OPINION. Let’s take a global whirl this week. The Ukrainian conflagration was further muddied by the Germans opposing a ban on “essential” Russian oil. Hence, the war may actually add to Russian coffers on some fronts.
By Omar S. Khan, Uncommonwisdom.online
Putin demands the Ukrainians accept Crimea as Russia, accept the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states. According to a Kremlin spokesman, “If these conditions are met, then Russian military action will stop in a moment.”
It would be fascinating to hear a full-fledged debate on those merits rather than cheering for one goon squad over another. The narrative, as narratives of late, is hard to trust.
Why was NATO heading inexorably eastward? But wait, why start there? Remember, allegedly Putin “installed” Trump somehow, oversaw Brexit, was the puppet master of the North Korea Summit, then “unleashed” Trumpzilla on the civilised world, while deranging all those “free” US elections.
The flourishing Ukrainian Nazi Party is to be discounted due to the current Ukrainian President being Jewish. David Brooks waxed misty-eyed about the waning affection, respect, and shared values among the Western alliance. Clearly, a history of the 20th century and the murderous rampages of the members of this alliance had not, as of that writing, flitted across his consciousness.
And here is the terrifying rub. We can’t have a sane discussion on critical, crucial topics. Voltaire’s line comes to mind, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
When millions are willing to believe whatever nonsense “the authorities” dish up, you have COVID mania in embryo. We trade in our autonomy for the comfort of the herd. You cannot reason with these folks, as they are vacuous, occasionally topped up by whatever jabber got injected into them through social media or otherwise that day.
If you tell the US that driving Russia into closer intimacy with China and India, while being forced to buy oil from Iran and Venezuela is insane, we join the cabal of traitorous heretics, doubtless being bankrolled by Putin to inject “evils” like skepticism, historical awareness, and critical thinking to pillory freedoms.
There is no discussion possible while accepting the horrors of the Russian invasion and the brutality being inflicted on innocent Ukrainians, of the historical karma of staging coups (whether in Iran or Ukraine in 2014 with avowed Ukrainian Nazi groups), and the blowback it may engender. We debase any moral standing when we clearly seek to manipulate political and commercial outcomes elsewhere. The 2014 coup has been amply documented by even the BBC and The Guardian.
And the “immunity from truth” reflex, honed and honoured in the Covidian disinformation sweepstakes, is clearly alive and well. The New York Times explained that completely fake stories like the fictional Ukrainian fighter pilot who personally shot down Putin’s entire air force while channeling the movie Die Hard or the Snake Island martyrs who told the Russians to go f**** themselves and were wiped out by a kill squad (only to mysteriously turn up alive a few days later) are not actually “disinformation.” They raise morale! My God, how tenuous our relationship to actual facts has become.
So, the playbook is to distract the masses from our real problems, but keep them whipped up in existential fear over, for example, a pathogen of mortal risk to virtually no one under 65 not suffering from multiple life-threatening illnesses already or to whip up hate-drunk hysteria over Russians, the “un-vaxxed”, the “Anti-vaxxers”, conspiracy theorists, or whoever. Indeed, the targets keep changing: “commies,” Islamic fundamentalists, populists, as long as they are “the other.”
Look at the seamless segues from War on Terror to the Apocalyptic Pandemic to Putin-Nazi, and all the themes interlaced.
What is going on is essentially a turf war between governmental and ultra-powerful private parties, not a Crusade between right and righteousness and tyrannical evil. The aim is to desperately divert the battered gaze of farmers, cattle ranchers, postal workers, teachers, from how their lives were frozen, stolen and undermined over a viral strain of no particular threat, and onto “the next Hitler.”
And this brings us to the nub of the media’s relentless distortions. UK’s SAGE (the most misnamed deliberative body in recent history) is discontinuing their regular monthly meetings, “confessing” their predictions were at “variance with reality” (how genially detached from malicious misinformation that sounds). The media are tripping over themselves to ladle “bad data” as the justification for why the Imperial College models calling for lockdowns were errant nonsense.
Professor Mark Woolhouse claims in his recent book, “lockdowns had surprisingly little effect” (tell that to the impoverished, the bankrupt, those who died from medical neglect, the bereaved who couldn’t be with family, the suicides and more). And he then says, “anyone who supported lockdown on the basis of the half million figure was misled.” Towering incompetence is easier to assert it seems than malice.
And this follows shameful tradition. 9/11 was almost “broadcast” before it happened, but we missed it, we are told, due to a “failure of imagination.” Complete indifference, lack of networking between crucial databases, and outright deductive imbecility when people asked for lessons on how to fly and were disinterested in learning how to land, is more like it.
The Iraq War was “bad intelligence” (truly so between the ears of those involved). There was no evidence shown, so more like “bad faith.”
Swine Flu was a sham. The realities surrounding the financial meltdown were erroneously ascribed to requiring a few more “regulations” rather than a re-engineering of the scam itself being needed.
So COVID as we were fed it, never existed. It was another coronavirus, likely manipulated in a lab. We had significant pre-existing immunity, it wasn’t very lethal, many early treatments could be located, and it was airborne, so distancing, masking and locking up the healthy made no sense.
The data was fudged, the “tests” were next to useless and no global standard for how to even conduct them was ever alighted upon or executed. The statistics were artificially inflated, including those relating to deaths, and institutionalised medical negligence added to the death count (the inappropriate use of ventilators, treating too late, using “treatments” that didn’t work, refusing efficacious off-label alternatives).
Hospitals in the US and many other jurisdictions received “funding bonuses” for “diagnosing” COVID (hence the myth of the asymptomatic spread, and positive tests decoupled from symptoms).
None of this is “bad data”, it was a cynical, sick playbook. Lives and countries and the global economy and our liberties all were sacrificial lambs.
With all we all lost, let us engage the next narrative, the current one and whatever is unveiled next, armed with a commitment to peek behind the curtain.
For the safety we forfeited, the money lost, the trust eroded, the health compromised, the friends estranged, the family prospects impaired or undermined, let’s ensure we at least gained some insight and conviction and a sheer unwillingness to have it happen again.
“If you tell the US that driving Russia into closer intimacy with China and India, while being forced to buy oil from Iran and Venezuela is insane, we join the cabal of traitorous heretics, doubtless being bankrolled by Putin to inject “evils” like scepticism, historical awareness and critical thinking to pillory freedoms”.
Kennedy
Not content with denunciations one-dimensionally caricaturing Putin (monstrous as his actions may well be on many of their merits, or lack thereof) and whitewashing Western alliance and Ukrainian complicity altogether, the NY Times tried recently to smear Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s heroic stand against these absurd gene therapy therapeutics which have been unjustly “canonised” as “life-saving vaccines.”
The NY Times claims his “crusade” is “anguishing” family and friends. And indeed, his sister is cited, but nowhere in this outpouring of anguish is a single fact contested, or any conclusion he has argued for been refuted.
In fact, his remarkable book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health” in my view is essential reading. Scrupulously researched, admirably referenced and footnoted, beautifully written. Anyone who has lived through this Covidian travesty, or wants facts with which to fashion views, owes themselves a traipse, if not an outright deep dive into this powerful analysis.
It just can’t do to call your brother “brilliant” (he clearly is) as a sidebar to stating distress regarding his positions, while ignoring the searing evidence-based (amply cited throughout, again with references) indictment of the “intelligence-run” (CIA influenced) C-19 operation he unravels.
Mr. Kennedy, like his father and uncle before him, has become an irrepressibly eloquent thorn in the side of the powers that be. He has offered to debate them publicly for decades, no one takes him up on it, any more than they do entrepreneur Steve Kirsch or the line-up of clinicians who have actually treated COVID and have visceral evidence to share.
This hit piece in the NY Times seems utterly bereft of any arguments but plies social gossip with a relish only tabloids would normally be able to summon. Here is a prime broadside. The writer tells the reader that RFK Jr’s work as the face of the “vaccine” resistance movement has “tested, ““rattled”, “anguished” and “mystified” family, friends, and this man “of the often-troubled life” has “effectively used his talent as one of the most prominent names in American political history as a platform for fuelling resistance to vaccines that could save countless lives.”
So, the innuendo is this “troubled” Hollywood glitterati and recovered drug addict is unbalanced enough to “betray” family and friends, touting medical conclusions that are not grounded in the truth.
However, everything he had warned about the COVID “vaccines” are now the case: mushrooming adverse effects, waning efficacy, no sterilising immunity, inadequate safety trials (the first “release” of the Pfizer documents which they had hoped to “postpone” for 75 years which is what any airtight organisation would surely do, but were compelled to produce, had over 1,200+ adverse effects listed, 9 pages in small print!).
And prestigious stooges like Michael Osterholm who must be aware of the rhetorical misdemeanours he is guilty of, assert “His conduct undercuts 50 years of public health vaccine practice…” But experimental mRNA “so-called” “vaccines” are in dispute here, not the last 50 years of vaccines that underwent full-scale safety trials, were targeted, and never mass inflicted in the middle of a pandemic (which precipitates more variants we were warned by leading specialists who were of course, smeared and side-lined).
There is the magisterial outcry: “In a best-selling new book, he claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is President Biden’s top medical adviser for the coronavirus pandemic, and Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, were in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to profiteer off dangerous vaccines.”
How is that a refutation? It lucidly enunciates what the evidence shows. Fauci has zig-zagged and careened from one position to the other, arguably committing perjury relative to gain of function research in Congressional testimony, likely on more than one occasion. The Gates cartel, a primary funder of the WHO, has influenced changing the definition of “case” (no symptoms needed), “immunity” (trying to claim only “vaccines” confer it, and then had to backpedal at the sheer absurdity of it), and more. Nobel Prize-winning off-label drugs have been vilified, though they have far better safety statistics than any “official” COVID treatment and certainly vis a vis the “vaccines.”
We have been manically seeking to jab those not at risk (children, the recovered, the healthy at nominal risk). From “passports” usurping rights to ice cream cones – has anyone seen such a ridiculous display of agendas for an illness, which at the height of its lethality, had a 97-99% recovery rate and then a global infection fatality rate between 0.1% to 0.5%? Hmmm, I wonder what “destabilised” Mr. Kennedy as he witnessed such humanitarian probity?
Recent Pfizer data release, 1223 reported fatalities during a 3-month period out of 42k reports, where 1-10% of such events get reported. By any metric of public safety, the “cure” should have been pulled.
We are questioning RFK Jr when novel gene therapies, essentially therapeutics, were approved, marketed, distributed, funded and to a large extent mandated by governments based on nothing more than “data” from the manufacturers themselves? Whereas a “right to try” for dozens of reputed, safer therapeutics has been militantly withheld.
Mr. Kennedy’s critique of the CIA, its media accomplices, armed with the charisma and political impact that is reminiscent of his late father, blows the lid off the prevarication and lies. He connects the dots, diagnoses the patterns, and I once more urge everyone concerned with life and liberty, to enter the purgatory of facts his book so ably provides.
The Year of Madness
The “lockdown frenzy” has been described as throwing ourselves off a cliff to avoid a car swerving in our general direction. Scientists became propagandists, journalists became irresponsible and craven, politicians morphed into quasi-fascistic zealots.
Professor Mark Woolhouse OBE, Professor of Infectious Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, deeply involved in the UK’s response to COVID-19, has published a book “The Year the World Went Mad,” excoriating governments around the world for spurning the idea of quarantining the sick and vulnerable (briefly) in favour of locking everyone “indoors” where all the spread occurs, compromising an embattled immune system further.
The infamous SAGE (Imperial College Report 9, published March 2020) predicted half a million UK deaths, among other outcomes, spanning two years. It must have been clear to anyone that no one could sanely forecast the evolution of what would transpire that far out. The BBC was undeterred and proclaimed this as fact, backed by other outlets globally, to terrorise a clearly gullible populace to devolve into gibbering wrecks.
And the hellish consequences that such an outright extended global paralysis would impose would have been evident to anyone who did the most basic analysis. But such analysis was verboten and cost-benefit discussions were outright anathema.
In fact, we know behavioural scientists were used in the UK to ramp up fear levels to coerce populations, and larcenous confusions were peddled by the media (as an example, the ridiculous assertion that “one cough” was enough to infect an entire restaurant by BBC Science Editor David Shukman, which beyond the fact that if true would render COVID unstoppable, was somehow alleged to be “unique” to COVID versus other pathogens on no basis whatsoever.)
Smear campaigns cavorted hither and thither, the attempt by Fauci & co to swiftly shut down the frankly unassailable wisdom of three of the most distinguished epidemiologists in the world (from Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford) via “The Great Barrington Declaration”. They were called “fringe” epidemiologists. Today, there is ample research further underwriting these prescriptions about protecting the vulnerable, verifying lockdowns don’t work and backfire disastrously and how mass injection of populations can backfire, as they very clearly are.
There was a drive towards a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) against the backdrop of the mushrooming crisis in the financial markets that emerged during autumn 2019. A major crisis in the repo markets during this period, resulted in desperate high-level planning to avert an impending financial crisis potentially more seismic than the 2008 banking crisis. “Freezing the planet,” coordinating economic activity, vastly reducing the need for credit, were all imperative, and a plausible “crisis” had to justify it, rather than the feckless financial recklessness and institutional corrosion actually behind it.
And all the “stats” are crumbling now. New figures from Britain are raising bright red flags about the direction of COVID in countries that used the mRNA and DNA shots. In February, 90% of the 1,000 Brits roughly who died each week, associated with COVID, were “vaccinated.” More Britons are hospitalised with COVID than at this time last year. In the four weeks ending February 27th, 397 unvaccinated Brits died of COVID, compared to 3,512 who were “vaccinated.”
These figures suggest that these “jabs” may have compromised the natural progress towards herd immunity we’ve seen otherwise in respiratory illnesses.
By comparison, India has 10 times fewer infections than the UK and fewer reported C-19 deaths, despite an exponentially greater population. The countries that either have low “vaccination” and/or did not use the genetic therapies on any large scale, are well on their way to the “pandemic” becoming “endemic.”
But then the spiking of anomalous deaths flowing “coincidentally” with the global vaccination program has required the concerted production of feeble explanations by the global media cartel.
Genetic heart disease asserted for so many young people dying suddenly since January 2021, referees’ whistles to “explain” mid-game deaths of so many athletes, pizza Margherita of all things, from binge-watching TV, to post-pandemic stress disorder, chemicals circulating, red meat again (how many times does this need debunking?), sex (Puritans of the world unite!), loneliness (just invented last year evidently) and so much more – anything, anything but these “vaccines.”
Last week, Cricket bowling legend Shane Warne’s sudden death was ascribed to his “extreme juicing diet.” But the gibberish is wearing thin. Propaganda eventually becomes too implausible, and this dam is surely breaking. Even Australian health officials acknowledge “vaccine-related” myocarditis deaths, and then there’s heightened susceptibility to certain cancers, and shocking increases in non-COVID-related all-cause mortality.
In the US, about 50% of post-vaccination deaths occurred in people who became ill within 48 hours of being “vaccinated.” In an open letter published in October 2021, Dr. Hartmut Glossman, professor of Pharmacology, one of Austria’s most cited scientists, globally renowned, founder of the Austrian-Drug Commission, described COVID vaccines as “the biggest drug scandal” he has ever witnessed.
Social follies
Ivan Illich spoke of a “convivial society” as being one that facilitates rather than stifles our creative commitments and capabilities (as lucidly crystallised by Professor Sinead Murphy). Our challenge is to stop being swayed by paternalistic propaganda; to refuse to be alienated from our creative energies and competence and rally to create lives worth living.
It may be that we are in for some collective austerity. But that may not be deprivation, but a sifting of the essential from the incidental. A chance to live and connect, as we seek to fashion a new era worthy of grand human passions.
By Omar S. Khan, Uncommonwisdom.online
Omar is a true global citizen. Born in Cairo, a US citizen, having lived in Germany, the US, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, the UK, Japan, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Singapore, and Dubai.
His consulting firms, EPL Global and Sensei International, focusing on organizational and individual growth and development and converting strategy into decisive action, have served clients in the US, UK, Argentina, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Bahrain, Oman, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, China, and Australia.
Clients have included Unilever, Maersk, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, American Express, DBS Bank, Singapore Airlines, Emirates Airlines, KLM, Raffles International, The Ritz-Carlton, Hilton International, DIIF, Emirates Bank, Suntory, Novartis, Motorola, FMC, the Shui On Group, and many others.
In 2010, Consulting Magazine, recognized Omar as one of the top 20 consultants in the world, the first time in the history of the award that acknowledgment went to someone leading a boutique global firm.
Crisis work included developing leaders for the Catholic Church in Pakistan, helping companies manage and rebound in the ’90s during Sri Lanka’s Civil War (KLM and Ceylinco after the Central Bank Bombing, The World Trade Center, and more), in the US working with the State Department and then the Foundation for Community Encouragement post 9/11 to create healthier responses and with various global clients during the 2008-9 Financial crisis creating the concept of “ROC” or “Return on Crisis”.
Since March 2020, he has been immersed as a COVID researcher, writing incessantly on various aspects of the “technical” and “adaptive” crises. His site, Uncommonwisdom.online contains articles and podcasts with leading researchers and clinicians and COVID response thought leaders like Dr. Peter McCullough, Steve Kirsch, Dr. Tess Lawrie, Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Nick Hudson of PANDA, Dr. Shankara Chetty, and Dr. Harvey Risch.
Omar has contributed to Think Tanks, podcasts and symposia worldwide on this topic. He is launching a new initiative with Dr. Shankara Chetty to make people aware of Dr. Chetty’s breakthrough “8th Day Protocol” and the need to sieve COVID claims, keeping “models” and actual “data” distinct. He has also been instrumental in bringing the early treatment paradigm to Sri Lanka, having had leading researchers, doctors, and clinicians presenting to policymakers there. Early outpatient therapy is now officially endorsed there.
Omar is the author of 5 books, and his business writings have been featured in the FT, The Conference Board, Leaders and Business, and many others.