Maybe a flu virus was repackaged as Covid. If it was, it blows the mainstream narratives to shreds. From Kit Knightly at off-guardian.org:
The big Covid news the last couple of days has been that the US Department of Energy, via the Wall Street Journal, has claimed that a laboratory leak is the “most likely” origin of “Covid”.
Citing “new evidence”, a DoE panel has amended their assessment from 2021, essentially switching “we don’t know” to “it probably came from a lab”.
This is just the latest step in the lab-leak theory’s remarkable journey from fringe idea to mainstream position, or from “conspiracy theory to government debate”, according to Forbes’ article timelining the whole process.
You know what OffG thinks of the lab-leak theory, we did a fact-check on it back in 2021, and then addressed it again in 2022: “Lab leak” theory makes no sense, and only reinforces the mainstream narrative.
Further, it can now be used as fuel for the “new cold war” narrative.
The US can blame China for creating the virus, while China can either claim it was natural or that the US released it in an act of “bio-terrorism”.
Both sides will claim the other side’s vaccines don’t work, but that theirs do. And, make no mistake, both sides will still very much want to vaccinate everyone.
In some ways this is a symptom of the failure of the Covid narrative. The greatest propaganda push of all time ran out of steam just two years in, and is suddenly fighting defensively simply to hold itself together. Because the “lab leak” debate is very much a fallback position. A retreat in good order, protecting – at all costs – the fundamental lie of “Covid”, viz – there was no new disease.
The Deep State doesn’t take kindly to politicians who actually take peace seriously enough to strive for it. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:
The deep animosity against Russia and China that the U.S. national-security establishment has inculcated in the American people brings to mind the remarkable speech that President Kennedy delivered on June 10, 1963, at American University that sealed his fate.
Just imagine what would happen to any American who today dares to say good things about Russia and China. The Russia haters and the China haters will heap condemnation and calumny on them. The haters will accuse them of being “Putin lovers” who support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the case of China, they will accuse them of being communist sympathizers who support China’s military expansionism.
No, there is no room in America for positive sentiments toward Russia and China. Through the power of indoctrination, the Pentagon and the CIA have succeeded in inculcating a mindset of deep hostility all across America toward both Russia and China.
Of course, they did the same thing back in the Cold War era, perhaps even more so given that, during that time, both Russia and China were communist regimes. Throughout the Cold War decades, Americans were indoctrinated in the same way that Americans today are indoctrinated. They were taught to hate and fear the Russian Reds and the Chinese Reds and, for that matter, the North Korean Reds, the Cuban Reds, the Vietnamese Reds, the Chilean Reds, the Guatemalan Reds, and, well, all the Reds in the world, including those who were inside the United States.
The Russians and Chinese see quite clearly that they stand in opposition to the U.S., and they are determined to build something different and what they regard as better than the American model. From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:
A powerful feeling rhythms your skin and drums up your soul as you’re immersed in a long walk under persistent snow flurries, pinpointed by selected stops and enlightening conversations, crystallizing disparate vectors one year after the start of the accelerated phase of the proxy war between US/NATO and Russia.
That’s how Moscow welcomes you: the undisputed capital of the 21st century multipolar world.
A long, walking meditation impregnates on us how President Putin’s address – rather, a civilizational speech – last week was a game-changer when it comes to the demarcation of the civilizational red lines we are all now facing. It acted like a powerful drill perforating the less than short, actually zero term memory of the Collective West. No wonder it exercised a somewhat sobering effect contrasting the non-stop Russophobia binge of the NATOstan space.
Alexey Dobrinin, Director of the Foreign Policy Planning Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Russia, has correctly described
Putin’s address as “a methodological basis for understanding, describing and constructing multipolarity.”
For years some of us have been showing how the emerging multipolar world is defined – but goes way beyond – high speed interconnectivity, physical and geoeconomic. Now, as we reach the next stage, it’s as if Putin and Xi Jinping, each in their own way, are conceptualizing the two key civilizational vectors of multipolarity. That’s the deeper meaning of the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership, invisible to the naked eye.
A society’s well being is directly calibrated to its adherence to the brain standard.
The world is moving towards multipolarity. One axis, the West, is led by the U.S., the other—Eurasia and the global south—by Russia and China. Ukraine currently serves as a cauldron of the military conflict between the two axes. Taiwan may become a second such cauldron.
Through sanctions, the West has made economic and financial warfare a part of the conflict. The longest arrow in the U.S.’s quiver is the dollar’s reserve currency status. Western economies are based on credit. Central banks serve as the focal point of fiat debt issuance and monetization, interest rate manipulation, and currency debasement. Russia, China, and their cohorts are exploring alternatives to the dollar’s role and the West’s fiat currency, debt, and financialization, discussing arrangements based on gold and commodities, and economic activity centered on agriculture, mining, petroleum, manufacturing, and trade.
It’s a common sense conclusion that these are a more durable economic foundation than fiat debt, whose value is wholly dependent on the ever-shifting whims of politicians and monetary functionaries. Several commentators have hailed the shift away from the West’s fiat currencies and credit to that which is tangible and real. Currently, however, Russia and China’s currencies and credit are just as fiat as the West’s.
Oil was as tangible and real in 1600 as it is now. Why was it regarded as a useless nuisance back then and now it trades at around $76 (or about 1/24th of an ounce of real money, or gold) per barrel? What made oil valuable, the linchpin of the global economy, for which countries have been invaded and wars fought? Somebody figured out how to unlock and control oil’s energy and use it to generate light and power, and to distill it to derive chemicals now used in everything from fertilizers and plastics to pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
Direct barter is the means of exchange in primitive economies. Money is the intermediary agent that allows a producer to indirectly trade his or her production for someone else’s, to the benefit of both parties. Gold’s suitability as money has been recognized for millennia. Credit allows those who consume less than they produce to invest their surplus in economic activity that generates returns higher than the interest charged.
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There is no mystery what the best and brightest seek: freedom to think, express, and produce; protection of property and contract rights; security from crime and war. The conundrum is how few times those conditions have even come close to being fulfilled. They stand out like isolated lighthouses, beacons shining through history’s all-too-frequent darkness and tempest tossed seas. There are no such beacons today; the world shuns the brain standard.
It is the human mind and productive activity that imparts value to oil, gold, and credit. The mind is the fountainhead of human progress and wealth. The world has always run on the brain standard. A society’s well being is directly calibrated to its adherence to that standard. Its requirements are not conceptually complicated, but throughout history its sporadic implementation has proven problematic.
These are not the kind of problems that are going to go away with a U.S. presidential visit or a big check. They are long fermented and are deeply ingrained. From Krishen Mehta at eurasiareview.com:
In October 2022, about eight months after the war in Ukraine started, the University of Cambridge in the UK harmonized surveys conducted in 137 countries about their attitudes towards the West and towards Russia and China.
The findings in the study, while not free of a margin of error, are robust enough to take seriously.
These are:
For the 6.3 billion people who live outside of the West, 66 percent feel positively towards Russia and 70 percent feel positively towards China, and,
Among the 66 percent who feel positively about Russia the breakdown is 75 percent in South Asia, 68 percent in Francophone Africa, and 62 percent in Southeast Asia.
Public opinion of Russia remains positive in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam.
Sentiments of this nature have caused some ire, surprise, and even anger in the West. It is difficult for them to believe that two-thirds of the world’s population is not siding with the West.
What are some of the reasons or causes for this? I believe there are five reasons as explained in this brief essay.
1. The Global South does not believe that the West understands or empathizes with their problems.
India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, summed it up succinctly in a recent interview: “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” He is referring to the many challenges that developing countries face whether they relate to the aftermath of the pandemic, the high cost of debt service, the climate crisis that is ravaging their lives, the pain of poverty, food shortages, droughts, and high energy prices. The West has barely given lip service to the Global South on many of these problems. Yet the West is insisting that the Global South join it in sanctioning Russia.
The Covid pandemic is a perfect example—despite the Global South’s repeated pleas to share intellectual property on the vaccines, with the goal of saving lives, no Western nation was willing to do so. Africa remains to this day the most unvaccinated continent in the world. Africa had the capability to make the vaccines but without the intellectual property they could not do it.
But help did come from Russia, China, and India. Algeria launched a vaccination program in January 2021 after it received its first batch of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines. Egypt started vaccinations after it got China’s Sinopharm vaccine at about the same time. South Africa procured a million doses of AstraZeneca from the Serum Institute of India. In Argentina, Sputnik became the backbone of their vaccine program. All of this was happening while the West was using its financial resources to buy millions of doses in advance, and often destroying them when they became outdated. The message to the Global South was clear—your problems are your problems, they are not our problems.
China has realized that it’s better to get involved in the Ukraine-Russia war as a peacemaker than as a participant. From Andrew Korybko at theautomaticearth.com:
State Of Affairs
China has hitherto done its utmost to remain completely away from the NATO-Russian proxy war that’s being waged between them in Ukraine, yet a fast-moving spree of developments over the past few days compellingly suggests that it’s recalibrating its approach to the New Cold War’s top conflict. The present analysis will begin by highlighting those aforesaid events before explaining the larger context in which they’re occurring, which should show the reader that something big is going on behind the scenes.
Diplomatic Developments In This Direction
Director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee Wang Yi met with Russian PresidentPutin in the Kremlin last week after visiting several countries and participating in the Munich Security Conference. Their talks were significant since the Russian leader rarely meets with anyone who isn’t his counterpart, and he wouldn’t have made an exception to his informal rule simply to discuss the details of President Xi’s upcoming springtime visit.
Less than 24 hours afterwards on Saturday, it was announced that Belarusian President Lukashenko will be traveling to China from 28 February-2 March, following which French President Macron said that he plans to go there too sometime in early April. This fast-moving spree of developments proves that China is serious about negotiating at least a ceasefire to the Ukrainian Conflict, to which end President Xi will likely share his views on this with his two aforementioned counterparts during their visits.
The leftist mantra is: “I control, therefore I am.” That is why they cannot live and let live. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.us:
It should be clear to anyone paying attention during this current stage of instability in our modern era that something is very wrong in terms of American society. I’m not talking about ongoing issues of political corruption and economic mismanagement, I’m talking about something much more dangerous. I’m talking about the systematic derailment of our culture, heritage, principals, history and moral compass. I’m talking about the vicious devouring of the very sinews that hold our civilization together.
There is a cancer eating away at America, a concerted and organized effort to destabilize. For anyone who is familiar with the Conjuring movies, it’s a bit like a demonic invasion. As Ed Warren cautions, the three stages of attack are infestation, oppression and finally, possession. The little demon we are dealing with, though, comes with Antifa patches, rainbow flags and special pronouns.
This week I came across a statement by Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene in which she called for a “national divorce”, a separation of conservative red states and far left blue states, a parting of ways due to our obvious irreconcilable differences. Leftists within the corporate media, of course, flipped out, accusing Greene of inciting treason and the destruction of the US.
While I don’t generally put much stock in the comments of politicians I think it’s important to address this particular sentiment because it echos the arguments made by the Liberty Movement and the alternative media for many years. It’s just surprising to hear a prominent public figure say what we have been saying for so long.
The good is not all that good, the bad is very bad, and the ugly is extremely ugly. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:
There has been much comment over the likelihood that central bank digital currencies will be introduced. I conclude they are unnecessary — a red herring. But it does allow us to discuss their possible relevance to a new Asian super-currency.
Earlier this month, the Bank of England in partnership with the UK Treasury produced a white paper on the subject, which waters down the objectives identified by the Bank for International Settlements considerably. The British proposal is a bad idea because it is pointless and I explain why.
In this article, I describe how a new gold-backed currency can do away with the US dollar for trade settlements and commodity purchases entirely between participating nations in the Russia China axis. Some informed commentary on the topic suggests that a blockchain will be involved, and Sberbank, the Russian state-owned lender has already issued a gold-linked fund designed to be available to the public by being compatible with ethereum. Perhaps it is front-running developments…
The ugly side in our title is found in the BIS’s dystopian proposals, which sees CBDCs as an opportunity to allow central banks to double down on their attempts to manage economic outcomes while restricting personal freedom.
Messing about with fiat currency alternatives such as CBDCs could end up revealing the formers’ fragility. CBDCs will take years to implement in any major currency anyway, during which fiat currencies led by the dollar are likely to fail anyway.
Introduction
It is not clear what encouraged central banks to think about introducing their own digital currencies, other than possibly a feeling that if they didn’t do something, then private sector money could threaten their monopoly.
Initially, bitcoin was touted as sound money with a hard stop of 21,000,000 coins and proof of ownership recorded on a blockchain. Bitcoin’s strength was to be the opposite of fiat currency weakness, whose expansion is the primary means by which a central bank stimulates an economy. But if central banks think that bitcoin could overturn fiat currencies, they merely exposed their own ignorance about the nature of money and credit.
The new reset is Russia’s recognition that the West has been double-dealing and cannot be trusted. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:
Putin’s announcement of a suspension of the last extant U.S.-Russia arms-control pact this week was a carefully attenuated move. It was also a big deal, but not in the way Western officials encourage us to think it is.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 23 in Moscow during Defender of the Fatherland Day, which marks the founding of the Red Army. (President of Russia)
News that Russia will suspend its participation in the New START nuclear arms pact, which arrived Tuesday via Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federal Assembly, had to land hard.
This suspension is not a withdrawal, as various Western media reports initially described it, and it is temporary, as the Russian president described it. It is a carefully attenuated move, then.
But it is a big deal nonetheless, although it is not a big deal in the way Western officials encourage us to think it is. It is a big deal in ways that Western officials do not want us to think about.
“With today’s decision on New START,” NATO Secretary–General Jens Stoltenberg said at a joint press conference in Kiev with Dmitry Kuleba, the Ukrainian regime’s foreign minister, “the whole arms control architecture has been dismantled.”
This is the baldest, farthest-out-there take on Moscow’s step back I have been able to find. The New York Times initially ran this quotation but dropped it from its news report within a few hours, wisely. Now you have to find it in The Kyiv Independent, the not-independent propaganda daily backed by various Western governments.
What Stoltenberg was doing in Kiev, given NATO claims it is not prosecuting a war against Russia, is a good question. Then again, lots of people of Stoltenberg’s stature travel to Kiev these days.
President Joe Biden just took a train from Poland to Kiev to have a look at the progress or otherwise of the war the U.S. is not waging against Russia. Let us not miss: This kind of thing has much to do with Putin’s New START decision, as he made clear in his remarks Tuesday.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, passing through Athens, termed Moscow’s decision “unfortunate and irresponsible”— an improvement on Stoltenberg’s deranged assessment.
Why all the Satanic symbols and rituals the last few years? From Dr. Naomi Wolf at naomiwolf.substack.com:
Is a Seemingly Far-Fetched Premise, Unfolding After All?
These days, to my surprise, people want to talk to me about evil.
In a Substack essay last year, and in my book The Bodies of Others, I raised a question about existential, metaphysical darkness.
I concluded that I had looked at the events of the past two and a half years using all of my classical education, my critical thinking skills, my knowledge of Western and global history and politics; and that, using these tools, I could not explain the years 2020-present.
Indeed I could not explain them in ordinary material, political or historical terms at all.
This is not how human history ordinarily operates.
I could not explain the way the Western world simply switched, from being based at least overtly on values of human rights and decency, to values of death, exclusion and hatred, overnight, en masse — without resorting to reference to some metaphysical evil that goes above and beyond fallible, blundering human agency.
When ordinary would-be-tyrants try to take over societies, there is always some flaw, some human impulse undoing the headlong rush toward a negative goal. There are always factions, or rogue lieutenants, in ordinary human history; there is always a miscalculation, or a blunder, or a security breach; or differences of opinion at the top. Mussolini’s power was impaired in his entry to the Second World War by being forced to share the role of military commander with King Victor Immanuel [https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/fascist-king-victor-emmanuel-iii-italy]; Hitler miscalculated his ability to master the Russian weather — right down to overlooking how badly his soldiers’ stylish but flimsy uniforms would stand up to extreme cold. [https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/hitlers-winter-blunder/]. Before he could mount a counter-revolution against Stalinism, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City in his bath. [https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/leon-trotsky-assassinated-mexico]
