Secrecy, Collusion and Bad Medicine (REDUX 2/27/08)

The drug industry's long and ignoble history of secrecy

In 2004, UK researchers commissioned by Nice to develop guidelines for prescribing antidepressant drugs to children tried to obtain unpublished trials from the drug companies. They were refused. They then contacted the individual researchers who had worked on the trials. Only then did a picture emerge of increased risk of attempted suicide, and a lack of efficacy. Nice concluded by banning the drugs for under-18s with the exception of Prozac.

Yesterday's report suggesting that modern antidepressants offer no significant clinical benefit over placebo has been dismissed by the drug industry as "just one study" which should not be allowed to undermine the wealth of research showing that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants are effective.

But that is to miss the point. The Hull University researchers have demonstrated how partial access to research can give a distorted view of a drug. The non-disclosure of data on the SSRIs has raised doubts about the trustworthiness of all research on antidepressants.

We should be relieved that the licensing authorities have an absolute right to see all trial data, positive and negative, before approving a drug. But, bizarrely, Nice, with the responsibility for deciding which drugs should be used by the NHS, only gets what the drug companies agree to give it. The Health Select Committee has called for action to remedy this omission. Ministers must respond.

Died Suddenly: Zeta Potential And Covid-19

amidwesterndoctor |   One mission of this Substack has been to bring the concept of zeta potential to the awareness of the general public as I believe it is critical for understanding many different diseases including COVID-19 and both spike protein and non-spike protein vaccine injuries. A detailed summary of the concept can be found here:

The Forgotten Side of Medicine

What Makes All Vaccines So Dangerous?

In the first part of this series, I discussed how diseases frequently emerge that before long affect many people, and how in many cases conventional medicine cannot acknowledge what happened. Instead, these diseases will often be labeled as “syndromes…

When a substance is mixed in water, it has three options, not mix with it (typically either floating to the top or settling to the bottom), dissolve like salt, or form a colloidal suspension. Stable colloidal suspensions are typically finely dispersed microparticles and as that stability is lost, the particles clump together in larger and larger agglomerations which eventually will separate out from the surrounding water.

The colloidal stability of biological solutions however is mostly overlooked in modern physiology (other systems like Chinese medicine through blood stasis hold a greater focus to it). When the colloidal stability of a living organism is sufficiently impaired, severe diseases, such as those created by blood cells clumping together and impairing circulatory function can occur (similarly early researchers showed malaria causes death by creating severe blood clumping in the largest blood vessels, something Pierre Kory has also observed occurs in critically ill patients via IVC ultrasound immediately preceding their deaths).

A key factor that determines if colloidal solutions clump together or remain dispersed is the balance of electrical charges present (positive charges agglomerate, negative charges disperse). Zeta potential provides a way to model this immensely complex balance and explains why tiny amounts of positive ions with high charge densities (e.g. aluminum) are capable of agglomerating colloidal suspensions (e.g. sewage or blood), and why microstrokes often follow injections of these substances (similarly, poor zeta potential increases the viscosity of the blood, and when it is improved, a variety of cardiovascular or circulatory disorders also improved).

When COVID-19 started, I realize that many of the unusual symptoms reported by colleagues were identical to what I would have associated with an agent severely impairing the zeta potential of the body as so many different fluid circulations appeared to be impaired or showing signs of agglomeration (e.g. the frequent blood clots). After some research, I concluded the spike protein had the most likely electrical composition to account for these facts, at which point I became extremely apprehensive over vaccine designs which mass produced spike protein within the body (much of what is now known about the spike protein’s toxicity was not known then).

In Fleming’s previously mentioned presentation which discussed the prion domain within the vaccine spike protein, he also provided one of the best examples I have seen of how a small amount of a zeta potential reducing agent can rapidly cause blood cells to clump together. This was done by showing the immediate effects of each of the spike protein vaccines on healthy blood.

The South African researchers quoted earlier in this article likewise observed the same phenomena:

Blood incubated with spike protein showed erythrocyte agglutination, despite the very low concentration of the spike protein. An increase in platelet hyperactivation, membrane spreading, platelet-derived microparticle formation were noted due to spike protein exposure.

Further as detailed here, this clumping is also consistently seen on the blood smears of vaccinated individuals:

This rapid clumping process is most likely what causes sudden death immediately following vaccination in susceptible individuals, such as this recent example where this ardent advocate of vaccination died 7 minutes after receiving the new booster in the pharmacy.

As we circle back to Died Suddenly and the abridged version presented here, consider the scenes where the blood of these deceased individuals is shown (I am putting this video in again here so you don’t need to scroll up).

 

 

The Future Is Here Already: It's Just Not Evenly Distributed...., (Nor Will It Ever Be)

NPR  |  Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee still remembers the first cell he cultured: It was an immune cell from a mouse, and he had grown it in a petri dish. As he examined it through a microscope, the cell moved, and Mukherjee was fascinated.

"I could sense the pulse of life moving through it," he says. "You suddenly realize that you're looking at the basic, fundamental unit of life and that this blob that you're seeing under the microscope — this glimmering, refulgent blob of a cell — is the basic unit that connects us and plants and bacteria and archaea and all these other genera and taxa across the entire animal and plant kingdoms."

As an oncologist, cell biologist and hematologist, Mukherjee treats cancer patients and conducts research in cellular engineering. In his new book, The Song of the Cell, he writes about the emerging field of cell therapy and about how cellular science could one day lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of cancer, HIV, Type 1 diabetes and sickle cell anemia.

Mukherjee has a particular interest in T cells — a type of white blood cell and part of the immune system activated to fight disease. He's been treating patients in India who have certain types of cancer with genetically engineered T-cell variants, and the results have been striking: "One day the cancer's there. The next day the cancer is virtually gone, eaten up by these T cells," he says.

Siddhartha Mukherjee: Can We Reimagine Our Approach To Treating Disease?

Genetically engineered T cells, known as CAR [chimeric antigen receptor ] T cells, have become a staple in the treatment of certain kinds of leukemias, lymphomas and blood cancers. But, Mukherjee says, the cells have not yet proven effective in combatting the solid tumors, like those associated with lung and prostate cancer. His hope is that further research might change that.

"It's hard for me to convey the excitement that's sweeping through the whole field of cell biology ... the kind of headiness, giddiness, the madness, the psychic power that grips you once you get into the field," Mukherjee says.

---

Interview highlights

On using CAR-T cell therapy to treat Emily, a child with leukemia

[The treatment is] we extract the T cells from the from a patient's body. And then we use a gene therapy to basically weaponize them, to activate them and weaponize them against the cancer. We grow the T-cells in flasks in a very, very sterile chamber. And then ultimately when the cells have grown and activated, we re-infuse them into the patient's body. So it's sort of gene therapy plus cell therapy — given back to a patient.

In Emily's case, she was about 7, I think, when she was first treated. She had a complete response. She also had a very terrifying course. When the T cells get activated, they release an incredibly inflammatory cascade, sort of like, as I say in the book, it's sort of like soldiers on a rampage. And you can get so much of a rampage of T cells killing cancer that body goes berserk, it can't handle this kind of attack. Now, Emily, fortunately, was treated with a medicine to dampen down that attack so that she ultimately survived. She was the first child treated with this therapy to survive and serves an icon for this kind of therapy. ... She still is alive today and applying to colleges, I hear.

Not Psychological Warfare But Failure To Recognize Objective Reality...,

TAC  |  Given that American politicians are always more preoccupied by domestic affairs than foreign policy, members of Congress are quick to adopt the “true faith.” This faith explains why for the last eight years members thought a future war with Russia was a low-risk affair. Ukrainians would provide the cannon fodder and Washington would provide the expensive weaponry and munitions. 

Predictably, Washington’s governing strategic principles are unchanged from previous U.S. interventions around the world. Muddle through: masses of soldiers—in this case Ukrainians advised by U.S. and allied officers—and huge infusions of cash, equipment, and technology can and will permanently alter strategic reality in America’s favor. 

The stupefying air of self-righteousness the Biden administration assumes when it attacks erstwhile strategic partners such as Saudi Arabia or delivers moralizing lectures to Beijing’s leadership, or when its media surrogates express contempt for the Russian state, is downright dangerous. Political figures in Washington are ready to indulge any transgression if it is committed in the name of destroying Russia. They do not view U.S. foreign policy in the context of a larger strategy, nor do they comprehend Russia’s capacity to hurt the United States, a bizarre judgment of Russia’s actual military and economic potential. 

The result is a toxic climate of ideological hatred making it hard to imagine a contemporary U.S. secretary of State ever signing an international agreement renouncing war as an instrument of U.S. national policy, as Secretary of State Frank Kellogg did in 1928. But as one of Shakespeare’s characters in the Merchant of Venice warned, “The truth will out.” 

The ongoing buildup of 700,000 Russian forces with modern equipment in Western Russia, Eastern Ukraine and Belorussia is a direct consequence of Moscow’s decision to adopt an elastic, strategic defense of the territories it seized in the opening months of the war. It was a wise, though politically unpopular choice in Russia. Yet, the strategy has succeeded. Ukrainian losses have been catastrophic and by November, Russian Forces will be in a position to strike a knockout blow. 

Today, there are rumors in the media that Kiev may be under pressure to launch more counterattacks against Russian defenses in Kherson (Southern Ukraine) before the midterm elections in November. At this point, expending what little remains of Ukraine’s life blood to expel Russian forces from Ukraine is hardly synonymous with the preservation of the Ukrainian state. It’s also doubtful that further sacrifices by Ukrainians will assist the Biden administration in the midterm elections.  

The truth is Moscow’s redline concerning Ukrainian entry into NATO was always real. Eastern Ukraine and Crimea were always predominantly Russian in language, culture, history, and political orientation. Europe’s descent into economic oblivion this winter is also real, as is support for Russia’s cause in China and India and Moscow's rising military strength.

In retrospect, it is easy to see how Congress was beguiled by the denizens of think tanks, lobbyists, and retired generals, who are, with few exceptions, people with a cocktail level of familiarity with high-end conventional warfare. Members of the House and Senate were urged to support dubious strategies for the use of American military assistance, including reckless scenarios for limited nuclear war with Russia or China. For some reason, U.S. politicians have lost sight of the reality that any use of nuclear weapons would overwhelm the ends of all national policy. 

Tulsi Fitna Get A Little "Civil Affairs And Information Operations" Training

It’s almost Friday! Who am I kidding ... Weekends haven’t been a thing for me for a while. Congress isn’t back in session til Nov 16th so doing some great Army Civil Affairs Officer training! Grateful to be in Hawai’i. Sending you all aloha & best wishes wherever you are! #ALOHA pic.twitter.com/EXxU8klhjD

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) October 15, 2020

armytimes |  Congresswoman and former presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has left the Hawaii Army National Guard for a new assignment with a California-based Army Reserve unit, military officials said.

Gabbard’s new part-time assignment as an Army Reserve civil affairs officer follows 17 years with the Hawaii National Guard, The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Sunday.

The Hawaii National Guard confirmed Gabbard, who holds the rank of major, made the switch in June, but the transfer to an out-of-state unit was not formally announced, even to the state’s National Guard personnel.

Gabbard’s new posting, the 351st Civil Affairs Command, is based in Mountain View, California, but has subordinate units in other Western states.

The Army Reserve supports the active-duty Army and has more commands and promotion opportunities. Like the National Guard, most Army reservists serve part-time.

“The House in Congress isn’t scheduled to be back in session til Nov. 16th so I’m taking advantage of the time to do some great Army Civil Affairs training! I’m grateful to be able to do it in Hawaii,” the 39-year-old Democrat said in a social media message posted Thursday.

Gabbard’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Gabbard served in the Hawaii Legislature and Honolulu City Council before being elected to the U.S. House in 2012.

wikipedia |  The Information Operations (IO) is the Unit specifically and officially tasked with deployment of ‘information related capabilities’ (IRCs), which is euphemistic U.S. Military jargon for rapidly developing a broad range of propaganda, disinformation and any other tools of political subterfuge available in order to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision making processes of foreign governments, such as through creating propaganda, suppressing foreign news outlets and communications systems with ‘media blackouts’ particularly during operations also involving significant traditional military combat or other activities likely to result in imagery not beneficial to the United States, stirring up civil unrest, supporting false flag operations with false reporting in support of the U.S. narrative, bribery, blackmail etc. but officially not through any supportive role in political assassination support due to the Church Committee controversy. Generally, foreign assassinations and most other actual use of force operations are done in collaboration with classified elements of the U.S. military & intelligence communities such as the CIA and not within IO Units themselves unless absolutely necessary, such as if ambushed unexpectedly.

Equivalent foreign military intelligence programs are officially under the purview of FBI Counter-Intelligence (COINTEL].

The 151st Theater Information Operations is Group (151st TIOG) was realigned under the command of USACAPOC(A) in October 2015.

Information Operations units are the field commander's capability to synchronize and de-conflict IRCs in the commander's information environment. The Soldiers consist of teams which interface and provide IO expertise to the staff.^[6] 151st TIOG IO practitioners are particularly suited for this mission as U.S. Army Reserve Soldiers with civilian occupations such as law enforcement, engineering, medicine, law, finance, public administration and civil service, etc.; and, civilian education such as Project Management Professional (PMP), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Juris Doctor (J.D.), Master of Business Administration (MBA), Master of Public Administration (MPA), etc.^[7][8]

Information Operations Soldiers are integral to U.S. missions across Northwest Africa, East Africa, Europe, Middle East, and various other locations. If you see something, say something.

Nazis Here And In Kiev Script Preposterous Presidential Shit-Talking...,

 MoA  |  The Biden administration is spewing ridiculous fear mongering propaganda:

 

Wow. Biden at a Dem fundraiser tonight: “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis.” He says Putin is “not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical,” nuclear or biological weapons because his military is underperforming.

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) October 7, 2022

Fact is that Putin has not talked about the "potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons." Not. At. All. 

On September 21 Putin announced a partial mobilization of reservists. In his TV speech he mentioned nuclear weapons only with regards to 'Western' threats of using them.

Also for the record: Russia has signed and ratified the Biological Weapons Convention which prohibits the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological weapons. Russia has also signed and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention. In November 2017 it destroyed its last (Soviet) chemical weapons as mandated by the convention. It is the U.S. that still has not destroyed its chemicial weapons.

All the war mongering talk and reports about Russia's alleged threat of nuclear weapon use in Ukraine is totally unfounded. That 'western' media suddenly engage in it shows that it is part of a well directed propaganda campaign.

Meanwhile the Ukrainian comedian has called for 'preemptive' nuclear strikes on Russia 

 

Ukronazis Let The Cokehead In Kiev Live - Because He Fronts Western Cash

waisworld |  Today, in the middle of the biggest military operation undertaken during this war by the Ukrainians, about which nothing, bizarrely, is reported in the Western press, the official spokesman of Zelensky, Oleksiy Arestovich, published a remarkably passionate (possibly not sober) diatribe against Ukrainian nationalists on the same Russian-language Telegram feed where he publishes Zelensky's daily briefings (which I read every day), among other things blaming them (Ukrainian nationalists) for the Russian invasion.

Some excerpts:

"The ‘patriotic forces' of Ukraine (as they proudly call themselves) have never gained more than 1.5% in elections.

"The [Ukrainian] people are gray, but wise. The people understand that these comrades should not be entrusted with state power under any circumstances. In general, in none. There is simply no such case.

"Yesterday, I noted with true satisfaction how wise our people are--watching the reaction of the ‘patriotic spirit' to the creation of the Political Center of the Russian militant opposition to the Putin regime, headed by Ilya Ponamarev.

"I didn't fully understand before how you can be headless and narrow-minded at the same time. They managed to show me, bravo.

"I got a sensual understanding of how Ukrainian statehood has been f***d up until now--over and over again, for several hundred years in a row.

"It's very simple--they allowed ‘this' and ‘these' [Ukrainian nationalists] to make real state decisions.

"The reaction is simple:

"--‘we don't need opposition to Putin here, f*** off to the Russian Federation, and we will close ourselves up here in the Motherland, we will love each other and write.'

"These, God forgive me, motherf*****s [I struggle to translate the colorful and fundamentally untranslatable Russian obscenity "dolboeb"--CS], are the quintessence of eternal Ukrainian defeats.

"You say--‘motherf*****s' is too strong. These are volunteers, activists, patriots.'

"Yes. These are volunteers, activists, patriots. And--mother****s.

"It's good that not all volunteers, activists and patriots are morons.

"I would even say that the morons are in the minority.

"It seems to you, and most importantly--to them, that there are a lot of them. It's an illusion.

"They are just loud. And they are noisy because the weakest screams the loudest.

"These are jerky, weak-willed, extremely selfish creatures, shriveled up in a strange mixture of hatred and envy for each other and a terrible resentment for the rest of the environment.

"The political center of militant opposition to Putin in Ukraine is influence. Our influence on the Russian Federation.

"Only a mother**** can voluntarily renounce influence.

"They renounce. Everything is logical.

"At one time, Skoropadsky [the puppet Hetman of Ukraine at one point, appointed by German occupiers during WWI, a weird reference--CS] was ashamed to wipe his boots on this audience. As a result, we got here the Kiev Cheka, and a little later--the Holodomor.

"We could have become Finland. Instead we became a republic of the USSR.

"Today we have Putin's invasion, because it is this herd that poisons Ukraine and deprives it of real strength and influence--a small, farm herd trying to escape from reality under the plausible pretext of ‘patriotism'.

"They decided that they had a monopoly on patriotism here.

"What do they have the right to determine here--what is patriotism and what it should be.

"Idiots, complete idiots.

"To remove the sign--with Bulgakov [great Russian writer--Master and Margarita--born in Kiev--CS]--is to pinch off some of your influence.

"To close the Bulgakov Museum is to tear off a piece of influence from oneself.

"To abandon the Russian language [Arestovich, like Zelensky, is a native Russian speaker--CS] by the method of total bans is to lose influence--on our main enemy.

"Exactly in this way, exactly under these slogans and from this picture of the world, the largest military grouping in Europe, which we inherited in 1991, was destroyed.

"All these dreams of isolation from the enemy, with whom we have thousands of kilometers of a common border--and without natural obstacles (!), hundreds of years of common history and an eternal desire to devour us--nothing more stupid, infantile and helpless can be imagined.

"They have not just imagined--they are trying to make it a strategy and still impose on us. And this is good.

"It doesn't even occur to them, dumb-headed, in their frog fuss (once, the need is puffed up) that their weakness and inability to influence real events are directly related to the voluntary rejection of influence--through the constant desire for isolation.

"Influence is the ability to cause a backlash.

"If you seek to break the feedback from the main adversary, you are not affected.

"You create ideal conditions for the enemy to influence you.

"The snail strategy humiliates Ukraine. It demonstrates that Ukraine has the brains of a snail.

"I won't allow it. I need a Ukraine that plays across the entire chessboard. Affects Moscow, Vladivostok, Beijing, Washington, and the Martian settlement of Mask. And only in this way will Ukrainian culture rise and be realized. Only in this way the Ukrainian language will become fashionable--and studied. Only in this way will they want to imitate us. Isolation is not imitated. Strength is imitated."

https://t.me/O_Arestovich_official/2533

An odd thing indeed to appear in such an official channel. One thing we don't see in the Western press is the remarkable diversity of Ukrainian society, which is made up of different cultures, languages, and points of view, some of them very eccentric. Zelensky and most of his team are Russian speakers from the East, and as I have written before, they were elected on a platform of compromise and peace with Russia, a sharp break from the confrontational policies of the previous US-sponsored regime. The tension between Zelensky's party and the nationalist factions in Ukrainian politics is huge, and as I have written before, Zelensky is constrained in his actions by these elements. The nationalist factions have little support among the people (as Arestovich emphasizes in the quoted post) but they have a great deal of muscle--they possess various far-right militias, which were used to overthrow the Yanukovich government in 2014, and which can be used to overthrow Zelensky. So you might imagine that Zelensky has a gun to his head. I think these elements keep relatively quiet and line up behind Zelensky only because Zelensky controls the pipeline of Western aid, without which the country would collapse in a few minutes. But this can change in a flash.

I'm not sure what this weird Telegram post portends--is a rupture coming between Zelensky and Ukrainian nationalists? It's hard to say; the proximate subject of this post is a relatively minor issue (in the context of a big war)--whether or not to harbor the Russian dissident Ilya Ponamarev. I have been afraid for a long time that Zelensky might meet his end at the hands of his own nationalists.

It is possible that the current military situation is causing this stress.  There is a media blackout in the West, which was requested by Ukraine, so we're not reading about it, but there are a lot of dramatic events occurring right now on the ground. Yesterday, for example, it is reported that Ukrainian commandos, in a large force, attempted to storm the Zaporozhia nuclear power plant just before the UN inspectors arrived, and large-scale Ukrainian attacks are going on in the outskirts of Kherson, some of them achieving significant breakthroughs according to Russian sources. Weird we don't read about it in our press.

Arestovich himself is a, well, strange figure. To say the least. He was himself involved in far right (but not Ukrainian nationalist) causes, and was even some kind of follower of Dugin at one point (there is a video from the early 2000s where Arestovich appears on a panel with Dugin at one of Dugin's "Eurasianism" conferences). Arestovich was the deputy head of the far-right group "Bratstvo" at one point, an organization described by its founder (the even stranger Dmytro Korchynsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmytro_Korchynsky ) as the "Orthodox Taliban" [!!]. Arestovich's professional background is in acting, then psychology, a student of psychology and astrology, and oddly seems to have found work as a military advisor [!], then military intelligence officer, then propagandist. See: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-president-adviser-arestovych/

JE comments:  This is the head-scratcher of the day.  What exactly is Arestovich trying to achieve?  Even more confusing, his interpretation of how things got to this point makes no sense.  It all seems to hinge on Arestovich's notion of "influence," but how?  That the ultra-nationalists rejected Russian culture itself (as in Bulgakov), thus sparking the invasion?  Or that they are destroying the moral influence they have in this war (hence Moscow, Beijing, Washington), which undermines the Ukrainian military effort?

Zelensky needs the martial zeal of the ultra-nationalists, but he also has to keep them from turning against him.  A screed like this one from Arestovich may be many things, but smart politics isn't one of them.

Refrain From Evil - Who God Bless - Let No Man Curse...,

gilbertdoctorow  |  The United States and Collective West are in open conflict with Russia for its insubordination, for its insistence on being itself and not following a diktat from anyone. The Collective West is intent on Russia’s destruction, its break-up into smaller units easier to control and colonize. The spoliation of Russia by the West at the time the country was flat on its back in the 1990s amounted to 1 trillion dollars.

Putin characterized the information war and lies propagated by the West about Russia as worthy of Goebbels, following the principle that the more outrageous is the lie, the more it is repeated, the greater the likelihood it will be believed and accepted.

The speech had very little content drawing on current events, aside from the referendums in the respective territories which have now become ‘subjects of the Russian Federation.’  He did mention the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in one sentence, as the work of the ‘Anglo-Saxons,’ which in the context we may take to mean the United Kingdom. It will be interesting to see in the coming days whether Russian diplomats put forward this allegation in international forums like the United Nations.

As for the speaker, he was in top form. His delivery was self-assured and smooth. He looked radiant and in good health.

Judging by the faces of those who were repeatedly captured by the cameramen, the mood of the audience was predominantly, almost exclusively somber, similar to when Putin delivered his announcement on recognition of the sovereignty of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics in the days leading up to the 24 February launch of the ‘special military operation.’ I call out in particular Prime Minister Mishustin, chief of the presidential administration Kiriyenko, speaker of the Federation Council Matviyenko, Speaker of the State Duma Volodin, former president and head of the Security Council Medvedev, head of the Just Russia party Mironov, head of Foreign Intelligence Naryshkin, head of the foreign affairs committee of the Federation Council Kosachev, minister of foreign affairs Lavrov.  The weight and responsibility before history for the fate of the country at this critical time could be read on all these faces.

Curiously, the party leader of the Communists, Zyuganov, was not picked out by the cameras; presumably, he would have been in a more celebratory mood. And the only major Russian politician who surely would have smiled broadly, Zhirinovsky, has been dead now for six months. Oh, yes, there was on the dais one man who was clearly in very good spirits: the leader of the Donetsk Republic, Pushilin.

Where does the campaign in Ukraine go from here?  There was absolutely nothing in Putin’s speech to answer that question. The only mention of Kiev in this connection was his insistence that Russia stands ready to enter into negotiations on condition that the status of the four new ‘subjects’ of the Russian Federation not be discussed, since their fate was solved now once and for all.

For the world at large, Vladimir Putin has set out a broad and vastly damaging condemnation of the Collective West which no one can ignore. He has thrown down his gauntlet. 

From the beginning of the ‘special military operation’ there has been speculation among expert observers of all political stripes that Russia would never have dared to invade Ukraine had he not had the backing of China’s president Xi.  It was assumed by others that the stress of the war and of the sanctions imposed by the West has made Russia a junior partner of China, with all the loss of independence that implies.  However, I would maintain that with this speech the Russians have both the Chinese and the Indians by the tail, not the other way around.  There is no way that either of these great powers can walk away from Russia without losing all credibility in the Global South as champions of a multipolar world and challengers to the rapacious collective West.

Trust Neither Your Senses Or Your Ordinary Waking State

Consciousness Come After Language?

OCBBM | The Features of Consciousness - I. Spatialization. The first and most primitive aspect of consciousness is what we already have had occasion to refer to, the paraphrand of almost every mental metaphor we can make, the mental space which we take over as the very habitat of it all. If I ask you to think of your head, then your feet, then the breakfast you had this morning, and then the Tower of London, and then the constellation of Orion, these things have the quality of being spatially separated; and it is this quality I am here referring to. When we introspect (a metaphor of seeing into something), it is upon this metaphorical mind-space which we are constantly renewing and 'enlarging' with each new thing or relation consciousized. In Chapter 1, we spoke of how we invent mind-space inside our own heads as well as the heads of others. The word invent is perhaps too strong except in the ontological sense. We rather assume these 'spaces' without question. They are a part of what it is to be conscious and what it is to assume consciousness in others. Moreover, things that in the physical-behavioral world do not have a spatial quality are made to have such in consciousness. Otherwise we cannot be conscious of them. This we shall call spatialization. Time is an obvious example. If I ask you to think of the last hundred years, you may have a tendency to excerpt the matter in such a way that the succession of years is spread out, probably from left to right. But of course there is no left or right in time. There is only before and after, and these do not have any spatial properties whatever — except by analog. You cannot, absolutely cannot think of time except by spatializing it. Consciousness is always a spatialization in which the diachronic is turned into the synchronic, in which what has happened in time is excerpted and seen in side-by-sideness. (leading to other problems and limitations previously noted (Bearden's 4th Law of Logic)) This spatialization is characteristic of all conscious thought. If you are now thinking of where in all the theories of mind my particular theory fits, you are first habitually 'turning' to your mind-space where abstract things can be 'separated out' and 'put beside' each other to be 'looked at' — as could never happen physically or in actuality. You then make the metaphor of theories as concrete objects, then the metaphor of a temporal succession of such objects as a synchronic array, and thirdly, the metaphor of the characteristics of theories as physical characteristics, all of some degree so they can be 'arranged' in a kind of order. And you then make the further expressive metaphor of 'fit'. The actual behavior of fitting, of which 'fit' here is the analog in consciousness, may vary from person to person or from culture to culture, depending on personal experience of arranging things in some kind of order, or of fitting objects into their receptacles, etc. The metaphorical substrate of thought is thus sometimes very complicated, and difficult to unravel. But every conscious thought that you are having in reading this book can by such an analysis be traced back to concrete actions in a concrete world. 2. Excerption. In consciousness, we are never 'seeing' anything in its entirety. This is because such 'seeing' is an analog of actual behavior j and in actual behavior we can only see or pay attention to a part of a thing at any one moment. And so in consciousness. We excerpt from the collection of possible attentions to a thing which comprises our knowledge of it. And this is all that it is possible to do since consciousness is a metaphor of our actual behavior. Thus, if I ask you to think of a circus, for example, you will first have a fleeting moment of slight fuzziness, followed perhaps by a picturing of trapeze artists or possibly a clown in the center ring. Or, if you think of the city which you are now in, you will excerpt some feature, such as a particular building or tower or crossroads. Or if I ask you to think of yourself, you will make some kind of excerpts from your recent past, believing you are then thinking of yourself. In all these instances, we find no difficulty or particular paradox in the fact that these excerpts are not the things themselves, although we talk as if they were. Actually we are never conscious of things in their true nature, only of the excerpts we make of them. The variables controlling excerption are deserving of much more thought and study. For on them the person's whole consciousness of the world and the persons with whom he is interacting depend. Your excerptions of someone you know well are heavily associated with your affect toward him. If you like him, the excerpts will be the pleasant things; if not, the unpleasant. The causation may be in either direction. How we excerpt other people largely determines the kind of world we feel we are living in. Take for example one's relatives when one was a child. If we excerpt them as their failures, their hidden conflicts, their delusions, well, that is one thing. But if we excerpt them at their happiest, in their idiosyncratic delights, it is quite another world. Writers and artists are doing in a controlled way what happens 'in' consciousness more haphazardly. Excerption is distinct from memory. An excerpt of a thing is in consciousness the representative of the thing or event to which memories adhere, and by which we can retrieve memories. If I wish to remember what I was doing last summer, I first have an excerption of the time concerned, which may be a fleeting image of a couple of months on the calendar, until I rest in an excerption of a particular event, such as walking along a particular riverside. And from there I associate around it and retrieve mem-ories about last summer. This is what we mean by reminiscence, and it is a particular conscious process which no animal is capable of. Reminiscence is a succession of excerptions. Each so-called association in consciousness is an excerption, an aspect or image, if you will, something frozen in time, excerpted from the experience on the basis of personality and changing situational factors. 3. The Analog 'I'. A most important 'feature' of this metaphor 'world' is the metaphor we have of ourselves, the analog 'I', which can 'move about' vicarially in our 'imagination', 'doing'things that we are not actually doing. There are of course many uses for such an analog 'I'. We imagine 'ourselves' 'doing' this or that, and thus 'make' decisions on the basis of imagined 'outcomes' that would be impossible if we did not have an imagined 'self' behaving in an imagined 'world'. In the example in the section on spatialization, it was not your physical behavioral self that was trying to 'see' where my theory 'fits' into the array of alternative theories. It was your analog 'I'. If we are out walking, and two roads diverge in a wood, and we know that one of them comes back to our destination after a much more circuitous route, we can 'traverse' that longer route with our analog 'I' to see if its vistas and ponds are worth the longer time it will take. Without consciousness with its vicarial analog 'I', we could not do this. 4. The Metaphor 'Me'. The analog 'I' is, however, not simply that. It is also a metaphor 'me'. As we imagine ourselves strolling down the longer path we indeed catch 'glimpses' of 'ourselves', as we did in the exercises of Chapter 1, where we called them autoscopic images. We can both look out from within the imagined self at the imagined vistas, or we can step back a bit and see ourselves perhaps kneeling down for a drink of water at a particular brook. There are of course quite profound problems here, particularly in the relationship of the 'I' to the 'me'. But that is another treatise. And I am only indicating the nature of the problem. 5. Narratization. In consciousness, we are always seeing our vicarial selves as the main figures in the stories of our lives. In the above illustration, the narratization is obvious, namely, walk-ing along a wooded path. But it is not so obvious that we are constantly doing this whenever we are being conscious, and this I call narratization. Seated where I am, I am writing a book and this fact is imbedded more or less in the center of the story of my life, time being spatialized into a journey of my days and years. New situations are selectively perceived as part of this ongoing story, perceptions that do not fit into it being unnoticed or at least unremembered. More important, situations are chosen which are congruent to this ongoing story, until the picture I have of myself in my life story determines how I am to act and choose in novel situations as they arise. The assigning of causes to our behavior or saying why we did a particular thing is all a part of narratization. Such causes as reasons may be true or false, neutral or ideal. Consciousness is ever ready to explain anything we happen to find ourselves doing. The thief narratizes his act as due to poverty, the poet his as due to beauty, and the scientist his as due to truth, purpose and cause inextricably woven into the spatialization of behavior in consciousness. But it is not just our own analog 'I' that we are narratizing; it is everything else in consciousness. A stray fact is narratized to fit with some other stray fact. A child cries in the street and we narratize the event into a mental picture of a lost child and a parent searching for it. A cat is up in a tree and we narratize the event into a picture of a dog chasing it there. Or the facts of mind as we can understand them into a theory of consciousness. 6. Conciliation. A final aspect of consciousness I wish to mention here is modeled upon a behavioral process common to most mammals. It really springs from simple recognition, where a slightly ambiguous perceived object is made to conform to some previously learned schema, an automatic process sometimes called assimilation. We assimilate a new stimulus into our conception, or schema about it, even though it is slightly different. Since we never from moment to moment see or hear or touch things in exactly the same way, this process of assimilation into previous experience is going on all the time as we perceive our world. We are putting things together into recognizable objects on the basis of the previously learned schemes we have of them. Now assimilation consciousized is conciliation. A better term for it might be compatibilization, but that seems something too rococo. What I am designating by conciliation is essentially doing in mind-space what narratization does in mindtime or spatialized time. It brings things together as conscious objects just as narra-tization brings things together as a story. And this fitting together into a consistency or probability is done according to rules built up in experience. In conciliation we are making excerpts or narratizations compatible with each other, just as in external perception the new stimulus and the internal conception are made to agree. If we are narratizing ourselves as walking along a wooded path, the succession of excerpts is automatically made compatible with such a journey. Or if in daydreaming two excerpts or narratizations happen to begin occurring at the same time, they are fused or conciliated. If I ask you to think of a mountain meadow and a tower at the same time, you automatically conciliate them by having the tower rising from the meadow. But if I ask you to think of the mountain meadow and an ocean at the same time, conciliation tends not to occur and you are likely to think of one and then the other. You can only bring them together by a narratization. Thus there are principles of compatibility that govern this process, and such principles are learned and are based on the structure of the world. Let me summarize as a way of 'seeing' where we are and the direction in which our discussion is going. We have said that consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog 'I' that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be manipulated like things in space. Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first. This has been a difficult chapter. But I hope I have sketched out with some plausibility that the notion of consciousness as a metaphor-generated model of the world leads to some quite definite deductions, and that these deductions are testable in our own everyday conscious experience. It is only, of course, a beginning, a somewhat rough-hewn beginning, which I hope to develop in a future work. But it is enough to return now to our major inquiry of the origin of it all, saving further amplification of the nature of consciousness itself for later chapters. If consciousness is this invention of an analog world on the basis of language, paralleling the behavioral world even as the world of mathematics parallels the world of quantities of things, what then can we say about its origin? We have arrived at a very interesting point in our discussion, and one that is completely contradictory to all of the alternative solutions to the problem of the origin of consciousness which we discussed in the introductory chapter. For if consciousness is based on language, then it follows that it is of a much more recent origin than has heretofore been supposed. Consciousness come after language! The implications of such a position are extremely serious.

 

The Panicdemic Separated Nudgeable Softheaded Sheep From Rational Hardheaded Goats...,

naomiwolf  |  On driveway after driveway of the ex-Brooklynites, of the former weekend people — (and I confess that I too was once a weekend person, but something has happened to me in the last two years that has changed me even more than my change of home address) there were now Ukrainian flags. Not American flags. No one cared or even asked about the town halls being closed for the past two years. Tyranny overseas was more pressing than the rights that had been suspended just up the road.

Otherwise most things were almost back to normal! Almost pre-2020 normal!

The masks had recently come off. Hudson, New York, and Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the two cities nearest us, and also, by chance, both left-leaning, had also been two of the maskiest and most coercive of places when it came to pandemic policies and pandemic cultures. Now businesses were being allowed to reopen.

(I’d been fired from my Great Barrington synagogue because I’d dared to invite people over to my house at the depth of the pandemic — if they had wanted, as adults, affirmatively, to join me — to watch the Zoom Friday Evening Shabbat service together. Shocking behavior on my part, I know.)

As if a switch had been flicked, now the cruel moral judgments, the two-tier society, the mandates, the coercions, the nasty looks, the desperate masked children with their laboring breath, the loneliness, the desolate centrally-planned economies — had evaporated and were no more.

A memo from a political consultancy had gone out to the DNC, warning about how these policies spelled defeat in the midterms, and Pouf! — a whole retinue of “mandates” messaged as if they had been matters of life and death, a raft of Board of Health demands, a plethora of social strictures, and baroque instructions on how and when to discriminate against one’s fellow Americans — vanished, like the smoke from an unwelcome cigarette on a breezy veranda. An MSNBC commentator said, in a logical non sequitur, that now that vaccines were available for kids, in-person office life would resume.

Overnight, a new concern, a new moral signifier, was presented, wholly formed: and it involved a conflict area half a world away. Now, war is always bad and invasions are always cruel; but I could not help noticing that there are wars, refugees, invasions and conflict areas around the world, and that only this one — this one one — demanded the attentions of my irksomely cultish and uncritical former tribe. I could not help noticing that the dozens of devastated conflict areas and war zones being totally ignored by the ex-Brooklynites — from Ethiopia, where there have been 50,000 deaths since September, to Sri Lanka, with its catastrophic food shortages, to Mexico’s drug war, which has led to 300,000 deaths, to Afghanistan, where women are being rounded up and people are being shot in the street — do not involve white people who look like the ex-Brooklynites; and for various other reasons, are not attracting a lot of television cameras.

You’d think the ex-Brooklynites, with their expensive educations, would bear those complexities in mind.

But no; the ex-Brooklynites are so easily led, when it comes to anyone invoking their particular moral high ground.

When they are directed to pay attention to one conflict out of dozens, and ignore the rest, no matter how dire the rest may be, they do so. Just like, when they were instructed to present their bodies uncritically to an untried MRNA injection and to offer up the bodies of their minor children, they did so. When they were asked to shun and to discriminate against their blameless neighbors, they did so.

So the great apparatus of messaging about COVID was switched off, almost overnight, as the politics clearly soured and as Republicans consolidated an increasingly popular, multiracially inclusive, transpartisan-ly appealing freedom message; and the comms apparatus simply replaced the COVID drama with a new, equally gripping European-conflict drama.

How Do You Feel About Being A Subject Of "The Bad Guys?"

“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud,” according to Orwell. In which case we’ve been totalitarian since at least 2001

TAE  |  I’ve been wondering for a long time why Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin as his successor in 1999, and I can’t find much information on it. Yeltsin was a US asset, and sold out his country to the CIA and a bunch of CIA-asset homegrown oligarchs. I’ve always suspected that when Yeltsin left, he felt a lot of regret for what he had done to Russia, and that maybe appointing Putin was his way to try and make up for that. I see people saying that Yeltsin thought Putin was pliable, but I think perhaps he knew exactly how Putin thought.

A “detail”: remember that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, male life expectancy for a period of time feel from a very steep cliff. And nothing Yeltsin did provided a solution to that crisis. Then, in August 1999, he appointed Putin as his prime minister, and didn’t leave a year later as planned, but 4 months later, in December. His chief of staff, Valentin Yumashev , who had hired Putin as his deputy in 1997, wrote his resignation speech:

Mr Yumashev was entrusted with writing Yeltsin’s resignation speech. “It was a hard speech to write. It was clear the text would go down in history. The message was important. That’s why I wrote the famous line ‘Forgive me’. “Russians had suffered such shock and stress during the 1990s. Yeltsin had to speak about this.”

Back to today. All economic -and other- sanctions against Russia since Putin first became president have led to one thing only: the country has dramatically increased its self-sufficiency. And in the process has upgraded its weapons arsenal to a level that no western country even comes close to, including the US, for maybe 10% of what the same US has spent on its own arsenal.

Russia’s latest generation of hypersonic missiles, against which no country has any defense, are far superior to what anybody else possesses. When they said recently they could take out a specific building in Kyiv if they wanted, they were not exaggerating. So yeah, look for Biden and Blinken and NATO et al to soon start using that superiority as a reason to incite more war vs Moscow.

A war they could never win, but that’s not the point any longer. One might argue of course that it never was after the advent of nuclear weapons. The whole point of NATO today, its raison d’être, is that it can create chaos wherever it goes and looks. It’s no longer capable of defending anyone from the Russian threat, but then that threat hasn’t been there for many years.

And NATO wants to continue existing, as does the Pentagon, and Boeing and Raytheon, it’s all about money, so they have to make up a threat, aided by their media brethren. That‘s why you see, from time to time, reports about Putin having yet another person “poisoned”, why governments in countries like the UK and Germany go along with the narrative, and why media in all other vassal states parrot these stories.

Russia only sprung into action when the west tried to take away their sole warm water port, Sevastopol in Crimea. An election was held, and 97% of mostly Russians voted to be part of Russia. Yeah, that upset NATO and the other usual suspects, but that doesn’t make Russia an aggressor.

Russia has no reason to “invade” Ukraine. They don’t need even more territory, they’re already by far the largest nation on earth. Moreover, they don’t have the military to occupy large swaths of land. They only have the capacity to protect their own.

Thing is, they really got that down. So the only thing NATO can do, in its quest to prove it has reason to exist, is to create chaos, as I said before. But there is a problem with consciously creating chaos between nuclear powers, instead of maintaining communication channels, as the US and USSR always did during the Cold War. Do we all understand this means we are in a worse situation today than back then?

And that some fool could actually fire a nuclear missile because of that? Me, I’m not so sure anymore. Between the Covid virus and the US cancel culture, there are not that many western people paying attention to warmongers and NATO aka warheads. Not a good idea.

 

While You Obsessed Over Will Smith's N***a Moment, Klaus Schwab An'Em Was Talm'bout You In Dubai...,

thelastamericanvagabond  |  While much of the “mainstream” world has spent the last few days obsessing over and debating the celebrity spectacle surrounding American actor Will Smith slapping American comedian Chris Rock, the international elitists were meeting in Dubai for the 2022 World Government Summit.

From March 28th to the 30th, corporate media journalists, heads of state, and CEOs of some of the most profitable companies in the world met for discussions on shaping the direction of the next decade and beyond. Anyone with a functioning brain should ignore the tabloids and instead pay attention to this little known gathering of globalist Technocrats.

Let’s take a look at the speakers and the panels, starting with Mr. Great Reset himself, Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum.

Schwab gave a talk entitled, Our World Today… Why Government Must Act Now?.  “Thank you, to his excellency for enabling this initiative to define a longer-term narrative to make the world more resilient more inclusive and more sustainable,” Schwab stated during his address. The use of the term narrative is important because in January 2021, Klaus and the World Economic Forum announced the next phase of The Great Reset, The Great Narrative.

As with The Great Narrative event, the World Government Summit was also held in Dubai. As I wrote during the Great Narrative meeting:

“While the political leaders of the UAE and Klaus Schwab may promote themselves as the heroes of our times, we should judge them according to their actions and the company they keep, not the flowery language they use to distract us. The simple fact is the UAE has a horrible record on human rights. The nation is known for deporting those who renounce Islam, limited press freedoms, and enforcing elements of Sharia law.”

During Schwab’s short talk he also mentioned his pet project “the 4th Industrial Revolution“, which is essentially the digital panopticon of the future, where digital surveillance is omnipresent and humanity uses digital technology to alter our lives. Often associated with terms like the Internet of Things, the Internet of Bodies, the Internet of Humans, and the Internet of Senses, this world will be powered by 5G and 6G technology. Of course, for Schwab and other globalists, the 4IR also lends itself towards more central planning and top-down control. The goal is a track and trace society where all transactions are logged, every person has a digital ID that can be tracked, and social malcontents are locked out of society via social credit scores.

Immediately following Schwab was a panel which made no attempt to hide the goals of the globalists. The panel, Are We Ready for A New World Order?, featured Fred Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council since 2007, as well as an anchor for CNN and a former advisor to former US president George W. Bush. Before joining the Council, Kempe was a prize-winning editor and reporter at the Wall Street Journal for more than 25 years.

In fact, the Atlantic Council had a fairly large presence at the World Government Summit, including appearances by Defne Arslan, senior director of the Atlantic Council IN TURKEY program, and Olga Khakova, Deputy Director of Global Energy Center of Atlantic Council.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Atlantic Council, I first reported in May 2018 that Facebook had partnered with the thinktank connected to NATO. I wrote:

“The Atlantic Council of the United States was established in 1961 to bolster support for international relations. Although not officially connected to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Atlantic Council has spent decades promoting causes and issues which are beneficial to NATO member states. In addition, The Atlantic Council is a member of the Atlantic Treaty Organization, an umbrella organization which “acts as a network facilitator in the Euro-Atlantic and beyond.” The ATO works similarly to the Atlantic Council, bringing together political leaders, academics, military officials, journalists and diplomats to promote values that are favorable to the NATO member states. Officially, ATO is independent of NATO, but the line between the two is razor thin.

Essentially, the Atlantic Council is a think tank which can offer companies or nation states access to military officials, politicians, journalists, diplomats, etc. to help them develop a plan to implement their strategy or vision. These strategies often involve getting NATO governments or industry insiders to make decisions they might not have made without a visit from the Atlantic Council team. This allows individuals or nations to push forth their ideas under the cover of hiring what appears to be a public relations agency but is actually selling access to high-profile individuals with power to affect public policy. Indeed, everyone from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton to the family of international agent of disorder Zbigniew Brzezinski have spoken at or attended council events.”

When The Zelensky Toilet Paper Hit The Biden/Schwab Butt Crack....,

thehill |  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday slammed NATO as being "weak" and "underconfident" for refusing to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine as his country fights in "the worst invasion since World War II."

In a Facebook video shared and translated by Axios on Friday, Zelensky said Ukrainians have fought fearlessly against Russians invading their country — and will continue to — but have been thrown into "nine days of darkness" without assistance from NATO.

"Knowing that new strikes and casualties are inevitable, NATO deliberately decided not to close the sky over Ukraine," Zelensky said in an emotional video address.

The president urged NATO to think about "all those people who will die because of you."

"Because of your weakness, because of your disunity, all the alliance has managed to do so far is to carry fifty tons of diesel fuel for Ukraine," he said. "Is this the alliance you were building?"

A no-fly zone, implemented to prohibit enemy aircraft from flying into a region and attacking, would cut off Russian air support and blunt the advance of Russian troops toward Kyiv.

The Biden administration, along with the NATO security alliance, has so far rebuffed Ukrainian calls to establish a no-fly zone over fears that it could spark a direct military confrontation between the U.S. and Russia.

“It would require, essentially, the U.S. military shooting down Russian planes and prompting a potential direct war with Russia, the exact step that we want to avoid," press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Thursday.

In his video address, Zelensky disputed the fact that it would result in a direct confrontation between NATO countries and Russia, calling it "self-hypnosis."

"I do not know how you can protect and whether you can protect NATO countries," Zelensky said. "You will not be able to buy us off with liters of fuel for liters of our blood."

While You're Transfixed By The Ukraine Antics, The Vaccine Credential Initiative Rolls On...,

nakedcapitalism  |  As the world is transfixed by the escalating war in Ukraine and its economic fallout, big moves concerning vaccine passports are taking place behind closed doors.

An article published last Thursday by Politico, citing a source from the so-called Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI™), reported that the World Health Organization is poised to convene member States and representatives of Covid-19 immunization credential technology groups to recognize different vaccine certificates across nations and regions. In other words, as countries around the world drop almost all of their COVID-19 public health measures, it looks like digital vaccine passports are going to be made not just universal but permanent (as I warned would happen in April 2021):

The WHO is bringing together the groups to develop a “trust framework” that would allow countries to verify whether vaccine credentials are legitimate, said Brian Anderson, chief digital health physician at MITRE and a co-founder of the VCI.

Why it matters: The effort would aid international travel by allowing proof of vaccination to be more easilyshared and verified, Anderson said. Many countries and regions have different standards for proof of inoculation, creating confusion for travelers and officials.

“It’s piecemeal, not coordinated and done nation to nation,” Anderson said. “It can be a real challenge.”

The WHO would say only that news on the topic should be coming “soon.”

The VCI is behind SMART Health Cards, which have become the de facto standard for digital vaccine credentials in the U.S., with dozens of states developing or adopting the technology. The group will participate in the initiative.

The Vaccine Credentials Initiative (VCI™) is one of a number of private partnerships working to harmonize vaccine passport standards and systems at a global level. The VCI™ is leading the development and implementation of the open-source SMART Health Card Framework and specifications. Its partners include U.S. government contractor MITRE Corporation, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Oracle, Sales Force and Mayo Clinic.

According to its own website, the VCI™ has helped to implement SMART health cards in 15 jurisdictions: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, Hong Kong, Israel, the Cayman Islands, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Senegal, Qatar, Rwanda, North Macedonia and Aruba. It has also helped to “quietly” roll out digital vaccine certificates across 21 US states, as Forbes recently reported:

While the United States government has not issued a federal digital vaccine pass, a national standard has nevertheless emerged. To date, 21 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico offer accessibility to the SMART Health Card, a verifiable digital proof of vaccination developed through the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI), a global coalition of public and private stakeholders…

And very soon, at least four more states will be rolling out access to SMART Health Cards. “We’ve seen a notable uptick in states that have officially launched public portals where individuals can get verifiable vaccination credentials in the form of SMART Health Cards with a QR code,” says Dr. Brian Anderson, co-founder of the VCI and chief digital health physician at MITRE.

Another global partnership seeking to standardize vaccine passports is the Commons Project Foundation (CPJ), which was founded by the Rockefeller Foundation and is supported by the World Economic Forum.

There is also the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which was founded last year by Mastercard, IBM, Grameen Foundation and the International Chamber of Commerce. The organization is the brainchild of the world’s largest digital identity advocacy group, the New York-based ID2020 Alliance, which itself was set up in 2016 with seed money from Microsoft, Accenture, PwC, the Rockefeller Foundation, Cisco and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. The ID2020 Alliance’s goal is to “enable access to digital identity for every person on the planet.”