EXPENSIVE MILITARY HARDWARE LIKE a new tank undergoes rigorous testing before heading to the battlefield. A startup called Istari, backed by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and chair of Alphabet, reckons some of that work can be done more effectively in the metaverse.
China
Browse the articles related to this topic below.
Join our community on Guilded.
Meanwhile, evidence is mounting of the long-term consequences of quarantining the country during lockdown. There were warnings at the time that keeping people under a form of house arrest would lead to rising loneliness, mental illness, domestic abuse and childhood obesity; a growing school attainment divide between pupils from rich and poor homes; an increase in hospital waiting lists and a rise in undiagnosed cases of cancer. All of which have come to pass. Only last month, for example, a report by the House of Commons Library expressed concern that the estimated rate of absence from school in the current academic year was 7.8% – compared with 4.8% in 2019-20.
We are nearing a turning point for democratic support for environmentalism. Gordon Brown’s 2008 Climate Change Act legislated to slash CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, a seismic shift pushed through with little debate but much superficial public approval. Theresa May strengthened this to 100 per cent by 2050, the “net zero” target; again, the public liked the sound of this, if not of Mrs May. China will continue to increase its emissions by more than we cut ours, but our entire ruling class has signed up to this iron-clad legal framework, with no dissent tolerated.
In his new book – The Truth About Wuhan – whistleblower Dr Huff claims the pandemic was the result of the US government’s funding of dangerous genetic engineering of coronaviruses in China.
The epidemiologist said China’s gain-of-function experiments – carried out with shoddy biosecurity – led to a lab leak at the US-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In March 2020, some colleagues in Parliament, knowing I was interested in genetics and medicine, asked me if I thought Covid began with a lab leak. “No,” I replied confidently. In this I relied on conversations with expert virologists and a paper that five of them published in Nature Medicine categorically ruling it out: “Our analyses clearly show that Sars-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposely manipulated virus.”
Today, I feel betrayed. Thanks to emails released under Freedom of Information this week, we now know that they did think a lab leak was possible, and the evidence that they then used to dismiss it was faulty.
What are the roots of the technocratic and transhumanist policies currently being pushed onto society? In this essay, Matthew Ehret traces two centuries of British imperial grand strategists who adapted Thomas Malthus’ system of scientific governance of useless eaters in opposition to the deeper creative impulses of the human species.
Oliver Stone is a filmmaker with 3 Oscar wins and 11 Oscar nominations. His films include Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, Scarface, JFK, Nixon, Alexander, W, Snowden, and documentaries where he has interviewed Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Vladimir Putin.
OUTLINE:
0:00 – Introduction
2:54 – Nuclear power
15:52 – Russia and US relations
21:07 – JFK and the Cold War
26:24 – Interviewing Putin
50:02 – Invasion of Ukraine
59:20 – Why Putin invaded Ukraine
1:13:44 – Propaganda
1:21:02 – Interviewing Putin in 2022
1:28:17 – Nuclear war
1:34:28 – Advice on interviewing
1:38:09 – Interviewing Hitler
1:41:30 – Putin interview language barrier
1:42:41 – Love
1:44:36 – Advice to young people
1:47:42 – Mortality
1:48:44 – Regrets
1:50:41 – Meaning of life
Oliver Stone’s The Putin Interviews (2017)
Revealing Ukraine (2019)
Ukraine on Fire (2016)
The Untold History of the United States (2012)
- Chapter 1: World War II
- Chapter 2: Roosevelt, Truman & Wallace
- Chapter 3: The Bomb
- Chapter 4: The Cold War: 1945-1950
- Chapter 5: The ’50s: Eisenhower, the Bomb & The Third World
- Chapter 6: JFK: To the Brink
- Chapter 7: Johnson, Nixon & Vietnam: Reversal of Fortune
- Chapter 8: Reagan, Gorbachev & Third World: Rise of the Right
- Chapter 9: Bush & Clinton: American Triumphalism – New World Order
- Chapter 10: Bush & Obama: Age of Terror
See the full episode playlist on Odysee.
So what should we expect from the sanctions? Western pundits and commentators have little doubt: the sanctions will hamstring the Russian economy, sow discontent among the Russian people and elites alike, and possibly even cause the downfall of the Putin regime. At the very least, we’re told, they will hinder Russia’s war efforts. But history suggests otherwise: see Iraq, or more recently Iran. Far more likely is that this turns out to be the latest Western strategic miscalculation in a long list of strategic blunders, of which the United States’ inglorious withdrawal from Afghanistan is just the most recent example.
After all, Russia has been preparing for this moment for quite some time. Following the first wave of Western sanctions, in 2014, and partly in retaliation against them, Putin embarked on what analysts have dubbed a “Fortress Russia” strategy, building up the country’s international reserves and diversifying them away from US dollars and British pounds, reducing its foreign exposure, boosting its economic cooperation with China, and pursuing import substitution strategies in several industries, including food, medicine and technology, in an effort to insulate Russia as much as possible from external shocks.
Genetic match discovered in Covid’s unique furin cleavage site on spike protein
Matched genetic sequence patented by Moderna for cancer research purposes
Researchers say one in 3trillion chance Covid developed the code naturally
“We knew from February [2020], never mind March, that the lockdown would not solve the problem. It would simply delay it,” Woolhouse says, a note of enduring disbelief in his voice. And yet in government, “there was no attention paid to that rather obvious drawback of the strategy”.
Instead, lockdowns – which “only made sense in the context of eradication” – became the tool of choice to control Covid. The die was cast in China, which instituted ultra-strict measures and, unforgivably in Woolhouse’s book, was praised by the World Health Organisation for its “bold approach”. “The WHO,” he suggests, “got the biggest calls completely wrong in 2020. The early global response to the pandemic was woefully inadequate.”
Google once believed it could use algorithms to track pandemics. People with flu would search for flu-related information, it reasoned, giving the tech giant instant knowledge of the disease’s prevalence. Google Flu Trends (GFT) would merge this information with flu tracking data to create algorithms that could predict the disease’s trajectory weeks before governments’ own estimates.
But after running the project for seven years, Google quietly abandoned it in 2015. It had failed spectacularly. In 2013, for instance, it miscalculated the peak of the flu season by 140 per cent.
According to the German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, this is a good example of the limitations of using algorithms to surveil and study society. The 74-year-old has just written a book on the subject, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World. He thinks humans need to remain in charge in a world increasingly filled with artificial intelligence that tries to replicate human thinking.
Two years in, there is no doubt the Covid pandemic began in the Chinese city of Wuhan. But there is also little doubt that the bat carrying the progenitor of the virus lived somewhere else.
Central to the mystery of Covid’s origin is how a virus normally found in horseshoe bats in caves in the far south of China or south-east Asia turned up in a city a thousand miles north. New evidence suggests that part of the answer might lie in Laos.
http://archive.today/2021.11.18-080509/https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-covid-lab-leak-theory-just-got-even-stronger
Our government has used Covid as an excuse to turn Australians into digital products. It is the perfect scam. Every dictatorship knows that humans are cheap, renewable, and disposable. Our digital identities are worth a fortune to the right third-party buyer, while the ability to track and control our movements presents a unique opportunity for politicians wishing to manage democracy instead of being a victim of its whims.
China and Russia have jointly called for the US to abide by a United Nations convention on biological weapons, as the powers continue to accuse each other of ramping up their military strength and threatening global safety.
The focus on biological weapons has intensified as Beijing and Washington have traded claims that the coronavirus’ origin could be linked to each other’s research in that field – accusations that have been largely rejected by scientists and denied by both governments.
The call was made on Thursday at an arms control committee discussion of the UN’s Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BWC).
Covid was spreading “virulently” in Wuhan as early as summer 2019 – far sooner than previously thought, according to an intelligence analysis of spending on PCR testing equipment.
A new report claims to have uncovered “notable, significant and abnormal” purchases of PCR lab equipment in the second half of that year.
…”We believe the increased spending in May suggests this as the earliest start date for possible infection,” the study claims, adding: “We assess with medium confidence that the significant increase in PCR purchasing starts in July 2019.”
The mainstream media will have you believe that the economy is on its way back from the devastation caused by the pandemic, but today’s guest says that the trends tell us another story.
Gerald Celente is the Founder and Director of the Trends Research Institute and publisher of the weekly Trends Journal magazine and he says, “America was the land of opportunity, that is no longer.”
Further, Gerald explains that the “bigs are in charge”: Big Banks, Big Pharma, Military-industrial complex, Big Tech. And as long as the bigs are in charge, the economy is in big trouble.
Hosts Robert and Kim Kiyosaki and guest Gerald Celente discuss what trends are telling us about the future of the global economy and where you should be putting your money.
All but one scientist who penned a letter in The Lancet dismissing the possibility that coronavirus could have come from a lab in Wuhan were linked to its Chinese researchers, their colleagues or funders, a Telegraph investigation can reveal.
The influential journal published a letter on March 7 last year from 27 scientists in which they stated that they “strongly condemned conspiracy theories” surrounding Covid-19.
“Lockdowns,” the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people, have never before been used for disease mitigation in the modern Western world. Previously, the strategy had been systematically ruled out by the pandemic plans of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by health experts of every developed nation. So how did we get here?
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/masked-ball-cowardice
So it is curious that since the Covid pandemic began, this hugely influential figure has been at the heart of the scientific establishment’s efforts to stifle debate on the origins of the virus that emerged in Wuhan.
The Oxford, Edinburgh and London-educated infectious diseases expert has claimed scientists ‘know’ Covid was not created in a lab, suggested such an idea was a ‘conspiracy theory’ and insisted that ‘evidence’ indicates it spilled over naturally from animals.
Now, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that emails from America’s top infectious disease chief, Anthony Fauci, show how Farrar played a key role behind the scenes in marshalling top scientists’ response to concerns over the virus’s origins, even demanding secrecy on their discussions.
Crucially, he was a central figure behind two landmark statements published by leading science journals that helped to silence dissident views, arguing against the plausibility of ‘any type of laboratory-based scenario’.
Federal data seen by DailyMail.com reveals The Pentagon gave $39 million to EcoHealth Alliance, which funded a lab in Wuhan, China, between 2013 and 2020
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is accused of being the source of Covid-19
The majority of the DoD funding came from the DTRA, a military branch with a mission to ‘counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks’
Federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government in total
Grants from the Pentagon included $6,491,025 from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) from 2017 to 2020
EHA also received $64.7 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID)
It received $13 million from Health and Human Services, which includes the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control
It is not known how much of the money actually went to the Wuhan lab
EHA has also funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells