wired | In terms of the SolarWinds incident, the deterrence game is not yet
over. The breach is still ongoing, and the ultimate end game is still
unknown. Information gleaned from the breach could be used for other
detrimental foreign policy objectives outside of cyberspace, or the
threat actor could exploit its access to US government networks to
engage in follow-on disruptive or destructive actions (in other words,
conduct a cyberattack).
But what about the Department of Defense’s
new defend forward strategy, which was meant to fill in the gap where
traditional deterrence mechanisms might not work? Some view this latest
incident as a defend-forward failure
because the Defense Department seemingly did not manage to stop this
hack before it occurred. Introduced in the 2018 Defense Department Cyber
Strategy, this strategy aims to “disrupt or halt malicious cyber activity at its source.”
This represented a change in how the Defense Department conceptualized
operating in cyberspace, going beyond maneuvering in networks it owns,
to operating in those that others may control. There has been somecontroversy about this posture. In part, this may be because defend forward has been described in many different ways, making it hard to understand what the concept actually means and the conditions under which it is meant to apply.
Here’s our take
on defend forward, which we see as two types of activities: The first
is information gathering and sharing with allies, partner agencies, and
critical infrastructure by maneuvering in networks where adversaries operate. These activities create more robust defense mechanisms,
but largely leave the adversary alone. The second includes countering
adversary offensive cyber capabilities and infrastructure within the
adversaries’ own networks. In other words, launching cyberattacks
against adversary hacking groups—like threat actors
associated with the Russian government. It isn’t clear how much of this
second category the Defense Department has been doing, but the
SolarWinds incident suggests the US could be doing more.
How
should the US cyber strategy adapt after SolarWinds? Deterrence may be
an ineffective strategy for preventing espionage, but other options
remain. To decrease the scope and severity of these intelligence
breaches, the US must improve its defenses,
conduct counterintelligence operations, and also conduct counter-cyber
operations to degrade the capabilities and infrastructure that enable
adversaries to conduct espionage. That’s where defend forward could be
used more effectively.
This doesn’t mean deterrence is completely
dead. Instead, the US should continue to build and rely on strategic
deterrence to convince states not to weaponize the cyber intelligence
they collect.
Slate | To
understand the difference between the SolarWinds compromise and the
other high-profile cybersecurity incidents you’ve read about in recent
years—Equifax or Sony Pictures or Office of Personnel Management, for
instance—it’s important to understand both how the SolarWinds malware
was delivered and also how it was then used as a platform for other
attacks. Equifax, Sony Pictures, and OPM are all examples of computer
systems that were specifically targeted by intruders, even though they
used some generic, more widely used pieces of malware. For instance, to
breach OPM, the intruders stole contractor credentials and registered
the domain opmsecurity.org so that their connections to OPM servers
would look less suspicious coming from that address.
This
meant that there were some very clear sources that could be used to
trace the scope of the incident after the fact—what had the person using
those particular stolen credentials installed or looked at? What data
had been accessed via the fraudulent domains? It also meant that the
investigators could be relatively confident the incident was confined to
a particular department or target system and that wiping and restoring
those systems would be sufficient to remove the intruders’ presence.
That’s not to say that cleaning up the OPM breach—or Sony Pictures or
Equifax, for that matter—was easy or straightforward, just that it was a
fairly well-bounded problem by comparison to what we’re facing with
SolarWinds.
The
compromised SolarWinds update that delivered the malware was
distributed to as many as 18,000 customers. The SolarWinds Orion
products are specifically designed to monitor the networks of systems
and report on any security problems, so they have to have access to
everything, which is what made them such a perfect conduit for this
compromise. So there are no comparable limiting boundaries on its scope
or impacts, as has been made clear by the gradual revelation of more and
more high-value targets. Even more worrisome is the fact that the
attackers apparently made use of their initial access to targeted
organizations, such as FireEye and Microsoft, to steal tools and code
that would then enable them to compromise even more targets. After
Microsoft realized it was breached via the SolarWinds compromise, it
then discovered its own products were then used “to further the attacks
on others,” according to Reuters.
This
means that the set of potential victims is not just (just!) the 18,000
SolarWinds customers who may have downloaded the compromised updates,
but also all of those 18,000 organizations’ customers, and potentially
the clients of those second-order organizations as well—and so on. So
when I say the SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign will last years, I
don’t just mean, as I usually do, that figuring out liability and
settling costs and carrying out investigations will take years (though
that is certainly true here). The actual, active theft of information
from protected networks due to this breach will last years.
nakedcapitalism | It’s alarming and disheartening to see that the effort to combat
Covid is becoming more and more politicized. It’s not just the elements
that are inherently political, since they involve government decisions
and allocations of resources, like whether to restrict international air
travel, mandate quarantines, provide support to households and
businesses for lost wages and revenues, and decide who gets first dibs
on scarce supplies. It’s that the elements of the debate that the great
unwashed public would really like to be in the hands of unbiased
trustworthy experts are now as much subject to politics and fashion as
whether Covid relief will be means-tested or not.
One of the side effects is Joe Biden making nonsensical statement
like “Trust the science.” Science with respect to medicine is regularly a
medieval art. Either practically or ethically, we can’t run large scale
studies on representative populations. We’re often stuck with
observation, experimental-level studies, and correlations as opposed to
clear-cut causality. And too often, the people making those studies have
reason to over-hype the results, even if it’s just to get their
research noticed.
The situation is made worse with the high level of corruption in our
society, starting with private equity rentierism in hospitals and
emergency services. Experts have complained about corruption in
scientific research for decades, to the degree that a lot of the public
has become aware of it. Agnotology to muddy the mounting evidence
against smoking, and later, against carbon emissions. Vioxx. Oxycontin.
Overdiagnosis of behavioral disorders in children, accompanied by
unprecedented administration of medications. In medicine, this is the
direct result of drug companies and health care providers being more and
more driven by commercial rather than patient interest.
Profit pressures have also degraded the doctor-patient relationship.
More and more MDs work as employees rather than in their old
configuration of independent small businessmen. Their corporate masters
regularly not only dictate how many patients to see in the day, but also
a lot of their treatment protocols. Allegedly, the latter is driven by
the need to get more doctors to adhere to the standards of
evidence-based medicine. Some practitioners retort that quite a few
patients have problems that don’t fall tidily into adequately researched
boxes, and clinicians need to be able to make judgement calls.
None of this is new, but it’s important to remember these issues as
the debate over Covid policy continues. The US has backed itself into
the corner of having to hope for a medical magic bullet due to our
inability to mobilize a society-wide response to Covid. And it’s not
just authoritarian China that has done better. Thailand, which has
Bangkok, literally the most visited city in the world as its commercial
center, has a population of 75 million and has had 60 Covid deaths. Yes
that means 60 in total. Alabama, with 4.9 million people, had 56 Covid
deaths yesterday.
Even parts of the West that had initial successes, as we know all too
well, have backslid spectacularly, loosening up too much in the late
summer and fall. And now that the disease is well entrenched, it seems
just too daunting to have a strict lockdown for five to six weeks, pay
people and business enough to get through a deep freeze, and put in
place post lockdown measures with teeth, like serious fines for breaking
quarantine (and support during quarantines, like stipends and delivery
of food and other supplies). The purpose of this post is not to debate
what that program might look like, but to posit that there is one, and
that stop-and-go leaky lockdowns are likely to be as costly in human and
financial terms in the long term.
So instead, the US is putting all its eggs in the Covid vaccine
basket. That is coming at the expense of pursuing other approaches in
parallel to reduce the health cost and societal damage of the disease.
nakedcapitalism | Earlier this week, we posted An Internal Medicine Doctor and His Peers Read the Pfizer Vaccine Study and See Red Flags [Updated].
Most readers responded very positively to the write-up by IM Doc, which
included the reactions of the eight other members of his Journal Club
who reviewed the article and its editorial, as they have done regularly
with important medical journal articles. We have embedded the Pfizer
article from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) below; the link
to the editorial is here.
However, some took issue with IM Doc noting that two nurses in the UK
had suffered anaphylaxis, a severe, potentially life threatening
allergic reaction, after getting the Pfizer shot. IM Doc criticized the
paper and editorial for not including or adding a discussion of any
exclusion criteria, particularly since Pfizer’s proxies admitted that
severe allergies were an exclusion criterion. From MedicalXpress:
Moncef Slaoui, who is the chief advisor to the US program
for COVID vaccine and treatment development, told reporters, “Looking
into the data, patients or subjects with severe allergic reaction
history have been excluded from the clinical trial.
“I assume—because the FDA will make those decisions—that tomorrow
this will be part of the consideration, and as in the UK, the
expectation would be that subjects with known severe reactions, (will be
asked) to not take the vaccine, until we understand exactly what
happened here.”
Slaoui is the co-head of Operation Warp Speed and previously head of
GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine department. Other media outlets and
professional medical writers (see here and here for examples) picked up his statement that subjects with severe allergic reactions were excluded.
If you look at the article below, you will see that it is not
searchable. That indicates an expectation that it would be read as a
print out only. You will find it make no mention of “exclusion
criteria”. Neither does the the separate editorial by NEJM editors. The
article does does mention “protocols” in the text, twice, but does not
have a link to where to find them, does not have a written URL, nor does
it provide a name or location to assist in finding them.
Some critics argued that the protocol (which you need to search
through to find the selection process for candidates, including the
exclusion criteria, for the Phase III trials) could “easily” be found in
the Supplemental Materials and further asserted that any regular reader
of medical papers would be able to find then. The fact that IM Doc, who
has been reading medical papers for 30 years, and his eight colleagues
did not locate them is already significant counter-evidence,
particularly since the NEJM’s media kit lists the publication’s audience solely as physicians.
No doubt scientists read it too, but the eyeballs advertisers really
want to reach are doctors, academics or scientists in the employ of
competitors.
RT | A nurse at a Tennessee hospital collapsed soon after taking a
dose of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine. Though she recovered moments
later, the mishap struck another blow to a public health initiative to
promote trust in the new jab.
A nurse manager at the CHI
Memorial hospital in Chattanooga, Tiffany Dover, was among the first to
get the inoculation at the facility on Thursday. But as she spoke to
media moments after receiving her first dose, Dover reported feeling “really dizzy” before fainting, as was captured in a live broadcast.
Fortunately, a doctor was there to break Dover’s fall, and after
several minutes she was back on her feet, explaining that the reaction
is not uncommon for her.
“It just hit me all of a sudden, I could feel it coming on,” Dover said. “I felt a little disoriented but I feel fine now, and the pain in my arm is gone.”
I have a history of having an overactive
vagal response, and so with that if I have pain from anything, hangnail
or if I stub my toe, I can just pass out.
Other
medical staff at CHI Memorial said the adverse reaction was not linked
to the ingredients in the vaccine, developed jointly by Pfizer and
German firm BioNTech and approved earlier this month by the Food and
Drug Administration.
“It is a reaction that can happen very frequently with any vaccine or shot,” said Dr. Jesse Tucker, a medical director at the hospital.
As public health officials around the country work to bolster confidence
in the new vaccine – developed at breakneck speed and fast-tracked
through emergency FDA authorization – the incident in Chattanooga was
not the only major PR flop for Pfizer’s immunization this week.
Following another vaccination publicity event at a hospital in El Paso,
Texas on Tuesday, a nurse was apparently stuck with an empty syringe,
prompting a flurry of questions and bewildered reactions online.
RT | An El Paso, Texas, hospital tried to promote Covid-19
vaccination by turning its first doses into a media event, but the
publicity stunt backfired when one of the nurses being inoculated was
apparently stuck with an empty syringe.
Video of Tuesday’s
vaccinations of five nurses at University Medical Center of El Paso
showed the second nurse being jabbed with a needle, but the plunger
won’t go down because it’s already at the bottom of the syringe.
The video circulated on social media on Thursday, but rather than
focusing on the embarrassing blunder, some observers suggested that
posting the footage was an attack meant to diminish public confidence in
vaccines.
For instance, when independent journalist Tim Pool tweeted the video on Thursday, Democrat strategist Nate Lerner said, “It’s really weird how anti-vaccine you are. You’ve been hanging out with Alex Jones too much, my guy.”
Another Democrat commenter also smelled an anti-vaxxer rat. “A mistake that probably happened because of the media attention,” he said of the botched shot. “The
real question is, what are you trying to accomplish with this tweet?
Furthering distrust in institutions that function great while still
being susceptible to the occasional bit of human error?”
It's entirely possible this cyber attack was Russia, but is it just me or did it go very quickly from "these are the hallmarks of Russian hackers to" media just saying this was Russia's hack? pic.twitter.com/rWJxjOGEAE
caitlinjohnstone | Today we're all expected to be freaking out about Russia again
because Russia hacked the United States again right before a new
president took office again, so now it's very important that we support
new cold war escalations from both the outgoing president and the
incoming president again. We're not allowed to see the evidence that
this actually happened again, but it's of utmost importance that we
trust and support new aggressions against Russia anyway. Again.
The New York Times has a viral op-ed going around titled "I Was the Homeland Security Adviser to Trump. We’re Being Hacked."
The article's author Thomas P Bossert warns ominously that "the
networks of the federal government and much of corporate America are
compromised by a foreign nation" perpetrated by "the Russian
intelligence agency known as the S.V.R., whose tradecraft is among the
most advanced in the world."
Rather than using its supreme
tradecraft to interfere in the November election ensuring the victory of
the president we've been told for years is a Russian asset by outlets
like The New York Times, Bossert informs us that the SVR
instead opted to hack a private American IT company called SolarWinds
whose software is widely used by the US government.
"Unsuspecting
customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which
included a hidden back door that gave hackers access to the victim’s
network," Bossert explains, saying that "The magnitude of this ongoing
attack is hard to overstate." Its magnitude is so great that Bossert
says Trump must "severely punish the Russians" for perpetrating it, and
cooperate with the incoming Biden team in helping to ensure that that
punishment continues seamlessly between administrations.
The problem is that, as usual, we've been given exactly zero evidence for any of this. As Moon of Alabama explains,
the only technical analysis we've seen of the alleged hack (courtesy of
cybersecurity firm FireEye) makes no claim that Russia was responsible
for it, yet the mass media are flagrantly asserting as objective, verified fact that Russia is behind this far-reaching intrusion into US government networks, citing only anonymous sources if they cite anything at all.
And of course where the media class goes so too does the barely-separate political class. Democratic Senator Dick Durbin told CNN
in a recent interview that this invisible, completely unproven
cyberattack constitutes "virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the
United States." Which is always soothing language to hear as the
Russian government announces the development of new hypersonic missiles as part of a new nuclear arms race it attributes to US cold war escalations.
Journalist
Glenn Greenwald is one of the few high-profile voices who've had the
temerity to stick his head above the parapet and point out the fact that
we have seen exactly zero evidence for these incendiary claims, for
which he is of course currently being raked over the coals on Twitter.
"I
know it doesn't matter. I know it's wrong to ask the question. I know
asking the question raises grave doubts about one's loyalties and
patriotism," Greenwald sarcastically tweeted. "But has there been any evidence publicly presented, let alone dispositive proof, that Russia is responsible for this hack?"
bloomberg | The hackers who attacked FireEye stole sensitive tools that the company
uses to find vulnerabilities in clients’ computer networks. While the
hack on FireEye was embarrassing for a cybersecurity firm, Carmakal
argued that it may prove to be a crucial mistake for the hackers.
“If this actor didn’t hit FireEye, there is a chance that this
campaign could have gone on for much, much longer,” Carmakal said. “One
silver lining is that we learned so much about how this threat actor
works and shared it with our law enforcement, intelligence community and
security partners.” Carmakal said there is no evidence FireEye’s stolen
hacking tools were used against U.S. government agencies.
“There will unfortunately be more victims that have to come
forward in the coming weeks and months,” he said. While some have
attributed the attack to a state-sponsored Russian group known as APT
29, or Cozy Bear, FireEye had not yet seen sufficient evidence to name
the actor, he said. A Kremlin official denied that Russia had any
involvement.
FireEye’s investigation revealed that the hack on
itself was part of a global campaign by a highly sophisticated attacker
that also targeted “government, consulting, technology, telecom and
extractive entities in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East,”
the company said in a blog post Sunday night. “We anticipate there are
additional victims in other countries and verticals.”
The
Department of Commerce confirmed a breach in one of its bureaus, and
Reuters reported that the Department of Homeland Security and the
Treasury Department were also attacked as part of the suspected Russian
hacking spree.
Carmakal said the hackers took advanced steps to
conceal their actions. “Their level of operational security is truly
exceptional,” he said, adding that the hackers would operate from
servers based in the same city as an employee they were pretending to be
in order to evade detection.
The hackers were able to breach U.S. government entities by
first attacking the SolarWinds IT provider. By compromising the software
used by government entities and corporations to monitor their network,
hackers were able to gain a foothold into their network and dig deeper
all while appearing as legitimate traffic.
In a Senate floor speech Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Dick Durbin,
D-Ill., said the U.S. needs to “respond in kind” and that Russian
President Vladimir Putin is not a friend. A day earlier on CNN, he called the hack “virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States, and we should take it that seriously.”
“No,
I’m not calling for an invasion myself or all-out war. I don’t want to
see that happen, but it’s no longer a buddy-buddy arrangement between
the United States and Vladimir Putin,” Durbin said Thursday. “When
adversaries such as Russia torment us, tempt us, breach the security of
our nation, we need to respond in kind.”
Durbin’s remarks came hours before President-elect Joe Biden issued an
announcement that he had instructed his team to learn as much as
possible about the breach. He vowed a tough response, beyond expanding
investment in cyber defense.
“But a good defense isn’t enough; we need to disrupt and deter our
adversaries from undertaking significant cyber attacks in the first
place,” Biden said in a statement. “We will do that by, among other
things, imposing substantial costs on those responsible for such
malicious attacks, including in coordination with our allies and
partners. Our adversaries should know that, as President, I will not
stand idly by in the face of cyber assaults on our nation.”
This week brought the disclosure of a global cyberespionage campaign
that penetrated multiple U.S. government agencies by compromising a
common network management tool from the company SolarWinds used by
thousands of organizations. Russia, the prime suspect, denied
involvement.
Cybersecurity investigators said the hack’s impact extends far beyond
the affected U.S. agencies, which include the Treasury and Commerce
departments. Defense contractors like General Dynamics and Huntington
Ingalls Industries were on SolarWinds’ client list, but those two firms
have declined to comment.
SolarWinds counts all five military services, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency among its clientele, and the New York Times reported that the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and parts of the Pentagon were compromised.
Congressional Democrats have generally been more vocal about the hack
than Republicans, pointing fingers at President Donald Trump, who fired
Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency chief Christopher Krebs in
November. As Washington continued to assess the extent of the hack,
Democrats criticized Trump’s silence on the matter.
“We need to gather more facts. But early indications suggest Pres
Trump’s tepid response to previous cyber transgressions by Russian
hackers emboldened those responsible,” Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed said
in a tweet Wednesday. He is the Senate Armed Services Committee’s top
Democrat and sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
theintercept |State-sponsored hackers believed to be from Russia have
breached the city network of Austin, Texas, The Intercept has learned.
The breach, which appears to date from at least mid-October, adds to the
stunning array of intrusions attributed to Russia over the past few
months.
The list of reported victims includes the departments of Commerce,
Homeland Security, State, and the Treasury; the Pentagon; cybersecurity
firm FireEye; IT software company SolarWinds; and assorted airports and
local government networks across the United States, among others. The
breach in Austin is another apparent victory for Russia’s hackers. By
compromising the network of America’s 11th-most populous city, they
could theoretically access sensitive information on policing, city
governance, and elections, and, with additional effort, burrow inside
water, energy, and airport networks. The hacking outfit believed to be
behind the Austin breach, Berserk Bear, also appears to have used
Austin’s network as infrastructure to stage additional attacks.
While the attacks on SolarWinds, FireEye, and U.S. government
agencies have been linked to a second Russian group — APT29, also known
as Cozy Bear — the Austin breach represents another battlefront in a
high-stakes cyber standoff between the United States and Russia. Both
Berserk Bear and Cozy Bear are known for quietly lurking in networks,
often for months, while they spy on their targets. Berserk Bear — which
is also known as Energetic Bear, Dragonfly, TEMP.Isotope, Crouching
Yeti, and BROMINE, among other names — is believed to be responsible for
a series of breaches of critical U.S. infrastructure over the past
year.
The Austin breach, which has not been previously reported, was
revealed in documents prepared by the Microsoft Threat Intelligence
Center, or MSTIC, and obtained by The Intercept, as well as in publicly
available malware activity compiled by the site VirusTotal. “While we
are aware of this hacking group, we cannot provide information about
ongoing law enforcement investigations into criminal activity,” a
spokesperson for the city of Austin wrote in response to a list of
emailed questions.
On Sunday, Reuters reported
that a state-sponsored hacking group had breached the Treasury and
Commerce departments, sparking an emergency weekend meeting of the
National Security Council. The Washington Post later attributed the attacks
to Cozy Bear, citing anonymous sources, and reported that the group
breached the agencies by infecting a software update to Orion, a popular
network management product made by SolarWinds, a firm based in Austin.
“Fewer than 18,000” users downloaded the malicious software update,
which has been available since March, SolarWinds said in a federal securities filing on Monday. The Intercept has seen no evidence that the Austin breach and the SolarWinds hack are related.
consentfactory | Even if one accepts the official “science,” you do not transform the
entire planet into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare in response to a
health threat of this nature.
The notion is quite literally insane.
GloboCap is not insane, however. They know exactly what they are
doing … which is teaching us a lesson, a lesson about power. A lesson
about who has it and who doesn’t. For students of history it’s a
familiar lesson, a standard in the repertoire of empires, not to mention
the repertoire of penal institutions.
The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We
Fucking Want.” The point of the lesson is self-explanatory. The USA
taught the world this lesson when it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
GloboCap (and the US military) taught it again when they invaded Iraq
and destabilized the entire Greater Middle East. It is regularly taught
in penitentiaries when the prisoners start to get a little too unruly
and remember that they outnumber the guards. That’s where the “lockdown”
concept originated. It isn’t medical terminology. It is penal
institution terminology.
As we have been experiencing throughout 2020, the global capitalist
ruling classes have no qualms about teaching us this lesson. It’s just
that they would rather not to have to unless it’s absolutely necessary.
They would prefer that we believe we are living in “democracies,”
governed by the “rule of law,” where everyone is “free,” and so on. It’s
much more efficient and much less dangerous than having to repeatedly
remind us that they can take away our “democratic rights” in a
heartbeat, unleash armed goon squads to enforce their edicts, and
otherwise control us with sheer brute force.
People who have spent time in prison, or who have lived in openly
totalitarian societies, are familiar with being ruled by brute force.
Most Westerners are not, so it has come as a shock. The majority of them
still can’t process it. They cannot see what is staring them in the
face. They cannot see it because they can’t afford to see it. If they
did, it would completely short-circuit their brains. They would suffer
massive psychotic breakdowns, and become entirely unable to function, so
their psyches will not allow them to see it.
Others, who see it, can’t quite accept the simplicity of it (i.e.,
the lesson being taught), so they are proposing assorted complicated
theories about what it is and who is behind it … the Great Reset, China,
the Illuminati, Transhumanism, Satanism, Communism, whatever. Some of
these theories are at least partially accurate. Others are utter
bull-goose lunacy.
They all obscure the basic point of the lesson.
The point of the lesson is that GloboCap — the entire global-capitalist system acting as a single global entity — can, virtually any time it wants, suspend the Simulation of Democracy, and crack down on us with despotic force.
thebellows | On January 19, 2020, Washington state reported the first US case of coronavirus. By the end of March, 245 million Americans were under stay-at-home restrictions to “flatten the curve.” Mainstream news terrorized the public with exponential graphs, threats of a medical supply shortage, and displays of hygiene theater. Appeals to science were weaponized to enforce conformity, and the media portrayed anti-lockdown protesters as backwards, astroturfedwhite nationalists bent on endangering the public.
Meanwhile, Walmart and Target reported record sales. Amazon tripled its profits and Jeff Bezos made $70 billion. Billionaires have collectively made over $1 trillion since March. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft now make up 20% of the stock market’s total worth. The tech industry has achieved an unparalleled level of wealth and dominance. Data, which has been more valuable than oil since 2017, is expected to expand its economic footprint.
Unemployment, hunger, institutional breakdown, and the destruction of
social bonds are not symptoms of a virus. They are the indirect
violence of class warfare. The pandemic is a convenient scapegoat for
the largest upward wealth transfer in modern human history. Under the
pretext of a public health policy, elites have successfully waged a
counterrevolution that will result in the erosion of working conditions
and quality of life for generations to come.
A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Death, disease, and pandemics have always been part of human life and they always will be. 2.8 million Americans die every year and 56 million people die worldwide. Each year 1.3 million people die of tuberculosis, 445,000 die of malaria, and 290,000-650,000 die of influenza. In 1968 1-4 million people died in the H2N3 influenza pandemic, during which businesses and schools stayed open and large events were held.
Indefinite closures have never before been used as a disease control
method on a global scale. These experimental restrictions were shaped by
the discreditedImperial College Model which predicted 2.2 million US deaths. Many epidemiologists and doctors questioned these doomsday projections and pointed out that there was not sufficient data to justify lockdowns. The virus has a low mortality rate, especially for people under 65, and 94% of US covid deaths have occurred with comorbidities. Most statistical analysis does not show lockdown measures to be an effective strategy for reducing mortality.
In March unprecedented policies were rationalized through shocking stories and videos
from northern Italy. The region’s crowded ICUs were presented as a
warning for the rest of Europe and the US. Unknown to many was the fact
that Lombardy had been severely impacted by ongoing privatization efforts and a shrinking hospital system regularly overwhelmed by influenza.
This omission by mainstream media played a key role in developing the
mythology that economic shutdown could magically eradicate a virus. In
reality lockdowns have accelerated a cycle of austerity and created a
self-fulfilling prophecy of perpetual crisis.
nypost | As we try to come to terms with the extent of Chinese influence over
the Biden family, a leaked database of registered members of the Chinese
Communist Party has exposed a mass infiltration of American companies — with serious national security implications.
Boeing, Qualcomm and Pfizer are just three US companies that have
employed dozens of CCP members in their Chinese facilities, the database
reveals.
As well, three female employees of the US consulate in Shanghai have
been identified in the list of 1.95 million party members that was
leaked to an international group of legislators, the Inter-Parliamentary
Alliance on China, which includes Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Bob
Menendez (D-NJ).
All CCP members swear an oath to “fight for communism throughout my
life, be ready at all times to sacrifice my all for the party and the
people, and never betray the party [and] guard party secrets, be loyal
to the party.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a member of the Homeland Security
Committee, said yesterday: “CCP agents have no place in US government
facilities, and this report should serve as a much-needed wake-up call
to Washington, DC, and corporate executives, who continue to welcome the
Chinese government with open arms.
“[It] is just more evidence of the extent to which the CCP has successfully infiltrated American companies and government.”
While none of the people listed in the database have been identified as spies,
mounting concerns in the State Department about the CCP have resulted
in tightened visa rules for its members earlier this month. CCP members
and their immediate families now are limited to one-month, single-entry
US permits.
The database was verified by international cybersecurity firm
Internet 2.0, which found it was originally leaked on encrypted
messaging app Telegram in 2016. It was passed on to IPAC six weeks ago
by a third party.
“We have high confidence this list is authentic,” Internet 2.0
co-founder David Robinson, a former Australian army intelligence
officer, told me Sunday.
“Someone — an insider, a dissident — managed to get physical access
to the server [in Shanghai] from outside the building. They didn’t have
to hack it over the internet.”
Each data entry contains the CCP member’s name, ethnicity, place of
birth, education level, identification number and, in some cases, a
phone number and address. Fist tap Dale
unherd | The Left’s posture of liberationism provided an interpretive frame in
which the deadly riots and wider explosion of urban crime in the 1960s
was to be understood as political rather than criminal. This
interpretation played a key role in the wider inversion: it is “society”
that is revealed to be criminal. The utility of urban rioting for the
new Left lay in the fact that it was thought to carry an insight
into the illegitimacy of even our most minimum standards of behaviour.
The moral authority of the black person, as victim, gave the bourgeoisie
permission to withdraw its allegiance from the social order, just as
black people were gaining fuller admittance to it.
For the new Left, then, it was not capitalism but the democratic
social order altogether that was the source of oppression — not just of
black people, or of workers, but of us, the college bourgeoisie. The
civil rights movement of black Americans became the template for
subsequent claims by women, gays and transgender persons, each based on a
further discovery of moral failing buried deep in the heart of America.
Hence a further license, indeed mandate, granted to individual
conscience, as against the claims of the nation.
But the black experience retains a special role as the template that
must be preserved. The black man is specially tuned by history to pick
up the force field of oppression, which may be hard to discern in the
more derivative cases that are built by analogy with his. Therefore, his
condition serves a wider diagnostic and justificatory function. If it
were to improve, denunciation of “society” would be awkward to maintain
and, crucially, my own conscience would lose its self-certifying independence from the community. My wish to be free of the demands of society would look like mere selfishness.
The white bourgeoisie became invested in a political drama in which
their own moral standing depends on black people remaining permanently
aggrieved. Unless their special status as ur-victim is maintained,
African-Americans cannot serve as patrons for the wider project of
liberation. If you question this victimisation, you are questioning the
rottenness of America. And if you do that, you are threatening
the social order, strangely enough. For it is now an order governed by
the freelance moralists of the cosmopolitan consensus. Somehow these
free agents, ostensibly guided by individual conscience, have coalesced
into something resembling a tribe, one that is greatly angered by
rejection of its moral expertise.
BBC |Do you think that Google would have treated you differently if you were a white man?
I have definitely been treated differently.
In all of the cases that I've seen in the past, they [Google] try so hard not to make it a headline.
They try so hard to make it smooth.
When
it's some other person who is toxic, there are always these
conversations about: "Oh, but you know, they're so valuable to the
company, they're a genius, they're just socially awkward, et cetera."
My entire team is completely behind me and they're taking risks.
They're taking actual risks to stand behind me.
My manager is standing behind me.
And even still, they decided to treat me in this way.
So definitely, I feel like I've been treated differently.
I suppose if you think that, the next obvious question is do you think Google itself is institutionally racist?
Yes, Google itself is institutionally racist.
That's quite a thing to say - you were a Google employee until a short while ago.
I feel like most if not all tech companies are institutionally racist.
I mean, how can I not say that they are not institutionally racist?
The Congressional Black Caucus is the one who's forcing them to publish their diversity numbers.
It's not by accident that black women have one of the lowest retention rates[, in the technology industry].
So for sure Google and all of the other tech companies are institutionally racist.
The last two weeks have been
difficult for many, many people, and have surfaced large, important
issues. Many in the Black+ and other communities have trusted us to make
good on promises regarding racial equity, respect and inclusion. I can
understand how the handling of Dr. Gebru's departure has made some
question our commitment to that. These are areas I care deeply about as
well, both personally and professionally. You can and absolutely should
raise concerns over our culture and lack of representation. We need to
do more to make Google Research more inclusive and representative. I,
along with our Research leadership team and the DEI Council, will be
focusing intensely on this in 2021. We know we have work to do to
improve our internal org culture and leadership accountability is
essential to that culture.
At the same time, researchers might hesitate to pursue crucial
work on bias in AI and related issues, and have raised concerns about
our org culture and ability to pursue this research. This deeply saddens
me, and I want to reiterate how important it is that we do work in this
area to highlight risks and larger societal issues that can arise in
uses of AI (indeed, much our of AI Principles highlight the importance
of this). So, I want to assure you all that yes, we need to double down
on research that ensures AI and other technologies have a positive and
equitable impact. We have over 200 people on multiple teams across the
company working on responsible AI, and we're going to continue and
expand that work. We'll also sharped up our publication goals and
processes going into 20201 to ensure that all researchers feel confident
that their work is supported.
We've heard the important
questions many of you have raised – thank you for your time and energy.
We had intended to gather at our All Hands next week to celebrate the
year and to preview our 2021 strategy, but while there's lots to be
proud of as an org and what we've accomplished, a celebration doesn't
seem appropriate at this time. So we won't hold that meeting next week,
and will look at getting together as a whole org after the holidays.
Instead, to make sure we have opportunities to come together and discuss
these important issues, I'll be setting aside time next week, along
with my direct reports and other leads within Research, to hold a series
of smaller group conversations. If you'd like to participate in these,
please fill out this form (the number of people interested and topics
shared will help us figure out the most effective format and number of
these sessions). In addition to the formal review underway that Sundar
shared, many of you have shared useful suggestions on how we can improve
our culture. If you have more thoughts, please feel free to share (this
one can be anonymous, or you can add your idap) and know that I'll be
reading every idea and reflecting on how we can do better.
I'm
sorry for how challenging this has been. Please take some time over the
next week as you see fit; if you prefer to continue your work, that's
fine, but I want everyone to know you can take the time you need. The
top priority for me is all fo you – your well-being and our ability to
pursue great research together.
You can expect to hear a clear follow up from me and my leads on this in January.
Progressive: Madam Speaker Pelosi, why do you ignore us?
Pelosi: [slaps impudent progressive] Your place is to be seen, not
heard. Now vote as you have been instructed and tell the rabble what you
will. Now, be gone from my sight!
Progressives: As it pleases you. [Bows and leaves, stage right]
“Over the weekend, there has
been a raging debate on social media,
in which some progressive critics began demanding that lawmakers like
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez use their votes
in the upcoming House Speaker election as leverage to get a commitment
for a floor vote on Medicare for All legislation…. However, only asking
for that performative vote — rather than also asking for things that
might change the structural power dynamic
— would be a waste, and yet another instance of progressives reverting
to a feckless tradition of prioritizing spectacles rather than the
wielding of actual power. They could additionally condition their vote
for Pelosi on a commitment that she:
– Remove the Medicare for All opponent who chairs the key committee [Richard Neal]
– Schedule a vote on existing legislation to let states create single-payer health care systems
– Schedule a vote on a resolution demanding Biden use executive authority to expand Medicare
– Include provisions in year-end spending bills that create a
presidential commission charged with crafting a Medicare for All program
– Author a discharge petition to force a vote on Medicare for All
That’s a good list (and boy would I like to see Neal,
who is a nasty piece of work, taken down a peg). More on the raging debate on social media:
Jimmy debated with David Sirota about this on an impromptu live
broadcast on his YT channel just now. I only caught the closing minutes
of the discussion but I can say that Sirota came off very disappointing.
Jimmy got him to admit that he’s worried for
Pelosi’s speakership. I suggest looking to Jimmy’s YT channel for a
future clip– I have no doubt at all that he will post the entire
discussion in short order.
Jimmy was also on the Katie Halper Show last
night. She had a massive guest list last night, starting with a long
conversation with Christian Parenti, then transitioning
into a discussion of Jimmy’s strategy with Sirota, Stoller, Briahna Joy
Gray, Justin Jackson, and Jimmy himself. Jimmy thoroughly dismantled the
similar weak sauce arguments offered by Matt Stoller. In my humble
evaluation, Stoller was utterly unmasked as a
sinophobic chaos agent against any progressive ideas during a pandemic
last night. The discussion starts at the 2:10 mark and Jimmy comes in 40 minutes later.
WSJ | Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may
seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance
you might drop the “Dr.” before your name? “Dr.
Jill Biden
” sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic. Your
degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the
University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title
“Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’
Needs.” A wise man once said that no one should call himself “Dr.”
unless he has delivered a child. Think about it, Dr. Jill, and forthwith
drop the doc.
I taught at Northwestern University for
30 years without a doctorate or any advanced degree. I have only a B.A.
in absentia from the University of Chicago—in absentia because I took my
final examination on a pool table at Headquarters Company, Fort Hood,
Texas, while serving in the peacetime Army in the late 1950s. I do have
an honorary doctorate, though I have to report that the president of the
school that awarded it was fired the year after I received it, not, I
hope, for allowing my honorary doctorate. During my years as a
university teacher I was sometimes addressed, usually on the phone, as
“Dr. Epstein.” On such occasions it was all I could do not to reply,
“Read two chapters of
Henry James
and get into bed. I’ll be right over.”
I was also often addressed as Dr. during the years I was editor of the
American Scholar, the quarterly magazine of Phi Beta Kappa. Let me
quickly insert that I am also not a member of Phi Beta Kappa, except by
marriage. Many of those who so addressed me, I noted, were scientists. I
also received a fair amount of correspondence from people who appended
the initials Ph.D. to their names atop their letterheads, and have twice
seen PHD on vanity license plates, which struck me as pathetic. In
contemporary universities, in the social sciences and humanities,
calling oneself Dr. is thought bush league.
The Ph.D. may once have held prestige, but that has been diminished by
the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university
education generally, at any rate outside the sciences. Getting a
doctorate was then an arduous proceeding: One had to pass examinations
in two foreign languages, one of them Greek or Latin, defend one’s
thesis, and take an oral examination on general knowledge in one’s
field. At Columbia University of an earlier day, a secretary sat outside
the room where these examinations were administered, a pitcher of water
and a glass on her desk. The water and glass were there for the
candidates who fainted. A far cry, this, from the few doctoral
examinations I sat in on during my teaching days, where candidates and
teachers addressed one another by first names and the general atmosphere
more resembled a kaffeeklatsch. Dr. Jill, I note you acquired your
Ed.D. as recently as 15 years ago at age 55, or long after the terror
had departed.
WaPo | The Wall Street Journal published a weekend op-ed
that opened by addressing incoming first lady Jill Biden as “kiddo,”
and argued she should drop the honorific “Dr.” from her name because
she’s not a medical doctor.
The piece swiftly went viral, with critics bashing it as sexist and Northwestern University distancing the school from the lecturer emeritus who penned it. Dozens of Biden supporters, academics and activists hurled barbs at the newspaper’s opinion section on Saturday and Sunday with one Journal news reporter calling the piece “disgusting.”
“The
@WSJ should be embarrassed to print the disgusting and sexist attack on
@DrBiden running on the @WSJopinion page,” Michael LaRosa, a spokesman
for Biden, said Saturday on Twitter.
“If you had any respect for women at all you would remove this
repugnant display of chauvinism from your paper and apologize to her.”
On
Sunday, though, Paul A. Gigot, the editorial page editor and vice
president of the Wall Street Journal, doubled down on the piece, calling
the attacks a bad faith example of “cancel culture.”
“Why go to such lengths to highlight a single op-ed on a relatively minor issue?” he wrote
in a letter to readers. “My guess is that the Biden team concluded it
was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message
to critics as it prepares to take power. There’s nothing like playing
the race or gender card to stifle criticism.”
The
rancorous debate this weekend echoed a much longer-running conversation
about Biden’s use of an honorific, a discussion ongoing since she
became second lady in 2009, two years after the community college
professor earned her doctorate in education from the University of
Delaware.
Joseph
Epstein, who wrote the op-ed, taught English at Northwestern as an
adjunct lecturer for three decades, but stopped teaching in 2003. He
earned a bachelor of arts in absentia from the University of Chicago,
and once received an honorary doctorate, but has no higher academic
credentials.
He
argued it is misleading for Biden to use the doctor title, at least
while her husband is in the White House, because it is considered “bush
league” in academic circles for nonmedical doctors to claim the
honorific. Epstein also argued that an attachment to the title is silly
because once-prestigious doctoral degrees have lost their value because
of “the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards” at
universities, in part because of an abundance of honorary doctorates
like the one Epstein received.
Biden responded to the op-ed without addressing it directly on Sunday.
“Together, we will build a world where the accomplishments of our daughters will be celebrated, rather than diminished,” she said in a tweet.
alt-market | I have to look back at Event 201
to really gauge the state of the game, because what the elites planned
and what has happened do not completely match up. For those not
familiar, Event 201 was a type of “war game” held by globalists from the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The scenario? A pandemic outbreak of a coronavirus
which would spread like wildfire and kill a predicted 65 million
people. The simulation was held only a couple of months before the real
thing happened at the start of 2020.
In the year since the outbreak, the globalists have attempted to
enforce nearly every plan that was outlined during Event 201, including
using social media to censor or restrict any news or information outside
of the establishment approved narrative (Yes, narrative control was
discussed at the event in great detail). Klaus Schwab of the World
Economic Forum has consistently and excitedly applauded the pandemic
crisis as a “perfect opportunity” to institute the “reset” that the
globalists have been talking about for years.
Unfortunately for them, the virus has not been anywhere near as
deadly as they appear to have hoped. With a death rate of well below 1%
for anyone outside of a nursing home with preexisting conditions, the
establishment has now been forced to pump up infection numbers as a
means to terrorize the populace because the death numbers are not enough
to convince people to willingly hand over their freedoms. The Infection
Fatality Rate (IFR) for Covid 19 not counting nursing home deaths with
preexisting conditions is only 0.26% of those infected.
There is a propaganda meme being passed around these days that tries
to exaggerate the danger of death from Covid, and it goes a little
something like this:
“Covid has killed more people that the Vietnam War and the
Gulf Wars combined in a single year, therefore your freedoms are
forfeit…”
This is an idiotic talking point but luckily no one is buying it.
Over 40% of Covid deaths are people that are already sick and on the
verge of dying anyway (And no, refusing to wear masks is not the same as
endorsing “death panels”, because a death panel is about socialists
refusing treatment to people at risk because of their age. No one is
suggesting that old people be refused treatment, and they always have
the option of staying under quarantine if they fear they will become
infected. They are already retired and receiving social security,
perhaps if we are going to stimulate then the bailout money should go to
those most at risk so that the rest of us can continue on with normal
life?)
Hundreds of thousands of people die every year from diseases and
illnesses including the flu, common colds and pneumonia, yet, the
prospect of abandoning the Bill of Rights, submitting to economic
shutdowns and wearing a muzzle on our faces wherever we go was never
brought up before.
Why should we ask 99.7% of Americans or the world to accept medical
tyranny just to make .26% of the population feel safe? People who
question the mandates are called “selfish”, but even if I was one of the
people susceptible to the virus, I would NEVER demand that 99% of the
population bow to totalitarianism at the off chance that I might live a
little while longer. Now THAT would be selfish.
As more and more studies and data are released, the mask mandates are also coming into question.
Though Big Tech has sought to suppress or censor studies that run
contrary to the mainstream narrative, this has only led more people to
question the motivations of governments pushing the mandates. After all,
the mainstream media keeps saying that we should “listen to the
science”, but they ignore or censor the science. So, if the pandemic
response is not based in science, then it must only be about control.
Many Americans are not as stupid as the elites think. They see the
inconsistencies in the rhetoric and the data and they are increasingly
prone to refuse to comply. This might be why the establishment is
suddenly rushing out at least two Covid vaccines in the span of half a
year; they have to get the vaccine phase of the Reset underway before
too many people jump from the panic bandwagon.
The vaccine rush and the claims of effectiveness of 94% to 95% from
Pfizer and Moderna are suspect. The average effectiveness of most
vaccines is around 50% or less, and these are vaccines with hundreds of
trials and years of usage. Somehow, Pfizer and Moderna were both able to
produce a vaccine for a SARS type virus when multiple governments tried
for over a decade to produce vaccines for SARS in China and were
unsuccessful, and they were able to achieve 95% effectiveness?
Many people are not buying the vaccine story, and this is perhaps why
the elites are jumping headlong into vaccination so fast. Consider this
fact:
Here I think we have our explanation for the vaccination bonanza. The
elites know that a third of Americans (and probably Europeans) will not
take the vaccine regardless of any propaganda they dish out. They also
know that 60% of Americans are unlikely to take the vaccine unless they
can show an effectiveness rate of at least 75%. Neither Moderna nor
Pfizer have actually produced any evidence that their vaccines are
capable of prevented severe illness or death from Covid, so, their
effectiveness rate is based on “projections” of success according to
their minimal trials. Meaning, the effectiveness rate of 95% is
completely arbitrary.
Why did they go with such a high number instead of a more realistic
50% to 60%? Because the polls say they need an epic effectiveness rate
in order to convince Americans to take the vaccine. I think it is really
as simple as that.
Americans are skeptical of the vaccines for a number of reasons. The
reality that they are minimally tested and rushed out in less than a
year is one reason . The fact that the government and the media have
been caught censoring or lying about Covid data is another reason.
People just don’t trust the elites, and who can blame them? Who would
trust a cabal of psychopaths to inject them with an unknown viral
cocktail? Maybe their intentions are not so pure?
birchgold | Government officials are constantly in the media these days claiming
that vaccinations will not be made mandatory. What they don’t mention is
that they are already trying to legislate that anyone without a
vaccination or medical passport will be unable to participate in normal
society or even be allowed to work in their job. This program is moving
at an incredibly fast pace, which makes me think the globalists realize
they are losing the battle for the minds of the citizenry and they need
to rush their agenda before it’s too late.
Here is what will happen in 2021 in terms of the pandemic:
The
media and elitist organizations will continue to pump up the infection
numbers to frighten the public, even though the death rate is so low it
makes the infection rate meaningless.
If Biden is in office, mandates will be made into a federal issue and will be federally enforced.
If Trump is in office, state governments will try to enforce mandates and major corporations will help them.
There
will then be a major push to require medical passports proving a person
is not infected to enter into any public place. This means submission
to 24/7 contact tracing or getting a new vaccine whenever ordered to.
Basically, your life will be under the total control of state or federal
governments if you want to have any semblance of returning to your
normal life.
If this process does not work and does not
intimidate enough people into compliance, governments will seek to offer
stimulus checks or a form of Universal Basic Income, but only for those people who agree to tracking through their cell phones and to vaccination.
New
mutations of COVID-19 will be conveniently found every year from now
on, meaning the public will have to get new vaccinations constantly, and
medical tyranny will never go away unless people take an aggressive
stand.
It Gets Worse From Here On…
2021
will be far worse that 2020, but at least the lines will be drawn and
the fight will be more clear to everyone. The economic crisis is what
concerns me the most. The events listed above will complete the final
downturn in the global system and America in particular. Such a
financial crash would cause far more chaos and death than the
coronavirus ever could.
Ultimately, I believe the public will
respond badly to pandemic mandates. Many conservative states and
counties will simply refuse to enforce them. However, the question is,
will people end up fighting each other and forget all about the
globalists that created the problem in the first place? Will mass
poverty succeed where the pandemic failed in convincing Americans to
give up their liberties in exchange for some stability?
mises | Individual liberty is at risk again. What may lie ahead was projected in November 2016 when the WEF published “8 Predictions for the World in 2030.” According
to the WEF’s scenario, the world will become quite a different place
from now because how people work and live will undergo a profound
change. The scenario for the world in 2030 is more than just a forecast.
It is a plan whose implementation has accelerated drastically since
with the announcement of a pandemic and the consequent lockdowns.
According to the projections
of the WEF’s “Global Future Councils,” private property and privacy
will be abolished during the next decade. The coming expropriation would
go further than even the communist demand to abolish the property of
production goods but leave space for private possessions. The WEF
projection says that consumer goods, too, would be no longer private
property.
If the WEF projection should come true, people would have to rent and
borrow their necessities from the state, which would be the sole
proprietor of all goods. The supply of goods would be rationed in line
with a social credit points system. Shopping in the traditional sense
would disappear along with the private purchases of goods. Every
personal move would be tracked electronically, and all production would
be subject to the requirements of clean energy and a sustainable
environment.
In order to attain “sustainable agriculture,” the food supply will be
mainly vegetarian. In the new totalitarian service economy, the
government will provide basic accommodation, food, and transport, while
the rest must be lent from the state. The use of natural resources will
be brought down to its minimum. In cooperation with the few key
countries, a global agency would set the price of CO2 emissions at an extremely high level to disincentivize its use.
In a promotional video, the World Economic Forum summarizes the eight predictions in the following statements:
People will own nothing. Goods are either free of charge or must be lent from the state.
The United States will no longer be the leading superpower, but a handful of countries will dominate.
Organs will not be transplanted but printed.
Meat consumption will be minimized.
Massive displacement of people will take place with billions of refugees.
To limit the emission of carbon dioxide, a global price will be set at an exorbitant level.
People can prepare to go to Mars and start a journey to find alien life.
Western values will be tested to the breaking point..
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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He ...
