr. John Thomas Littell, MD, who is President of the County Medical Society, and Chief of Staff at the Florida Hospital, summed it up in a letter to the editor of the Orlando Medical News, He said:

“Why did we as a society stop sending our children to schools and camps and sports activities? Why did we stop going to work and church and public parks and beaches? Why did we insist that healthy persons “stay at home” – rather than observing the evidence-based, medically prudent method of identifying those who were sick and isolating them from the rest of the population – advising the sick to “stay at home” and allowing the rest of society to function normally.”

(“Second wave? Not even close”, JB Handley, The Off-Guardian)

Why? Because we were misled by Doctor Fauci and the Vaccine Gestapo, that’s why. In contrast, Sweden shrugged off the dire predictions and fearmongering, and “got it right the first time.”

Hurrah for Sweden!

==========================

A stock-take of New Zealand’s management of Covid-19

A stock-take of New Zealand’s management of Covid-19  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZ Centre for Political Research, 10 July 2020

At Labour’s annual conference last weekend, Covid-19 dominated Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s address: “Our strong health response now gives us an economic head start, the ability to move from responding to Covid-19, to recovering and rebuilding… So today my ask of you is simple. Don’t put on the brakes when now more than ever is the time that we need to speed up… let’s keep up the momentum… Let’s keep rebuilding.”

The Prime Minister outlined the steps her Government has taken to help the economy recover from the hit caused when she imposed ‘the strictest constraints placed on New Zealanders in modern history’. A record $50 billion in borrowing has been providing wage subsidies, loan guarantees, job creation, re-training, and additional welfare support – leaving $20 billion of unallocated spending to ‘assist the recovery’. And while the generous funding pledges now being announced almost daily do not amount to “treating” under the Electoral Act, the scale and proximity to the election are most irregular.

With the PM pitching for a second term on the basis of her track record of managing the Covid-19 crisis, let’s do a quick stocktake of how the two main parties have responded to pandemics.

John Key’s National Government faced the swine flu pandemic in 2009, which affected up to 1.4 billion people world-wide and caused 600,000 deaths, while Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Government has, of course, been dealing with Covid-19, which, at this stage, has 12 million notified cases and 550,000 deaths.

Swine flu is caused by the H1N1 influenza virus and the pandemic, which originated in Mexico, lasted for around 19 months. Altogether, it was estimated that of the 430,000 symptomatic cases of H1N1 in New Zealand, around 116,000 visited GPs, some 1,100 were hospitalised, and 119 patients were admitted to intensive care units. Of the forty-nine deaths attributed to the disease, 86 percent had underlying health complications, most notably, respiratory illnesses, obesity, and substance abuse.

To deal with the pandemic, the National Government adopted the Ministry of Health’s Influenza Pandemic Plan – a mitigation strategy designed to manage an outbreak in such a way as to prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, whilst reducing the impact on society and the economy. While border controls were introduced, and some schools and businesses temporarily closed to reduce the spread of the disease, there was minimum economic and social disruption.

Fast-forward to 2020.

When reports of the spread of Covid-19 emerged in January, the Ministry of Health’s Influenza Pandemic Plan was again enacted. Border controls were introduced, work began on testing and tracing, and an Alert Level system was developed.

By mid-March, with fewer than 50 reported cases and no deaths, but more New Zealanders arriving home from infected areas, the Ministry of Health recommended that the country move to Alert Level 2 for a month. This involved stricter border controls, the introduction of social distancing and good hygiene measures, increased testing and tracing, a restriction on gatherings to 100 people, and a recommendation that those at the greatest risk from the disease – namely the elderly and anyone with underlying health conditions – take extra care.

Two days after introducing Level 2, the Prime Minister, warning of tens of thousands of deaths, ordered the country to Level 3 for two days, and then to Level 4 for a month.

This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator former Cabinet Minister Barry Brill has analysed the Ardern Government’s response to the pandemic and reminds us how the Prime Minister over-rode the Ministry of Health’s recommendation for “a 30-day pause at Level 2” with her Captain’s Call to lock the country down:

“The Prime Minister impulsively chose to disregard this official advice and instead leaped to the world’s most masochist restrictions – the Lockdown – with the resounding battle-cry of ‘go hard, go early’, and hang the expense!

“Political instincts and theatre easily trumped all the evidence-based science. There was no cost-benefit analysis of any kind. The PM’s historic Captain’s Call was apparently influenced by alarming forecasts from three academic computer models – one from the Imperial College of London, one from Otago University, and one from Auckland University… In announcing her extreme Lockdown decision, Ms Ardern signalled that ‘the worst case scenario is simply intolerable’. All three unvalidated models have since been thoroughly discredited by both peer reviews and real-world events.”

Barry reminds us that in spite of the media and others treating the Prime Minister as a hero for keeping us safe, that is not the reality. He argues that Jacinda Ardern’s Lockdown was “the worst policy decision ever and almost surely resulted in a net loss of New Zealand lives… In retrospect, there is no evidence that our extreme Lockdown saved the life of a single New Zealander.”

We certainly know that in spite of the frail elderly being clearly identified as the group most vulnerable to Covid-19 – especially those in rest homes – Jacinda Ardern’s lockdown wasn’t able to keep them safe. Almost three-quarters of the country’s 22 deaths were of rest home residents.

While they died in spite of the lockdown, many other New Zealanders died as a result of the lockdown: mothers and babies lost their lives due to the disruption in regular health care; gravely ill people were too afraid of the virus to seek medical help from doctors or hospitals; suicides were triggered by financial ruin caused by the lockdown; cancer sufferers were unable to access life-saving tests, operations, and treatment.

Many deaths never made the headlines – like the case of a frail elderly gentleman with a chronically sore foot who lived alone but had friends who ensured he ate properly and took care of his foot. Without their support, by the end of the lockdown he had developed gangrene and died just a few weeks later – a victim of the lockdown.

Governing a country means carefully weighing up policies to ensure the damage caused by unintended consequences do not outweigh the benefits being sought. While government agencies usually provide Cost-Benefit Analyses and Regulatory Impact Statements to outline the pros and cons of policy options, as well as identifying costs and risks, Jacinda Ardern used no such analyses to inform her lockdown decision.

In fact, a new report from the OECD, which has analysed the effectiveness of the responses of various countries to the Covid-19 pandemic – not only in keeping infection and death rates low but also in minimising economic and social disruption – has ranked New Zealand ninth, with South Korea first, Latvia second, and Australia third.

Those highly ranked countries relied more on stringent isolation and quarantine measures, border controls, comprehensive testing and tracing, and good hygiene and social distancing practices, rather than on harsh lockdown restrictions.

This week’s news that Britain is opening its borders to 70 countries with returning passengers not required to self-isolate, highlights a significant flaw in Labour’s Covid-19 response.

Instead of following the Ministry of Health’s plan to manage the virus – as John Key had done during the swine flu pandemic – Jacinda Ardern decided on ‘elimination’. As a result most New Zealanders have developed no immunity to the virus. In an increasingly infected world, that will never be able to eliminate Covid-19, the Prime Minister’s strategy – which depends on our borders remaining closed – has left New Zealanders isolated and extremely vulnerable.

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark along with Sir Peter Gluckman, a former Prime Minister’s Science Advisor, and former Air New Zealand chief Rob Fyfe believe that this is unsustainable and they argue that New Zealand needs to ‘re-engage with the world’: “Just after COVID hit our shores, initial discussions centred on adopting a ‘flattening the curve’ strategy. This involved accepting there would be some influx of disease, but by using behavioural and hygiene measures, viral transmission would be slowed and our hospital system would not be overloaded.

“But soon after cases started appearing, a clear shift in strategy was made – sometimes expressed as ‘keep it out, stamp it out’. In epidemiological terms, elimination of the virus became the goal. But it required huge effort and sacrifice by all New Zealanders – the burden of which will continue to echo for many years.”

They ask, “Is New Zealand prepared to hold itself in its state of near-total isolation for the indefinite future?” Other countries “have not adopted the elimination strategy. While we pin our hopes on a vaccine, it could be much further away than the hype suggests. Can we afford to wait out another year, two years, or even more in almost total physical isolation? And at what cost? This is not just affecting tourism and export education, but also the many ways in which New Zealand projects and leverages its place in the world.”

They conclude that unless New Zealand has global connectivity “we will rapidly progress to a position of relative disadvantage”.

These are important questions to which our Prime Minister has few answers.

It’s becoming clear that around the world countries are now beginning to treat Covid-19 as ‘just another flu’, shifting to a management strategy so life can return to “normal”.

That new normal comes with caveats of course, such as good hygiene and sensible social distancing – as well as facemask use in an increasing number of countries. Since the majority of infected people are now known to be asymptomatic, facemask use in public is seen as an effective way of helping to stop the spread of the virus.

It is something that many New Zealanders called for, but the Director General of Health refused to recommend their use – no doubt because of insufficient stocks of masks.

Professor Mark Woolhouse, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh recommends that since Covid-19 is ‘not going away any time soon, if at all’, alternative approaches are now needed: “The chances of dying from Covid-19 are at least 10,000 times greater for the over-75s than the under-15s. Our priority should be to protect the old and others at greatest risk.”

He believes, “When the reckoning comes we may well find the cure turned out to be far worse than the disease. I fear history will judge lockdowns as a monumental mistake on a global scale.”

It is becoming increasingly accepted that countries that are trying to “keep the virus out” are doing a grave disservice to their citizens.

Oxford University’s epidemiologist Professor Sunetra Gupta believes that closing borders in the long term is unsustainable: “You can only lock down for so long unless you choose to be in isolation for eternity so that’s not a good solution. Being self-congratulatory, ‘we have kept it out’, is misplaced.”

She says that instead of lockdowns, governments should be focussing their energies on shielding the elderly and those with comorbidities to protect them as much as possible. She also warns, “There is no way lockdowns can eliminate the virus … and so it’s not at all surprising once you lift lockdown in areas it will flare up again. In places where it has already swept through, a proportion of people are immune and you are not seeing it come back.”

So while in 2009 John Key followed the Ministry of Health’s pandemic plan and the country moved on once the swine flu epidemic had abated, in 2020, Jacinda Ardern ignored the warning that eliminating flu viruses is impossible in the long term and imposed such harsh State controls that ‘fortress New Zealand’ has become our reality.

As the election approaches and our future hangs in limbo, the major parties are asking voters to ‘trust’ them to manage the country out of the difficulties we now face, including massive debt, skyrocketing unemployment, collapsing businesses, and chaotic border controls.

Meanwhile, seemingly oblivious to this crisis, Labour’s probable coalition partner, the Green Party, is proposing a tax policy that would completely undermine economic recovery through an annual wealth tax on everything, income tax increases, higher minimum wages, and a guaranteed income for those not in employment that would reduce the incentive to work.

Since Labour hasn’t ruled it out, New Zealand’s future could be even worse than we had thought!

==========================

Read it and weep: sorry tale of a Covid catastrophe

Read it and weep. Sorry tale of a Covid catastrophe  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 6 July 2020

When the history of COVID-19 is written, it will be a sorry tale of ­ineptitude at the highest levels of world medicine — how global politics, cover-ups and fashionable causes left the world, Taiwan aside, lamentably unprepared for an inevitable pandemic.

The World Health Organisation is the United Nations agency primarily responsible for inter­national public health, yet its record is disturbing. It is accused of medical malpractice for knowingly promoting useless malaria drugs which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of African children. Along with the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, it covered up UN culpability in a Haitian cholera epidemic, responsible for more than 10,000 deaths. And despite Zimbabwe’s life expectancy plummeting from 61 to 44 in less than two decades, it appointed Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe a “goodwill ambassador”.

This unprincipled mindset seems to have permeated medical research. In an article, The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With The Scientific Method?, The New Yorker warns that “all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed scientific findings have started to look uncertain”.

Biologist Richard Palmer from the University of Alberta believes scientists selectively report data, disregarding what they don’t want to see. “Our beliefs are a sort of blindness,” he says.

Stanford University epidemiology professor John Ionnidis expresses “increasing concern that most current published research findings are false”. In an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, he looked at the 49 most-cited clinical research studies in three major medical journals and discovered that of 34 replicated claims, 41 per cent had effectively been falsified.

The Wall Street Journal cites a dramatic upward trend in retraction notices, including for fraud. The latest high-profile withdrawal is a hydroxychloroquine study in The Lancet. HCQ has become highly politicised since President Donald Trump used it as a COVID-19 prophylactic. Indeed, despite many doctors claiming significant success with early onset coronavirus patients, the FDA has banned its use in the US.

Does politicisation of medicine explain why, despite the 2002 SARS experience, preparation for COVID-19 was so derisory? Was the pandemic declaration delayed until March for political reasons? According to the South China Morning Post, Chinese authorities knew of multiple coronavirus cases in early November. They ­officially advised the WHO on ­December 31. A month later, an international health emergency was announced.

That interval gave Beijing sufficient time to complete new hospitals, stock up on medical equipment and prepare a propaganda offensive. Even then, the emergency declaration was accompanied by a disarming advisory that: “Based on the facts on the ground, containment is possible.”

Taiwan is not a WHO member. It dismissed the official line as ­disinformation and rapidly implemented its own plans. In January, when Beijing imposed a lockdown in Wuhan, Taipei closed its borders to mainland Chinese arrivals. With a similar population to ours [Australia], it has recorded seven deaths.

Similar border closures quickly followed in Australia, Singapore and the US, earning a WHO rebuke for breeding “fear and ­stigma”, and causing “more harm than good”.

Like polite members of a college, most countries dutifully downplayed the unmistakeable warning signs, insisting that their early COVID-19 responses were based on the “best medical advice” — in other words, based on WHO-Chinese propaganda.

It’s why New York Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot recommended people “not to change any plans due to misinformation spreading on coronavirus”. She, and mayor Bill de Blasio, who encouraged New Yorkers to “Get out on the town, despite coronavirus”, simply followed the WHO script. Like London mayor Sadiq Khan, who reassured Londoners they “faced no risk” on public transport.

It explains why health authorities were silent when the Italian government bowed to the WHO’s warnings about racism by not quarantining thousands of returning Chinese workers, and why Spain suppressed publication of new COVID-19 cases to maximise participation in feminist marches.

Once the epidemic’s seriousness became impossible to hide, cautious mitigation became draconian suppression overnight. Alarmist simulation models appeared from nowhere. The Imperial College London predicted there would be 500,000 deaths in the UK and 2.2 million in the US. Australia’s deputy chief medical officer warned the best we could expect was 50,000 deaths out of five million infections. When was this known?

The prospect of hospitals being overwhelmed panicked governments everywhere. Apocalyptic projections were accepted as Holy Writ. Fear crowded out critical examination of the evidence, let alone proper consideration of the massive, potentially more harmful, economic and social consequences of prolonged lockdowns.

A pop-up hospital was built in Canberra and respirators and ­additional beds were hastily procured. In the event, the beds and respirators overwhelmed patients. Despite dire predictions, just more than 100 Australians, 44,000 Britons and 132,000 Americans have died so far.

Surely such a dismal track record calls for caution? But no. Ahead of Black Lives Matter marches, politics intervened again. A Seattle public health spokes­person rationalised: “We can’t let COVID-19 distract us from our resolve and show how it is possible to break down the historical institutional racism that affects our communities every day.”

Victorian authorities also put this “worthy cause” ahead of public health. Having translated social distancing rules into 53 languages and fined thousands of individuals for breaking them, the government exempted 10,000 Melbourne BLM protesters from prosecution. Now, a rattled Premier Daniel Andrews is desperate to ensure that this double standard and the government’s bungled quarantining and testing protocols are not linked to the latest spike in infections.

The sad truth is, COVID-19 was foreseeable and, potentially, preventable. It has exposed a medical-political complex unsuited to its primary duty of protecting public health. Even in democracies, when ideology calls, governments have demonstrated scant regard for the wellbeing of those they represent. As a consequence, this pandemic has inflicted on a trusting world needless deaths and unnecessary economic hardship.

It is a very sorry tale indeed.

=========================

The Brave New Normal

The Brave New Normal  By CJ Hopkins, anti-empire.com, 2 July 2020

Hello Brave New Normal Brought to You by Zombie Totalitarian Cultists – “It is irresistible…The chance to be a part of something like that, and to unleash one’s hatred on those who refuse to go along with the new religion”

“When you are talking to them, you’re not talking to them. You’re talking to the agents. You’re talking to the machines. Try it sometime. You’ll see what I mean. It’s like talking to a single algorithm that is running in millions of people’s brains”.

It was always going to come to this … mobs of hysterical, hate-drunk brownshirts hunting down people not wearing masks and trying to get them fired from their jobs, “no mask, no service” signs outside stores, security staff stopping the mask-less from entering, paranoid pod people pointing and shrieking at the sight of mask-less shoppers in their midst, goon squads viciously attacking and arresting them …

Welcome to the Brave New Normal.

And it isn’t just the Maskenpflicht-Sturmabteilung. The new official narrative is omnipresent. The corporate media are pumping out hysteria about “Covid-19 hospitalizations” (i.e., anyone admitted to a hospital for anything who tested positive for the coronavirus) and “major incidents” (i.e., people at the beach). Police are manning makeshift social-distancing-monitoring watchtowers in London. There are propaganda posters and billboards everywhere, repeating the same neo-Goebbelsian slogans, reinforcing the manufactured mass hysteria. Dissent and nonconformity are being pathologized, “diagnosed” as psychopathy and paranoia. Mandatory vaccinations are coming.

You didn’t think they were kidding, did you, when they started introducing the Brave New Normal official narrative back in March? They told us, clearly, what was coming. They told us life was going to change … forever. They locked us down inside our homes. They ordered churches and synagogues closed. They ordered the police to abuse and arrest us if we violated their arbitrary orders. They closed the schools, parks, beaches, restaurants, cafés, theaters, clubs, anywhere that people gather. They ripped children out of their mother’s arms, beat and arrested other mothers for the crime of “wearing their masks improperly,” dragged mask-less passengers off of public buses, gratuitously beat and arrested people for not “social-distancing” on the sidewalk, shackled people with ankle monitors, and intimidated everyone with robots and drones. They outlawed protests, then hunted down people attending them and harassed them at their homes. They started tracking everyone’s contacts and movements. They drafted new “emergency” laws to allow them to forcibly quarantine people. They did this openly. They publicized it. It’s not like they were hiding anything.

No, they told us exactly what was coming, and advised us to shut up and follow orders. Tragically, most people have done just that. In the space of four months, GloboCap has successfully imposed totalitarianism — pathologized totalitarianism — on societies all across the world. It isn’t traditional totalitarianism, with a dictator and a one-party system, and so on. It is subtler and more insidious than that. But it is totalitarianism nonetheless.

GloboCap could not have achieved this without the approval (or at least the acquiescence) of the vast majority of the masses. The coronavirus mass hysteria was a masterstroke of propaganda, but propaganda isn’t everything. No one is really fooled by propaganda, or not for long, in any event. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari noted in the opening of Anti-Oedipus:

“The masses were not innocent dupes. At a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for.”

I am not going to try to account for the “perversion of the desire of the masses” here in this essay, but I do want to dig into the new pathologized totalitarianism a little bit.

Now, I’m going to assume that you understand that the official “apocalyptic pandemic” narrative is predicated on propaganda, wild speculation, and mass hysteria, and that by now you are aware that we are dealing with a virus that causes mild to moderate symptoms (or absolutely no symptoms at all) in 95% of those infected, and that over 99.5% survive … thus, clearly, no cause for widespread panic or justification for the totalitarian “emergency measures” that have been imposed. I am also going to assume that you watched as GloboCap switched off the “deadly pandemic” to accommodate the BLM protests, then switched it back on as soon as they subsided, and that you noted how their propaganda shifted to “cases” when the death count finally became a little too embarrassing to continue to hype.

So, I won’t waste your time debunking the hysteria. Let’s talk pathologized totalitarianism.

The genius of pathologized totalitarianism is like that old joke about the Devil … his greatest trick was convincing us that he doesn’t exist. Pathologized totalitarianism appears to emanate from nowhere, and everywhere, simultaneously; thus, technically, it does not exist. It cannot exist, because no one is responsible for it, because everyone is. Mass hysteria is its lifeblood. It feeds on existential fear. “Science” is its rallying cry. Not actual science, not provable facts, but “Science” as a kind of deity whose Name is invoked to silence heretics, or to ease the discomfort of the cognitive dissonance that results from desperately trying to believe the absurdities of the official narrative.

The other genius of it (from a GloboCap viewpoint) is that it is inexhaustible, endlessly recyclable. Unlike other official enemies, the “deadly virus” could be any virus, any pathogen whatsoever. All they have to do from now on is “discover” some “novel” micro-organism that is highly contagious (or that mimics some other micro-organism that we already have), and wave it in front of people’s faces. Then they can crank up the Fear Machine, and start projecting hundreds of millions of deaths if everyone doesn’t do exactly as they’re told. They can run this schtick … well, pretty much forever, anytime the working classes get restless, or an unauthorized president gets elected, or just for the sheer sadistic fun of it.

Look, I don’t mean to be depressing, but seriously, spend an hour on the Internet, or talk to one of your hysterical friends that wants to make mask-wearing mandatory, permanently. This is the mentality of the Brave New Normal … irrationally paranoid and authoritarian. So, no, the future isn’t looking very bright for anyone not prepared to behave as if the world were one big infectious disease ward.

I’ve interacted with a number of extremely paranoid corona-totalitarians recently (just as a kind of social experiment). They behave exactly like members of a cult. When challenged with facts and basic logic, first, they flood you with media propaganda and hysterical speculation from “medical experts.” Then, after you debunk that nonsense, they attempt to emotionally manipulate you by sharing their heartbreaking personal accounts of the people their therapists’ brother-in-laws’ doctors had to helplessly watch as they “died in agony” when their lungs and hearts mysteriously exploded. Then, after you don’t bite down on that, they start hysterically shrieking paranoia at you (“JUST WAIT UNTIL THEY INTUBATE YOU!” … “KEEP YOUR SPITTLE AWAY FROM ME!”) and barking orders and slogans at you (“JUST WEAR THE GODDAMN MASK, YOU BABY!” … “NO SHOES, NO SHIRT, NO MASK, NO SERVICE!”)

Which … OK, that would be kind of funny (or terribly sad), if these paranoid people were not just mouthpieces echoing the voice of the official power (i.e., GloboCap) that is transforming what is left of society into a paranoid, pathologized, totalitarian nightmare right before our eyes.

They’re kind of like the “woman in red” in The Matrix. When you are talking to them, you’re not talking to them. You’re talking to the agents. You’re talking to the machines. Try it sometime. You’ll see what I mean. It’s like talking to a single algorithm that is running in millions of people’s brains.

I can’t lie to you. I’m not very hopeful. No one who understands the attraction (i.e., the seduction) of totalitarianism is. Much as we may not like to admit it, it is exhilarating, and liberating, being part of the mob, surrendering the burden of personal autonomy and individual responsibility, fusing with a fanatical “movement” that is ushering in a new “reality” backed by the sheer brute force of the state … or the transnational global capitalist empire.

It is irresistible, that attraction, to most of us. The chance to be a part of something like that, and to unleash one’s hatred on those who refuse to go along with the new religion … to publicly ridicule them, to humiliate them, to segregate them from normal society, to hunt them down and get them fired from their jobs, to cheer as police abuse and arrest them, to diagnose them as “abnormal” and “inferior,” these social deviants, these subhuman “others,” who dare to challenge the authority of the Party, or the Church, or the State, or the Reich, or Science.

Plus, in the eyes of GloboCap (and its millions of fanatical, slogan-chanting followers), such non-mask-wearing deviants are dangerous. They are like a disease … an infestation. A sickness in the social body. If they refuse to conform, they will have to be dealt with, quarantined, or something like that.

Or they can just surrender to the Brave New Normal, and stop acting like babies, and wear a goddamn mask.

After all, it’s just a harmless piece of cloth.

========================

The lockdown is causing so many deaths

The lockdown is causing so many deaths  Interview with Dr Malcolm Kendrick, Spiked Online, 27 June 2020

Few would disagree that the UK’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been a shambles. We are now in the 14th week of a three-week lockdown and excess deaths are among the highest in Europe. But while the received wisdom is that lives could only have been saved by locking down harder, earlier and for longer, the benefits of lockdown remain unproven, while the costs of lockdown are starting to mount. Dr Malcolm Kendrick is a GP and author of Doctoring Data: How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense. spiked caught up with him to get his take from the frontline.

spiked: Do you think the Covid statistics are accurate?

Malcolm Kendrick: It is very difficult to tell. It is clear that different countries are recording deaths differently. Death certification is not a precise science. Normally, when someone dies, you have got a reasonably good idea what they died from. But if a person who is 85 drops dead, what do you put on the certificate? I do this, so I know it is not very accurate. GPs were advised to put Covid-19 on the certificate if they suspected somebody had it, even if there was no test done. We are in a strange situation where we are probably both over-recording Covid-19 and simultaneously under-recording it. Will we ever know what the real statistics were?

We are over-recording it because elderly people die quite often, and we may say they have died of Covid-19 but not know that was the case. Therefore there will have been a number of people who died of other things who have been recorded as dying of Covid-19. Equally, there will be people who died of Covid-19 but the GP did not know, so did not put it on the certificate. It really depends on how people decide to record the death.

The really concerning thing is that if all the deaths taking place during lockdown are put down as Covid-19 deaths, we are going to miss the fact that the lockdown policies have caused an increase in deaths from many other things. There has been a 50 per cent reduction in people turning up to A&E. It is clear that people just do not want to bother the doctors. And a number of these people will be dying. If we muddle the Covid-19 statistics in with the other statistics, we might think the lockdown has prevented a certain number of deaths, when it has actually caused a large number of deaths.

spiked: Was there any danger of hospitals becoming overwhelmed from Covid?

Kendrick: The clarion call was to clear the hospitals of patients. There was a point when my local hospital was a quarter full. Staff were wandering around with nothing to do. You hear this idea that all NHS staff have been working 20 times as hard as they have ever done. This is complete nonsense. An awful lot of people have been standing around wondering what the hell to do with themselves. A&E has never been so quiet.

This initial response was understandable, but it quite rapidly became clear that it was an overreaction. The problem then was that it was essentially decided that wherever beds could be found, patients would be put in them, whether tested or not tested, positive or negative. They basically just started throwing people out into the intermediate care sector.

The average age of death from Covid-19 in the UK is around 82, and most of those people have comorbidities. I said to our managers that we had to test people and could not just be throwing them into nursing homes. But that is what they did. Homes were virtually ordered to take elderly patients. We had one nursing home that ended up with 12 deaths in a week.

The health service treated elderly, vulnerable people as figures on a piece of paper. The lack of any brain power being applied to this was amazing. They had one objective – to clear the hospitals – and everything else was subordinate to that. Of course, they will never say this is what happened. But that is precisely what did happen.

spiked: You’ve described our policy as an ‘anti-lockdown’. What do you mean by that?

Kendrick: How many people aged 15 or under have died of Covid-19? Four. The chance of dying from a lightning strike is one in 700,000. The chance of dying of Covid-19 in that age group is one in 3.5million. And we locked them all down. Even among the 15- to 44-year-olds, the death rate is very low and the vast majority of deaths have been people who had significant underlying health conditions. We locked them down as well. We locked down the population that had virtually zero risk of getting any serious problems from the disease, and then spread it wildly among the highly vulnerable age group. If you had written a plan for making a complete bollocks of things you would have come up with this one.

spiked: Was there a reluctance to confront the potential damage caused by lockdown?

Kendrick: You cannot just spend all the money in the world on something, because that money needs to pay for other things. NICE has a cut-off point for expenditure. They are willing to spend £30,000 to achieve one extra year of high-quality life. This has been the policy for 20 years. The last figure on how much this will cost the UK government was over £300 billion. Even if you divide that by 500,000, which is the total number it was initially suggested might die, you still end up with a figure that is about £600,000 per death. You cannot dissociate money and health.

We are spending as much on Covid-19 as we would spend on the NHS in three normal years. You have got to ask the question of what we are going to get from that. Refusing to engage that question is political cowardice. Politicians have just said they did what everyone else did and so we cannot blame them for anything that has happened. It was only Sweden that did not go down that route, and Japan, too, which has had very few deaths.

I have looked at the impact of social upheaval in the post-Soviet Union countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Russia had five million excess deaths in that period due to economic problems. That is how powerful the effects can be. We are going to see the downsides of lockdown policies around the world.

It will probably be okay for Britain – we will be a bit worse-off for a while. But some countries in Africa, South Asia and South America are just going to obliterate themselves trying to model their response to Covid-19 on a lockdown they just cannot afford. South Africa is already bursting at the seams. We have to look at this with a global perspective. This is going to be extremely costly and destructive of huge sections of the population.

Even just the health costs are huge. We had a patient who had lung cancer. He was very unwell and was being treated with chemotherapy, but they just stopped treating him. He died. His life expectancy was not great, but in my mind it is absolutely a case of cause and effect – the stopping of his chemotherapy meant he gave up hope, despaired and died. That is going to be a theme.

These figures are hard to measure, because it is difficult to say with certainty that an individual did not contact the doctor because of Covid-19, and that is why they died. But this is happening.

This has cost us at least £300 billion. It is going to destroy the health of a lot of people. And for what? All of these factors are of considerable importance, and I know they are just going to be swept under the carpet. If you are not willing to accept that you might have done more harm than good, you cannot look at the situation accurately or objectively.

If you are someone who says, ‘this is bollocks’, you are dismissed as not caring about people, as wanting people to die. Dare question the orthodoxy and you face a full broadside. People want to be seen as caring. But the economy is pretty important. If you do not have an economy, you do not have a health service. If you do not have a health service, everyone dies.

spiked: We were pushed into lockdown by modelling. What did you make of those models?

Kendrick: Epidemiologists would rather overestimate a threat by 100 times than underestimate it by 10 per cent. These models will always hugely overestimate risk. Everyone has to say things will be really serious because they would look terrible if they said things would be all right and they were not. If they are proved wrong, they can say it was just as well to warn people because it could have been terrible even though it did not end up being so. This approach is taken without any cognisance of the damage that the advice they have given has caused.

Take the Imperial College modelling. It said 80 per cent of people might get infected. That has never happened with a virus. It was also predicated on the idea that everybody was equally likely to get the virus and nobody had any internal immunity against it. This also turned out to be nonsense. It also assumed a death rate of 0.9 per cent. This figure might be right for people with symptoms, but not for the wider population. The modelling was based on the worst possible scenario. And unfortunately, Imperial College seems to have an immense influence.

spiked: What other questions are not being asked at the moment?

Kendrick: One issue is how long immunity lasts for this virus. If immunity only lasts for a short time, it cannot work. This does not seem to be being discussed. If the vaccine raises antibodies, it will have an effect. But if the virus mutates or we lose our immunity, we are in trouble. It is not clear that getting the virus actually makes you immune to it in the future, and it is not clear a vaccine would either. What then? Has anyone thought that through?

We are probably all going to get Covid-19 and we are all going to keep getting it. The only purpose of lockdown was to protect the health service from being overwhelmed, which did not happen. The end result is that lockdown was a waste of time. It cannot be continued forever.

They have been trying to get a vaccine for HIV for the last 30 years and they have not managed it yet. There is a reason for that, and it is probably the same reason why they will not get a vaccine for this.

Malcolm Kendrick was talking to Fraser Myers.

======================

Coronavirus: Too many ‘experts’ were crying wolf over COVID-19

Coronavirus. Too many ‘experts’ were crying wolf over COVID-19  By Judith Sloan, The Australian, 25 June 2020

I’ve been reading John Kay and Mervyn King’s Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future. Written before­ the COVID-19 outbreak, its themes are extremely relevant to any analysis of today’s circumstances. It is highly entertaining and wide-ranging. Kay and King make the important distinction between risk and uncertainty. While it’s possible to place prob­abilities against particular contingencies in risky situations, uncer­tainty involves no such numerical specifications. The authors use the two terms puzzles and mysteries to make the point. Puzzles may be difficult to solve but, with effort, intelligence and resources, robust answers can be produced. This is not the case with mysteries.

What starts off as a mystery can become a puzzle over time. And, in the best cases, the ultimate solutions emerge. But many puzzle­s or problems are what are called wicked, as opposed to tame. There is often contradictory and changing evidence, the aims of the exercise are many and also changing, and often are not compatible in the sense that they can all be achieved at the same time.

The bottom line is that life is tough for policymakers faced with complex situations with inadequate information and the absence of a proven framework to answer the question “what is going on here?’’.

Their professional lives are made even more complicated by grandstanding “experts” whose motivations often include public exposure and adulation. Having worked for years in some labor­atory out the back, or cranking the handle of the computer with ­masses of data (often wildly inaccurate), their time in the sun has fin­ally come. Think epidemiol­ogists, infectious diseases specialists and climate scientists.

One of the main problems Kay and King identify is experts’ tendency to convert mysteries into puzzles before there is reliable information on the values of the key parameters that drive the models. Assumptions are por­trayed as “truth” and the implications of the models are seen as a reliable guide for decision-making.

Early this year, various international experts presented expect­ed infection and death rates arising from COVID-19 using statistical models. Mostly, those figures today look preposterous.

Australians were led to believe there would be between 50,000 and 150,000 deaths, numbers sufficient­ly large to scare most people. (It was rarely mentioned that more than 160,000 people die in Australia each year.) Estimates overseas were equally ridiculous, including from Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London’s School of Public Health. He claimed there could be up to 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 in Britain and up to 2.2 million in the US.

Many epidemiologists are scrambling to salvage their reput­ations. Some even suggest there are shonky scientists out there who have been making extravagant claims. There are good ones and bad ones, evidently. The fact almost all of these scientists hold publicly funded positions in well-known institutions makes this claim difficult to sort out.

Then there is the irrefutable ­response that the predictions were wrong because social distancing and lockdowns flattened the curve. That’s really just the equivalent of “heads I win, tails you lose”. Take this explanation from Ferguson: “My (recent) evidence to parliament referred to the deaths we assess might occur in the UK in the presence of the very intensive social-distancing and other public health interventions now in place. Without those controls, our assessment remains that the UK would see the scale of deaths reported in our study (namely, up to about 500,000).”

This sort of statement leaves many issues unanswered. What is the real evidence that particular types of social distancing and lockdowns affect the course of the virus? Does preventing families meeting in groups really matter compared with allowing large sporting events or music festivals? Does the closure of sit-in restaur­ants, pubs and clubs really make much difference? Does the shutting of international borders and enforced quarantine for all arrivals effectively contain the virus?

These are research questions scientists could have spent their time on. But it was never going to be enough to leave it to the scientists, because the practicality and sustainability of imposed restrictions are also critical public policy considerations. Psychologists and economists both have roles to play in this context.

It’s not too early to make the claim that the scientists were far too quick to claim COVID-19 was a puzzle rather than a mystery. Of course, coronaviruses had been identified in the past, but this variety­ has characteristics that are only now becoming clearer.

By presenting the situation as one based on risk (but with assumed­ and highly contestable values attached to the parameters) rather than uncertainty, arguably the key policymakers jumped the gun in terms of making decisions with profound social and econo­mic consequences for many­ ­people without anything close to adequate evidence.

This doesn’t mean all the measures have been wrong. After all, decision-making in the contex­t of uncertainty means policymakers will mostly err on the side of caution. What is baffling­ is why more attention wasn’t paid to the ability of the health system ­(including intensive care unit ­capacity) to deal with the disease. Let’s face it, COVID-19 hasn’t laid a glove on our healthcare system at any stage.

A bit of humility on the part of the scientists also wouldn’t go astray. They also might care to ­re-read the fable about the boy who cried wolf.

JUDITH SLOAN, CONTRIBUTING ECONOMICS EDITOR

Judith Sloan is an economist and company director. She holds degrees from the University of Melbourne and the London School of Economics. She has held a number of government appointments, including Commissioner… Read more

======================

Coronavirus – how the US took leave of its senses

 

Coronavirus – how the US took leave of its senses  From HumansAreFree, 21 June 2020

Millions of Americans remain subjected to unprecedented restrictions on their personal lives, their daily lives, their family’s lives.

The coronavirus lockdowns continue in many places. You may not know that because it gets no publicity, but it’s true. And if you’re living under it, you definitely know.

As a result of this, tens of millions of people are now unemployed. A huge number of them have no prospects of working again.

Many thousands of small businesses are closed and will never reopen. More Americans have become dependent on drugs and alcohol, seeing their marriages dissolve, and become clinically depressed.

Some of them delayed their weddings. Others were banned by the government from burying their loved ones in funerals.

Some Americans will die of cancer because they couldn’t get cancer screenings, some unknown number have taken their own lives in despair.

Others have flooded the streets to riot because bottled up rage and frustration take many forms.

The cost of shutting down the United States and denying our citizens desperately needed contact with one another is hard to calculate. But the cost has been staggering.

The people responsible for doing all of this, say they have no regrets about it. We faced a global calamity, they say. COVID-19 was the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu. That flu killed 50 million people.

We had no choice. We did the right thing. That’s what they’re telling us. Is it true?

The answer to that question matters, not just because the truth always matters, but because the credibility of our leaders is at stake here.

This is the biggest decision they have made in our lifetimes. They were able to make it. They rule because we let them. Their power comes from us.

As a matter of public health, we can say conclusively the lockdowns were not necessary.

So the question, now and always is, are they worthy of that power?

That’s not a conversation they want to have. And right now, they don’t have to have that conversation because all of us are distracted and mesmerized by the woke revolution underway outside.

They just created a separate country in Seattle. Huh? We’ll bring you the latest on that. But we do think it’s worth four minutes taking a pause to assess whether or not they were in fact lying to us about the coronavirus and our response to it.

And the short answer is this: Yes, they were definitely lying.

As a matter of public health, we can say conclusively the lockdowns were not necessary. In fact, we can prove that.

And here’s the most powerful evidence: States that never locked down at all – states where people were allowed to live like Americans and not cower indoors alone – in the end turned out no worse than states that had mandatory quarantines. The state you probably live in.

The states that locked down at first but were quick to reopen have not seen explosions of coronavirus cases. All of this is the opposite of what they said would happen with great confidence.

The media predicted mass death at places like Lake of the Ozarks and Ocean City, Md. – places where the middle class dares to vacation. But those deaths never happened.

In the end, the Wuhan coronavirus turned out to be a dangerous disease, but a manageable disease, like so many others. Far more dangerous were the lockdowns themselves.

For example, in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, panicked and incompetent governors forced nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients, and as a result, many thousands died, and they died needlessly.

This is all a remarkable story, but it’s going almost entirely uncovered. The media would rather tell you why you need to hate your neighbor for the color of his skin.

The media definitely don’t want to revisit what they were saying just a few weeks ago, when they were acting as press agents for power-drunk Democratic politicians.

We were all played. Corrupt politicians scared us into giving up control over the most basic questions in our lives.

At the same time, they gave more power to their obedient followers, like Antifa, while keeping the rest of us trapped at home and censored online.

Back then, news anchors were ordering you to stop asking questions and obey.

Chris Cuomo, CNN anchor: All right, so while most Americans are staying inside – or should be, right, if they’re not out protesting like fools – they’re not happy about being told to stay home. Staying home saves lives.

And the rest of us should be staying at home for our mothers and the people that we love, and to keep us farther apart, will ultimately bring us closer together in this cause.

Our collective conscientious actions – staying home.

Oh, if you love your mother, you will do what I say. It turns out cable news anchors don’t make very subtle propagandists.

And then Memorial Day arrived in May, and some states started to reopen. Millions of grateful Americans headed outdoors for the first time in months, and the media attacked them for doing that. They called them killers.

Swimming with your kids, they told us, was tantamount to mass murder.

Claire McCaskill, MSNBC political analyst: Frankly, a lot of the people in those crowds – they thought they were, you know, standing up for what the president believes in and that is not to care about the public safety part of this.

Robyn Curnow, CNN host: Look at this. I mean, this is kind of crazy, considering we’re in the middle of a global pandemic.

I mean, as one person quipped, you know, that’s curving the curve. That’s not flattening it.

Don Lemon, CNN anchor: Massive crowd of people crammed together, as if it were just an ordinary holiday weekend despite the risks of a virus that has killed more than 98,000 people.

Boy that montage was the opposite of a MENSA meeting. Has that much dumbness been captured on tape ever?

The last clip you saw was from May 25th. That was just over two weeks ago. “Ninety eight thousand people are dead. How dare you leave your house? You don’t work in the media. You’re not essential.”

But it didn’t take long for that message to change completely. In fact, it took precisely five days.

Here’s the same brain dead news anchor you just saw less than a week later. He is no longer angry, you’ll notice, about Americans going outside.

As long as they are rioting and burning and not doing something sinful, like swimming with their children, he is delighted by it.

Lemon: And let’s not forget, if anyone is judging this – I’m not judging this, I’m just wondering what is going on.

Because we were supposed to figure out this experiment a long time ago. Our country was started because – this is how: the Boston Tea Party. Rioting.

So don’t – do not get it twisted and think that, oh, this is something that has never happened before. And then this is so terrible, and where are we in these savages and all of that. This is how this country was started.

Yes, don’t judge. This is how this country was started – by looting CVS and setting fire to Wendy’s. Of course, you took American History. You knew that.

Andrew Cuomo’s brother must have been in the same history class because he had the same reaction.

Chris Cuomo: America’s major cities are filled with people demanding this country be more fair, more just.

And please, show me where it says that protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful.

Because I can show you that outraged citizens are the ones who have made America what she is and led to any major milestones.

They are here to yell, criticize, blame, and shame.

Citizens have no duty to check their outrage.

Wow. So, one minute they were mass murderers for going outside. Now, they’re Sam Adams. They’re patriots. They’re American heroes.

If all of this seems like a pretty abrupt pivot, fret not. Rioting is not a health risk as long as it helps the Democratic Party’s prospects in the November election. Rioting will not spread the coronavirus.

Sounds implausible, but we can be certain of that, because last week, hundreds of self-described public health officials signed a letter saying so.

They announced that the Black Lives Matter riots are a vital contribution to public health. In effect, they’re an essential medical procedure.

But that doesn’t mean you get to go outside. You don’t.

Thanks to coronavirus, you do not have the right to resume your life, and if you complain about that, it’s “white nationalism.” That was their professional conclusion.

Does a single American believe any of that? No, of course not. It is too stupid even for CNN to repeat, so they mostly ignored it.

That’s an ominous sign if you think about it. It means these people are done trying to convince you, even to fool you.

They’re not making arguments, they’re issuing decrees. They think they can. They no longer believe they need your consent to make big decisions to run the country.

Once the authority stops trying to change your mind, even by deceit, it means they’ve decided to use force – and they have.

During the lockdowns, people whose loved ones died were not allowed to have funerals for them. Think about that. It’s hard to think of anything crueler, but it happened to a lot of people. They claimed it was necessary.

It was not necessary. And we know that because now that a man has died whose death is politically useful to the Democratic Party, the authorities have given him three funerals and not a word about a health risk.

Or consider King County, Wash – that’s where Seattle is. Restaurants in King County are operating at just 25 percent capacity. That’s the law now. Nonessential businesses are allowed just 15 percent capacity.

The effect of that is economic disaster. Most small businesses run on very small margins. They can’t survive for long, and in fact, many have failed.

What should they do? They should join Antifa, obviously, because in King County, Wash., Antifa can do whatever Antifa wants to do.

They have taken over an entire six-block section of downtown Seattle, and that’s fine with health authorities. There is no social distancing required. They’re essential.

Are you getting the picture? Is it adding up to a message? Yes, the message is we were played. We were all played.

Corrupt politicians scared us into giving up control over the most basic questions in our lives.

At the same time, they gave more power to their obedient followers, like Antifa, while keeping the rest of us trapped at home and censored online.

In other words, they used a public health emergency to subvert democracy and install themselves as monarchs. How were they able to do this?

The sad truth is, they did it because we let them do it. We believed them, therefore, we obeyed them.

If there’s anything good to come out of this disaster, it’s that none of us will ever make that mistake again.

========================

Doug Casey on How Fake Science is Used as Propaganda

Doug Casey on How Fake Science is Used as Propaganda  By Doug Casey, Internationalman.com, 18 June 2020

International Man: The Lancet recently retracted an anti-hydroxychloroquine study, which the media had used to attack Trump.

Trump had admitted to taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventative measure against the coronavirus. The media then went into a frenzy. The talking heads often cited The Lancet study as proof hydroxychloroquine was dangerous.

The bottom line is that bogus research made its way—likely deliberately—into one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. People then used this “science” as a political weapon.

What is your take on this?

Doug Casey: I’d say the whole charade is tragic, except that “tragic” has become the most overused word in the language today. It bears a short discussion.

Look at the recent death of a small-time career criminal, George Floyd. It’s as if “tragic” were part of his name. It’s as if people no longer understand the meaning of the word. A tragedy used to mean that a heroic protagonist succumbed to a cosmic force. There are no heroes in the degraded melodrama, just villains, where a costumed thug murdered a street thug under the color of law.

Sorry to go off on a tangent. But it’s a timely instance of another word whose meaning has been twisted. It’s Orwellian, like so many other things in our devolving society.

Let’s talk about something that’s actually tragic: the corruption of science over the last couple of generations.

I’ve subscribed to Scientific American, Discover, and New Scientist for many years. During this time, I’ve noticed a distinct change in their respective editorial policies. They’ve all been politicized, captured by the PC left. These popular magazines are nowhere near the quality they once were. But this is just symptomatic of a bigger problem.

You might recall the 2018 hoax where three academics, disgusted with widespread incompetence and dishonesty in research, submitted absurd “spoof” papers to twenty leading journals. They were written in gobbledygook, full of made-up facts and flawed reasoning. But most, as I recall, were peer-reviewed and published.

If you research the subject a bit, you come to the conclusion half the peer-reviewed papers—absolutely in “soft” fields like psychology, sociology, political science, race and gender studies, etc.—are unreadable, dishonest, useless, and pointless.

Why might this be? If an academic wants to advance in today’s university system, he has to publish research. It’s Pareto’s Law in action, the 80–20 rule. It’s pretty reliable, 80% of this sort of thing is crap because it’s written mainly to fabricate credentials, not advance knowledge.

This is a bad thing.

It’s causing the average guy, who may not know anything about science but still has some respect for it, to lose that respect. That’s because science has become politicized.

You can see it with the conflicting information about COVID-19. Is it deadly or just another seasonal flu? Does it affect everyone, like the black death, or mainly the old and sick? Does almost everyone who contracts the virus get very sick or die or only a tiny percentage? Should you quarantine or live normally?

So far, as near as I can tell, the great virus hysteria has gone from being the next black plague to basically a big nothing. It’s not nearly as bad as the Asian Flu from the 50s or the Hong Kong Flu from the 60s. Forget about the Spanish Flu—there’s no comparison whatsoever. The main effect of COVID isn’t medical; it’s the hysteria that’s destroyed the economy. And political actions are even more insane than those after 9/11.

Politics thrives on hysteria. The politicization of everything is the real problem. And it’s not just about the total disruption of society and multitrillion-dollar deficits. For instance, I’ve played poker with a bunch of guys in Aspen every Monday night for years. Now, even though the lockdown in town is easing, the group is breaking up because most of them insist that everyone wear a mask. I won’t, nor will a couple of other guys. So, between that and a few guys who are now scared to socialize no matter what … game over. It may also mean the end of a larger Friday business lunch group I belong to that’s been around for decades.

There are millions of similar small rips in the social fabric taking place everywhere now. And they’re largely justified by “the science.”

The real problem is that the knock-on effects of the virus will last much, much longer than the trivial virus itself—which will soon burn out and be forgotten. The political, economic, and social changes, however, will linger for years, as will attitudes toward “science.”

International Man: What are the implications of people corrupting the scientific process to launder their political propaganda to shape mainstream opinions?

Doug Casey: You might think this is a new thing, but the left, in particular—who have always been advocates of social engineering— love using “science” to further their political agenda.

The first important instance of this was Karl Marx and his notion of “scientific socialism”—a totally bogus idea.

Since he first promoted it over 150 years ago, the concept has become ingrained in the culture, especially academia. People have been taught to believe there’s such a thing as “scientific socialism,” and that it’s not just inevitable, but desirable. In fact, it’s pseudoscience. But that’s just the first example of corruption of science in modern times.

Keynesianism is another example. Keynesians believe that they can manipulate the economy as if it were a machine.

A machine is a horrible analogy for the economy, however. It’s not a machine or a factory where you can pull levers to make magic happen—which is precisely what the Keynesians (who run the economic world today) think they can do.

The economy is more like a rainforest, which is very complex. It can’t be manipulated from outside by apparatchiks enforcing rules. And if you do try to manipulate a rainforest from outside, you’re likely to destroy it.

Keynesianism is a perfect example of scientism (that’s the use of the vocabulary and trappings of science for inappropriate subjects). You can see scientism used everywhere in the humanities and “soft” sciences. This is usually to legitimize some type of state intervention.

Sociology and psychology are basically about social engineering. They’re not generally scientific so much as scientistic. They often try to put a scientific patina on forcing people to interact with each other in prescribed ways.

But it goes way beyond just sociology and psychology. English departments are notorious for using leftist literary works to insinuate certain ideas in students. Economics departments use arcane math formulas to describe human action—pure scientism, with lots of ideological baggage. Marx himself was primarily a historian. Many college degrees today are completely bogus and worthless. An example? There are degrees in gender studies.

The trend is way out of control. Ridiculous scientific concepts that started with Marx are everywhere.

The same people—by that, I mean those with Marxist, socialist, and Keynesian outlooks—are behind the global warming frenzy, which is full of pseudoscience, fudged numbers, and bogus statistics.

The latest manifestation of all this, of course, is the COVID hysteria.

But behind it all is state funding of science—Big Science. It started in earnest after World War II.

Government funding is authorized by politicians. They make decisions for political reasons. In order to qualify, you have to come up with results that are politically acceptable, which itself is the best reason for not having any government funding.

But some might ask: Without the government, where would Big Science get the billions needed for giant projects?

In fact, most of the capital that goes into scientific research from the state would still go into science; knowledge has value. But money would be allocated economically, not politically, thereby creating more wealth—much more than today, when much is wasted on politically caused boondoggles. Most government science spending is necessarily misallocated.

The increasingly political nature of science funding has served to discredit the idea of science itself.

International Man: The Democrats liken themselves as the so-called “Party of Science.” What do you think?

Doug Casey: It’s nonsense, but it’s very clever marketing on their part.

They get away with it because the Republicans are basically the party of business. And more importantly, the people who vote Republican tend to be traditionalist and religion-oriented.

That’s a problem because scientific thinkers tend to see religion as irrelevant, dangerous, or even laughable—at best, as an inaccurate or bogus way to describe the world.

Democrats, on the other hand, are notoriously secular and non-religious. Coincidentally, so are most scientists. That’s resulted in some unfortunate confusion. Democrats, illogically, seem to believe that just because they’re secular, they must be scientific.

The fact is, however, that the Democrats are not the party of science.

In fact, they’re the party of pseudoscience, bogus science, and scientism. Science doesn’t mix well with politics—or religion.

But Democrats are clever marketers, linking themselves with science to differentiate themselves from Republicans, the party of tradition and religion.

When you think about tradition and religion, it can bring to mind flat earth theories, geocentric astronomy, Torquemada, the persecution of Galileo, and witch trials. Democrats love to paint themselves as rational advanced thinkers and Republicans as superstitious atavists.

Of course, religion and science have been at each other’s throats forever. Another reason I’ve always said the Dems are more the evil party and the Reps more the stupid party. But a pox on both their houses…

International Man: Events like this seem to be a prime reason why a growing number of people are losing confidence in previously credible institutions and the self-anointed “experts.”

What does this mean?

Doug Casey: Tens of millions now have college degrees that they think mean something. In fact, they’re worth less than a high school diploma was before World War 2. People go on to get PhDs, which, it’s always been said, stands for “piled higher and deeper.”

Especially since World War 2, government has gotten vastly bigger and involved in everything. Huge mistake…

The government’s role is simple—to protect people from coercion: protection from domestic coercion, which implies the police force; protection from transnational coercion, which implies an army; and providing justice within the country, which implies a judicial system.

The government shouldn’t do anything else.

But since it’s now involved in absolutely everything, you need “experts” to decide what’s to be done.

We see this today with people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who’s nothing more than a lifelong bureaucrat. He’s lived in the swamp his entire life, and he’s a typical technocrat. He believes he knows what’s best for you.

People like Fauci have assumed tremendous power over other people and the way society works. He’s a clever politician and has been effective at backslapping and backstabbing. And wheedling his way into a high bureaucratic position. The government is full of people like him.

Another important thing about COVID is that they call it a “health crisis.”

That’s untrue for several reasons. First, health is something that you take care of yourself. It’s personal, not public. As wonderful and as advanced as medicine has become, it’s of little use for maintaining your health.

You maintain your health through proper diet, exercise, and good habits. Medicine is about repairing damage if you have a serious injury or illness. It overlaps, obviously, but is essentially very different from health care.

Anyway, COVID has been dressed up as an excuse to not just destroy the economy, but in many ways, destroy society itself. Similar to global warming, Keynesianism, Marxism, and other forms of scientism.

It’s one of many signs of how society is degrading at an accelerating rate.

I don’t know what the next massive boondoggle is going to be after this is over. You might recall the police state pictured in the excellent movie “V for Vendetta” was brought into being because of a fake virus epidemic. Talk about life imitating art! If things keep going in this direction, the US will start looking like the old USSR.

International Man: Society is degrading at an accelerating pace. What can people do to protect themselves?

Doug Casey: Unfortunately, the whole world seems to worship democracy. Democracy, however, is really just mob rule dressed in a coat and tie. Worse, that trend is not only still in motion, but it’s accelerating.

What can you do to protect yourself? It’s becoming a situation of sauve qui peut—every man for himself. That’s where gold comes in.

I’ve always been a fan of gold—always for savings and often as a speculation. It’s been great, and gold bugs have done very well. It’s gone from $35 to over $1,700. And it’s going much higher.

It’s a great way to save money and build capital over time. At the moment, I’m speculating in gold mining stocks, which are extremely cheap. I expect the next mania to be in them.

But I don’t have any political solutions for people, except to stop looking to politics as the solution to problems. And stop acting like a bunch of chimpanzees looking for a leader.

Politics is the problem, the cause of most of today’s problems. It’s not the solution.

Editor’s Note: Economically, politically, and socially, the United States seems to be headed down a path that’s not only inconsistent with the founding principles of the country but accelerating quickly toward boundless decay.

It’s contributing to a growing wave of misguided socialist ideas.

That’s exactly why Doug Casey and his team just released this new video outlining what it’s all about and what comes next. Click here to watch it now.

===================================

Coronavirus: Inflated pandemic estimates weaken climate forecasts

Coronavirus. Inflated pandemic estimates weaken climate forecasts  By Adam Creighton, The Australian, 17 June 2020

Tony Abbott’s suspicion that climate change modelling was “absolute crap” soon will resonate more broadly — so spectacularly bad was expert modelling of the spread and lethality of the coronavirus, faith in all modelling must surely suffer.

Why trust the experts to forecast the climate decades into the future when they were so wrong about a disease related to the common cold?

Official coronavirus and climate change modelling share catastrophic predictions. Unfortunately for virus modellers, reality dawned a lot sooner and it has delivered an F for fail.

The pandemic has damaged the credibility of “experts” and highlighted the limits of “the science” and the misplaced hubris of the political class.

On whatever measure you choose — deaths, infections, rate of transmission — the epidemiological models that convinced governments to take a sledgehammer to their economies, now mired in unrest, have proved scandalously pessimistic and out by orders of magnitude.

We were told the virus’s spread would be “exponential”. It wasn’t; transmission was falling before mandatory lockdowns scared the daylights out of people.

The infection fatality rate, we were told, would be about 1 per cent; it’s closer to 0.2 per cent, akin to a severe flu. Apparently, lifting lockdowns early would see cases surge; they haven’t. And we were all vulnerable — but most weren’t; the median age of death is well over 80. Driving is more dangerous. At least half of deaths globally have been in aged-care homes, which were already locked down. We understood you could catch COVID-19 again — also wrong. We closed schools and wore masks, but the evidence we needed to do so is scant.

The raw numbers speak for themselves. The death toll globally is on track to be smaller than the flu pandemics of the 1950s and 60s, when the world’s population was less than half that today.

Indeed, if you put the number of global deaths last year, this year, and next year (about 60 million each year) on a simple column chart you’ll struggle to see the ­impact of COVID-19.

Future historians will be shocked at the disproportionate response. At least they will chuckle at SAGE, the acronym for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, the expert panel advising the British government, which has presided over the worst performance of any country.

But it wasn’t only the British. Experts in Sweden warned 100,000 would die by June if it didn’t lock down as the rest of Europe had, yet fewer than 5000 were lost. Experts said 420,000 might die in Japan without a hard lockdown. Fewer than 950 did.

Our own experts at the Doherty Institute said 5000 intensive care unit beds would be required, even with strict isolation and social distancing; fewer than 50 were needed. For anyone here who is worried about a second wave of COVID-19, we’re still waiting on the first one.

Climate modelling was struggling even before the pandemic, given the planet has warmed about half as much as forecast by the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in back 1990.

“Almost the entire alarm about global warming is based on model predictions. If you just look at the last 30 to 40 years of data, nothing spectacular has happened, there’s no sign temperature increase is accelerating,” says Benny Peiser, founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London.

It’s remarkable we put so much faith in expert models, given their history of failure. The Club of Rome in 1972 notoriously forecast that growth would collapse as the world’s resources ran out, ignoring human ingenuity and the shale revolution.

Financial models failed to account for — indeed they probably facilitated — the global financial crisis. And as almost every utterance by a central bank governor since has reminded us, economists struggle to know what happened last month, let alone forecast the impact of a policy change tomorrow.

“In the late 1990s, models suggested the entire Great Barrier Reef would bleach every year by 2020, but in the last 15 years parts of the reef have bleached on only three occasions, with each event affecting only one-third of the reef,” says physicist Peter Ridd, a former professor of James Cook University.

In the last 15 years parts of the Great Barrier reef have bleached on only three occasions.

It’s remarkable we put so much faith in climate modelling, given it is a far more complex task. “Climate sensitivity” — the size and speed of the response of global temperatures to a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — is harder to predict than a spreading virus. Even if we knew it, drawing implications about future economic growth is even more heroic.

“The big mistake that’s clearly been made is the failure to systematically appraise the models that underpin policy with actual data,” notes Gordon Hughes, a former professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, speaking on a panel about the pitfalls of mathematical modelling last month.

By April, we knew the coronavirus was not as dangerous as feared yet modellers and governments doubled down on the catastrophe narrative. It’s almost July and people in our capitals are wearing masks in their own cars.

How can we avoid the hysteria next time? It won’t be easy. All the incentives are stacked in favour of dodgy doomsday modelling; apocalyptic scenarios allow politicians to increase their power and appear caring. Public health experts enjoy more prestige. And some of the media naturally prefer models with horrifying forecasts to draw eyeballs.

Humans have a natural tendency to focus on extremes — what psychologists call a “negativity bias”. Models are almost cartoons, highly simplified versions of reality. History has proved a better guide to the future. It’s a pity we’re wasting res­ources on a royal commission into the bushfires. How and why authorities have overreacted so much, and how we can avoid doing so again, would be a better line of inquiry.

ADAM CREIGHTON, ECONOMICS EDITOR

Adam Creighton is an award-winning journalist with a special interest in tax and financial policy. He was a Journalist in Residence at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2019.

=====================

Previous articles

• NY BAR(R) ASSOCIATION ADVOCATES MANDATORY COVID-19 …  By Joseph P. Farrell, 13 June 2020
• THE COVID-19 “PANDEMIC”  By Andrew Johnson, 9 June 2020
• GERMAN INTERIOR MINISTRY COVID 19 REPORT RAISES SERIOUS ISSUES  By Joseph P. Farrell, 4 June 2020
• Global vaccine passport coming soon for you  By Editor, Cairnsnew, 4 June 2020
• Evidence that Covid-19 is a Bioweapon  By Stefan Stanford, AllNewsPipeline, 29 May 2020
• Virtually no evidence to justify lockdowns  By Ryan McMaken, The Mises Institute, 28 May 2020
• Mandatory vaccinations, biometric identification and digital payments coming soon  By Alexandra Bruce, via CairnsNew, 28 May 2020
• COVID VACCINE. WHAT ELSE COULD THEY PUT IN THE SHOT  By Jon Rappoport, Infowars.com, 27 May 2020
• The idea of ‘social distancing’ came from a 14-year-old’s scientific study  By Jeffrey A. Tucker, 26 May 2020
• COVID-19 lockdowns are ruining economies  By John Rofe, 20 May 2020
• How will history judge our coronavirus lockdown  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 18 May 2020
• Today’s Covid Dictators Dishonour Heroes of Past Generations  By Tom Harris, Jay Lehr, The Heartland Institute, 17 May 2020
• Trump to enforce coronavirus vaccine for all  By Mike Adams, Natural News, 15 May 2020
• ‘Social Distancing’ Is Snake Oil, Not Science By William Sullivan, American Thinker, 13 May 2020
• Make the Lie Big. This time, Coronavirus  by Jeff Thomas, InternationalMan.com, 12 May 2020
• The Cost of Big Pharma’s Covid-19 Vaccine Will Be Paid in Lives and in Billions of Dollars  By Paul Craig Roberts, 11 May 2020
• Ex-Czech President Václav Klaus Warns We’re on the Path to Huxley’s “Brave New World”  By Claudio Grasse, Anti-Empire.com, 10 May 2020
• The Washington Times, Coronavirus Hype Biggest Political Hoax In History  By Cheryl K. Chumley, The Washington Post, 6 May 2020
• Professor Neil Ferguson, And The Idiot Presidents And Prime Ministers Who Believe His Computer Predictions  By Jon Rappoport, from LewRockwell.com, 5 May 2020
• Dr. Montagnier Shines New Light on COVID-19 and The Future of Medicine  By Matthew J.L. Ehret, Veterans Today, 4 May 2020 
• UK elites’ Covid-19 PROJECT FEAR has worked  By Norman Lewis, 4 May 2020
• Nobel Prize winner who discovered HIV says coronavirus was definitely released from Wuhan lab, contains HIV DNA  By Ethan Huff, Natural News, 1 May 2020
• AN OPEN LETTER TO NZ PM ADERN RE COVID-19  28 April 2020
• Bill Gates Discusses Vaccinating ‘7 Billion Healthy People’ In Order To ‘Return To Normal’  By Phillip Schneider, Waking Times, 26 April 2020
• Poor decisions on the coronavirus make tough problems worse  By Terry McCrann, The Australian, 25 April 2020
• Coronavirus. Why I won’t be signing up to the PM’s contact-tracing app  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 22 April 2020
• What if the lockdown was a giant mistake  By Ron Paul, 21 April 2020
• The great 2009 Swine Flu ‘pandemic’ fraud  By Jon Rappoport, 17 April 2020
• A cure worse than the disease  Peter Andrews, RT.com, 16 April 2020
• Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda. A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination  By Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 15 April 2020
• Seasonal flu kills many more than Covid-19, yet nobody talks about it By Hanne Nabintu Herland, Herland Report, 12 April 2020
• Northern Italy’s Economy Is Highly Integrated with China’s  By Philip Giraldi, Strategic Culture Foundation, 11 April 2020
• The New and Improved Propaganda  by Jeff Thomas, Internationalman.com, 7 April 2020
• The Real Reason for the New Cold War with Russia  Interview with Vladimir Pozner by International Man, 4 April 2020
• The Biggest Fraud in History is Happening Right Before Our EyesBy Gary D. Barnett, LewRockwell.com, 1 April 2020
• The Great Hysteria Pandemic  By John Lee, from AntiEmpire.com, 29 March 2020
• Coronavirus. It will be unhealthy to ignore the cost of all this  By Henry Ergas, The Australian, 27 March 2020
• Covid-19 Panic Reaffirms Humans Are Hostages to Media and Their Own Lizard Brain  By Claudio Grass, antiempire.com, 27 February 2020
• Assange’s Persecution Has Exposed Media Depravity The World Over  By Caitlin Johnstone, 22 February 2020
• The Geopolitics Of Biological Weapons Part 1: A Useful And Timely Factual Overview. Part 2: Efficiency & Deployment
• New Zealand is allowing apartheid by stealth  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR, 3 February 2020
• Prison Inmates More Ethical Than Western Media and Governments  By Caitlin Johnstone, 25 January 2020
• The US Police StateBy Lawrence Ferlinghetti, via Zerohedge, 23 January 2020
• Putin Has Purged The West From The KremlinBy Tom Luongo, via Zerohedge, 18 January 2020
• Why Everything is Fucked  By Caitlin Johnstone, 22 December 2019
• Barack Obama birth certificate  By Richard R. Siverlieb, US Attorney at Law, 14 December 2019
• Are Women Destroying Academia. Probably  By Lance Welton, The UNZ Review, 27 November 2019
• Now Assange is safely locked up, Sweden drops its “investigation”  By Caitlin Johnstone, 20 November 2019
• Hong Kong mob protesters rule the streets  By Hedley Thomas, The Australian, 19 November 2019
• Scientists Discover That The Heart & Brain Respond To Future Events – Before They Happen  By Arjun Walia, Collective Evolution, 20 October 2019
• Is Iran really the world’s biggest exporter of terrorism  By Professor Ian Hall,  American Herald Tribute Editor, 13 October 2019
• Yemen Houthis defeat three brigades of Saudi Arabian army  By Frederico Pieraccini, American Herald Tribune, 1 October 2019
• Vacancies for True Blue Leaders  By Brigadier George Mansford, 29 September 2019
• Why Google’s “quantum supremacy” means the end of encryption security for cryptocurrency, military, finance and personal communications  By Mike Adams, Natural News, 23  September 2019
• ‘Woke’ religion filling the void in modern societies  The Australian editorial, 17 September 2019
• Nostalgia, recalling the golden age of rock music  By Damon Linker, The Week, 31 August 2019
• How to Make Sense of Foreign Protests, Conflicts and UprisingsBy Caitlin Johnstone, American Herald Tribune, 29 August 2019
• Latest Australian Foreign Policy Venture in the Middle East a Symptom of a Much Wider Problem  By James O’Neill, American Herald Tribune, 23 August 2019
• Hong Kong In Crosshairs Of Global Power StruggleBy Kevin Zeese and  Margaret Flowers, via ConsortiumNews.com
• Will Ukraine return to popular rule, or will the NeoNazis-oligarchs prevail  By The Saker, 15 August 2019
• Prince Charles. Is the king you would choose  By Tom Bower, Daily Mail, 27 July 2019
• MH17 Evidence Tampering Revealed by MalaysiaBy John Helmer, CheckpointAsia.net, 24 July 2019
• About Russia and Putin  By Israel Shamir, CheckpointAsia.com, 17 July 2019
• Putin Is Right, Liberalism Is Dead, So What Will Replace It  By Dmitry Orlov, 7 July 2019
• The West’s Trumped-Up Hatred of Iran Serves The Zionist Dream of a Greater Israel Dominating the Middle East  By Stuart Littlewood, The American Tribune, 2 June 2019
• Everything About the BBC,CNN Account of Tiananmen Square Is a Lie  By Godfree Roberts, CheckPoint Asia, 4 June 2019
• Always looking on the bright side of life  By Ruth Ostrow, The Australian, 3 June 2019
• The continuing cover-up of the health consequences of 5G  By Arjun Walia, Collective Evolution, 26 May 2019
• Who is going to run a perfect world  By John Rappoport, The Matrix Revealed, 23 May 2019
• Former Prime Minister Paul Keating referred to the Australian intelligence agencies as nutters  By James O’Neill, American Herald Tribute, 12 May 2019
• How did our nation, Australia, sink to this  By Andrew Clennell, The Australian, 9 May 2019
• The Bolshevik Revolution’s Jewish Soul  From William, Defend Europa, 7 May 2019
• Why Venezuela Is a Threat to The Neo-colonial World-System  By Dr. Charles McKelvey, American Herald Tribune, 4 May 2019
• The madness of nuclear deterrence  By Mikhail Gorbachev, The Wall Street Journal, 1 May 2019
• The Martyrdom of St. Julian of Wikileaks  By Dmitry Orlov, 29 April 2019
• Who killed the John F Kennedy, his brother Robert and his son John  By Laurent Guyenot, 24 April 2019
• Russia Warns Bolton ‘Monroe Doctrine’ Remarks Are Insulting to Latin America  By Andre Vltchek, American Herald Tribute, 23 April 2019
• When philosophy goes begging in society  By Jon Rappoport, nomorefakenews.com, 19 April 2019
• The Legal Narrative Funnel That’s Being Used To Extradite Assange  By Caitlin Johnstone, American Herald Tribune, 17 April 2019
• Assange Arrest, Ecuador and UK, Bullied by US, Throw WikiLeaks Founder to the Dogs By Makia Freeman, ToolsForFreedom.com 13 April 2019
• Kill Them Over There, Not Here, Please  By Jeremy Salt, American Herald Tribune, 22 March 2019
• Assessment of the Middle East and North Africa situations and futures  Interview with Adbel Bari Atwan, American Herald Tribune, 19 March 2019
• President Putin’s address to Russia’s National Assembly  Authored by Dmitry Orlov via Russia Insider, 13 March 2019
• Putin Is the Preeminent Statesman of Our Time  John Chuckman, 9 March 2019
• Shining a light on the endlessly divisive social conflicts  By John Anderson, The Australian, 25 February 2019
• “The war on Venezuela is built on lies”  By John Pilger, 24 February 2019
• Venezuala, historic and current issues, and solutions  Interview with Michael Hudson, The Saker, 11 February 2019
• The Intolerable Scourge Of Fake Capitalism From Zerohedge, 18 November 2018
• The cultural world changed with Professor Jordan PetersonBy Judy Stove, Quadrant Online, 29 October 2018
• Mainstream media, journalism is dead  By John Pilger, via ConsortiumNews.com. 22 September 2018
• Norway Officials Admit They Knew Nothing About Libya But Joined Regime Change Efforts Anyway From Zerohedge, 20 September 2018
• Serena, that cartoon, and the truth about bigotry By Brendan O’Neill, Spikes Online, 15 September 2018
• How the Swedish model is collapsing under the weight of Muslim immigrants  By Henry Ergas, The Australian, 14 September 2018
• Doug Casey On China’s Exploitation Of Africa  An interview with Doug Casey, CaseyReasearch.com, 4 September 2018
• Abraham Lincoln, the myth is destroyed  By Thomas DiLorenzo, 2 September 2018
• Sanction Mania vs. Russia  By Stephen F. Cohen, 17 August 2018
• How to restore Australia’s status as the ‘Lucky Country’  Senator Fraser Anning’s first speech
• How the rot started in Australian business  By Robert Gottliebsen, The Australian, 13 August 201
• Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the real story From State of the Nation, 5 November 2014
• Breakout from the controlled ordinary mind  By Jon Rappoport, , 17 July 2018
• The official Skripal story must be a false flag botch-up  By Craig Murray, craigmurray.org, 15 July 2018
• The infinite power of imagination  By Jon Rappoport, 1 July 2018
• Why Norway’s prison system is so successful  By Christina Sterbenz, Business Insider, 12 December 2014
• Universities are failing our society By Julian Tomlinson, The Cairns Post, 21 June 2018
• Bringing Julian Assange HomeBy John Pilger, via GlobalResearch.ca, 18 June 2018
• Mass shootings and psychiatric drugs, the connection  By Jon Rappoport, nomorefakenews.com, 13 June 2018
• The positive power of imagination  By Jon Rappoport, 3 May 2018
• It’s not all bad news – indeed the news gets even better  By Bjorn Lomborg, The Australian, 30 April 2018
• The manipulation of history, and brainwashing  By Paul Craig Roberts, 19 April 2018
• Lies And Propaganda Started Nearly Every War In US History  By John Vibes, Freedom Post, 15 April 2018
• Turns out Australians are real stars at cheating.  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 4 April 2018
• Skripal poison saga just another episode in West’s propaganda campaign to corral Russia  By Finian Cunningham, 30 March
• What Happened To The West I Was Born In?  By The Saker, 28 March 2018
• The real Prince Charles, heir to the British throne  By Tom Bower, the Daily Mail, 18 March 2018
• The good old days  By Fred Reed, LewRockwell.com, 27 February 2018
• Listening is good for our soul  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 24 February 2018
• The British-American coup that ended Australian independence  By John Pilger, 20 February 2018 (repeat of article from 23 Oct 2014)
• What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa, Trump Is Right  By Karin McQuillan, American Thinker, 17 January
• Elites beware, a populist tidal wave looms  By Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 23 January 2018
• The Persecution of Julian Assange  By Paul Craig Roberts, 13 January 2018
• Has the US-Israeli-UK War with Iran officially started  From The Freedom Articles, 10 January 2018
• Milo Yiannopoulos is a threat to leaders of the outrage industry  By The Mocker, The Australian, 1 January 2018
• Can’t You See War On The Horizon? By Paul Craig Roberts. 29 November 2017
• Saudi Arabia gets its first real government  By David Goldman, Spengler, 9 November 2017
• How the Nazis won the war  By Makia Freeman, Editor of alternative media, 7 November 2017
• Blame parents for Generation Meh  By Teresa Mull, The Australian, 28 Oct 2017
• The Top 10 Characteristics of Highly Evolved Beings  By Jeff, guest author for HumansAreFree.com, 18 October 2017
• Communist barbarians led to genocide  By Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 9 October 2017
• Speech on Muslim immigrant issues in Australia  By Pauline Hanson, leader of Australian party One Nation, 9 August 2017
• The Greatest Speech Ever Written  From HumansAreFree, 24 September 2017
• Burqa message, Julian Tomlinson, 170824  By Julian Tomlinson, Cairns Post, 24 August 2017
• North Korea, The Great Deception  By Christopher Black, 12 August 2017
• Physical material ‘matter’ is not the only reality  By Arjun Walia, 3 August 2017
• The UN doesn’t like this free, liberal world  By Jennifer O’riel, The Australian, 31 July 2017
• The right to die, a human right  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 26 July 2017
• The Venezuelan Economic crisis, corruption not socialism  By Makia Freeman, 11 July 2017
• The silence of our friends A salutary reminder of the dangers of ignoring fanatics, 7 July 2017
• Understanding terrorism  By Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 6 June 2017
• Understanding blockchain, beyond the banks  By Gerald Celente, for Daily Reckoning, Australia, 3 June 2017
• Time to confront local Islamists, this is war  By Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 29 May 2017
• Media’s choice is between truth and propaganda  By Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 22 May 2017
• New Zealand is bringing in apartheid by stealth  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR Weekly, 7 May 2017
• Forget talk of clouds and cuckoos, Australia is in strife  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 25 April 2017
• Is It Time to Break Up Google  By Jonathan Taplin, 23 April
• When Government Evil Triumphs, Freedom Falls  By John Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute, 5 April 2017
• People aren’t rejecting truth, they’re rejecting the values of the elites  By Frank Furedi, Spiked Review, 3 April 2017
• Forget the candles, values are on the line  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 29 March 2017
• David Rockefeller Was Obsessed With Eugenics and Globalism  From the Corbett Report, 23 March 2017
• The Collapse of Trust in the West  Paul Craig Roberts, 21 March 2017
• Open Letter to the Brave People of Greece  By Peter Koenig, 16 March 2017
• The collapse of Western civilization  2013 speech by President Putin, repeated, 13 March 2017
• Washington’s Benevolent Mask Is Disintegrating  Paul Craig Roberts, 8 March 2017
• The world has gone mad  By Vern Gowdie on the Gold Coast, 4 March 2017
• How do you solve a problem like sharia  By Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Australian, 19 February 2017
• Background to the China and Taiwan situation  Bruce Jacobs, The Australian, 27 January 2017
• President Trump, la-la land still doesn’t get the big disrupter  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 22 January 2017
• What would happen if Donald Trump became Australian Prime Minister  By Robert Gottliebsen, The Australian, 20 January 2017
• Three Factions of the CIA that Control the World  By the Anonymous Patriots, The Millennium Report Exclusive, 17 January 2017
• The Islamization Of Britain In 2016  By Soeren Kern, The Gatestone Institute, 11 January 2017
• Russia-bashing, the world’s most dangerous blame game  By Tim Black, Spiked Online, 7 January 2017
• President Putin’s Response To Obama’s New Sanctions  By Stephen Lendman, 31 December 2016
• The remarkable consistency of experts’ views, getting it wrong  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 27 December 2016
• democracy-trumps-the-victim-generation  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 23 November 2016
• we-the-people-against-tyranny-seven-principles-for-free-government By John Whitehead, The Rutherford Institute, 9 November 2016
• cp-editorial-031116 Kiwis hold key for prosperity, by Julian Tomlinson, Cairns Post, 3 October 2016
• free-market-not-state-capitalism-holds-the-key-to-growth  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 2 November 2016
• president-putin-speech-valdai-asks-us-to-stop-provoking-russia  President Putin’s speech at Valdai, 29 October 2016
• russia-bashing-is-making-the-west-blind  By Tim Black, Spiked Online, 29 October
• what-is-at-stake-in-the-us-election  Paul Craig Roberts, 27 October 2016
• the-hypocrisy-of-saudi-arabia-on-un-human-rights-council  By Leah Schulz, Middle East Eye, 26 October 2016
• the-suicide-of-the-west  By Merv Bendle, Quadrant Online, 18 October 2016
• the-neo-marxist-dictatorship-of-man%c2%acu%c2%acfactured-minorities  By Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 17 October 2016
• a-pretext-is-needed-a-false-flag-may-be-imminent-to-drag-u-s-into-war  Mac Slavo warns, “The scenario is plenty likely.” 15 October 2016
• obesity-is-a-personal-responsibility-not-a-disease  By Gary Johns, The Australian, 5 October 2016
• new-zealand-government-is-planning-apartheid  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR Weekly, 30 September 2016
• british-parliament-confirms-libya-war-was-based-on-lies  By Anthony Freda, 27 September 2016
• syrian-president-al-assads-interview-given-to-associated-press-video-and-translation  22 September, 2016
• nobel-peace-committee-wants-obama-to-return-peace-prize  Victor Mikhin, State of the Nation, 20 September 2016
• camerons-botched-libya-intervention-blamed-for-rise-of-isis  The Times, 15 September 2016
• the-disturbing-signs-of-global-conflict-continue-to-gather-pace   By Graham Vanbergen, via Stratgic-Culture.org, Zerohedge, 11 September 2016
• interview-with-russian-president-putin  Interview by John Micklethwait. Bloomberg Business week, September 8, 2016
• the-tide-is-turning-the-official-story-is-now-the-conspiracy-theory  By Paul Craig Roberts, 8 September 2016
• Several physicists suggest our Universe is a giant simulation  By Phillip Ball, BBC Earth, 5 September 2016

August 2016

• The monumental stupidity of the failed war on drugs  By Mike Krieger, Liberty Blitzkrieg blog, from Zerohedge, 25 August 2016
• The Genocide of a Land  By Paul Craig Roberts, 23 August 2016
• Prohibition – it should be banned  By Lizzie Marvelly, NZ Herald, 20 August 2016
• Globalization on Its Head  From Mauldin Economics’ newsletter, 8 August 2016

July 2016

• A Stark Warning About the Coming Revolution From Inner Circle, 28 July 2016
• Why Sajid Tarar thinks Donald Trump is the leader Muslims need  By Michele Manelis of news.com.au
• There’s a revolution happening all over the world  By Julian Tomlinson, the Cairns Post, 7 July 2016
• Australia, disruption ahead as voters reject political contortions  The Australian editorial, 4 July 2016

June 2016

• Gorka’s plan to defeat ISIS  By Dr Sebastion Gorka, 27 June 2016
• Shut down the sheiks who incite violence by Muslims  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 18 June 2016
• Making rational instead of political decisions  By Bjorn Lomborg, The Australian, 17 June 2016
• New conservatism of Western progressives is killing humour  By Bill Leak, The Australian, 11 June 2016
• Anti-establishment Trump a voice for the West’s silent majority  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 8 June 2016
• Predicting the Efficacy of a Coming Revolution  By Jeff Thomas, Casey Research, International Man, 7 June 2016

May 2016

• The impact of immigration on Auckland NZ housing and infrastructure  By John Rofe, 26 May 2016
• Why Islam needs a reformation  By Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Wall Street Journal, 21 March
• Russia’s Palmyra concert reveals what the West lacks  By Tim Black, editor of spiked review, 14 May 2016

April 2016

• Leftists erode our social fabric  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 29 April 2016
• Union power in NZ and Australia is ruinous  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR, 29 April
• Black hole revelation may upset understanding of the universe  By Oliver Moody, The Times, 25 April 2016
• Where Is Australia’s John Galt  By Merv Bendle, Quadrant Online, 15 April 2016
• Muslim integration ‘I should have known better’  By Raheem Kassem, Breitbart, 12 April 2016
• The West’s Slow-Motion Lobotomy  By Merv Bendle, Quadrant Online, 3 April 2016

March 2016

• Australian watchdogs asleep at the wheel  By Hedley Thomas, The Australian, 13 April
• The Enemy is standard Islam, not ‘radical’ Islam  By Peter Smith, Quadrant Online, 28 March 2016
• ISIS is faithful To Islam  By Patrick Buchanan, Zerohedge, 26 March 2016
• Apartheid by stealth, in New Zealand of all places  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR Weekly, 25 March 2016
• Federal election 2016, Voters doubly disillusioned  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 23 March 2015
• North Korean Strategy, the rationale for appearing irrational  By George Friedman, Mar 21, 2016
• Same-sex marriage imposition  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 16 March
• Putin And The Press, The Demonology School Of Journalism  By James Petras, Eurasia Review, 14 March 2016
• Emperor Xi Jinping must offer hope, rather than personality cult  By Jasmine Yin, The Australian, 9 March 2016
• Beijing and the South China Sea  By Alistair Pope, Quadrant Online, 7 March 2016
• Could there be an Australian Donald Trump?  By Robert Gottliebsen, The Australian, 3 March 2016

February 2016

• Ukraine Collapse Is Now Imminent  From Zerohedge, 31 February 2016
• The New Mind Control  By John Mauldin, 26 February 2016
• Multiculturalism has proven divisive, not coalescent, so let’s ditch it  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 24 February 2016
• China is moving towards one-man rule  By Michael Sheridan, The Times, 22 February
• The disenfranchised find their voices, led by Trump  By Merv Bendle, Quadrant Online, 19 February 2016
• Loathing of the political elite  By Nic Cater, The Australian, 16 February 2016
• Real-time language translaters coming soon  By James Dean, The Australian, 8 February 2016
• Blockchain, and how it will change everything  By James Eyers, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 February 2016
• Zeka, another apocalyptic narrative du jour  By Tom Slater, Spiked Online, 6 February
• Neo-puritans strive to find offence — anywhere  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 3 February 2016

January 2016

• Donald Trump’s policies, as opposed to media hype – Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 29 January
• Social agendas are sure to wreck the military  By Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 29 January 2016
• War on cash, Governments and Banks want complete control  From Zerohedge, 25 January 2016
• CEOs are the next corruption target  By Robert Gottliebsen, The Australian, 22 January
• Why is the NZ government planning to bring in apartheid  By Dr Muriel Newman, 21 January 2016 –
• Political Correctness exposes the West  By Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, 20 January
• The new Kafkaesque Europe  By Brendan O’Neill, Editor, Spiked Online, 16 January
• The US role in ISIS and Mosul  From Zerohedge, 14 January 2015
• When faith takes up arms, silence is no option  By Henry Ergas, The Australian, 11 January 2016
• Understanding Iran v Saudi Arabia and the exhaustion of politics  By Brendan O’Neill, Editor, Spiked Online, 9 January 2016
• Understanding North Korea and its nuclear tests  From Associated Press, 7 January
• Australian unions, “louts, thugs, bullies, thieves, perjurers etc.” protected by the Labor party  By Henry Ergas, The Australian, 6 January 2015

December 2015

•  Islamic State v Islam  Article by Tom Harley, The Australian, 30 December 2015, a counter view by ‘Andrew’ and a full response by Andrew Bolt, Herald-Sun
• 2015, the year of speaking twaddle  By Professor Judith Sloan, The Australian, 29 December 2015

November 2015

• Islamist extremism is the ideology that must be defeated  From The Australian, 22 November 2205
• Paris, IS and the resurrection of old Europe  By George Friedman, from Mauldin Economics, Outside the Box, 19 November 23015
• Hard left student authoritarian demands  From Zerohedge
• Salus populi suprema lex esto, said the Romans  By Henry Ergas, The Australian, 16 November 2015
• For liberals, doomsday is the religion of choice  Brett Stephens, Wall Street Journal, 9 November 201
• Yet another last chance to save the planet  Rodney Hide, NZ Herald, 8 November
• THE CLIMATE WARS, and the damage to science  By Matt Ridley, GWPF, 6 November

October 2015

• THE DANGERS OF JUNK SCIENCE  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR, 30 October 2015
• Challenging Chinese coercion  The Australian editorial, 29 October, 2015
• Misjudging Putin’s Russia  By Marin Katusa, Zerohedge
• Stultifying academic groupthink  Editorial, The Australian, 23 October 2015
• Rape, Islam and the deafening silence  By Christie Davies, Quadrant Online, 20 October 2015
• Surgeons’ culture of concealment  By Hedley Thomas, The Australian, 17 October 2015
• Media distortions and lies  By Bjorn Lomborg, The Australian, 13 October 2015
• Big lies as the UN suppresses truth with ideology  By Jennifer Oriel, The Australian, 5 October 2015
• Syria, another failure by the US-led alliance  By Tom Switzer, The Australian, 1 October

September 2015

• President Putin address to the UN General Assembly, 280915
• Learn the lessons from Iraq, Libya and other fiascos  By Tara McCormack, Spiked Online, 26 September 2015
• A failure in our democratic system  The Australian editorial, 24 September 2015
• A Marxist clothed in white papal robes  By Susan Warner, 23 September 2015
• Modern politics are too polarised.  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 22 September 2015
• Oxfam’s real agenda – destroy Australian coal industry  By Henry Thomas, Quadrant Online, 14 September 2015
• Sweden’s ugly immigration problems  By Margaret Wente, The Globe and Mail, 14 Sept
• The Human Cost Of Socialism In Power  By Richard Ebeling, 12 September 2015
• Another explanation of the 911 tragedy  By Paul Craig Roberts, 12 September
• Syria, should USA and Russia join forces to defeat ISIS  From the Times of Oman, 9 September 2015

August 2015

• •  A sea of frothing, sweary, often pompous, intolerance  By Tim Black, Spiked Online, 29 August 2015

• • Labor promises will lead us to become another Greece  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 24 August 2015

• • The Empire of Offence laying free speech to waste  By Brendan O’Neill, The Australian, 22 August

• Same-sex marriage and the new Dark Age  By Brendan O’Neill, The Australian, 19 August 2015
• Academia’s PC police  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 18 August 2015
• Shadow Boxing with Keynesianism  By Peter Smith, Quadrant Online, 16 August 2015
• Obama’s road to disaster  By Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 8 August 2015
• Australia’s supposed Aboriginal ‘stolen generation’  By Dallas Scott, 5 August

July 2015

• What next for the EU?  By John Mauldin, 26 July 2015
• Obama’s blunder gives us a nuclear Iran  By Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 16 July
• Has Germany just killed the golden goose  By Raul Ilargi Meijer, 14 July 2015
• History lesson, why democracy has always failed in the past  By Patrick Buchanan, 13 July 2015
• The EU’s contempt for democracy  By Brendan O’Neill, Spiked 11 July 2015
• Greece, Take Back Your Democracy With Your Head Held High  Address by UKIP’s Nigel Farage, 9 July 2015
• We need a better model for democracy  By Greg Rudd, The Australian, 7 July 2015
• Why Greeks should embrace a future a Euro exit  By Tim Black, Spiked Online, 4 July
• Xi’s Anti-Corruption Campaign Is Key to China’s Prospects  By George Magnus, 2 July

June 2015

• • Papal prescription for flawed economic order  The Australian editorial, June 27, 2015

• • Nature Rebounds, Jesse Ausubel, 2015 Jesse H. Ausubel 2015

• • Interview with President Putin  Via interviewer Charlie Rose, 24 June

• • The Pope joins the EU in a sad world of make-believe  By Christopher Booker, The Telegraph, 23 June

• • The Climate Wars’ Damage to Science  By Matt Ridley, Quadrant Online, 20 June 2015

• • Yet another papal failure  By Julia Hartley-Brewer, The Telegraph UK, 19 June

• • Britain’s Royal Society abandons science, now a lobby group  From Breitbart, 17 June

• • China’s mocks G7, a gathering of debtors, disastrous confrontation  From Zerohedge, 16 June

• “The US is destroying Europe”  From Zerohedge, 11 June

May 2015

• Deradicalisation of radical Muslims is not a viable option  By Clive Kessler, The Australian, 30 May
•  “War is just a racket”, General Butler, 1933  By Paul Craig Roberts, Zerohedge, 25 May
• The fury of the elites  By Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, 16 May 2015ay 2015
• Australian universities’ shift to green left ideology  By Nic Cater, The Australian, 12 May 2015
• Establishing a nanny state in NZ  By Sir Bob Jones, 12 May 2015
• University shame  By Henry Ergas, The Australian, 11 May 2015

April 2015

• Which is worse, Islamist terror or the Cold War  The Australian Editorial, 29 April 2015
• Democracy in decay  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 22 April 2015
• Deep green parlour-pink anti-development government  By Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 16 April 2015
• Is inequality a bad thing  By Pater Tenebrarum, 13 April 2015
• Understanding China  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 9 April 2015
• Heretical thoughts about science and society  By Freeman Dyson, 8 July 2007
• The Squirrel and The Grasshopper  An old story updated, 7 April 2015
• Obama’s Iranian nuke deal a dismal outcome  By Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 6 April 2015
• Latte–belt luvvies put Greens in power  By Nic Cater, The Daily Telegraph.  1 April 2015

March 2015

• • Political correctness stifles vital debate  By Nic Cater, The Australian, 24 March 2015

• • Australian politics heading towards Greece  By Henry Ergas, The Australian, 23 Mar

• • The political system is broken  By Paul Kelly, The Australian, 19 Mar

• • Australia, the prejudice of the Left  By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 17 March

• • The liberal elite versus the hoi polloi  By Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, 16 March 2015

• • The massive EMP threat  By F. Michael Maloof, 13 Mar 2015

• • Australia is slipping downhill  By Rowan Callick, The Australian, 12 Mar 2015

• • United Nations – hypocrisy, twisted priorities and ineffectiveness  By Chris Kenny, The Australian, 10 Mar 2015

• • Bellicose NATO, Berlin stunned  From Zerohedge, 9 Mar 2015

• • London property boom build on dirty money  By Jim Armitage, Independent, 6 Mar

• Battlefield of ideas is where fanatics will fall  By Janet Albrechtsen, Australian, 4 Mar

February 2015

• •  

• • What ISIS Really Wants  By Dr Muriel Newman, NZCPR, 26 Feb 2015

• • No end to Age of paternalism  By Nick Cater, The Australian, 24 Feb 2015

• • The bigotry of the elite  By Brendan O’Neill, Editor of spiked. 21 Feb 2015

• The US’s suicidal strategy on Ukraine By Chris Martenson, 19 Feb 2015
• The US’s suicidal strategy on Ukraine  By Chris Martenson, 19 Feb 2015
• We, the people, are the threat to fiscal reform  By Janet Albrechtsen, 18 Feb 2015
• Message to Indonesia, the meaning of Sovereignty  By Greg Craven, 17 Feb 2015
• Cagey about condemning the Islamic State  By Brendan O’Neill, Spiked.  14 Feb 2015
• Ukraine Proxy Wars  From Zerohedge, 13 Feb 2015
• 42 ADMITTED false flag attacks  By WashingtonsBlog, 12 Feb 2015
• Obama administration supports Muslim terrorists  By Jerome Corsi, 11 Feb 2015
• Obama’s plan to regulate the internet sounds Orwellian  By Chriss Street, 10 Feb 2015
• Obama Yawns at Evil  By Mark Steyn.  7 Feb 2015
• Scientists losing credibility  By Jo Nova, 5 Feb 2015
• The Chinese economy, dangers ahead  By Craig Stephen,  Market Watch, 4 Feb 2015
• UN plans New World Order via climate change  From United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe, Tuesday 03 Feb 2015
• The end of the American dream By Michael Snyder, from Zerohedge, 1 Feb 2015

January 2015

• • The only thing necessary for evil to triumph  By Paul Rosenberg, Jan 30, 2015
  • Ron Paul, failures of the Fed and fiat currencies By Ron Paul , 29 Jan 2015.
  • British Greens are even nuttier than ours  By Hal GP Colebatch, The Australian, 28 Jan.
  • Understanding the Greek mess  By Greg Canavan, The Daily Reckoning, 27 Jan 2015 
  • How President Woodrow Wilson ruined the Western World – By David Stockman, Contra Corner blog, 26 January 2015
  • Shock Waves from Zurich …  By Henry Ergas, The Australian, 19 January 2015.

• • The Digital Arms Race….By Jacob Appelbaum et al, Spiegel Online, 18 Jan 2015. 

• • The party’s (nearly) over  By Vern Gowdie, the Daily Reckoning, 16 Jan 2015.

• •  My predictions for 2015…By Ron Paul, Ron Paul Institute. 14 Jan 2015.

• • Restore the right to offend……By Brendan O’Neill, The Australian, 10 January 2015.

• • An evolutionary disaster in Africa……By Kevin Myers, Irish Sunday Times, 11 Jan 2015.

• •  Je Suis Charlie ….  By Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Australian, 10 January 2015.
  • The Left’s Unholy Alliance with Islam. By Frank Pledge, Quadrant Online, 8 January 2015.
  • With Nero in the (US) house we should be worried By Maurice Newman, The Australian, 7 Jan 2014.

• • Russia’s startling proposal – EU invited to join EEU…….From Zerohedge, 5 January 2015.

• • Predicting a bear or bull market for 2015 ….By Vern Gowdie, Daily Reckoning, 5 January 2015.

• • The EU’s Keynesian fallacies ….By Patrick Barron via Mises Canada, 4 January 2015.
  • And now for the good news from 2014….By Brendan O’Neill, Spiked. 3 Jan 2015.

• • Beware red tape.….  By John Lloyd, The Australian, 2 January 2015.

• Australia’s anti-military  …A reader’s comment in Quadrant Online.  1 January 2015.

 

This post comprises reviews books that add substantially to the understanding of our world, economics, politics, history and geopolitics, and what may happen in the future.  Scroll down to read all reviews.

• They’re Conning You! By Peter Senior. Note: the book can now be downloaded as a PDF document until the updated version is available: They’re Conning You!
• Full review at: David Icke’s Everything You Need To Know But Have Never Been Told
• JFK and the Unspeakable. Why He Died and Why It Matters  Book review by Edward Curtin, 31 October 2017
• The Cosmic War, by Dr Joseph P Farrell
• Phantom Self, by David Icke
• 1984 – Nineteen Eighty Four. George Orwell’s 1950 classic
• Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• The Death of Money, James Rickards  
• American Betrayal, Diana West
• From Third World to First, Lee Kuan Yew
• Lee Kuan Yew by Graham Allison

They’re Conning You! 

Who are ‘they’? And what are ‘they’ planning? This is the REAL story of our past, present and possibly future.

They’re Conning You! By Peter Senior, Senior Consulting

Note: the book can now be downloaded as a PDF document until the updated version is available: They’re Conning You!

They’re Conning You! is only available on Amazon Kindle because it includes hundreds of vital Internet links that would be far too tiresome to type in from a paper book.

They’re Conning You! presents information that is likely to cause ‘cognitive dissonance’ as it examines in depth a wide range of evidence that demonstrates much of what thought we knew is, in fact, wrong. The subjects discussed cover a wide spectrum from aliens and UFOs to asking where the technologies used to construct ancient structures come from, whether ancient civilisations waged nuclear wars against each other, to financial treason.

‘Consciousness’ is examined, as is what are we made of and how did this come about? Could it be that aliens modified our DNA, which may have come from the outer Cosmos anyway?

We are accustomed to overt and covert PC education, indoctrination and media ‘fake news,’ but do we realise how this is turning us into zombies? Servants of the State? Many scientific bodies, government departments and corporations often distort and lie about what is assumed to be ‘science.’ Even nastier things are being exposed such as paedophilia and Satanism.

Some ‘deep state’ government departments with-hold information that would enable free energy and the consequent massive improvement to most peoples’ lives and countries’ economies in order to protect their secrets as well as the massive oil and associated industries valued at $500 trillion.

There is compelling evidence that US President John F Kennedy was assassinated by covert government people because he planned to share US’ knowledge of aliens and UFOs with Russian President Khrushchev, as well as expose massive corruption.

The book presents frightening information about the two events that changed our world most in the last 55 years: JFK’s assassination and ‘911’, the demolition of the Twin Towers and Tower 7 on 11 September 2001 by covert government-controlled actions.

The subject of who ‘they’ are is discussed in depth, in particular with regard to plans for a New World Order (NWO), and who is orchestrating this.

The US is mimicking the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, whilst Europe is gradually transitioning into a bureaucratic dictatorship. The world’s financial systems are being manipulated for the benefit of their controllers, all underpinned by the ‘deep state’ which has been shown to have syphoned off at least $21 trillion through covert Pentagon misappropriations. Globalisation has expanded trade around the world, but it is now being manipulated by global corporations.

Compelling evidence demonstrates the US and other ‘deep state’ governments have secret space programs that have grown since the first UFO sightings and capture during and shortly after WWII. Imagine what 70 years of ‘reverse engineering’ from captured UFOs would yield, together with alien contact?

Several potential future scenarios are presented with assessments of each. Readers are invited to decide which seems more likely based on what they now know after reading this book and, hopefully, carrying out much more in-depth research.

A review of They’re conning you! by highly-regarded executive journalist Julian Tomlinson, based on 24 years’ experience, notes:
‘This book will appeal to the firm believers in so-called “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy facts”, as well as those with a curiosity and even the firm non-believers. The author combines painstaking research from innumerable sources and combines bland shreds of information into a compelling narrative. Readers will feel they are sitting there actually talking to the author as he manages to convey a sense of wonder, concern and excitement in every sentence, effortlessly flicking between known pre-history, the Roman period and modern times in a manner that’s easy to follow.
If you are in the “conspiracy camp” this book expertly summarises everything you do know and want to know into one, easy-to-read volume. If you are not in the camp, you’ll at least gain an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of “conspiracies” and why they exist. You may even start to believe. Well worth a look.’

They’re conning you! is available from Amazon Kindle: www.amazon.com – search for: they’re conning you

Seven further reviews by Indie Book Reviewers are highly complimentary, and recommend the book should be read by everyone:

1. This is a powerful, very well-written and highly informative book! I have read several books on different types of hidden ‘truths’ and conspiracy theories… what is really going on in our world and what the future might hold, and sometimes I get the sense that most are just recycling old information or things we’ve all already heard before. For this book it seems like I read a lot of new ideas presented in a way that makes a great deal of sense, even if might be perceived as somewhat “controversial”. The content was mostly new to me and laid out in a coherent way that is easy to follow, but is meticulously researched and supported with solid evidence. Peter Senior uses facts and present-day conditions as well as real-life examples to share his perspectives and ideas, Fast paced, informative, and easy to read, I recommend this book, “They’re Conning You!” to everyone who wants to know what is really going on, from aliens to secret societies, shadow governments and 9/11 and so much more.  (5 stars) John Goldman– Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers
2. Peter Senior has a great ability to take complex ideas, concepts and put them in the simplest terms for all to understand easily. He covers many different points of society – past, present and future—and holds nothing back in the way of exposing information that many people might not be aware of. The media and governments do a great job of distorting reality and manipulating truths so that the average person has no idea what is really happening. Mr. Senior has compiled so much interesting research and documentation on a variety of hot-button topics and gives straightforward, convincing arguments that demand to be heard and studied further. Nicely crafted and I liked how it was formatted/broken down into individual chapters that focused on different elements. Made for easier reading and retention. Near flawless editing (formatting is a little wonky at times) and I walked away feeling like I really learned something from reading this book and am inspired to do more reading and research on my own. (4 stars) Leo Gregory– Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers
3. Funny how few books there actually seem to be on so many of these topics… and this is such important information! I am still in college and it’s just not normally the type of book that I gravitate to for ‘fun’, but I thought there might be something useful I could learn anyways and I was so right! It is eye-opening and very compelling – it is clear that the author knows what he’s writing about and has done in-depth research (and has detailed and comprehensive appendices at the end to prove it). Provocative and bold, this book is not just for academics or scientists or political gurus, but for anyone who wants to know what is REALLY going on ‘behind the scenes’ and how different it is from what “they” are telling you. Everything from the JFK assassination to Twin Towers to Extra-Terrestrials, Antarctica and “Deep State” governments… Peter Senior has created an impressively comprehensive body of research and theories that can definitely get people’s attention, whether you are a ‘skeptic’ or a ‘believer’. I could definitely see the truths behind much of what he was saying. The main concern I had was that while he presented lots of great information and shocking revelations, I was left with the feeling of like “okay, now what am I supposed to do with this info?” So in that regard it is a little frustrating, but I guess it is better to know than to not know. I like that it challenged the traditional narrative and put things into new perspective. (4 stars) James Masters– Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers
4. I wasn’t sure what to expect when reading “They’re Conning You” by Peter Senior, as I’m not normally one to read about things like this. But surprisingly enough I found the straight-forward and engaging narrative style to be quite fascinating and down-to-earth. I liked how Mr. Senior uses his vast and well-researched knowledge ‘story-style’ to make his points and relate his ideas in ways that we all can fully and easily grasp. Each chapter/section/topic gives valuable information, examples and supporting links or sources for further research/reading. The whole thing just flowed so well and I hope people pay attention to as it is clear that the author knows what he is talking about, and that he is an excellent writer. I have found that many times reading philosophy/political or ‘conspiracy’ theory books can either be too ‘highbrow’ and esoteric, or they just don’t present the material in a way that I feel I can relate to (or its condescending), but this definitely was not the case here at all. My only very small complaint was that I wish there were more in-text citations for sources (footnotes or direct links), because while the author does provide a very thorough appendices/references at the end, there were a few times I would’ve preferred to see the sources cited in text. A very minor thing, though. Recommended read. (4 stars) Cale Owens– Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers
5. I think a lot of these types of books get a bad rap sometimes, as a lot of times they are all theory and ‘talking in circles’ but don’t really bring anything ‘new’ to the table or make the information credible and or relevant. But I have to say in this case I feel like the author did a solid job of getting his message out and doing so in a very digestible manner. I was unaware of so many things discussed in this book, and I consider myself to be fairly well educated and worldly. I’m not exactly sure who the right target audience for this would be, as it almost seems something almost anyone could (and should!) read. I admit I am not all that sure what to do with this information, but if nothing else I enjoyed learning more about certain things I was unaware of before, and I have ALWAYS had an interest in knowing more truths with aliens/ET and their contributions to our planet and advancing civilizations. The pacing is pretty even and overall it is an impressive effort by Mr. Senior and worth serious thought and discussion. (4 stars) Carla Biggins– Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers
6. In “They’re Conning You…” Peter Senior lays out his ideas is a way that encourages the reader to think ‘outside the box’ and question the ‘reality’ that is often presented to the masses. Whether you believe in conspiracy theories or facts or not, there is enough detailed examination of ‘controversial’ subjects here to entice the pickiest of readers. His narrative is easy to follow, even if some of the concepts were admittedly a little ‘out there’ at times. I still feel like I gleaned some valuable information – actually a lot that I didn’t know before. While not exactly a ‘mainstream’ sort of book, in a way that is exactly what makes it so good –This book is intelligent and thought-provoking – opens your eyes and provides a necessary paradigm shift. Some parts pull the rug out from under you – others will pull the wool from your eyes and expose truths, sometimes uncomfortable, that we all need to at least hear about, even if you chose not to believe it.  At least you can decide for yourself when given the bigger picture. I liked how many outside sources he references, so many links, videos, articles and books… I will definitely be reading more! Recommend. (4 stars) Cody Brighton – Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers
7. Warning – when starting “They’re Conning You…” make sure you don’t have anywhere you need to be or anything you need to do because you won’t want to stop reading until you’ve finished it all!! Trust me on this! The book starts off with an intriguing beginning pulling us into this provocative world and ideas, and just keeps going with one interesting topic after the next. I think what I liked the most about this book was just the overall feel the author Peter Senior managed to create where it felt intimate, like a friend is telling me this really cool, strange story that I didn’t want to stop listening to. Loved the energetic tone and the fact that he has his opinions, but the book doesn’t feel overly ‘biased’ or judgmental… This went much deeper than that, and I was truly impressed with the author’s literary and research skills. I actually feel like I learned a lot, all while being ‘entertained’. I’ve always had a fascination with many of these subjects (esp. aliens and secret societies), but they are usually presented in such an eye-rolling, unbelievable way It was great to read something so intelligently constructed with impressive research and complex connections that all come full circle. Suitable for mature teens on up. (5 stars) Essie Harmon—Goodreads; Barnes & Noble; Indie Book Reviewers

================

Note: this review is  copied from the Amazon/Kindle website.

Now in a new edition updated through the unprecedented 2016 presidential election, this provocative book makes a compelling case for a hidden “deep state” that influences and often opposes official U.S. policies. Prominent political analyst Peter Dale Scott begins by tracing America’s increasing militarization, restrictions on constitutional rights, and income disparity since World War II. With the start of the Cold War, he argues, the U.S. government changed immensely in both function and scope, from protecting and nurturing a relatively isolated country to assuming ever-greater responsibility for controlling world politics in the name of freedom and democracy. This has resulted in both secretive new institutions and a slow but radical change in the American state itself. He argues that central to this historic reversal were seismic national events, ranging from the assassination of President Kennedy to 9/11.
Scott marshals compelling evidence that the deep state is now partly institutionalized in non-accountable intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA, but it also extends its reach to private corporations like Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC, to which 70 percent of intelligence budgets are outsourced. Behind these public and private institutions is the influence of Wall Street bankers and lawyers, allied with international oil companies beyond the reach of domestic law. Undoubtedly the political consensus about America’s global role has evolved, but if we want to restore the country’s traditional constitutional framework, it is important to see the role of particular cabals—such as the Project for the New American Century—and how they have repeatedly used the secret powers and network of Continuity of Government (COG) planning to implement change. Yet the author sees the deep state polarized between an establishment and a counter-establishment in a chaotic situation that may actually prove more hopeful for U.S. democracy.

================

Everything You Need to Know,  by David Icke, 14 February 2018

See full review at: David Icke’s Everything You Need To Know But Have Never Been Told

David’s latest book is reviewed in a recent post by Freedom Article, as follows: ‘This book sprinkled throughout with David’s humor, e.g. when discussing transhumanism poster boy Ray Kurzweil of Google, David remarks “I wouldn’t trust him to tell me the date in a calendar factory” or when discussing the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist (eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ), David remarks that mainstream religion is “Satanism lite.”

Here are 2 key quotes from the book:

“If you want to control the dream you must control the perceptions of the dreamer and that’s the global conspiracy to enslave humanity in a single sentence.”

David uses the same quote from Einstein twice in the book, since it’s so important:

“Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can’t help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”

Therein lies the grand solution. The solution to all these problems, to the entire New World Order, comes down to some very simple principles. Remember who you are. Identify with the depth of your spirit, not the shallowness of your form. Life is a mirror: whatever you put out, you receive. Change your perception and your change everything. The universe matches your vibration with an experience or situation, so if you change your vibration, you change your experience, and your entire life. If enough of us do it, we change the entire world.

Everything You Need To Know But Have Never Been Told is the kind of book that can change your life. Get a copy, read it, let it inspire you with knowledge and courage, and let the astonishing amount of dot-connecting sink in and give you a perceptual reboot.’

================

JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

 JFK and the Unspeakable. Why He Died and Why It Matters  Book review by Edward Curtin, 31 October 2017

Despite a treasure-trove of new information having emerged over the last forty-six years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. There are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission. Both groups agree, however, that whatever the truth, it has no contemporary relevance but is old-hat, history, stuff for conspiracy-obsessed people with nothing better to do. The general thinking is that the assassination occurred almost a half-century ago, so let’s move on.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as James Douglass shows in his extraordinary book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Simon & Schuster, 2008). It is clearly one of the best books ever written on the Kennedy assassination and deserves a vast readership. It is bound to roil the waters of complacency that have submerged the truth of this key event in modern American history.

It’s not often that the intersection of history and contemporary events pose such a startling and chilling lesson as does the contemplation of the murder of JFK on November 22, 1963 juxtaposed with the situations faced by President Obama today. So far, at least, Obama’s behaviour has mirrored Johnson’s, not Kennedy’s, as he has escalated the war in Afghanistan by 34,000. One can’t but help think that the thought of JFK’s fate might not be far from his mind as he contemplates his next move in Afghanistan.

Douglass presents a very compelling argument that Kennedy was killed by “unspeakable” (the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s term) forces within the U.S. national security state because of his conversion from a cold warrior into a man of peace. He argues, using a wealth of newly uncovered information, that JFK had become a major threat to the burgeoning military-industrial complex and had to be eliminated through a conspiracy planned by the CIA – “the CIA’s fingerprints are all over the crime and the events leading up to it” – not by a crazed individual, the Mafia, or disgruntled anti-Castro Cubans, though some of these may have been used in the execution of the plot.

Why and by whom? These are the key questions. If it can be shown that Kennedy did, in fact, turn emphatically away from war as a solution to political conflict; did, in fact, as he was being urged by his military and intelligence advisers to up the ante and use violence, rejected such advice and turned toward peaceful solutions, then, a motive for his elimination is established. If, furthermore, it can be clearly shown that Oswald was a dupe in a deadly game and that forces within the military/intelligence apparatus were involved with him from start to finish, then the crime is solved, not by fingering an individual who may have given the order for the murder or pulled the trigger, but by showing that the coordination of the assassination had to involve U.S. intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA. Douglass does both, providing highly detailed and intricately linked evidence based on his own research and a vast array of the best scholarship.

We are then faced with the contemporary relevance, and since we know that every president since JFK has refused to confront the growth of the national security state and its call for violence, one can logically assume a message was sent and heeded. In this regard, it is not incidental that former twenty-seven year CIA analyst Raymond McGovern, in a recent interview, warned of the “two CIAs,” one the analytic arm providing straight scoop to presidents, the other the covert action arm which operates according to its own rules. “Let me leave you with this thought,” he told his interviewer, “and that is that I think Panetta (current CIA Director), and to a degree Obama, are afraid – I never thought I’d hear myself saying this – I think they are afraid of the CIA.” He then recommended Douglass’ book, “It’s very well-researched and his conclusion is very alarming.” [1]

Let’s look at the history marshaled by Douglass to support his thesis.

First, Kennedy, who took office in January 1961 as somewhat of a Cold Warrior, was quickly set up by the CIA to take the blame for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961. The CIA and generals wanted to oust Castro, and in pursuit of that goal, trained a force of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. Kennedy refused to go along and the invasion was roundly defeated. The CIA, military, and Cuban exiles bitterly blamed Kennedy. But it was all a sham.

Though Douglass doesn’t mention it, and few Americans know it, classified documents uncovered in 2000 revealed that the CIA had discovered that the Soviets had learned of the date of the invasion more than a week in advance, had informed Castro, but – and here is a startling fact that should make people’s hair stand on end – never told the President. [2] The CIA knew the invasion was doomed before the fact but went ahead with it anyway. Why? So they could and did afterwards blame JFK for the failure.

This treachery set the stage for events to come. For his part, sensing but not knowing the full extent of the set-up, Kennedy fired CIA Director Allen Dulles (as in a bad joke, later to be named to the Warren Commission) and his assistant General Charles Cabell (whose brother Earle Cabell, to make a bad joke absurd, was the mayor of Dallas on the day Kennedy was killed) and said he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Not the sentiments to endear him to a secretive government within a government whose power was growing exponentially.

The stage was now set for events to follow as JFK, in opposition to nearly all his advisers, consistently opposed the use of force in U.S. foreign policy.

In 1961, despite the Joint Chief’s demand to put troops into Laos, Kennedy bluntly insisted otherwise as he ordered Averell Harriman, his representative at the Geneva Conference, “Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.”

Also in 1961, he refused to concede to the insistence of his top generals to give them permission to use nuclear weapons in Berlin and Southeast Asia. Walking out of a meeting with top military advisors, Kennedy threw his hands in the air and said, “These people are crazy.”

He refused to bomb and invade Cuba as the military wished during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Afterwards he told his friend John Kenneth Galbraith that “I never had the slightest intention of doing so.”

Then in June 1963 he gave an incredible speech at American University in which he called for the total abolishment of nuclear weapons, the end of the Cold War and the “Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war,” and movement toward “general and complete disarmament.”

A few months later he signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khrushchev.

In October 1963 he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 U. S. military troops from Vietnam by the end of the year and a total withdrawal by the end of 1965.[3]

All this he did while secretly engaging in negotiations with Khrushchev via the KGB , Norman Cousins, and Pope John XXIII , and with Castro through various intermediaries, one of whom was French Journalist Jean Daniel. In an interview with Daniel on October 24, 1963 Kennedy said, “I approved the proclamation Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will go even further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we will have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.” Such sentiments were anathema, shall we say treasonous, to the CIA and top generals.

These clear refusals to go to war and his decision to engage in private, back-channel communications with Cold War enemies marked Kennedy as an enemy of the national security state. They were on a collision course. As Douglass and others have pointed out, every move Kennedy made was anti-war. This, Douglass argues, was because JFK, a war hero, had been deeply affected by the horror of war and was severely shaken by how close the world had come to destruction during the Cuban missile crisis. Throughout his life he had been touched by death and had come to appreciate the fragility of life. Once in the Presidency, Kennedy underwent a deep metanoia, a spiritual transformation, from Cold Warrior to peace maker. He came to see the generals who advised him as devoid of the tragic sense of life and as hell-bent on war. And he was well aware that his growing resistance to war had put him on a dangerous collision course with those generals and the CIA. On numerous occasions he spoke of the possibility of a military coup d’etat against him. On the night before his trip to Dallas, he told his wife, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it.” And we know that nobody did try to stop it because they had planned it.

But who killed him?

Douglass presents a formidable amount of evidence, some old and some new, against the CIA and covert action agencies within the national security state, and does so in such a logical and persuasive way that any fair-minded reader cannot help but be taken aback; stunned, really. And he links this evidence directly to JFK’s actions on behalf of peace.

He knows, however, that to truly convince he must break a “conspiracy of silence that would envelop our government, our media, our academic institutions, and virtually our entire society from November 22, 1963, to the present.” This “unspeakable,” this hypnotic “collective denial of the obvious,” is sustained by a mass-media whose repeated message is that the truth about such significant events is beyond our grasp, that we will have to drink the waters of uncertainty forever. As for those who don’t, they are relegated to the status of conspiracy nuts.

Fear and uncertainty block a true appraisal of the assassination – that plus the thought that it no longer matters.

It matters. For we know that no president since JFK has dared to buck the military-intelligence-industrial complex. We know a Pax Americana has spread its tentacles across the globe with U.S. military in over 130 countries on 750 plus bases. We know that the amount of blood and money spent on wars and war preparations has risen astronomically.

There is a great deal we know and even more that we don’t want to know, or at the very least, investigate.

If Lee Harvey Oswald was connected to the intelligence community, the FBI and the CIA, then we can logically conclude that he was not “a lone-nut” assassin. Douglass marshals a wealth of evidence to show how from the very start Oswald was moved around the globe like a pawn in a game, and when the game was done, the pawn was eliminated in the Dallas police headquarters. As he begins to trace Oswald’s path, Douglass asks this question: “Why was Lee Harvey Oswald so tolerated and supported by the government he betrayed?” After serving as a U.S. Marine at the CIA’s U-2 spy plane operating base in Japan with a Crypto clearance (higher than top secret but a fact suppressed by the Warren Commission), Oswald left the Marines and defected to the Soviet Union. After denouncing the U.S., working at a Soviet factory in Minsk , and taking a Russian wife – during which time Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane is shot down over the Soviet Union – he returned to the U.S. with a loan from the American Embassy in Moscow, only to be met at the dock in Hoboken, New Jersey by a man, Spas T. Raikin, a prominent anti-communist with extensive intelligence connections, recommended by the State Department. He passed through immigration with no trouble, was not prosecuted, moved to Fort Worth, Texas where , at the suggestion of the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Service chief, he was met and befriended by George de Mohrenschildt, an anti-communist Russian, who was a CIA asset. De Mohrenschildt got him a job four days later at a graphic arts company that worked on maps for the U.S. Army Map Service related to U-2 spy missions over Cuba. Oswald was then shepherded around the Dallas area by de Mohrenschildt who, in 1977, on the day he revealed he had contacted Oswald for the CIA and was to meet with the House Select Committee on Assasinations’ Gaeton Fonzi, allegedly committed suicide. Oswald then moved to New Orleans in April 1963 where got a job at the Reilly Coffee Company owned by CIA-affiliated William Reilly. The Reilly Coffee Company was located in close vicinity to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and Office of Naval Intelligence offices and a stone’s throw from the office of Guy Bannister, a former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Chicago Bureau, who worked as a covert action coordinator for the intelligence services, supplying and training anti-Castro paramilitaries meant to ensnare Kennedy. Oswald then went to work with Bannister and the CIA paramilitaries.

During this time up until the assassination Oswald engaged in all sorts of contradictory activities, one day portraying himself as pro-Castro, the next day as anti-Castro, many of these theatrical performances being directed from Bannister’s office. It was as though Oswald, on the orders of his puppet masters, was enacting multiple and antithetical roles in order to confound anyone intent on deciphering the purposes behind his actions and to set him up as a future “assassin.” Douglass persuasively argues that Oswald “seems to have been working with both the CIA and FBI,” as a provocateur for the former and an informant for the latter. Jim and Elsie Wilcott, who worked at the CIA Tokyo Station from 1960-64, in a 1978 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, said, “It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency.”

When Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963, de Mohrenschildt exited the picture, having asked the CIA for and been indirectly given a $285,000 contract to do a geological survey for Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier, which he never did , but for which he was paid. Ruth and Michael Paine then entered the picture on cue. Douglass illuminatingly traces in their intelligence connections. Ruth later was the Warren Commission’s chief witness. She had been introduced to Oswald by de Mohrenschildt. In September 1963 Ruth Paine drove from her sister’s house in Virginia to New Orleans to pick up Marina Oswald and bring her to her house in Dallas to live with her. Thirty years after the assassination a document was declassified showing Paine’s sister Sylvia worked for the CIA. Her father traveled throughout Latin America on an Agency for International Development (notorious for CIA front activities) contract and filed reports that went to the CIA. Her husband Michael’s step-father, Arthur Young, was the inventor of the Bell helicopter and Michael’s job there gave him a security clearance. Her mother was related to the Forbes family of Boston and her lifelong friend, Mary Bancroft, worked as a WW II spy with Allen Dulles and was his mistress. Afterwards, Dulles questioned the Paines in front of the Warren Commission, studiously avoiding any revealing questions. Back in Dallas, Ruth Paine conveniently got Oswald a job in the Texas Book Depository where he began work on October 16, 1963.

From late September until November 22, various Oswalds are later reported to have simultaneously been seen from Dallas to Mexico City. Two Oswalds were arrested in the Texas Theatre, the real one taken out the front door and an impostor out the back. As Douglas says, “There were more Oswalds providing evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald than the Warren Report could use or even explain.” Even J. Edgar Hoover knew that Oswald impostors were used, as he told LBJ concerning Oswald’s alleged visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He later called this CIA ploy, “the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico…their ( CIA’s) double-dealing,” something that he couldn’t forget. It was apparent that a very intricate and deadly game was being played out at high levels in the shadows.

We know Oswald was blamed for the President’s murder. But if one fairly follows the trail of the crime it becomes blatantly obvious that government forces were at work. Douglass adds layer upon layer of evidence to show how this had to be so. Oswald, the mafia, anti-Castro Cubans could not have withdrawn most of the security that day. The Sheriff Bill Decker withdrew all police protection. The Secret Service withdrew the police motorcycle escorts from beside the president’s car where they had been the day before in Houston; took agents off the back of the car where they were normally stationed to obstruct gunfire. They approved the fateful, dogleg turn (on a dry run on November 18) where the car came, almost to a halt, a clear security violation. The House Select Committee on Assasinations concluded this, not some conspiracy nut.

Who could have squelched the testimony of all the doctors and medical personnel who claimed the president had been shot from the front in his neck and head, testimony contradicting the official story? Who could have prosecuted and imprisoned Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent personally brought on to the White House detail by JFK, who warned that he feared the president was going to be assassinated? (Douglass interviewed Bolden seven times and his evidence on the aborted plot to kill JFK in Chicago on November 2 – a story little known but extraordinary in its implications – is riveting.) The list of all the people who turned up dead, the evidence and events manipulated, the inquiry squelched, distorted, and twisted in an ex post facto cover-up – clearly point to forces within the government, not rogue actors without institutional support.

The evidence for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the intelligence apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass presents it in such depth and so logically that only one hardened to the truth would not be deeply moved and affected by his book.

He says it best: “The extent to which our national security state was systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system, we absorb and think in a system. We lack the independence needed to judge the system around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s murder and immediate cover-up.”

Speaking to his friends Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell about those who planned the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, JFK said, “They couldn’t believe that a new president like me wouldn’t panic and try to save his own face. Well, they had me figured all wrong.”

Let’s hope for another president like that, but one that meets a different end.

[1] http://consortiumnews.com/print’2009/091309a.html [This link appears to be too old to still work. Unlike the print age, the digital age loses references, another way that memory and history are stolen.]

[2] Vernon Loeb, “Soviets Knew Date of Cuba Attack,” Washington Post, April 29, 2000

[3] See James K. Galbraith, “Exit Strategy,” Boston Review, October/November 2003

Edward Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts

====================

The Cosmic War, by Dr Joseph P Farrell

A review from Amazon of this extraordinary and compelling  ‘must read’ book, The Cosmic War: Interplanetary Warfare, Modern Physics, and Ancient Texts: A Study in Non-Catastrophist Interpretations of Ancient Legends, Author Dr Joseph P Farrell.

Farrell’s foray into ancient antiquity is scholarly in it’s precision and thought-provoking in its ramifications.  Oxford educated researcher Dr. Joseph P. Farrell unleashes a reverberating hypothesis regarding ancient history whose echoes will be forever heard.

Cosmic War is an extremely intriguing incursion into the possibility of a very ancient war in high antiquity. Dr. Farrell’s hypotheses of an Ancient Interplanetary War is argued in an in-depth, precise and reasonable approach. The extensive evidence Farrell collates and synthesizes will leave the reader aghast with the possibilities.

Intriguingly, many ancient cultures stated that the ‘Wars of the Gods’ were quite real. Predictably, even though there’s extensive evidence for advanced physics, advanced weapons, ancient [millions and BILLIONS of year old artifacts found by reputable sources], the establishment has painted all over ancient history with myth.

Regarding this very issue, Jim Marrs in his book Our Occulted History, sets his cross hairs on this very issue: “The term mythology stems from the Greek word mythos, simply meaning words or stories reflecting the basic values and attitudes of people. In past ages, when the vast majority of humans were illiterate, easily understood parables were used to educate people about history, science, and technology. During the Dark Ages, when most of people were taught that the Earth was flat, the word mythology was changed by the Roman Church to mean imaginative and fanciful tales veering far from truthfulness. This small change in semantics has caused untold damage in current perceptions.”

Ironically enough, there is starting to be more and more evidence of ‘myths’ now turning out to be fact. As Chris Hardy Ph.D remarks in her poignant book DNA Of The Gods: “…let’s remember that, before the discoveries of loads of ancient tablets written in the pictographic Sumerian language (Late Uruk period, fourth millennium BCE), the kingdom of Sumer was believed to be a myth. We had already discovered Akkad and deciphered Akkadian, and still archaeologists wouldn’t give credence to the numerous carved references, within historical dated records, to a line of kings whose title was “King of Sumer and Akkad”.

Or how about the “myth” of Troy: “This myth collapsed in 1865 with archeologist Frank Calvet’s discovery of the historic ruins of not only one city of Troy but nine layers of it! The city, whose siege is recounted in Homer’s Iliad, is only Troy VII, the seventh level underground, dating to the thirteenth century BCE.”

The gatekeepers, for many reasons, want to keep established history in a nice little box. Fortunately, as anyone who has extensively research these topics know, there’s more than ample evidence that shows that at minimum history isn’t what we have been told.

In any case, Cosmic War covers wide ranging but pertinent topics such as Van Flandern’s exploded planet hypothesis, an analysis of plasma in relation to weapons that employ scalar physics, petroglyphs which show plasma instability glyphs that were recorded by ancient cultures, remnants of giants in ancient history, optical phase conjugation, the story of the ‘gods’ as related through ancient texts, pulsars, generational charts of the ‘gods’, the scarring of The Valles Mariners being possibly from a weapon, Iapetus and its hexagonal craters, and a LOT more.

The ramifications of this book abound, and filter in all aspects of our lives. Dr. Farrell gives compelling reasons [coupled with countless others in his other trenchant books] as to why we need to give history, particularly ancient history, a very long and thorough look.

In its totality, this book is a veritable fountain of information that is scholarly in precision, and thought-provoking in its ramifications. This book is a must read for anyone interested in ancient history, ancient civilizations, and any of the topics there-in. There is more than enough information to make the reader curious about our past in more ways than they can really imagine.

========================

David Icke’s “Phantom Self”: A Book Review from Freedom Articles

david-ickes-phantom-self-a-book-review-from-freedom-articles

Phantom Self, the latest book of researcher David Icke, takes conspiracy research to a new depth with the idea of a primal virus that has hacked Life itself.

(Editor’s note: this book is amongst the most fascinating, timely and thought-provoking books I’ve ever read.  I strongly recommend setting aside all prejudice and past learning – what we were taught, and so believed – then reading it with an open mind. And then thinking deeply.)

Phantom Self is the latest book of famous researcher and free-thinker David Icke. Just as in his previous book The Perception Deception, David takes his research to a new level of depth with a comprehensive display of dot-connecting that will leave many in awe of his knowledge – but more importantly awaken people to the real dire straits humanity is in. Like many of his books, it ends with a positive message and the ultimate solution to all of humanity’s problems; however, most of the book is devoted to exposing the current reality of planet Earth, often in horrifying detail. This is an essential part of David’s message, for without the true knowledge of what is really going on – and the capacity to feel the horror of it – we will not muster the courage and motivation to change it. Part of the reason humanity is so stuck deep in the conspiracy is that it is engaged in massive collective denial, which it prevents it from acting decisively to quash and transform the evil (or unconsciousness as I prefer to call it). A hallmark of Phantom Self is that it takes a step further down the rabbit hole – past the reptilians and Archons – and looks at the controlling force behind them, which David says resembles some kind of computer virus that has hacked life itself.

The full review can be seen at david-ickes-phantom-self-a-book-review-from-freedom-articles

========================

1984 – Nineteen Eighty Four

George Orwell’s classic 1950 novel is very worthwhile reading (again for most people).  It is frightening to review how much of what Orwell wrote is happening today, albeit is somewhat different guise.  Recall Orwell was a member of the Fabian Society, where he learnt of their plans before resigning.  He used novels as a practical was to publicise the plans he learn about from other Fabian members.  The Amazon website – – explains much about the book, and presents several perceptive reviews – this is one of the 4,613:

George Orwell’s classic was incredibly visionary. It is hardly fathomable that this book was written in 1948. Things that we take for granted today – cameras everywhere we go, phones being tapped, bodies being scanned for weapons remotely – all of these things were described in graphic detail in Orwell’s book.
Now that we have the Internet and people spying on other people w/ webcams and people purposely setting up their own webcams to let others “anonymously” watch them, you can see how this culture can develop into the Orwellian future described in “1984.”
If you’ve heard such phrases as “Big Brother,” “Newspeak,” and “thought crime” and wondered where these phrases came from, they came from this incredible, vivid and disturbing book.
Winston Smith, the main character of the book is a vibrant, thinking man hiding within the plain mindless behavior he has to go through each day to not be considered a thought criminal. Everything is politically correct, children defy their parents (and are encouraged by the government to do so) and everyone pays constant allegiance to “Big Brother” – the government that watches everyone and knows what everyone is doing at all times – watching you shower, watching you having sex, watching you eat, watching you go to the bathroom and ultimately watching you die.
This is a must-read for everyone.

=====================

Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now

Author: Ayaan Hirsi Ali.  Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, was raised Muslim, and spent her childhood and young adulthood in Africa and Saudi Arabia. In 1992, Hirsi Ali came to the Netherlands as a refugee. She earned her college degree in political science and worked for the Dutch Labor party. She denounced Islam after the September 11 terrorist attacks and now serves as a Dutch parliamentarian, fighting for the rights of Muslim women in Europe, the enlightenment of Islam, and security in the West.

Editor’s note: this book should be considered essential reading by anyone who has an interest in Islam as well as everyone who is or may be effected by Muslims (that means just about everyone!).  The book is very comprehensive and, unlike most other books on the subject, provides not only a wide-ranging background and analyses based on her own experience, but some thought-provoking solutions.  After scanning numerous reviews of this excellent book, the following written by ‘Helpful Advice’ on Amazon is more or less  what I would have written.

After ‘Infidel’ and ‘Nomad’ worldwide known, equally hated and adored Ayaan Hirsi Ali is back on literary (and considering the topic inevitably political) scene with her new and probably the most controversial book so far she wrote – ‘Heretic’.

A book that will certainly be subject of numerous texts, quoted or despised, she raised the question of some key Islam teachings incompatibility with the values of modern or free society for which the majority (or at least we think so maybe) people in the world stands for.

It seemed that comparing to some other major religions, Islam somehow proved immune to changes in the new world we are living, characterized by enormous speed of information exchange and the development of human rights. There were some attempts such as Arab Spring that tried to challenge traditional thinking, ingrained prejudices or facts about the Muslim world. But with the simultaneous proliferation of Islamic fundamentalism and even its acceptance in certain circles of the population in the West, according to the author it seems that it is time for some radical actions that must be implemented by the very Muslims, not someone else from outside.

So, what Ali proposes needs to happen for Muslims to defeat the extremists for good? Economic, political, judicial and military tools have already been proposed, some of them deployed, though it seems that all these will have little effect unless Islam itself is reformed.

Therefore she calls for a Muslim Reformation—a revision of Islamic teachings, alignment of modern society with traditional religion doctrine, that seems difficult, but not unfeasible due to the rejection of extremist behavior among the majority of Muslims around the world.

She reminds that such reformation has been called for since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent abolition of the caliphate, but instead of general phrases and generalized objectives she precisely pointed out five key precepts that have made Islam resistant to historical change and adaptation. And only when the harmfulness of these ideas will be recognized and as result they will be rejected, a true Muslim Reformation would be possible.

Although to comment each of them would require writing essays, I’ll just list all five of them:
• Removing of Muhammad’s semi-divine status, putting him into the history context as important figure that united the Arabs in a pre-modern time that cannot be copied in the 21st century. And consequently also recognizing the fact that Quran is the book made by human hands.
• Emphasizing that life is more important than something that comes after it will reduce the appeal of martyrdom.
• Appreciation of modern laws that need to be put in front of Shariah legislation that is violent, intolerant or anachronistic.
• The abolition of the individual’s right and so called religious police to enforce the law, something for Muslim community is unfortunately particularly known
• And most important, Islam must become a religion of peace removing the imperative to wage holy wars against infidels

Once again this author must be admitted undeniable courage to tackle the dangerous subjects in a world where because of the drawn cartoons you can easily lose a life. Her theses are clear, her objectives are fully explained, her mission to change the Islamic world from the inside continues, causing the happiness and satisfaction of all civilized Muslims worldwide.

Therefore high recommendations for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, this brave author who after fighting for the rights of women engages into even greater battle with the hope that one day we will be able to say that books like these changed the world. For the better.

===============================

The Death of Money

The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System.  8 April 2014.  By James Rickards.

James Rickards, author of the other best seller, Currency Wars, has gone even further in The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System, in telling it like it is (and will be, so prepare yourself!). Jim’s all-facts, straightforward approach is peppered with just enough analogy and anecdotal wit to make sophisticated economic/mathematical/political concepts understandable to the (educated) layperson. His clarification techniques serve the book well by making sure the content never gets watered down or condescending. For anyone interested in knowing what is going on behind the scenes, how the dollar is being systematically devalued by The Fed (and why), what a rigged sham our banking system is, and how things are likely to play out in the very near future, read The Death of Money!

American Betrayal

The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character by Diana West (May 28, 2013).  Diana West’s newest book “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on our Nations Character” is a highly researched, blockbuster of a story taking 356 pages to tell with 29 pages of notes.  Whilst not directly about ‘management’, this book is packed with information that any successful manager should understand, in particular regarding communications (propaganda?)  and planning.  It’s the most thought-provoking, worrying, disillusioning book I’ve ever read.  I’ve attached a couple of reviews of the book from Amazon.com. American Betrayal, Diana West, May 2013. Reviews  that give you a glimpse of what it’s about.  John, of John’s Newsletter fame, noted: ‘American Betrayal explains what many already know about the creation of the soviet monster by the FDR administration, stacked with communist spies and the author of the cold war from as early as 1942.  How FDR’s lackeys could give the USSR the atomic bomb via Lend Lease is fascinating and unfortunately true.  It is clear that powerhouse though she may be, America has been ungovernable since the outset…Just too big, too complex and too full of leaks and confused ideologies.  America is now, as a reaction, on the road to becoming a police state.  Folk who have read the book  called “The Open Society and Its Enemies” by Karl Popper will understand how the USA came to this pretty pickle and the realities behind this scandalous state of affairs.  Horrific though her anecdotes are, I have seen independent corroboration elsewhere of Diana’s central themes and accept them as factual – when asserted as such.  This book is too disturbing for general consumption.’

From Third World to First

The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 by Lee Kuan Yew  (Oct 3, 2000).  Note:  although older, it is useful to read this book before the Grand Master’s Insights book, below. Some comments on the Amazon website: Lee Kwan Yew had a clear vision, set himself clear goals…. Above all, what led to his success is his execution skills…. Although Singapore is a free market economy, its philosophy concerning workers and employees are caring and genuine, unlike in the United States….His views regarding leadership and a wide range of management issues are profound….. Read this book to be inspired.

Lee Kuan Yew

The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World by Graham Allison et al., 1 Feb. 2013.  Some comments on the Amazon website: Lee excels in pithy evaluations of regional and national strengths and weaknesses. At his best, the man is a cross between Confucius and Machiavelli. (Washington Times)……..”I found myself engrossed this week by the calm, incisive wisdom of one of the few living statesmen in the world who can actually be called visionary. The wisdom is in a book, “Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States and the World,” a gathering of Mr. Lee’s interviews, speeches and writings…He is now 89, a great friend of America, and his comments on the U.S. are pertinent to many of the debates in which we’re enmeshed.” — Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal.