tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64391013711760305062024-03-07T18:46:15.818+10:00Sarah DenizMiddle East Politics, Human Rights, Animal Rights Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1066125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-34474533309514967242021-02-11T10:42:00.042+10:002023-02-25T22:20:46.887+10:00"AKP'nin Anayasa hazırlama ehliyeti yok" - Kemal Okuyan<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifamaoscGM6wRksOyF1W7sO4G__ZjgXoaMUV2DlNe4FwHWlcSExtQ9C23nRDagyOB5LUpRRD76J1n13eJ3gMi1zglShCtju5FEZVT9q3ssj7GwulULj4dqJZXpnFk6_VidyoS5Y4M93yhO/s2048/kemalokuyanlagundem10subat.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1138" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifamaoscGM6wRksOyF1W7sO4G__ZjgXoaMUV2DlNe4FwHWlcSExtQ9C23nRDagyOB5LUpRRD76J1n13eJ3gMi1zglShCtju5FEZVT9q3ssj7GwulULj4dqJZXpnFk6_VidyoS5Y4M93yhO/s16000/kemalokuyanlagundem10subat.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kemal Okuyan'la Gündem</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;">Gazeteci Iskender Özturanlı'nın gündemle ilgili sorularını yanıtlayan TKP Genel Sekreteri Kemal Okuyan özellikle yeni anayasa tartışmaları konusunda dikkat çekici açıklamalarda bulundu.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Özturanlı AKP’nin reform paketinden sözü açarak, konuyu yeni anayasa tartışmalarına getirdi ve Okuyan’a bu konudaki düşüncelerini sordu.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Okuyan AKP’nin bir yandan ekonomik sorunlar, diğer yandan dış politikada ve içerde sıkışıklık yaşamasından kaynaklanan bir gündem değiştirme çabasında olduğunu, bununla birlikte Anayasa meselesinin aynı zamanda AKP’nin ülkede yerleştirmeye çalıştığı Türkiye tasarımında 20 yıla yaklaşan iktidarını tescilleme açısından da ayrı bir yeri olduğunu söyledi. Düzen muhalefetinde Anayasa konusunda her partinin kendi önceliği olduğunu ve gerisiyle ilgilenilmediğini belirten Okuyan, AKP’nin bu tartışmayı açarak karşısındaki düzen muhalefetini bölme konusunda yeni bir hamle hedefiyle hareket ettiğini ifade etti.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div><h3 style="text-align: left;">"Anayasa tartışmalarında çizgiyi baştan çekmek gerekiyor"</h3><div style="text-align: justify;">AKP’nin anayasa hazırlama ehliyeti olmadığını söyleyen Okuyan, baştan bu çizgiyi çekmenin önemine vurgu yaptı ve sözlerine şöyle devam etti:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><blockquote>“AKP 19 yıldır iktidarda, Anayasa’yı delik deşik etmiş, mevcut Anayasa’yı zaten uygulamıyor. Anayasa bir toplum sözleşmesidir. Siz ona uymayı taahhüt edersiniz. Üstelik 12 Eylül Anayasası’nı değiştireceğiz diye bambaşka ekler yaptılar, daha iyiye gitmedi. Evet Türkiye’nin yeni bir Anayasaya ihtiyacı var ama öncelikle yeni bir düzene ihtiyacı var. AKP iktidarında yapılacak herhangi bir Anayasa Türkiye’yi daha da geriye götürür. </blockquote></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">"Denmeli ki; AKP iktidarında yeni bir anayasa yapılamaz. AKP mevcut anayasaya zaten uymuyor, peki neden yeni anayasa istiyor. Çünkü ek bazı kazanımlardan kuvvet alma ihtiyacı duyuyor. 12 Eylül anayasasında çok acımasız bir hüküm var. ‘Türkiye, demokratik, laik bir sosyal hukuk devletidir.’ ‘Hiçkimse kutsal din duygularını istismar edemez’ gibi hükümler var anayasada hâlâ. Laiklik hükmü AKP’nin canını sıkıyor ama bunu sadece laiklik hükmünü çıkararak yapamaz ve bu yüzden yeni bir anayasa yapmak istiyor.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Okuyan AKP’nin laikliğe müdahalesini parlamentodaki partilerin görmezden geldiğini söyledi ve Kılıçdaroğlu’nun “Laiklik tehlikede değildir” açıklamasını hatırlattı ve normal şartlar altında hali hazırda parlamentodaki neredeyse tüm partilerin laiklik karşıtı faaliyetten kapatılmaları gerektiğini belirtti.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Dün yeni göreve gelen Ayasofya imamının ve aynı zamanda muhalefette yer alan Saadet Partisi’nin ‘1921 ruhuna dönme’ isteğinden bahseden Okuyan, <b>bu tartışmaların gündeme geleceğini ve toplumda ne kadar direnç oluşacağını gözlemleyeceklerini söyledi ve laiklikle ilgili herhangi bir revizyon tartışmasına çok sert tepki verilmesi gerektiğini ekled</b>i.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;">"Yeni anayasayı devrimci bir iktidar yapacaktır"</h3><div style="text-align: justify;">Okuyan ‘memleketin bir sürü derdi arasında, tek dert laiklik mi?’ sorusuna şöyle yanıt verdi:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">“AKP zaten her şeyi halletti, derdi burası. Buradan kurtulurlarsa bir sonraki adımın hukuk sistemine dini referansların sokulması olacağını düşünüyorum. Hilafetin gündeme gelmesi de mümkündür, bunu laiklik hâlâ engelliyor. Diğer konular 12 Eylül Anayasası’nda çözüldü. Grev hakkı örneğin, Anayasa’da yer verilmiş ama öyle şartlara bağlanmış ki fiilen yasaklanmış durumda.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Okuyan, anayasaların devrimlerden ya da karşı devrimlerden sonra yenilendiğini söyledi ve 12 Eylül anayasasının bir karşı devrim ürünü olduğunu ve bir karşı devrim anayasasından başka bir karşı devrim anayasasının yapılamayacağını belirtti. Okuyan artık sıranın devrimci bir iktidara geldiğini söyledi ve ‘yeni anayasayı devrimci bir iktidar yapacaktır’ dedi. Türkiye’de emekçi halkın ayağa kalkıp, anayasa yapabilecek yetkiyi eline geçirmesi gerektiğini söyleyen Okuyan, ancak bundan sonra dünyanın en eşitlikçi, özgürlükçü anayasasının hazırlanabileceğini ifade etti.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: justify;">Yeni düzenin Toplumcu Anayasası</h3><div style="text-align: justify;">Okuyan her anayasanın bir düzen değişikliğiyle hazırlandığını tekrar hatırlatarak, TKP’nin 2007 yılında hazırladığı <a href="https://www.tkp.org.tr/tr/temel-metinler/toplumcu-anayasa">Toplumcu Anayasa</a>’dan söz açtı ve şunları söyledi:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div></div><blockquote><div><div style="text-align: justify;">“Biz ‘işsizlik ortadan kalkacak’, ‘herkesi kapsayan tek bir sosyal güvenlik sistemi olacak’, ‘eğitim, sağlık parasız olacak’, ‘herkes sağlıklı bir konutta yaşamalıdır, ısınma, aydınlatma bunların hepsi bedelsiz olmalıdır’ diyoruz. Bunlar temel haklardır. Bunları nasıl uygulayacağınızı anlatırsınız anayasada. Soruyorum; AKP’nin nasıl bir öyküsü var, bu topluma ne diyebilir? İnsanların sokağa çıkmasını engelleyen, insanların toplumsal hayattaki varlığını reddeden bir siyasi parti 'sizi uzaya yollayacağız' diyor. Bunun üzerine bir anayasa tartışması açıyor. Bu iktidarın anayasadan anladığı şey kendi elini daha serbest bırakacak bir düzenleme. Güçlendirilmiş parlamenter sistemle filan AKP durdurulamaz. Bugün sokaktaki insana güçlendirilmiş parlamenter sistem ne ifade eder? Bu göreli bir kavram, nereye doğru güçlendireceksiniz? Ya sermayeden yana ya da eşitlikçi bir düzende, halktan yana olunur."<br /></div></div><div style="text-align: justify;"></div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/dGYifXC_YNs" width="560"></iframe></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><span><!--more--></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://www.tkp.org.tr/tr/haberler/akpnin-anayasa-hazirlama-ehliyeti-yok" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Kaynak</a></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-62535644907538256532021-02-09T23:18:00.015+10:002023-02-25T22:21:50.525+10:00Turkey’s Solidarity Assembly: Struggle for justice, secularism and enlightenment are intertwined<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1UUMhTR9k9b74v6DAj8jM9IJwKJRfshtxd5n9BF4YPuyWfI0saFXACmG7hpDGu4xDhh7DXCOInXw3R51Q74iBbNoYUk0ZRnBazTReNLczN0ZJvzQqYU9FFhhF1TM8wbmzc5NoItVg6Xxx/s615/turkey.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="410" data-original-width="615" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1UUMhTR9k9b74v6DAj8jM9IJwKJRfshtxd5n9BF4YPuyWfI0saFXACmG7hpDGu4xDhh7DXCOInXw3R51Q74iBbNoYUk0ZRnBazTReNLczN0ZJvzQqYU9FFhhF1TM8wbmzc5NoItVg6Xxx/s16000/turkey.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px;">The Solidarity Assembly of Turkey, initiated by the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) and formed by a group of scientists, artists, writers, journalists, trade unionists, labor leaders, made a statement regarding the recent debates in the country, including the reform discussions and exploitation of religion. The struggle against the exploitation of labor can not be considered apart from the struggle against the exploitation of religion and reactionism, the Assembly emphasized.</span></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;">The statement noted that as for presenting a hopeful future for most people, the system in Turkey is worse than ever. Solidarity Assembly emphasized that unemployment, poverty, livelihood concerns and the cost of living have become the most important reality of the country and the people's biggest problem.</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;">The Assembly added that "the bourgeois organizations expect and call for austerity policies under the name of reform and IMF programs without the IMF. The government is preparing to make new regulations under the name of reform in favor of domestic and international capital and, of course, against laborers."</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;">"The government has no choice but to increase the abuse of religion, to exploit more the religious feelings of the people, and to cling to the rope of reaction," the Assembly stated.</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;">Drawing attention to the fact that the exploitation of religion increases as the labor exploitation increases in the country, the Solidarity Assembly said, "As the people are deprived of the blessings of this world, the other world is promised to them. The people are asked to trust and show more patience as they get poorer."</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;">THE OPPOSITION IS SILENT</strong></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;">“Except the socialist parties, the opposition, especially the main opposition party that founded the Republic is silent. Bourgeois opposition does accept that the exploitation of labor and religious reactionism are intertwined in Turkey. They don’t defend secularism. Some opposition parties justify this in terms of not confronting the religious feelings and sensitivities of the people. In contrast, others do not even have such an issue because they are reactionist as much as the power. "</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;">“Today, this reactionism is the biggest tool of a blockade against children, women, and youth, and this blockade needs to be dissolved," the statement of the Assembly noted.</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;">NEW CONSTITUTION IS AN ATTACK ON SECULARISM</strong></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;">Regarding the discussions of a new constitution and the related preparation process, the Solidarity Assembly made the following assessment:</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;">"Secularism is formed the intellectual backbone of the Republic of 1923 with the Enlightenment and now it is a class matter more than ever before. Secularism, which is the most important part of the Enlightenment struggle, is essential for laborers today. Although they are the workers who carry the world on their shoulders, they are the ones who are deprived of the riches of this world, they are the ones whose labor is usurped by an intense religious fatalism. For these reasons, attacks on secularism are among the targets of the government's constitutional amendments.”</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;">Today, the struggle against the exploitation of labor cannot be separated from the struggle against religion's reaction and exploitation.</p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;">The struggle for the state, law, and justice, and the struggle for secularism and enlightenment are now intertwined." </p><div><br /></div><div>First published by <a href="https://news.sol.org.tr/turkeys-solidarity-assembly-struggle-justice-secularism-and-enlightenment-are-intertwined-177107" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sol International</a></div><div class="sm-buttom-buttons" style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: "Open Sans"; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 20px; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;"><a class="socialpopup twitter-horizontal" href="https://twitter.com/share?text=Turkey%E2%80%99s+Solidarity+Assembly%3A+Struggle+for+justice%2C+secularism+and+enlightenment+are+intertwined%20@soLIntern&url=http://news.sol.org.tr/turkeys-solidarity-assembly-struggle-justice-secularism-and-enlightenment-are-intertwined-177107&amp" style="box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.5s ease 0s;" title="Tweet"></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-4388361519522768472021-01-09T18:05:00.004+10:002023-02-25T22:24:27.736+10:00Syria’s Nightmarish Narrative<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjK6fg98R8kzfOC5orqh0oY2YeYML_k7D8GlVjGVgjaAVCl54RxUIAi5D-UG37UHae8wEdMEqLCh079yIDMvfg55RsLAW4tbZkx8wN8DKg0alCZhFkaKz8JLWiW8Z8EDT5IAC-c1bjfOzo/s646/syria+map.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="646" data-original-width="599" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjK6fg98R8kzfOC5orqh0oY2YeYML_k7D8GlVjGVgjaAVCl54RxUIAi5D-UG37UHae8wEdMEqLCh079yIDMvfg55RsLAW4tbZkx8wN8DKg0alCZhFkaKz8JLWiW8Z8EDT5IAC-c1bjfOzo/s16000/syria+map.JPG" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div>27 April 2015<br /><br /><b> Exclusive: With military and political help from Saudi Arabia and Israel, the nightmare scenario of an Al-Qaeda and/or Islamic State victory in Syria may be coming true, as the army of the more secular Syrian government retreats and as President Obama seems frozen by indecision, reports Robert Parry.<br /></b><br /><br />By Robert Parry<br /><br />The <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2015/04/15/did-money-seal-israeli-saudi-alliance/">Saudi-Israeli alliance</a>, in league with other hard-line Sunni countries, is helping Al-Qaeda affiliates advance toward gaining either victory or at least safe havens in Syria and Yemen, highlighting unresolved contradictions in President Barack Obama’s policies in the Middle East.<br /><br />Fueled by a surge of support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey and with Israel striking at Syrian government allies Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and Al-Qaeda’s hyper-brutal spinoff, the Islamic State, are making major advances in Syria with some analysts now predicting the likely collapse of the relatively secular government of President Bashar al-Assad.<br /><br />Saudi Arabia and Israel have made clear over the past few years that they regard the overthrow of the Iranian-backed Assad government as a geopolitical priority even if it results in a victory by Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. But Obama, who has been unwilling or unable to rein in the Saudi-Israeli alliance, would then have to decide what to do with Islamic terrorists dominating a major Mideast nation.<br /><br />Some of these Sunni radicals have shown that they will move aggressively toward slaughtering minority groups that they consider infidels, including Christians, Alawites and Shiites. The terrorists could leave the streets of major Syrian cities running red with blood and give Al-Qaeda a solid platform from which to launch terrorist attacks against the West.<br /><br />How Obama or his successor might respond to that is uncertain but it would be difficult for any American president to sit back and do nothing. Yet, dispatching another U.S. military expeditionary force to Syria to dislodge Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State from Damascus and across Syria would likely be a fool’s errand resulting in massive loss of life, costing trillions of dollars and promising little success.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the neocon-dominated mainstream U.S. news media is already pushing the narrative that Obama’s failure was that he didn’t intervene earlier to overthrow the Assad regime so some “moderate” rebels could have taken power.<br /><br />But the existence of a significant “moderate” rebel army was always a fiction. As Obama noted in a frank <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/opinion/president-obama-thomas-l-friedman-iraq-and-world-affairs.html?_r=0">interview</a> with New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman in August 2014, the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has “always been a fantasy.”<br /><br />Obama explained: “This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.”<br /><br />Obama added that his administration had trouble finding, training and arming enough secular Syrian rebels to make a difference: “There’s not as much capacity as you would hope.”<br /><br />Indeed, much of the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army threw in its lot and their U.S.-supplied weapons with Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front or the Islamic State in 2013. After that, Obama’s only realistic choice was to strike a pragmatic political agreement with Assad and cooperate with Iran and Russia in reclaiming territory from Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.<br /><br /><b>Getting Rid of Assad</b><br /><br />But that option proved politically impossible because the Israel Lobby and American neocons continued to press for Assad’s overthrow. They were aided by Obama’s unwillingness to release U.S. intelligence that undercut some of the major anti-Assad themes dominating the mainstream U.S. media. For instance, Obama could have revealed doubts within the U.S. intelligence community that Assad’s regime was responsible for the infamous sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013.<br /><br />Blaming Assad for the sarin attack, which killed hundreds of civilians, was a valuable part of the neocon narrative that prevented any détente with Assad. Yet, even as more evidence emerged that the attack was likely a provocation committed by rebel extremists, Obama balked at updating the initial rush to judgment nine days after the event fingering Assad’s forces.<br /><br />As recently as this month, the Obama administration was still handing out those initial accusations to CBS’ “60 Minutes” and other mainstream media outlets, which simply regurgitate the outdated intelligence data rather than examine the newer evidence that points to a rebel “false-flag” operation designed to draw the U.S. military into the Syrian civil war on the rebel side. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “<a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2015/04/20/a-fact-resistant-group-think-on-syria/">A Fact-Resistant ‘Group Think’ on Syria.</a>”]<br /><br />Though Obama pulled back in 2013 from bombing the Syrian military, which could have opened the gates of Damascus to Al-Qaeda and/or the Islamic State, the President hasn’t been willing to override the “regime change” desires of his State Department, which remains influenced by neocons and their sidekicks, the liberal interventionists.<br /><br />Now, despite the growing risk of an Al-Qaeda or Islamic State victory in Syria, Obama seems frozen by indecision over what to do, hemmed in by the Israel Lobby, the oil-rich Saudis and neocon politicians and opinion-leaders in Official Washington.<br /><br />But the dangers of an Islamic terror victory in Syria grow by the day. In <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/assads-regime-at-increasing-risk-amid-a-surge-of-rebel-advances/2015/04/26/c2742e22-ec32-11e4-8050-839e9234b303_story.html">an article</a> entitled “Rebel resurgence puts Syrian regime in peril,” the Washington Post’s Liz Sly reported on Monday that “A surge of rebel gains in Syria is overturning long-held assumptions about the durability of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which now appears in greater peril than at any time in the past three years.<br /><br />“The capture Saturday of the town of Jisr al-Shughour in northern Idlib province was just the latest in a string of battlefield victories by rebel forces, which have made significant advances in both the north and the south of the country.<br /><br />“The battlefield shifts come at a time when the Obama administration has set aside the crisis in Syria to focus on its chief priorities: defeating the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and concluding a nuclear deal with Iran. Yet the pace of events in Syria may force the United States to refocus on the unresolved war, which remains at the heart of the turmoil engulfing the Middle East, analysts say.<br /><br />“Iran backs Assad, Saudi Arabia backs the rebels, and a shift in the balance of power in Syria could have profound repercussions for the conflicts in Iraq and Yemen. ‘We’re seeing a game changer right now in Syria,’ said Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist. ‘I think we are going to see an end to the Assad regime, and we have to think now about what will happen the day after, because the day after is near.’<br /><br />“The revival of rebel fortunes is attributed to a large degree to the recent rapprochement between a newly assertive Saudi Arabia and its erstwhile rivals for influence over the rebels, Turkey and Qatar.<br /><br />“Since inheriting the throne in January, Saudi King Salman has moved forcefully to challenge the expanding regional influence of Iran, Saudi Arabia’s biggest foe, most publicly by embarking on an air war against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. He has also acted to shore up the flagging and deeply divided rebels in Syria, in coordination with Qatar and Turkey, Khashoggi said.<br /><br />“The result has been an unexpectedly cohesive rebel coalition called the Army of Conquest that is made up of al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, an assortment of mostly Islamist brigades and a small number of more moderate battalions. The coalition, which launched last month, has proved more effective than expected.<br /><br />“In a commentary for the Middle East Institute in the past week, Robert S. Ford, a former U.S. envoy to Syria, said a regime collapse cannot be ruled out. The regime’s schisms, its battlefield setbacks and its manpower shortages ‘are all signs of weakness,’ he wrote. ‘We may be seeing signs of the beginning of their end.’”<br /><br /><b>More Israeli Airstrikes</b><br /><br />Meanwhile, Israel has reportedly <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/world/middleeast/israeli-military-says-it-killed-armed-men-in-strike-on-golan-heights-frontier.html">resumed airstrikes</a> against Syrian military bases near Lebanon, possibly aimed at Lebanese Hezbollah forces cooperating with the Assad government in battling Sunni rebels. While refusing to comment directly on these reported airstrikes, Israeli officials have vowed to prevent Syria from transferring sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah.<br /><br />An earlier Israeli airstrike killed a number of Hezbollah fighters and an Iranian general who was in Syria assisting Assad’s military. Israel also has arranged what amounts to a non-aggression pact with Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front along the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, with Israel even providing hospital care for Nusra fighters who then return to the battlefield.<br /><br />More importantly, Israel has turned loose its powerful Israel Lobby in the United States to rally Republicans and many Democrats to obstruct President Obama’s efforts to work out an agreement with Iran to limit its nuclear program and clear the way for a more constructive relationship with the Shiite-ruled country.<br /><br />Obama’s overtures toward Iran have alarmed Saudi Arabia, which views itself as leading the Sunni faction in the Middle East. The Saudi disdain for Iran even has led to the Saudis joining sides with Israel in an odd-couple relationship, since both countries now view Iran as their principal adversary.<br /><br />As this relationship firmed up, Israel even began voicing a preference for Al-Qaeda’s militants over the relatively secular Assad government, which was viewed as the protectors of Alawites, Shiites, Christians and other Syrian minorities terrified of the Saudi-backed Sunni extremists.<br /><br />In September 2013, in one of the most explicit expressions of Israel’s views, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren, then a close adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told the Jerusalem Post that Israel favored the Sunni extremists over Assad.<br /><br />“The greatest danger to Israel is by the strategic arc that extends from Tehran, to Damascus to Beirut. And we saw the Assad regime as the keystone in that arc,” Oren told the Jerusalem Post in <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Syria-Crisis/Oren-Jerusalem-has-wanted-Assad-ousted-since-the-outbreak-of-the-Syrian-civil-war-326328">an interview</a>. “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” He said this was the case even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with Al-Qaeda.<br /><br />Oren expanded on his position in June 2014 at an Aspen Institute conference. Then, speaking as a former ambassador, Oren <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgBsTT0h_SA">said</a> Israel would even prefer a victory by the Islamic State, which was massacring captured Iraqi soldiers and beheading Westerners, than the continuation of the Iranian-backed Assad in Syria.<br /><br />“From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail,” Oren said.<br /><br />On Oct. 1, 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu hinted at the new Israeli-Saudi relationship in his United Nations General Assembly speech, which was largely devoted to excoriating Iran over its nuclear program and threatening a unilateral Israeli military strike.<br /><br />Amid the bellicosity, Netanyahu dropped in a largely missed clue about the evolving power relationships in the Middle East, saying: “The dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran and the emergence of other threats in our region have led many of our Arab neighbors to recognize, finally recognize, that Israel is not their enemy. And this affords us the opportunity to overcome the historic animosities and build new relationships, new friendships, new hopes.”<br /><br />The next day, Israel’s Channel 2 TV news<a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-gulf-states-said-discussing-new-alliance-to-stop-iran/"> reported</a> that senior Israeli security officials had met with a high-level Gulf state counterpart in Jerusalem, believed to be Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to the United States who was then head of Saudi intelligence.<br /><br />The reality of this unlikely alliance has even reached the mainstream U.S. media. For instance, Time magazine correspondent Joe Klein <a href="http://time.com/3659186/the-path-to-peace/">described</a> the new coziness in an article in the Jan. 19, 2015 issue: “On May 26, 2014, an unprecedented public conversation took place in Brussels. Two former high-ranking spymasters of Israel and Saudi Arabia Amos Yadlin and Prince Turki al-Faisal sat together for more than an hour, talking regional politics in a conversation moderated by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius.<br /><br />“They disagreed on some things, like the exact nature of an Israel-Palestine peace settlement, and agreed on others: the severity of the Iranian nuclear threat, the need to support the new military government in Egypt, the demand for concerted international action in Syria. The most striking statement came from Prince Turki. He said the Arabs had ‘crossed the Rubicon’ and ‘don’t want to fight Israel anymore.’”<br /><br /><b>Rallying Congress<br /><br /></b>During Netanyahu’s March 3 speech to a joint session of Congress, he further indicated Israel’s preference for the Saudi-backed jihadists over Iranian allies in the Syrian government. He urged the U.S. government to shift its focus from fighting Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to fighting Iran.<br /><br />Netanyahu depicted the danger from the Islamic State as relatively minor with its “butcher knives, captured weapons and YouTube” compared to Iran, which he accused of “gobbling up the nations” of the Middle East.<br /><br />To the applause of Congress, he claimed “Iran now dominates four Arab capitals, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa. And if Iran’s aggression is left unchecked, more will surely follow.” His choice of capitals was peculiar, however, because Iran took none of those capitals by force and, indeed, was simply supporting the embattled government of Syria and was allied with Shiite elements of the government of Lebanon.<br /><br />As for Iraq, Iran’s allies were installed not by Iran but by President George W. Bush via the U.S. invasion. And, in Yemen, a long-festering sectarian conflict has led to the capture of Sanaa by Houthi rebels who are Zaydi Shiites, an offshoot of Shia Islam that is actually closer to some Sunni sects. The Houthis deny they are agents of Iran, and Western intelligence services believe Iran’s support has consisted mostly of some funding.<br /><br />However, as part of the Saudi-Israeli campaign against Iranian influence, Saudi Arabia has bombed Yemeni cities from the air using sophisticated American-supplied aircraft while the U.S. Navy has supported a blockade of Yemen from the sea, including this past weekend turning back nine Iranian ships carrying relief supplies because of unconfirmed suspicions that there might be weapons onboard as well.<br /><br />Though the Saudi leadership had agreed to peace talks urged by President Obama, the Saudi air force resumed its bombing of the Yemeni capital of Sanaa and other targets on Sunday. Despite U.S. intelligence support, the Saudi airstrikes have been largely indiscriminate killing hundreds of civilians and shattering some of Yemen’s ancient cities.<br /><br />Another effect of the Saudi airstrikes has been to bolster the cause of “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” an affiliate that the U.S. government has identified as the most dangerous Al-Qaeda branch in terms of sponsoring attacks on the West. With the Houthi rebels under Saudi bombardment, AQAP has succeeded in seizing more territory in the east and overrunning a prison to free Al-Qaeda militants.<br /><br />The most immediate and severe crisis, however, appears to be unfolding in Syria where Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the bloodthirsty Islamic State appear to be gaining the upper hand, with military support from Saudi Arabia and political cover from Israel.<br /><br />[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “<a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2015/04/15/did-money-seal-israeli-saudi-alliance/">Did Money Seal the Israeli-Saudi Alliance?</a>”]<br /><br /><i>Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in <a href="https://org.salsalabs.com/o/1868/t/12126/shop/shop.jsp?storefront_KEY=1037">print here</a> or as an e-book (from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Stolen-Narrative-Washington-ebook/dp/B009RXXOIG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350755575&sr=8-1&keywords=americas+stolen+narrative">Amazon</a> and <a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/americas-stolen-narrative?keyword=americas+stolen+narrative&store=ebook&iehack=%E2%98%A0">barnesandnoble.com</a>). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2014/06/25/continuing-parrys-3-book-offer/">click here</a>.</i><br />564<br /><br /><a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2015/04/27/syrias-nightmarish-narrative/" target="_blank">SOURCE</a><div id="posts-pagination" style="background-color: #edede3; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: #555555; font-family: Georgia; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px 0px 20px; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow: hidden; width: 860px;"></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-27753142612983861682020-12-22T10:21:00.014+10:002023-02-25T22:25:15.448+10:00Hayvan Hakları - Herkesin Bilmesi Gerekli Bilgiler<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVOR7kZ6CvxMTuTgzGMSJ498SstXwR-cWHJH-lxH45loRDJW3PiPucCXvRwplGG9PCH4Nw3SZP5bdXU8mjHACGLeDL8uJIk-gMaJHEFG-Wz91piSI6RhmSLx9oc1FdtV-se0ajfhkqvHVN/s640/eric-ward-ISg37AI2A-s-unsplash+%25281%2529.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVOR7kZ6CvxMTuTgzGMSJ498SstXwR-cWHJH-lxH45loRDJW3PiPucCXvRwplGG9PCH4Nw3SZP5bdXU8mjHACGLeDL8uJIk-gMaJHEFG-Wz91piSI6RhmSLx9oc1FdtV-se0ajfhkqvHVN/s16000/eric-ward-ISg37AI2A-s-unsplash+%25281%2529.jpg" /></a><br /><div> </div><div> <br /> Dünya genelinde her yıl 4 Ekim Hayvanları Koruma Günü olarak kutlanırken, küresel olarak hayvanlara yönelik eziyet ve kötü muamele devam ediyor. Peki Hayvan Hakları nelerdir? Hayvan haklarında hangi ülkeler zayıf durumda? İşte 4 Ekim Hayvanları Koruma Gününe dair detaylar...<br /><br />Dünya genelinde maddi kazanç ve eğlence amacıyla bir çok hayvan, işkence, eziyet ve kötü muameleye maruz kalıyor.<br /><br />Dünya genelinde bir çok yerde gelenekler kapsamında hayvanlara eziyetler sürüyor. İspanya'da boğalar boynuzları yakılarak halk arasına salınıyor, Bulgaristan'da köpekler ipe asılıyor, Japonya'da balina, yunus ve foklar vahşice avlanıyor, Çin'de minik hayvanlar anahtarlıklar içerisine hapsediliyor, Güney Amerika'da boğalar güreştiriliyor ve Filipinler'de tavuklar dövülerek öldürülüyor.<br /><br /><div>Öte yandan dünyanın bir çok yerinde hayvanlar, sirk ve gösteri alanlarında para kazanma uğruna eziyete maruz kalıyor. Zincirlere tutsak edilen hayvanlar, eğitim amacıyla iplere bağlanıyor, elektriğe maruz bırakılıyor, kancalı sopayla dövülüyor, kırbaçlanıyor ve doğal yaşamından koparılıyor. <br /><br /><br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">HAYVANLARI KORUMA GÜNÜ NEDİR?</h3><br />Hayvan dostları ilk kez İngiltere’de 1822 yılında; hayvanları korumak, insanların hayvanlara iyi davranmalarını, daha iyi koşullarda beslenme ve korunmalarını sağlamak amacıyla Hayvanları Koruma Birliği’ni kurdular. Ülkemizde Hayvanları Koruma Derneği 1908 yılında kuruldu. Aynı amaçla dernekler birleşerek Hollanda’nın başkenti Lahey’de Dünya Hayvanları Koruma Federasyonu’nu oluşturdular.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh12zfHvrniowH3ZEb0OK9rzVeNhECpQIfdsEO76cDe4rpc38JiXwy_BFZTprjZ1v9guMtdR-Jz5yPTRS6Gw-V04qSnn01qd_7CIs9J2xuByqRU0ZNfHfHRAQfW-ZplHB40Tlv4b1X4QcSd/s960/alexis-chloe-dD75iU5UAU4-unsplash.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh12zfHvrniowH3ZEb0OK9rzVeNhECpQIfdsEO76cDe4rpc38JiXwy_BFZTprjZ1v9guMtdR-Jz5yPTRS6Gw-V04qSnn01qd_7CIs9J2xuByqRU0ZNfHfHRAQfW-ZplHB40Tlv4b1X4QcSd/w426-h640/alexis-chloe-dD75iU5UAU4-unsplash.jpg" width="426" /></a></div><br /><div><br /><br />1931 yılında Floransa’da toplanan bu kuruluş dünya üzerinde yok olma tehdidi altında bulunan hayvan türlerine dikkat çekmek üzere 4 Ekim’i Hayvanları Koruma Günü ilan etti. Bu günün amacı; evrende insanlardan başka canlılar olduğunu anlamak, onların yaşam alanlarına müdahale etmemek, yaşama hakkına saygı duymaktır.<br /><br />Evde beslenen hayvanlara merhametli davranmak, koruyup kollamak, iyi koşullarda beslenmeleri, duyarlı davranılması konusunda farkındalık yaratmaktır.</div><div><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiVQY0DTFgD3aXZmHb0YVH9-sun5N6SJbkBTc5dAk-hC25g6MWtJIgNTiSxCS43J2pBfI4-k6mef9BlOEwUBXK3wCEcv1ZpwE2A1EhSXYqkYQ8Rk2faXhBoUuwWRjj3JB3Tk_mS2oNFkQm/s791/hayvan+haklari.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="791" data-original-width="601" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiVQY0DTFgD3aXZmHb0YVH9-sun5N6SJbkBTc5dAk-hC25g6MWtJIgNTiSxCS43J2pBfI4-k6mef9BlOEwUBXK3wCEcv1ZpwE2A1EhSXYqkYQ8Rk2faXhBoUuwWRjj3JB3Tk_mS2oNFkQm/s16000/hayvan+haklari.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">HAYVAN HAKLARI NELERDİR?</h3><br />15 Ekim 1978’de Paris UNESCO evinde ilan edilen Hayvan Hakları Evrensel Bildirisine göre genel olarak hayvan hakları şu şekildedir;<br /><br />1. Bütün hayvanlar yaşam önünde eşit doğarlar ve aynı var olma hakkına sahiptirler.<br /><br />2. Bütün hayvanlar saygı görme hakkına sahiptir. Bir hayvan türü olan insan , öbür hayvanları yok edemez. Bu hakkı çiğneyerek onları sömüremez.Bilgilerini hayvanların hizmetine sunmakla görevlidir. Bütün hayvanların insanca gözetilme, bakılma, ve korunma hakları vardır.<br /><br />3. Hiçbir hayvana kötü davranılamaz, acımasız ve zalimce eylem yapılamaz. Bir hayvanın öldürülmesi zorunlu olursa, bu bir anda, acı çektirmeden ve korkutmadan yapılmalıdır.<br /><br />4. Yabani türden olan bütün hayvanlar, kendi özel doğal çevrelerinde karada, havada ve suda yaşama ve üretme hakkına sahiptir. Eğitim amaçlı olsa bile özgürlükten yoksun kılmanın her çeşidi bu hakka aykırıdır.<br /><br />5.Geleneksel olarak insanların çevresinde yaşayan bir türden olan bütün hayvanlar uyumlu bir biçimde türüne özgü yaşam koşulları ve özgürlük içinde yaşama ve üreme hakkına sahiptir.<br /><br />6.İnsanların yanlarına aldıkları bütün hayvanlar doğal ömür uzunluklarına uygun sürece yaşama hakkına sahiptir. Bir hayvanı terk etmek acımasız ve aşağılık bir davranıştır.<br /><br />7.Bütün çalışan hayvanlar iş süresi ve yoğunluğunun sınırlandırılması ve güçlerini artırıcı bir beslenme ve dinlenme hakkına sahiptir.<br /><br />8.Hayvanlara fiziki ya da psikolojik bir acı çektiren deneyler yapmak hayvan haklarına aykırıdır. Tıbbi, bilimsel, ticari ve başkaca biçimlerdeki her türlü deneyler için de durum böyledir.<br /><br />9.Hayvan beslenmek için yetiştirilmişse de bakılmalı, barındırılmalı, taşınmalı, ölümü de acı çektirmeden ve korkutmadan olmalıdır.<br /><br />10.Hayvanlardan insanların eğlencesi olsun diye yararlanılamaz, hayvanların seyrettirilmesi ve hayvanlardan yararlanılan gösteriler hayvan onuruna aykırıdır.<br /><br />11.Zorunluluk olmaksızın bir hayvanın öldürülmesi yaşama karşı suçtur.<br /><br />12.Çok sayıda yabani hayvanın öldürülmesi demek olan her davranış bir soykırım, yani bir suçtur.<br /><br />13. Hayvan ölümüne de saygı göstermek gerekir. Hayvanın öldürüldüğü şiddet sahneleri sinema ve televizyonda yasaklanmalıdır.<br /><br />14. Hayvanları koruma ve savunma kuralları, hükümet düzeyinde temsil olunmalıdır. Hayvan hakları da insan hakları gibi yasayla korunmalıdır.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.haberturk.com/4-ekim-hayvanlari-koruma-gunu-nedir-hayvan-haklari-nelerdir-2527972" target="_blank">KAYNAK</a></div><div><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRM4zMP73kVAudPYNhy4nEJeJWOpKfSS4CQfGYzDtGmo5bExk-X1tGQ7M-i9xcEzNMPDUI3hbDFhM8Y_uJQN4NqQvZ4wrd0_qbuJRavP1CFWE6TKUtrm4FKPMZi4r68PagMsure3bXjo7X/s2048/20200730_082823.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1561" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRM4zMP73kVAudPYNhy4nEJeJWOpKfSS4CQfGYzDtGmo5bExk-X1tGQ7M-i9xcEzNMPDUI3hbDFhM8Y_uJQN4NqQvZ4wrd0_qbuJRavP1CFWE6TKUtrm4FKPMZi4r68PagMsure3bXjo7X/w245-h320/20200730_082823.jpg" width="245" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"> Miss Indy 💓</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-70259620994341289052020-12-05T00:47:00.006+10:002021-02-10T01:12:21.987+10:0010 Natural remedies for hair growth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirxWDFIYtqfnqECOJOV46Bstxq9I_1HHmJ78xfdmyGQ2iy1l6lg9RHmqfoT2z3cMh4bTUUkPMj30gMTicAlR4cuUZ0Nrhzlk2_jV-_DPne_ajaXE6pxpKISXxtbALiEmrjFjBNlywRIjxL/s1280/pretty-2111499_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1052" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirxWDFIYtqfnqECOJOV46Bstxq9I_1HHmJ78xfdmyGQ2iy1l6lg9RHmqfoT2z3cMh4bTUUkPMj30gMTicAlR4cuUZ0Nrhzlk2_jV-_DPne_ajaXE6pxpKISXxtbALiEmrjFjBNlywRIjxL/w526-h640/pretty-2111499_1280.jpg" width="526" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>Your hair is said to be your crowning glory, and it’s normal to want to improve your hair if it’s not to your satisfaction. If you’re trying to regrow hair that you’ve lost or would simply like to improve the hair that you have, try some of these natural remedies. Their proven benefits can help to stimulate growth and enhance the hair that you have.</p><div><b>1. Massage</b><br /><br />Massaging the scalp can help to restore hair growth and can be used in conjunction with hair oils and masks. This stimulates the scalp and can improve hair thickness. Taking the time to massage your scalp each day can also help you relieve stress and tension. It’s thought that stretching forces during the massage encourage hair growth and thickness in the dermal papilla cells.<br /><b><br />2. Aloe vera</b><br /><br />Aloe vera has long been used for treating hair loss. It also soothes the scalp and conditions hair. It can reduce <a href="http://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/aloe/evidence/hrb-20058665">dandruff</a> and unblock hair follicles that may be blocked by excess oil. You can apply <a href="https://amzn.to/2wsfZOx?correlationId=ce7085d7-e1d5-4996-aa9a-83bb28c9707c">pure aloe vera gel</a> to your scalp and hair a few times per week. You can also use shampoo and conditioner that contain aloe vera.</div><div><br /><b>3. Coconut oil</b><br /><br />Coconut oil contains fatty acids that penetrate inside the hair shaft and reduce protein loss from hair. Coconut oil can be used either before or after you wash your hair depending on your hair type. If your hair tends to be oily, you can do a leave-in treatment overnight or for a few hours before you wash it. Massage <a href="https://amzn.to/2C0a7RD?correlationId=cb5e74af-4be3-4867-99f8-887e309278d5">coconut oil</a> into your scalp and all of your hair. If your hair is dry, you can also use it as a leave-in treatment. There needs to be more research on coconut oil as a promoter of hair growth, but it’s been shown to <a href="https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/top-10-evidence-based-health-benefits-of-coconut-oil">improve the health and luster of hair</a> and has been used for centuries.<br /><br /><b>4. Viviscal</b><br /><br />Viviscal is a natural hair-growth supplement that promotes hair growth in people with thinning hair. It contains a marine complex known as AminoMar C. This is made of minerals, vitamins, and shark and mollusk powder. These ingredients help to regenerate new cells and strengthen existing cells. You have to take the pills twice a day for at least six months in order to see results. Viviscal also makes a shampoo and conditioner.</div><div><br /><b>5. Fish oil</b><br /><br />Consuming omega fatty acids can help to improve your hair from the inside, since they are filled with nutrients and proteins. Taking an omega supplement along with antioxidants helps to improve hair density and diameter. It also reduces hair loss. Omega fatty acids help your cells to work correctly and can boost <a href="http://www.mayoclinic.org/what-are-omega-3-fatty-acids-from-fish-oil/art-20232583">immunity</a>, leading to better overall health. Follow the manufacturer’s recommended dosage.<br /><br /><b>6. Ginseng</b><br /><br />Taking ginseng supplements can promote hair growth by stimulating hair follicles. Ginsenosides are the active components of ginseng and are thought to be responsible for its positive effect on hair. Always take as directed and be sure to check for any possible side effects.<br /><br /><b>7. Onion juice</b><br /><br />If you can handle the smell of onion juice, you may find that the benefits are worth it. Onion juice has been shown to successfully treat patchy area by promoting hair growth. Onion juice is also thought to improve circulation. You can blend a few onions and squeeze out the juice. Apply the juice to your scalp and hair and leave in for at least 15 minutes. Then shampoo normally.</div><div><br /><b>8. Rosemary oil</b><br /><br />Rosemary is one of the first essential oils people choose to promote hair growth and reduce hair loss. Rosemary oil stimulates new hair growth and can be used to treat androgenetic alopecia. Mix a few drops of rosemary oil into a carrier oil and massage it into your hair and scalp before rinsing. Do this a few times per week. Add a few drops of rosemary oil into your shampoo and conditioner on a daily basis. Do not use essential oils directly on the skin. Always mix them in a carrier oil or shampoo.</div><div><br /><b>9. Geranium oil</b><br /><br />You can use geranium oil to promote hair growth and boost circulation. Mix a few drops into a carrier oil and use it to make a hair mask. You can also add a few drops to your shampoo and conditioner. Geranium oil can help to strengthen, hydrate, and restore your hair.</div><div><br /><b>10. Lemon</b><br /><br />You can use fresh lemon juice or lemon oil since they are said to enhance hair quality and growth. Lemon oil can help you to maintain a healthy scalp and encourage hair growth. Apply fresh lemon juice to your scalp and hair 15 minutes before you shampoo. You can use lemon essential oil diluted in a carrier oil as a hair mask.</div><div><br /><b>YOU MAY ALSO...</b></div><div><br /><b>Consider prescription medications</b><br /><br />There are two clinically approved drugs for preventing further hair loss – finasteride and minoxidil. Finasteride works by inhibiting the hormone dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which causes the hair follicles to shrink and eventually fall out, while minoxidil increases blood flow and nutrient uptake to the follicles. Both treatments may result in some hair regrowth as well, but they include the risk of side-effects. Finasteride has been found to lead to erectile dysfunction and decreased libido in approximately 1 in 31 men, while minoxidil can result in skin irritation and allergic reactions.<br /><br /><b>Use a laser comb</b></div><div><b><br /></b>Apart from finasteride and minoxidil, laser combs are the only hair-loss treatment to have received FDA approval. (In the UK, the medication and the combs have to be paid for privately as they are not available on the NHS.) A 2014 study of 103 men with pattern hair loss found a significant increase in hair density after 26 weeks of applying a laser comb across the scalp three times a week. The exact way the combs work isn’t fully understood, but it has been suggested that low-power lasers have an antioxidant effect on hair follicles.<br /><br /><b>Change your hair products</b></div><div><b><br /></b>There is some evidence that many gels and other styling products may contribute to hair loss, as the chemicals within these products stay on the scalp and become trapped in the follicles, preventing the hair from coming to the surface. Avoid excessive use of hair gels and try more natural styling products, which contain fewer chemicals.<br /><br /></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-56881313968856056062020-12-02T02:12:00.000+10:002021-02-10T02:15:21.213+10:00Australian court upholds sacking of academic for criticising US and Israeli militarismby <span style="color: #2b00fe;">Mike Head</span><div><br /></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIkFLTBQ5JA0z7qw_6fbMvWBLp6kpkWfQJ19tbC9h3U0qP9HTavUqsDeT4ytGTyjpo4PvLuELaV_F80mmkclNQTdlqqIE1bFCX9cQ4MKcpnYr3PGKzvv-M3prKrFkJOleaodHv-N8556cl/s1280/Tim+anderson.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="927" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIkFLTBQ5JA0z7qw_6fbMvWBLp6kpkWfQJ19tbC9h3U0qP9HTavUqsDeT4ytGTyjpo4PvLuELaV_F80mmkclNQTdlqqIE1bFCX9cQ4MKcpnYr3PGKzvv-M3prKrFkJOleaodHv-N8556cl/s320/Tim+anderson.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Prof Tim Anderson</td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div>A Federal Court judge last week set a chilling and far-reaching precedent for the further overturning of basic democratic rights and academic freedom, especially to express political or other dissenting views.<br /><br />The ruling backed the University of Sydney’s February 2019 dismissal of Dr. Tim Anderson, an economics department senior lecturer, primarily on the basis of allegations that his criticisms of US militarism and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people were “offensive.”<br /><br />The court decision is another warning of the poisonous and repressive atmosphere being whipped up to silence opposition to the preparations for Australian involvement in potentially catastrophic US-led wars against China or other perceived threats to the global hegemony asserted by Washington since World War II.<br /><br />Significantly, the University of Sydney hosts the US Studies Centre, which was established in 2006, with US and Australian government funding, for the express purpose of overcoming popular hostility to US militarism after the massive protests against the invasion and occupation of Iraq.<br /><br />The court’s judgment also exposed the fraud of claims by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) that its enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) with universities protect the essential principle of academic freedom.<br /><br />Justice Thomas Thawley ruled that the university’s EBA with the union, which is similar to those at most universities, “does not recognise the existence of, or give rise to, a legally enforceable right to intellectual freedom.”<br /><br />In particular, Thawley declared that EBA “academic freedom” clauses do not protect university workers from being sacked for making comments—even on their private social media accounts—that managements deem in breach of their employee codes of conduct. Instead, EBA commitments to academic freedom were “purely aspirational.”<div><br />University of Sydney Institute Building, where United States Studies Centre is located (Photo source: Wikipedia)<br /><br />This thoroughly anti-democratic decision comes on the back of a similar result in another case taken to the courts by the NTEU. In July, the Full Federal Court upheld the dismissal of James Cook University academic Dr. Peter Ridd, for expressing his views, as a climate-change sceptic, that cut across the university’s reputation.<a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/05/book-o05.html"><br /></a><br />Anderson’s case demonstrates how far university managements, working in league with governments and the corporate media, can victimise academics, especially those who oppose the wars of US imperialism and its allies, including the Zionist regime in Israel.<br /><br />Among the charges the University of Sydney made against Anderson was that he tweeted, on his own Twitter account, criticism of the university hosting an address by US Senator John McCain. Anderson described McCain, a backer of every US military intervention for the past three decades, including the brutal neo-colonial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as “a key US war criminal.”<br /><br />Other allegations included Anderson posting on his personal Facebook account a photograph of a group of friends eating lunch, one of whom wore an anti-Israel badge. Anderson was accused of “promoting racial hatred and/or racism” and charged with violating the university’s Code of Conduct even though he was on leave from the university at the time.<br /><br />Anderson was further charged with posting to his Facebook and Twitter accounts a denunciation of a video news report by Channel 7 reporter Bryan Seymour that insinuated that Anderson supported racism and the North Korean regime. Anderson’s comment that “Colonial media promotes ignorance, apartheid and war” was declared “derogatory” toward Seymour.<br /><br />Anderson was also cited for giving a lecture that allegedly featured an Israeli flag with the Nazi swastika superimposed on it, examined media coverage of Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014, and encouraged students to seek independent evidence of claims of “moral equivalence” between Israel’s deadly aerial bombardments and primitive Palestinian rocket attacks.<br /><br />This was judged to be “derogatory and/or offensive” and as “reasonably seen as racist towards or seeking to target and/or offend Israelis and/or Jewish people and/or Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.” Yet, critics of the Israeli government, including anti-Zionist Jews, have often compared its persecution of the Palestinian people to the actions of the fascist German regime.<br /><br />Finally, Anderson was accused of breaching confidentiality orders barring him from even telling anyone that he was facing dismissal, and of failing to comply with “a lawful and reasonable direction” to delete his social media posts.<br /><br />The judge agreed with the university management’s determination that Anderson’s posts and efforts to fight his dismissal amounted to “serious misconduct” under both the NTEU’s EBA and the university’s Code of Conduct, thus justifying his sacking.<br /><br />Anderson’s dismissal followed a protracted campaign by senior figures in the federal Liberal-National Coalition government, the corporate media and university management, to demonise Anderson because of his denunciations of wars and military interventions by the US, Israel and other major powers.<br /><br />In April 2018, Education Minister Simon Birmingham, who was in charge of university funding, demanded an investigation into Anderson for comments he made questioning US claims that the Syrian government was responsible for a sarin gas attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun.<br /><br />The Murdoch-owned Sydney Daily Telegraph hysterically denounced Anderson as a “sarin gasbag” and the Sydney Morning Herald later reported that the university was taking disciplinary action against Anderson—a media disclosure that violated its own confidentiality regime.<br /><br />Justice Thawley found Anderson’s dismissal as justified by the university’s Code of Conduct, which imposes requirements such as “the exercise of the best professional and ethical judgment,” “integrity and objectivity,” being “fair and reasonable” and treating “members of the public with respect, impartiality, courtesy and sensitivity.” The university’s employees must also “uphold the outstanding reputation of the University in the community.”<br /><br />These formulations are so vague and value-laden that they could provide a pretext for sacking academics or other university workers for condemning government policies, denouncing corporate greed or accusing the US and Australian governments of military aggression or war crimes. Employees could be dismissed for criticising university policies, such as hosting pro-military think tanks.<br /><br />Virtually every university campus across the country now participates in government-funded programs to tie academic research to the development of new military technologies. Australian universities are being integrated into a vast US-led military build-up, aimed at preparing for war with China and other powers.<br /><br />The NTEU’s response to the court ruling, as it was to Anderson’s sacking itself, and the massive job cuts ravaging universities, is to oppose any mobilisation of university workers and instead appeal to the employers for a deal.<br /><br />In a union media statement, NTEU New South Wales division secretary Michael Thomson said: “We call on all Vice Chancellors to come to the table to talk about how we can formulate a legally enforceable right, to provide the appropriate protections for university staff and to avoid these circumstances occurring in the future.”<br /><br />The Federal Court’s support for Anderson’s victimisation is part of a deeper attack on fundamental democratic rights. It widens the impact of a High Court 2019 ruling that essentially abolished freedom of speech for workers, whether in government or corporate employment. With no dissent, the judges endorsed the <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/08/09/high-a09.html">sacking</a> of a federal public servant for criticising—even anonymously—the country’s brutal refugee detention regime.<br /><br />A warning must be sounded. The ruling class and its agencies, including university managements, are seeking to suppress dissent amid mounting social inequality, war preparations and deepening political discontent.<br /><br />Hence the federal police raids on journalists for publishing leaks exposing government and military crimes, the prosecution of the whistleblowers involved and the <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/08/03/assa-a03.html">bipartisan</a> backing for the persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.</div><div><br /></div><div>Source | <a href="https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/acad-d03.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">WSWS</a></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-65479386222315550012020-10-30T00:29:00.004+10:002021-01-30T20:14:26.756+10:00Charlie Hebdo’s anti-Islamic jokes are getting old and the attention seeking and scandal-mongering is neither big nor clever<br />29 Oct, 2020 <div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVqO2kSXfnIr8-kCWuPKFYPumWzBjX7k5DTjlZfVNNdxwmCpzYrFqxM7T4hazJMaCmpK1p4l1vXsmfGkP1aeFNo_uM7XUq4EKYsRb5_Zo1LKJs9BCNconVud_hDrVkL0TsZZkzAMJapkrV/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="697" data-original-width="1240" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVqO2kSXfnIr8-kCWuPKFYPumWzBjX7k5DTjlZfVNNdxwmCpzYrFqxM7T4hazJMaCmpK1p4l1vXsmfGkP1aeFNo_uM7XUq4EKYsRb5_Zo1LKJs9BCNconVud_hDrVkL0TsZZkzAMJapkrV/w640-h360/image.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><br />The controversial French magazine has been slammed by Turkish strongman Erdogan, but isn’t that what they wanted? Have they become conditioned to create outrage, no matter the consequences?<br /><br />They’re back at it. The men and women of Charlie Hebdo have delivered yet another trademark cover. This one has Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in his underwear, lifting up the dress of a veiled female, whilst calling out, in reference to the Prophet Mohammed.<br /><br />The controversial leader hit back: “I don’t need to say anything to those scoundrels who insult my beloved prophet on such a scale.” <br /><br />Erdogan is far from everyone’s cup of tea thanks to his military interventions and somewhat illiberal policies. He has also been one of the loudest voices encouraging Turks to boycott French goods, amid the row over French President Emmanuel Macron’s robust stance on political Islam.<br /><br />For his part, Macron has reiterated his support for state secularism (laicite) and added that France <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-54692485">“will not give up our cartoons.”</a> His comments come in the wake of the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty by a radicalised teenager, thought to have been provoked by Paty’s decision to show Charlie Hebdo cartoons to his students during a lecture about freedom of speech.<br /><br />Those were the same depictions of the Prophet Mohammad that resulted in the 2015 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack that killed 17. The resulting trial sparked another incident last month, when a man wounded two people with a meat cleaver outside the magazine’s old offices. It’s a lot of bloodshed and anguish for what is supposed to be satire.<br /><br />Charlie Hebdo seems to have developed a perverse obsession with Islam. They want to spark a reaction and offend on purpose. Down the years, they have listed the Prophet Mohammed as a guest editor with the headline, “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter.” Another of their headlines was, “The Quran is crap. It does not stop bullets.” Then in 2010, when France invoked the intolerant law of banning face-covering garments, aimed at Muslim women – Charlie’s contribution was a naked woman with the headline, “Yes to wearing burqas…on the inside.”<br /><br />There is no justification for violence or attacks, no matter what religion they are in the name of. It’s unacceptable, and no society should tolerate it<br /><br />But France has an issue.<br /><br />Its government endorses what Charlie Hebdo does, and what it does is produce religious hatred. There are volumes of satire created daily, in print, digitally and on screen. There is also “a line,” where things go from thought-provoking to hate speech.<br /><br />If you know Muslims regard their prophet’s image as sacrosanct, then why do cartoons of him? The same with Muslim women and their modesty, why focus in on that?<br /><br />This is not about defending Erdogan or those who have committed terrorist attacks – that’s a ridiculous position no serious person would hold. Charlie Hebdo is smart enough to know that the Turkish leader isn’t bothered in the slightest personally. He has endured criticism and jokes at his expense. The issue is what it reveals about one of Europe’s largest countries and its views on Islam.<br /><br />Large sections of the Muslim population in France feel they don’t belong because of the hostile actions of their government. Speaking out, a <a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/02/23/france-islamophobia-islam-french-muslims-terrorism/">Paris-born</a> man of Tunisian heritage explained: “When you have millions of people who are already marginalized, disenfranchised, and without community institutions that can give them answers, you create easy targets for extremists.” <br /><br />That's basic logic and will be of no surprise to Charlie Hebdo, but they are perfectly happy to disregard it. They have become adrenaline-junkies who no longer want to satirise the news but become it. They are purposely trying to create scandals.<br /><br />They now even keep their headquarters secret. Isn’t one bastion of a progressive society for the media to be accessible and not hide away?<br /><br />Their agenda-driven egos hardly do anything for freedom of speech. Genuine satire breaks down walls and allows people to interpret things in new ways. Charlie Hebdo is only digging deeper and deeper, entrenching long-held positions and insulting anything that will bring the spotlight their way.<br /><br />It’s not only Islam, the Jewish and Catholic faiths are also featured in the magazine, along with multiple public figures from the celebrity and political world. Having a go at any of these is not the issue. It’s the way it’s carried out.<div><br /></div><div>.<br /><br /><i>Chris Sweeney - is an author and columnist who has written for newspapers such as The Times, Daily Express, The Sun and Daily Record, along with several international-selling magazines. Follow him on Twitter @Writes_Sweeney</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i><br /></i><a href="https://www.rt.com/op-ed/504890-charlie-hebdo-anti-islamic-jokes/" target="_blank">SOURCE</a> : https://www.rt.com/op-ed/504890-charlie-hebdo-anti-islamic-jokes/</div><div><br />**************************************<br /><b><u><span style="color: red;">READ MORE </span></u></b><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/504708-french-battle-radical-islam/">French interior minister warns of terrorist threat amid nation's ‘battle against an Islamist ideology’</a></div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>.</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-26834485029155573952020-10-29T14:05:00.001+10:002020-10-29T14:05:07.339+10:00Humanity’s Madness Would Not Be Possible Without Extensive Marketing<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6oGRtlmVgxk0woBYeJVLsEc9TjIilUm_swte6BvhEdkDeepfZKhaclm-AsENVlFSuSKDrtDw7KXwlOBsxvgq-YlK3Vmvg-cazMu2QUYKOLcsQv0P5_GSbPfneS6eVoUFRMymkPVGDQxYx/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img alt="" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6oGRtlmVgxk0woBYeJVLsEc9TjIilUm_swte6BvhEdkDeepfZKhaclm-AsENVlFSuSKDrtDw7KXwlOBsxvgq-YlK3Vmvg-cazMu2QUYKOLcsQv0P5_GSbPfneS6eVoUFRMymkPVGDQxYx/w640-h426/image.png" width="640" /></a></p><br /><br /> <br />by <a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">Caitlin Johnstone</a><br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that inhaling cigarette smoke into their lungs all the time is a nice thing to do.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that Mountain Dew is something they should put into their bodies.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that Madonna should be famous.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to women that they should always feel somewhat to severely uncomfortable with the way they look.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to women that slicing apart their bodies to be more attractive is something sane that they should do.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that women should not have pubic hair.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to men to spend hours at the gym building up muscles they'll never actually need to use.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that they need to drive their car to a room where they run in place for thirty minutes and then drive home again.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that fabric designed to cover the body can go "out of style".<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people to believe in an invisible patriarchal god whose church must be believed and funded on pain of eternal torture.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that being overwhelmed at work means they need better stress management instead of better unions.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that widespread depression and anxiety are a sign that they need to take more pills instead of a sign that they need to drastically change society.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that something which grows in the ground should be illegal.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that anyone should be locked in a cage for having an addiction.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that you could own land that you don't live on and tend to.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people to worry about nations on the other side of the world who have never harmed them in any way.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that they should accept their nation's wealth and resources being continuously used to kill strangers in endless wars.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to anyone that murdering human beings in other countries is a good career path for young people.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that opaque military powers brandishing armageddon weapons at each other all the time is something we should allow to continue.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that deliberately starving children whose government disobeys their government is no big deal.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that human life should be spent and gambled like pennies over elite struggles for unipolar planetary domination.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that it's normal for some of them to become homeless or go without medical treatment because they don't have the right amount of imaginary numbers in their bank account.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that it's normal to spend eight hours a day doing something you hate to no benefit other than the imaginary numbers in the bank accounts of shareholders.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that humanity's collective behavior should be governed by a desire to add more imaginary numbers to one's bank account.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people to throw the entire ecosystemic context in which they evolved into the gears of a machine which generates imaginary numbers for their bank accounts.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that scores of species going extinct forever every single day is not cause for extreme alarm.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that a two-party system which promotes the same policies in both parties should be called "democracy".<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that billionaire oligarchs in Silicon Valley should control how humans communicate around the world.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that in order to give money to poor people, you should give it to rich people.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that it's fine for someone who works no harder than they do to make a thousand times as much.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that their governments should pour money into massive corporations and the military but not into taking care of their own citizenry.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that some humans are superior to other humans.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that some people ought to have power over other people.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that a few rich people should control the information that people consume which governs their thoughts, actions and votes.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that any of this is normal.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that the young should spend their childhoods in buildings where they are trained to believe that all this is normal.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing it would never have occurred to people that they should spend hours staring at screens which train them to believe that all this is normal.<br /><br />Without extensive marketing, none of this madness would be possible at all.<br /><br /><a href="https://draft.blogger.com/#">SOURCE</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-89109787868372022522020-08-26T08:07:00.005+10:002020-08-26T08:38:02.426+10:00In Belarus, the Left Is Fighting to Put Social Demands at the Heart of the Protests<div>17 Aug 2020</div><div><br /></div>An Interview with <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/p">KSENIA KUNITSKAYA</a> and <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/s">VITALY SHKURIN</a><div>.<br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgemI2Npyg8WczfDnaTTWCfA5Swesiv4gUEUMVcyLya3VDp6St0gT9Z2IeRrkvje38KACA3TVoBB_A_t7RoHEC-ThwSfNIb4At-mzqVwDsA9eOWS0vnbqf5y2ZH_uSmMvFz5O0cVoMaFWuG/s1024/belarus.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="1024" height="427" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgemI2Npyg8WczfDnaTTWCfA5Swesiv4gUEUMVcyLya3VDp6St0gT9Z2IeRrkvje38KACA3TVoBB_A_t7RoHEC-ThwSfNIb4At-mzqVwDsA9eOWS0vnbqf5y2ZH_uSmMvFz5O0cVoMaFWuG/w640-h427/belarus.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">An aerial view of protesters during a demonstration on August 16, 2020 in Minsk, Belarus.</span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />.<div><div>The protests in Belarus have widely been painted as a pro-Western “color revolution” or “Minsk Maidan,” ignoring the deeper reasons for popular discontent with president Alexander Lukashenko. Jacobin spoke to left-wingers in Belarus about the forces behind the protests and the prospects of organized labor asserting its own agenda.<br /><br />The police brutality in Minsk is often said to be without parallel in Europe: something that France’s gilet jaunes protestors would surely deny. Yet something definitely is changing in Belarus, after unprecedented popular support for opposition candidates </div>challenged the twenty-six-year rule of president Alexander Lukashenko. When authorities claimed that he had taken 80 percent of the vote in the August 9 election — and crowds took to the streets to protest — the state unleashed police terror against them.<br /><br />The street demonstrations were initially dominated by urban youth. Yet, <a href="http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/partisans-or-workers-belarusian-protest/?fbclid=IwAR3qL_1D3UCHlCZ81f1m6nDDKxvHSH1Odn6H8NrV9psaKfncWWi4-1h5lHg">as I have shown in a recent article</a>, the protest has in recent days changed form, expanding into a wider working-class movement involving <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/belarus-lukashenko-protests-election-results">widespread workplace mobilizations</a>. Actions spanning most of the country’s biggest industrial sites have seen thousands of workers gathering, discussing their demands, and threatening a <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/08/belarus-strike-election-fraud-lukashenko">general shutdown</a>.<br /><br />So, everything in Belarus is said to be “unprecedented.” Yet one can, indeed, find precedents, in Poland’s Solidarnosc or the miners’ strikes in the late Soviet Union — examples of worker militancy allied to wider protest movements that unwittingly paved the way for neoliberal transformations. The tragic story of labor in the post-Soviet space thus calls for a careful and grounded approach to the recent events in Belarus.<br /><br /><b>In order to shed some light on the contradictions of Belarusian society and the condition of its working class, I interviewed two representatives of the Belarusian left, who asked not to reveal their identities. “Ksenia Kunitskaya” is a member of <a href="https://poligraf.red/">Poligraf </a>online magazine, and “Vitaly Shkurin” is a Belarus-based author of <a href="http://september.media/">September</a>, a leftist media platform covering the post-Soviet space. Both of them have connections in activist circles and are well placed to assess the situation from a working-class perspective.</b><br /><br /><br /><b>VA:</b><br />It seems that neither analysts nor Belarusian authorities expected unrest on this scale around the elections that took place on August 9. What sparked the pre-electoral mobilization and the subsequent protests? In what wider political conjuncture should we see them?<br /><br /><div><b>KK:</b><br />The first reason is the fatigue that has long built up among much of the population on account of Lukashenko’s quarter-century rule. His approach is apparent in his abrupt style of communication with both opponents and his own subordinates, often resembling casual rudeness. This is aggravated by the indifference shown by local officials, following not the mood of the people but the mood of the leader. These qualities clearly manifested themselves during the government mishandling of the COVID-19 epidemic, which massively irritated the population.<br /><br />Additionally, the government has been consistently dismantling the welfare state model and its social obligations to its citizens. This was apparent with the 2004 introduction of individual contracts with workers instead of collective agreements; the 2017 “tax on unemployment”; and the exclusion of military service, maternity leave, and university or college studies from the years that count toward your pension. The tight monetary policy of the past five years also led to a wage freeze, while prices continued to rise.<br /><br /><b>VS:</b><br />The last ten years saw a depoliticization of Belarusians. After the failed post-election protests of 2010 and the subsequent “clapping revolution” [when people clapped in the street to show their dissent, fearing that they would be arrested if they mounted protests], many members of parties and movements suffered state repression.<br /><br />In 2017, after the government introduced the so-called tax on unemployment, <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2017/04/belarus-lukashenko-decree-three-social-dependency-parasites-tax-unemployment">Belarus saw protests not only in Minsk, but also in small provincial towns</a>, for the first time in six years. This tax was then postponed. But it seemed that after the defeat of oppositional parties and movements, the new opposition to Lukashenko appeared only in the vague form of “Belarusians.”<br /><br />Since a substantial share of Belarusian economy is still state-owned, the “common people” — Lukashenko’s own usual voters — consist of workers of state-owned factories, schoolteachers, or doctors. In recent years, the public sector has been starved of money, which led to falling wages, contraction of the labor force, forced unpaid vacations, and a rising retirement age. Obviously, this did politicize the “common people,” but unfortunately no strong positive agenda emerged.<br /><br /></div><div><b>KK:</b><br />Besides, the authorities paid little attention to their positive image in the eyes of the population. Our state propaganda is very weak and often looks ridiculous: “We have never lived as well as we do now,” they claim. Their opponents, however, have created an effective system of professional, modern, electronic media. Through this, they highlight the state’s shortcomings and conduct propaganda in favor of neoliberal reforms and a nationalist memory politics. This allowed the liberal-nationalist opposition to mobilize supporters before the elections, to catch the authorities on numerous cases of vote rigging, and to bring people to the streets.<br /><br />Additionally, the harsh police actions — the use of stun grenades, water cannons and tear gas, tortures of the detainees — aroused indignation not only among opposition supporters but also shocked those who were not previously interested in politics.<br /><br /></div><div><b>VA:</b><br />What kind of Belarusians have tended to support Lukashenko — and is this support now coming apart? Is this to do with the weakening of the tradeoff of “no political rights, but still welfare rights”?</div><div><b><br />KK:</b><br />After Lukashenko’s first electoral victory in 1994, his support was very wide, comprising proponents of an alliance with Russia and the revival of the USSR, opponents of tough market reforms, and Russian speakers dissatisfied with the policy of “Belarusianization.” Village residents perceived him as “their guy.” In the 2000s, he attracted supporters with a policy of constant wage growth, promising to bring the average salary to $500 and even $1,000 a month.<br /><br />A series of economic crises prevented this dream from being realized. The union with Russia also suffers due to the contradictions among Russian and Belarusian elites. And the campaigns to raise wages were replaced by a tight monetary policy, in the spirit of IMF recommendations.<br /><br />Independent sociology in modern Belarus is practically banned, and state-associated sociologists do not publish data, so it is difficult to judge the president’s real ratings. Obviously, it is less than in the 1990s and 2000s, and the harsh police actions clearly did not add to his popularity. At the same time, the opinion popular among the opposition that Lukashenko’s rating is only 3 percent is most likely a myth.<br /><br /><b>VS:</b><br />I think that Lukashenko’s economic model based on the re-export of Russian oil has exhausted itself, since Russia increased its oil price for Belarus and global prices plummeted. Obviously, Lukashenko cannot sustain the current level of welfare for the population, so for him, neoliberalism seems to be the only exit route.<br /><br />However, we must remember that a high share of employment in the public sector means that workplaces are also sites of political control. As the unofficial unemployment rate in Belarus is quite high (about 10 percent) and unemployment benefits are about $10 per month, being unemployed is not very comfortable. Public-sector employees must regularly participate in other activities to save their workplaces: working Saturdays, voting in early elections (where falsifications mostly occur), and even participating in elections as members of electoral committees and falsifying results. Employment in the public sector is based on fixed-term contracts that prevent an employee from easily leaving — but allow an employer to get rid of the worker at will. Obviously, at some point, many public-sector employees realized that there is no way out, except for voting against Lukashenko.<br /><br />At the same time, we can identify new strata that support Lukashenko: his servants in the sphere of ideology and power. By the former, I mean a new generation of pro-government “public experts” employed in various state-owned institutions (from universities to dubious “public organizations”). They are regular guests on state-owned, independent, and foreign media, where they promote the Belarusian state. As opposed to the old establishment of boring Soviet-style clerks, these people are bright in their speeches and their appearance. The old Soviet-style official establishment also strongly supports Lukashenko, as outside of his system they are useless.<br /><br />The police and secret services are the second stratum of Lukashenko supporters. They have special welfare benefits that include subsidies for the purchase of housing, early retirement, health care in special clinics, vacation in sanatoriums, etc. The number of police in Belarus is not publicly known, but the interior minister said in 2016 that there are 405 police officers per 100,000 citizens, and according to a 2013 UN estimate, this number is 1,442 per 100,000. This job is also a significant factor for social mobility: people from small towns without employment can move to bigger cities to work as police. In exchange, they must blindly obey orders: we can see the outcome on the first days of the protests, when stun grenades and tear gas were used against relatively small and disarmed groups of protesters. Police and secret services are outside of public control, and, significantly, the new, shiny “ideology men” have ties with them.<br /><br /><b>VA:</b><br />How would you describe the social constitution of the protesters, their social and class profile, ideologies, and grievances?<br /><br /></div><div><b>KK:</b></div><div>First, there is the traditional opposition from the 1990s: nationalists, liberals, and the intelligentsia sympathetic to them. Second, there are urban youth, businessmen, and the likes of IT specialists, who call themselves progressive, Western, and anti-Soviet. During the election campaign, the opposition headquarters managed to mobilize a slightly wider population, at least from large cities. The politicization in society during the pre-election days was extremely high. A lot of disaffected citizens were actively involved as election observers.<br /><br />Now, wider sections of the society are joining, shocked by the unprecedented police violence and outraged by electoral fraud. Some of them had been dissatisfied with their economic situation but had passively supported Lukashenko as the “lesser evil” compared to the right-wing opposition. The national liberals involved in the electoral process did not speak openly about their program, only about fair elections and later about reducing police violence as an end in itself.<br /><br /><br /><b>VS:</b><br />Despite many orthodox communists’ belief that this is a “hipster-programmer revolution,” many young protesters are factory workers, taxi drivers, and students. I don’t think we can attribute any specific ideology to this spontaneous movement. Protesters carry Belarusian official [green-and-red] flags as well as the old flags [white-red-white flags that served as national symbols in 1991–1994]. Since the latter dominate, some argue that the protests are nationalist. But as I said, the leaders of the traditional nationalist opposition are in jail, and there were no conflicts about symbols among protesters. When protesters started using violence against the police, we can suspect that the organized football fans were involved, but they are still small groups.<br /><br /><b>VA:</b><br />How would you compare these protests to other mobilizations in Belarus and in the region?<br /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><b>VS:</b><br />All protests before 2010 had a strong nationalist politics, but already the 2011 “clapping revolution” had no such agenda. After Ukraine’s Maidan in 2014, nationalism was back in vogue among protesters — it became commodified as a brand of new, successful, more “European” Belarusians. The current protests are even further removed from nationalism and rather more reminiscent of the protests of 2017, when large crowds all around Belarus protested against the tax on unemployment.<br /><br />This year’s protests have two peculiarities: they lack any political and social agenda apart from contesting election results, and they are scattered around Belarus. Before 2017, almost all big demonstrations happened in Minsk and followed the same scenario: big procession through the city center, gathering on a big square, and the subsequent hard beating by police. Except for 2006, when there was a tent camp on the main square, they lasted for a day. But these protests have already lasted for four days in different cities and towns, not only in Minsk. Even in the capital, protesters do not occupy one place, mostly because the city center is under police control from early evenings. Throughout the evening and night, protests can happen in different districts; protesters run from the police and return after police’s retreat.<br /><br /><b>KK:</b><br />Most significantly, the scale of violence has become such that it is no longer perceived as an abstract picture in the news. A huge number of people have seen and experienced this themselves or have victims among friends and relatives. The opposition does not formally propose anything that could lead to a conflict of interests of different classes and social groups, only new elections — this has become an additional mobilization factor.<br /><br /><b>VS:</b><br />Most violence comes from the police: never before in Belarus were flash grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets used on such a scale. I think the state wanted to intimidate protesters, but this had the opposite effect of prolonging the unrest. Besides, the scale of violence is clear from the amount of people detained — never before did we have three thousand people in jail over one night.<br /><br />Finally, on the fourth day after the elections, we saw a new dimension of protest activity: statements from labor collectives across the country about possible strikes. Unfortunately, these statements mostly do not include any social demands, only the demands to stop the police violence, release all detainees, and hold fresh elections. Anyway, there has been no (legal) strike activity in Belarus since 1991.<br /><br />Also, the internet as the efficient communication medium was used for the first time, although during the first three days of protests, foreign internet traffic was disrupted, and most people used VPNs and proxy servers. Thus, by analogy with “Twitter revolutions” during the Arab Spring of 2011, the protests in Belarus can be called a “Telegram revolution.” Telegram messenger was founded by Pavel Durov after his emigration from Russia, and it became popular among post-Soviet users to buy drugs (basically it resembled access to a dark net, only without any hard technical skills being needed on the user’s part). In 2018, a young emigrant from Belarus in Poland started the Telegram channel “Nexta” (“нехта,” meaning “someone” in Belarusian), and it gained popularity among Belarusians because of “insider” posts about Belarusian authorities.<br /><br />Obviously, one guy can’t organize a network of insiders, and there are suspicions that various journalists and media specialists who emigrated during the years of Lukashenko’s rule work for it. Nexta and a network of affiliated Telegram channels shared photos and videos from different spots during the protests. Before the first protest night, they posted “instructions on how to protest carefully,” but without radical things like recipes for Molotov cocktails. Besides, Nexta provided scenarios of protests that people mostly followed. If, on the first night, this scenario was one place in Minsk and big squares in small towns, on the next two nights, the scenario implied movement of small groups in Minsk’s sleeper districts and big streets in small towns. Sometimes Nexta was really provocative: “Just one last push, let’s show the police our solidarity,” “[Town X] calls for help, police are beating our women.” After the internet started working, Telegram channels lost some of their influence. The protests started occurring mostly in daylight and had exceptionally peaceful character, mostly in the form of “chains of solidarity”: lines of people, mostly women, holding flowers along the main streets.<br /><br />I don’t see similarities between these protests in Belarus and previous protests in Eastern Europe. Some try to find similarities with Euromaidan in Kiev in 2014, but this is a purely ideological tool to justify Lukashenko and show that no alternative is possible. In contrast to Euromaidan, Belarusian protests have no big far-right groups that lead and use violence. We have a couple of ultras gangs, but after Euromaidan, most of them were repressed by the police. In Belarus, there’s no language and ideological conflict, as in Ukraine. Finally, in contrast to Euromaidan, the Belarusian protests have no leader: traditional opposition figures are in jail, and the presidential candidate Sviatlana Tikhanovskaya is in Lithuania. I am absolutely sure it can’t lead to war like in Donbass: there’s no ideological conflict between West and East, as in Ukraine in 2014.<br /><br /><b>VA:</b><br />How would you describe the current situation of the Belarusian left?<br /><br /><b>KK:</b><br />The left-wing movement has been in crisis for a long time, because Lukashenko himself used quasi-socialist slogans to come to power. When right-wingers call him “Soviet” and “communist,” he doesn’t seem to mind. Soviet monuments, street names, and holidays have been preserved in full in Belarus. So, somehow it was “decided” that he was a “leftist.” Additionally, under a dictatorship, only those non-state political forces and media can survive that are fed from abroad. It is well known that large American and European funds donate money to non-communists.<br /><br />As a result, we do not have large left-wing media outlets and parties capable of supporting at least part of the leadership. Under these conditions, we have two “communist” parties. The first is called Communist Party of Belarus, and it supports the regime (including its most odious antisocial measures); the other, A Just World, supports the liberal opposition in demands for regime change, focusing less on the class agenda. There are also grassroots initiatives: Marxist circles, small media, interest groups, small associations of anarchists.<br /><b><br />VS:</b><br />The party of the Left “A Just World” split from the Communist Party in 1996 after Lukashenko’s first referendum shifted the balance of power toward the president. Today, it stands against both Lukashenko and against Western-oriented opposition. The Belarusian Green Party, founded in 1994 and oriented against nuclear energy, developed a left and anti-authoritarian agenda. It is quite strong and, in contrast to A Just World, is less oriented on Marxist-Leninist classics. Also, we’ve got three social-democratic parties, some of whose members do have strong social orientations, but most are part of the Western-oriented oppositional establishment.<br /><br />Belarus used to have a big and strong anarchist movement, maybe the strongest in post-Soviet space, connected to a punk-hardcore scene. Some of them infiltrated the Green Party; some ended up in jail. It is hard to say anything about anarchists’ activity now, because they are still the main target of repression. Some anarchist groups don’t call themselves “left-wing,” for they wrongly associate it with pro-Soviet “tankies”; some find their support from the Western-oriented nationalist opposition.<br /><br />Finally, a Russian fashion of “Left YouTube” and Marxist kruzhki (small self-education organizations) reached Belarus in recent years. Unfortunately, much of their content is not so much about their own agenda but a fierce criticism of the Western-oriented opposition. They charm their viewers with Soviet nostalgia or Soviet ressentiment more than propose a positive agenda for building a wide democratic social movement. This Left YouTube and kruzhki are not bad in themselves, but they can’t be seen as the only strategy for the Left, such as they often propose.<br /><b><br />VA:</b><br />What is the attitude of these various groups to this political conjuncture and the protests?<br /><br /><b>KK:</b><br />Part of the Left is ready to directly support the liberal protest, mostly at the level of grassroots activist involvement and statements. Another part believes that the people have the right to protest, that the police violence is unacceptable and outrageous, and that the elections were rigged, but cannot take the side of the liberal opposition. For its goals are to continue the privatization of enterprises, to curtail free medicine, and introduce even more labor flexibility than we have now.<br /><br />Recently, a small grassroots initiative has emerged with a purpose of bringing economic and social demands to the workers’ protest agenda, since at the moment, all workers’ protests are centered around broad political demands: Lukashenko’s resignation, the release of political prisoners, lawsuits against the security forces, fair elections.<br /><br /></div><div><b>VS:</b><br />All the left-wing parties refused to participate in presidential elections during the pandemic; and anyway, they didn’t have enough resources to mobilize common people and activists to turn the popular discontent with Lukashenko into a socialist agenda.<br /><br />At the same time, after the state had already started using repression against alternative candidates and their supporters before the elections, many kruzhki and YouTube activists decided not to take notice. They continued to reject any opposition to Lukashenko; some went looking for similarities with Euromaidan, warning of a catastrophic end in decommunization and repression from far-right groups. But mostly they insist on a cunning strategy to develop Left YouTube and kruzhki while the state grapples with the pro-Western, democratic opposition.<br /><br />For me, this position is a big failure, because it ignores the mood among Belarusians. They are really tired of Lukashenko’s system, and obviously the Left must work with this, not just blame them for being blind sheep that will lead the country into a total market economy. Under Lukashenko’s system, working-class or grassroots organizations will never be able to change the situation.<br /><br />At the same time, when on the fourth day of protests, working-class masses took to the streets and the possibility of strikes became real, almost no left organization or party actually opposed this movement. Everyone tries to organize a strike movement and propose social and economic demands to shift these protests from a purely electoral to a social agenda.<br /><b><br /></b></div><div><b>VA:</b></div><div>To what extent is the working class taking part in the unrest, and what is the role of organized labor?<br /><br /></div><div><b>VS:</b><br />Workers’ collectives from more than twenty state-own factories and organizations expressed their desire to strike. After Lukashenko’s first dismissive words about strikers (“there were about twenty strikers in some factory,” he claimed), some workers from the Minsk Tractor Works marched through Minsk to Parliament to demonstrate their opposition. In my view, this was not specifically class-conscious — it overlapped with the “chains of solidarity against violence.” But on August 14, outside Parliament, we could see workers with banners reading, “We are workers, not sheep.”<br /><br /><b><br />KK:</b><br />There is only one large national trade-union association, the Federation of Trade Unions of Belarus, which has become part of the Lukashenko government’s bureaucratic apparatus. All its activities boil down to organizing celebrations of national holidays and issuing vouchers for rest homes. This “trade union” has nothing to do with protecting workers’ rights.<br /><br />The few independent unions formed in the wake of the early 1990s upsurge in the labor movement were crushed. Only a few enterprises have cells, for example, of the Belarusian Independent Trade Union. These independent trade unions are now more similar to NGOs, relying less on workers’ contributions than on foreign grants. Their activities are focused on legal assistance to individual employees who have applied for them.<br /><br />The last major protest by metro workers in 1995 was brutally suppressed by Lukashenko. Since then, there has been no talk of strikes. Now, we are seeing the first large protest movement of workers since then. So far, these protests look rather like meetings with the management of the enterprises, the “yellow” trade unions, and the local authorities. Now there is news that on August 17, Belaruskali potash miners are planning a strike (the Independent Union’s cell has survived there — its chairman was beaten half to death during his arrest). Workers’ collectives from the large factories threatened strike action, and this, at least at the time of writing, forced the authorities to rein in police violence.<br /><br />But so far, workers have put forward only general democratic demands, in line with a broad liberal protest. The protests clearly marked a new trend: traditional political parties, whether left or right, played practically no role in them. The ideological and practical inspiration rather came from the media in a broad sense, including social media. Who has a strong media owns the mind. But now a strong media is in the hands of those who promote the liberal and nationalist agenda. And if the workers are indoctrinated in this, then where would a class-conscious labor movement come from?<p class="po-fr__desc" style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat; box-sizing: border-box; color: #191919; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0.01em; line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px;"></p></div><div style="text-align: center;">==========</div>ABOUT THE AUTHOR<br /><br /><div>Ksenia Kunitskaya is a member of <a href="https://poligraf.red/">Poligraf</a> online magazine.<br /><br />Vitaly Shkurin is a Belarus-based author of <a href="http://september.media/">September</a>, a leftist media platform covering the post-Soviet space.<br /><br /><div>ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER<br /><br />Volodymyr Artiukh is a PhD in sociology and social anthropology who specializes in the political economy of post-Soviet societies. He is an editor at <a href="https://commons.com.ua/en/p/pro-nas/">Commons: Journal of Social Criticism</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/belarus-protests-lukashenko-minsk" target="_blank">SOURCE</a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-60157021230224436922020-08-04T11:01:00.000+10:002020-08-04T11:08:11.754+10:00What IF? <div>
by Kim Carlson - 3 Aug 2020<br />
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<i>What If I told you I was no longer going to be “political?” What if I told you I’d come to the conclusion that expressing my political opinions, or sharing information was a waste of time because the system was rigged anyway? </i><br />
<i><br />What if I said I was just going to keep my head down and try to enjoy my life because politics is so confusing and contradictory that you never know who’s telling the truth and who’s lying, and besides, talking about it just makes people so angry, hateful, and divided?</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>What if I told you that voicing my opinion had cost me the friendships of those who didn’t agree with my politics so I decided to let others express their opinions and just go along with everyone else? </i><br />
<i><br />What if I decided to believe whatever was on the news because if it was on television or in print, it had to be true? </i><br />
<i><br />What if I didn’t care that my government was engaged in illegal spying on me, or had the right to assassinate me without a trial if they believed I was linked to terrorist activities, or could seize my assets, rendition me for an indefinite period of time, refuse me the right to a lawyer, all without charging me with a crime—because, after all, I’ve done nothing wrong so why should I care what they *could* do?</i><br />
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<i>What if it made no difference to me that 90% of the wealth in this country is held by a tiny fraction of people, or that our government bombs poor brown people for their oil—because what’s our oil doing under their sand?—or that the CIA’s collusion with the media is so deep that journalists actually feel they’re doing their patriotic duty by putting out CIA propaganda?</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>What if I didn’t care that decent, hard-working people could not afford to buy a house—any house—or afford adequate healthcare, or had to work two or three jobs just to stay afloat? </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>What if I said that I didn’t care if people protested as long as they didn’t inconvenience me? </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>What if I admitted that trying to change the system was too hard or simply insurmountable and I was going to throw in with the crap shoot of capitalism like everyone else and try to wring from it every last drop I could, and screw the others who were unable or didn’t want to play? </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>What if I revealed that by going along I had dramatically improved the quality of my life—moved up from where I lived, the car I drove, the people with whom I associated? </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>What if I started saying things that made you believe that I cared more about protecting my own interests and the interests of my peers than the people who were disenfranchised, betrayed, abandoned, and bankrupted by our corrupt system?</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Now imagine a system where everyone felt like this.</i><br />
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^</div>
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<img alt="ite28099s-not-broken.-it-was-built-this-way.-it-was-built-to ..." height="614" src="https://goodschoolhunting.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/ite28099s-not-broken.-it-was-built-this-way.-it-was-built-to-oppress.-it-was-built-to-control.-it-was-built-for-profit.-it-was-built-for-political-gain-and-power.-it-lives-off-of-us.-ava.png" width="640" /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-45911755043144105432020-06-27T08:28:00.004+10:002020-06-27T08:43:53.814+10:00How a US and Qatari regime change deception produced ‘Caesar’ sanctions driving Syria towards famine<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-color: white; color: #0b5394; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 30px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; position: relative;">
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By Max Blumenthal - 25 June 2020<br />
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The US Department of Treasury’s imposition this June of the so-called Caesar Civilian Protection Act, a draconian set of <a href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm1037" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">economic sanctions on Syria</a>, amounts to a medieval-style siege on all Syrians living inside the country.</div>
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Inspired by photos that Western governments and media claim were smuggled out of Syria by a supposed Syrian military whistleblower codenamed “Caesar,” the sanctions are the product of a highly deceptive intelligence operation orchestrated by the US and Qatari governments.</div>
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As this investigation will demonstrate, a network of US- and Qatar-backed regime change operatives marketing themselves as human rights lawyers and concerned Syrian activists groomed the supposed whistleblower, managed his files, and worked overtime to obstruct public scrutiny.</div>
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Desperate to stimulate support for war on Syria, this network worked with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in a cynical campaign to portray the Syrian crisis as equal to – and possibly worse than – the Jewish genocide in Europe.</div>
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Shockingly, investigators have determined that at least half of the photographs in the “Caesar” trove depict the bodies of government soldiers killed by the armed opposition. This highly inconvenient fact, which undermines the entire narrative of Caesar’s promoters and exposes them as cynical liars, has been ignored across the board by mainstream US media, Congress, and of course, by the network of operatives that managed “Caesar.”</div>
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Washington encourages Syrian famine as “an opportunity”</h3>
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Authorized by Congress with no opposition, the so-called Caesar Civilian Protection Act amounts to an act of all out war on the very people it claims to protect. Targeting the Syrian Central Bank and penalizing any foreign company that does business with Damascus, the bill was conceived with the explicit aim of preventing the country from rebuilding after it defeated a proxy war imposed on it by the West, Israel, Turkey, and Gulf monarchies.</div>
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Charles Lister, a <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/08/09/gulf-government-gave-secret-20-million-gift-to-d-c-think-tank/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Gulf-backed</a> de facto lobbyist for the Syrian opposition in Washington, inadvertently revealed the Caesar Act as an instrument of financial terror. In an op-ed for Politico this June, he forecasted “even greater levels of <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/11/assad-syria-collapse-313276" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">destitution, famine, and worsening criminality</a> and predatory behavior” as a result of the new sanctions.</div>
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Predicting that “bread shortages are only a matter of time,” and projecting a famine in the near future, Lister cheerfully framed the human suffering caused by the sanctions as “an opportunity” for the United States to achieve regime change.</div>
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After a decade of grinding war, however, the Syrian government has proven resilient. And in Damascus, even opponents of Assad concede that sanctions are unlikely to scathe government officials. “Assad and his people are doing fine, and the security state is only stronger because of the war,” a businessman who was active in the initial round of protests against Assad in 2011 told me over lunch in Damascus in September 2019. “The sanctions ruin our currency and put old ladies into the street, but they don’t touch the regime.”</div>
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A pair of pro-opposition analysts echoed this view in the national security website <a href="https://warontherocks.com/2020/06/will-more-syria-sanctions-hurt-the-very-civilians-they-aim-to-protect/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">War on the Rocks</a>: “The Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act may prove little more than a policy of economic escalation by default — a box-checking exercise for which ordinary Syrians will pay the price,” they wrote.</div>
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Thanks to the policy choices of the US government, the Syrian people are set to sink deeper into economic misery. Migration abroad will intensify, another generation will be lost, excess deaths will climb, and in a country where <a href="https://www.unicef.org/mena/reports/syria-crisis-fast-facts" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">over one-third of the population are children</a>, youth will experience deprivation at unprecedented levels.</div>
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The coming human catastrophe is the byproduct of a years-long lobbying campaign carried out by a network of regime-change operatives working under cover of shadowy international NGOs and Syrian-American diaspora groups.</div>
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Their push for an escalation of the economic war revolved around a supposed Syrian whistleblower who they claim smuggled thousands of photographs from a military prison, revealing an industrial slaughter of opposition activists. It was the code-name of that so-called whistleblower, “Caesar,” that inspired the sanctions bill.</div>
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A close look at these operatives and the forces propelling their activities reveals their campaign as a deceptive operation financed by the Qatari government and orchestrated in Washington, raising serious questions about the credibility of “Caesar.”</div>
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The dubious origins of the “Caesar” file</h3>
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In June 2019, The Grayzone exposed a non-profit widely praised in Western media, the <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2019/06/19/commission-for-international-justice-and-accountability-cija-syria-al-qaeda/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Center for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA)</a>, as a US- and EU-funded regime-change initiative that aims to destabilize the Syrian government by subverting the international legal system.</div>
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As The Grayzone reported, CIJA field investigators worked directly with extremist militants – including Al Qaeda’s local affiliate – to gather documents from pillaged government offices and spirit them out of the country. CIJA even “pays rebel groups and couriers for logistical support,” the New Yorker acknowledged in a puff piece about the organization.</div>
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No trove of documents has been more valuable to regime-change lobbyists in Washington than the so-called “Caesar” file. In another profile of CIJA that omitted the role of the US State Department in establishing the group, the New York Times’ Anne Barnard claimed that Caesar <span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“fled Syria with pictures of at least 6,700 corpses, bone-thin and battered, which shocked the world when they emerged in 2014.” </span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Caesar’s supposed escape from Syria, and the story of how he obtained the photos, closely mirrored the shady tactics that CIJA investigators used to obtain other documents they planned to exploit for prosecutions of Syrian former officials in Western courts.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">According to <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/06/assad-war-crimes-syria-torture-caesar-hospital" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Vanity Fair</a>, “Caesar” was actively spying for the Syrian opposition since 2011, and working with </span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">a “handler” described as “a Syrian academic and human-rights figure named Hassan al-Chalabi.” This character (no relation to the late Iraqi con artist Ahmad Chalabi) was himself “running a shadowy intelligence network inside Syria,” according to the magazine. </span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Chalabi told Vanity Fair that he arranged for “Caesar” to be smuggled out of Syria with his files in 2013 with the help of the CIA-created Free Syrian Army and an obscure militia known as the Strangers Battalion. (Observers of the Syrian conflict has since </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ibnnabih1/status/953685642910846977?lang=en" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">identified</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> the latter group to be a collection of Uyghur foreign fighters allied with Al Qaeda.)</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Caesar then passed his files to the Syrian National Movement, a marginal group of Islamists that was </span><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-crimes/lawyers-see-war-crimes-charges-for-syrian-officials-newspaper-idUSBREA0J1GK20140120" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">funded and overseen</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> by the government of Qatar.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">From there, the files went to outfits like CIJA, </span><a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/12/16/syria-stories-behind-photos-killed-detainees#" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Human Rights Watch</a>,<span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> and the New York Times – and “Caesar” went to Capitol Hill. </span></div>
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Caesar’s Qatari connection</h3>
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The Caesar files were first brought to the American public’s attention in <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140122053241/https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/world/middleeast/photo-archive-is-said-to-show-widespread-torture-in-syria.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">a New York Times article</a> published on January 21, 2014 – a PR stunt carefully timed to coincide with the opening of the UN-backed Geneva II Peace Conference on Syria.</div>
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The following acknowledgement was mentioned in passing in the Times article: “only a few photographs have actually been released by lawyers commissioned by the Qatari government, an avowed opponent of Mr. Assad, and the claims about their origins could not be independently verified.”</div>
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<figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-26282" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_26282" style="background-color: #fcfcfc; border-radius: 2px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: #444444; font-family: Lora, serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; max-width: 100%; width: 1638px;"><img alt="New York Times Caesar photos Qatar verified" class="size-full wp-image-26282" data-attachment-id="26282" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-description="<p>The New York Times acknowledges that the “Caesar” photos were commissioned by Qatar and not independently verified</p>
" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="New York Times Caesar photos Qatar verified" data-large-file="https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/New-York-Times-Caesar-photos-Qatar-verified.png?fit=845%2C319&ssl=1" data-medium-file="https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/New-York-Times-Caesar-photos-Qatar-verified.png?fit=300%2C113&ssl=1" data-orig-file="https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/New-York-Times-Caesar-photos-Qatar-verified.png?fit=1638%2C618&ssl=1" data-orig-size="1638,618" data-permalink="https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/25/us-qatari-intelligence-deception-produced-the-caesar-sanctions-syria-famine/new-york-times-caesar-photos-qatar-verified/" height="319" sizes="(max-width: 845px) 100vw, 845px" src="https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/New-York-Times-Caesar-photos-Qatar-verified.png?resize=845%2C319&ssl=1" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/New-York-Times-Caesar-photos-Qatar-verified.png?w=1638&ssl=1 1638w, https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/New-York-Times-Caesar-photos-Qatar-verified.png?resize=300%2C113&ssl=1 300w, https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/New-York-Times-Caesar-photos-Qatar-verified.png?resize=1024%2C386&ssl=1 1024w, https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/New-York-Times-Caesar-photos-Qatar-verified.png?resize=768%2C290&ssl=1 768w, https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/New-York-Times-Caesar-photos-Qatar-verified.png?resize=1536%2C580&ssl=1 1536w, https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/New-York-Times-Caesar-photos-Qatar-verified.png?resize=150%2C57&ssl=1 150w, https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/New-York-Times-Caesar-photos-Qatar-verified.png?resize=1200%2C453&ssl=1 1200w" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 8px; vertical-align: middle;" width="845" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-26282" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #6d6d6d; font-size: 0.9em; font-style: italic; line-height: 23.04px; margin: 0.8075em 0px 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px 0px 1em; text-align: center;">The New York Times acknowledges that the “Caesar” photos were commissioned by Qatar and not independently verified</figcaption></figure><br />
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Sir Geoffrey Nice, the lead prosecutor in the trial of the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, was quoted prominently by the Times. “It was like getting the keys to the Nazi archive,” Nice said of the Caesar file.</div>
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Nice, who had been charged with authenticating the photographic files, <span style="box-sizing: border-box;">was </span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">listed at the time</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> as “</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ihhen/posts/763738950315070/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">advisor to Qatar</a> in the possible Syria case to come.” Desmond De Silva, another British lawyer called in to authenticate the documents, was later </span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">described</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> as part of a team of “high profile lawyers <a href="https://en.royanews.tv/news/10612/Qatar_finds_way_round_embargo_" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">instructed by the Qatari government</a>.”</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The permanent monarchy of Qatar has <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/30/the-case-against-qatar/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">bankrolled</a> an array of Islamist militias across Syria over the years, including Al Qaeda’s ruthless affiliate <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/tag/jabhat-al-nusra/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Jabhat al-Nusra</a>. Carter-Ruck, the law firm employing Nice and De Silva under a Qatari contract, had also been <a href="https://www.carter-ruck.com/news/read/turkish-prime-minister-wins-libel-claim-against-daily-telegraph" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">hired by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan</a>, another key sponsor of Syria’s insurgency and the destabilization campaign against Damascus.</span></div>
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Also quoted on the significance of the Caesar file in the New York Times article was David Crane, who was merely described by the newspaper as “an investigator involved in examining the photos, who previously indicted President Charles G. Taylor of Liberia.”</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">In fact, Crane was a veteran military-intelligence operative who previously held various </span><a href="https://forum-network.org/speakers/crane-david/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">positions inside the Pentagon</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">, including at the Defense Intelligence Agency. M</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">onths before the Caesar file surfaced, he <a href="http://insct.syr.edu/david-m-crane-testify-syrian-war-crimes-tribunal/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">appeared on Capitol Hill</a> to advocate for prosecuting Syrian government officials. </span></div>
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Crane stated in a <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20140315-interview-david-michael-crane-co-author-report-on-syrian-prisoners-torture-killing-assad-regime" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">2014 interview</a> that when his team began its investigation into the file, “We brought in what we named ‘Caesar,’ the individual who brought out these photographs, along with handler – his case officer – interviewing them separately.”</div>
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His case officer? Crane’s casual use of a term almost uniquely associated with CIA activity offered a strong suggestion that the Agency had played a role in grooming the mystery man known as “Caesar.”</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The UK-based academic <a href="https://timhayward.wordpress.com/2019/04/04/caesar-evidence-for-atrocities-in-syria-what-does-justice-require/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Tim Hayward </a></span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">outlined</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> the US government’s role in supporting Crane’s various Syria regime change projects.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Crane “also leads the Syrian Accountability Project (SAP), which he founded some time prior to Caesar’s defection,” Hayward wrote. “SAP is said to be student-run and its clients include the Syrian National Council and US State Department. It also ‘works very closely with’ the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, which in turn is a conduit of US funding to CIJA.”</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Crane authored the initial Qatar-sponsored report on Caesar’s trove, yet was merely described as <span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: , "blinkmacsystemfont" , "segoe ui" , "roboto" , , "ubuntu" , "cantarell" , "helvetica neue" , sans-serif;">“a war crimes prosecutor” </span>in a Vanity Fair puff piece about the file.</span></div>
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“Caesar” goes to Capitol Hill</h3>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">On April 13, 2014, an anonymous man completely cloaked in a blue Patagonia hooded jacket from Hudson Trail Outfitters, purporting to be “Caesar” and </span><a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/syrian-defector-assad-poised-to-torture-and-murder-150000-more" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">claiming</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> to bear photographic evidence of “genocide,” appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Audio and video recording of the testimony was strictly forbidden, supposedly to protect Caesar’s safety.</span></div>
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Caesar’s handlers spun an elaborate tale to <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/wrestling-with-the-us-to-expose-assad" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">neoconservative Daily Beast writer Tim Mak</a> about the “counter-surveillance techniques” they employed to protect their star witnesses identity in the days and hours before the hearing.</div>
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Somehow, no one covering the appearance of “Caesar” stopped to consider that the Syrian military might have already known the identity of one of the most high-profile defectors to emerge from its ranks. Were they protecting him from the Syrian Mukhabarat (which has no presence in the United States) or from public scrutiny?</div>
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As the anti-war activist and writer <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2016/03/the-caesar-photo-fraud-that-undermined-syrian-negotiations/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Rick Sterling</a> pointed out, “how many military photographers took photos at Tishreen and Military 601 Hospitals during those years and then disappeared? According to the [Qatari] Carter Ruck report, Caesar’s family left Syria around the same time. Considering this, why is ‘Caesar’ keeping his identity secret from the Western audience? Why does ‘Caesar’ refuse to meet even with highly sympathetic journalists or researchers?”</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">When “Caesar” appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on August 4, 2014, he was seated beside the man who had brought him to Washington. The handler was <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2019/04/04/syrian-american-council-genocide-censor-max-blumenthal/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Mouaz Moustafa</a>, a Syrian-American regime-change lobbyist who served as the director of the State Department-funded Syria Emergency Task Force.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">A key figure pushing for more arms to extremist militias inside Syria, Moustafa fervently opposed the State Department’s listing of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate, as a terrorist group. “It was a mistake,” <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150412210016/https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/06/06/reps-ed-royce-and-eliot-engel-dispatch-aides-near-syrian-border/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">he said</a> to Foreign Policy of Nusra’s blacklisting.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">A year prior, Moustafa escorted Arizona Sen. John McCain on a trip inside Syria to meet with members of the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army — including <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-mccain/u-s-senator-mccain-pictured-with-syrian-rebel-kidnapper-paper-idUSBRE94T0V320130530" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">kidnappers</a> of Shia pilgrims — during a failed stunt to stimulate US military intervention.</span></div>
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<figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-26249" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_26249" style="background-color: #fcfcfc; border-radius: 2px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: #444444; font-family: Lora, serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; max-width: 100%; width: 639px;"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-26249" data-attachment-id="26249" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-description="" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="mccain-syria-rebels" data-large-file="https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/mccain-syria-rebels.jpg?fit=639%2C480&ssl=1" data-medium-file="https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/mccain-syria-rebels.jpg?fit=300%2C225&ssl=1" data-orig-file="https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/mccain-syria-rebels.jpg?fit=639%2C480&ssl=1" data-orig-size="639,480" data-permalink="https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/25/us-qatari-intelligence-deception-produced-the-caesar-sanctions-syria-famine/mccain-syria-rebels/" height="480" sizes="(max-width: 639px) 100vw, 639px" src="https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/mccain-syria-rebels.jpg?resize=639%2C480&ssl=1" srcset="https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/mccain-syria-rebels.jpg?w=639&ssl=1 639w, https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/mccain-syria-rebels.jpg?resize=300%2C225&ssl=1 300w, https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/mccain-syria-rebels.jpg?resize=150%2C113&ssl=1 150w, https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/mccain-syria-rebels.jpg?resize=400%2C300&ssl=1 400w, https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/mccain-syria-rebels.jpg?resize=200%2C150&ssl=1 200w" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 8px; vertical-align: middle;" width="639" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-26249" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #6d6d6d; font-size: 0.9em; font-style: italic; line-height: 23.04px; margin: 0.8075em 0px 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px 0px 1em; text-align: center;">Mouaz Moustafa (far right) with Sen. John McCain (second to left) and armed FSA kidnapper (far left) in Syria, May 2013</figcaption></figure><br />
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<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/syrian-defector-assad-poised-to-torture-and-murder-150000-more" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Testifying</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> alongside Caesar was David Crane, the author of the Qatar-sponsored Caesar report, who accused the Syrian government of “</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">crimes the likes of which we have not seen since Auschwitz.”</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Next, Frederic Hof of the Atlantic Council’s Saudi-funded Rafic Hariri Center demanded that Congress respond to Caesar’s testimony by allocating more US tax dollars to purchase weapons for anti-Assad extremist militants in Syria.</span></div>
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The stage was set for Congress to sign off on crushing sanctions on Syria, in bipartisan fashion and with negligible opposition. But first, the regime-change lobby mobilized to build a public case for its agenda by cynically linking the crisis it had helped foment in Syria to the Jewish genocide that took place in mid-century Europe.</div>
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<figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-26251" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_26251" style="background-color: #fcfcfc; border-radius: 2px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: #444444; font-family: Lora, serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; max-width: 100%; width: 832px;"><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-26251" data-attachment-id="26251" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-description="" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"4","credit":"United States Holocaust Memorial","camera":"Canon EOS 5D Mark III","caption":"10 May 2017, The Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide's (CPG) public program Syria's Disappeared: The Case Against Assad. Screening of the documentary film \"Syria's Disappeared\" and panel discussion with Sara Afshar, director and producer, Qutaiba Idlbi and Mahmoud Nowara, survivors of detention in Syria, Stephen Rapp, former US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, moderated by Michael Isikoff, Yahoo News chief investigative correspondent.","created_timestamp":"1494443953","copyright":"United States Holocaust Memorial Museum","focal_length":"65","iso":"1600","shutter_speed":"0.00625","title":"10 May 2017, The Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide's (CPG) public program Syria's Disappeared: The Case Against Assad. Screening of the documentary film \"Syria's Disappeared\" and panel discussion with Sara Afshar, director and producer, Q","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="10 May 2017, The Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide’s (CPG) public program Syria’s Disappeared: The Case Against Assad. Screening of the documentary film “Syria’s Disappeared” and panel discussion with Sara Afshar, director and producer, Q" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Syrias_Disappeared_Film_Screening.jpg?fit=832%2C567&ssl=1" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Syrias_Disappeared_Film_Screening.jpg?fit=300%2C204&ssl=1" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Syrias_Disappeared_Film_Screening.jpg?fit=832%2C567&ssl=1" data-orig-size="832,567" data-permalink="https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/25/us-qatari-intelligence-deception-produced-the-caesar-sanctions-syria-famine/10-may-2017-the-simon-skjodt-center-for-the-prevention-of-genocides-cpg-public-program-syrias-disappeared-the-case-against-assad-screening-of-the-documentary-film-syrias-disappeared-and-pane/" height="567" sizes="(max-width: 832px) 100vw, 832px" src="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Syrias_Disappeared_Film_Screening.jpg?resize=832%2C567&ssl=1" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Syrias_Disappeared_Film_Screening.jpg?w=832&ssl=1 832w, https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Syrias_Disappeared_Film_Screening.jpg?resize=300%2C204&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Syrias_Disappeared_Film_Screening.jpg?resize=768%2C523&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Syrias_Disappeared_Film_Screening.jpg?resize=150%2C102&ssl=1 150w" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 8px; vertical-align: middle;" width="832" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-26251" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #6d6d6d; font-size: 0.9em; font-style: italic; line-height: 23.04px; margin: 0.8075em 0px 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px 0px 1em; text-align: center;">Stephen Rapp (far left) at a Holocaust Memorial Museum event promoting regime change in Syria, May 2017</figcaption></figure><br />
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Enlisting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the push for war</h3>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Back in July 2014, a self-styled human rights lawyer named Stephen Rapp sat on stage at the Saudi-funded Rafiq Hariri Center of DC’s Atlantic Council think tank and demanded regime change in Syria: “Its legitimacy, its ability to serve the people of Syria is gone, if ever it where there,” he said of Assad’s government.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Throughout the event, entitled “</span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLEQkuvT8O0" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Making the Case Against Assad,</a>“<span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> Rapp touted the work the aforementioned US-funded Center for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) was doing to gather documents implicating the Syrian government, and the State Department’s role in supporting them.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">At the time, Rapp was the Barack </span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Obama administration’s ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice.</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> He later moved on to serve as the </span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">chair of CIJA and <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/simon-skjodt-center/fellows/ambassador-stephen-j-rapp" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">visiting fellow</a> at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, where according to his bio, he pursued “justice and accountability on Syria.”</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Rapp had worked with the Qatar-sponsored authors of the initial Caesar inquiry in the past when he, David Crane, and Desmond De Silva each served as chief prosecutor at the special court for Sierra Leone.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">In his capacity at the Holocaust Museum, Rapp focused on “bringing forth </span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">the first case against the Assad regime and working on potential cases related to the ‘Caesar file’ in Germany.”</span></div>
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Under Rapp’s watch, the Holocaust Museum was transformed into an overt tool of US foreign policy in the Middle East. The institution’s interventionist bent was supplemented by the presence of neoconservative ideologues like <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2019/02/13/genocide-venezuela-congress-ilhan-omar-coup-elliott-abrams/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Iran-Contra felon Elliott Abrams</a>, former DHS Chief Michael Chertoff, and Stuart A. Levey – a pioneer of US sanctions policy – on the museum’s ironically named <a href="https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/simon-skjodt-center/committee-on-conscience" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">“Committee on Conscience.”</a></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">In 2014, Mouaz Moustafa, the Syrian-American regime change lobbyist who worked as “Caesar’s” handler, joined Stephen Rapp in</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> </span><a href="https://www.ushmm.org/information/about-the-museum/museum-publications/memory-and-action/calling-out-syrias-crimes" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">helping</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> the Holocaust Memorial Museum establish an </span><a href="https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/museum-exhibitions/syria-please-dont-forget-us" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">exhibition</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> likening the Syrian war to the Jewish genocide of World War Two Europe. The exhibit contained a special section on the Caesar file, presenting it as evidence of industrial mass murder without a scintilla of critical context or evidence.</span></div>
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<figure aria-describedby="caption-attachment-26214" class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_26214" style="background-color: #fcfcfc; border-radius: 2px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; color: #444444; font-family: Lora, serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px 0px 1rem; max-width: 100%; width: 834px;"><img alt="" class="wp-image-26214 size-full" data-attachment-id="26214" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-description="" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="Mouaz Holocaust" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mouaz-Holocaust.png?fit=834%2C444&ssl=1" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mouaz-Holocaust.png?fit=300%2C160&ssl=1" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mouaz-Holocaust.png?fit=834%2C444&ssl=1" data-orig-size="834,444" data-permalink="https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/25/us-qatari-intelligence-deception-produced-the-caesar-sanctions-syria-famine/mouaz-holocaust/" height="444" sizes="(max-width: 834px) 100vw, 834px" src="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mouaz-Holocaust.png?resize=834%2C444&ssl=1" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mouaz-Holocaust.png?w=834&ssl=1 834w, https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mouaz-Holocaust.png?resize=300%2C160&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mouaz-Holocaust.png?resize=768%2C409&ssl=1 768w, https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mouaz-Holocaust.png?resize=150%2C80&ssl=1 150w" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 100%; padding: 8px; vertical-align: middle;" width="834" /><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-26214" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #6d6d6d; font-size: 0.9em; font-style: italic; line-height: 23.04px; margin: 0.8075em 0px 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px 0px 1em; text-align: center;">Mouaz Moustafa (right) at the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Exhibition on Caesar on November 20, 2014</figcaption></figure><br />
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">According to Rapp, the file provided a “better” basis for prosecutions of Syrian officials than the Allies mustered at Nuremberg, where key Nazi German officials were convicted for crimes against humanity. Rapp has even </span><a href="https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2017/02/07/intv-amanpour-stephen-rapp.cnn" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">claimed</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> that, based on the Caesar files, “</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Conservatively, we’re looking at 50,000 Syrian civilians tortured and murdered by their own government.”</span></div>
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When the Holocaust museum in DC established its exhibition in late 2014, it was only able to display 10 carefully selected photos from the Caesar file. Once other investigators were able to view the full file, however, the one-sided narrative of its promoters began to crumble.</div>
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46% of the Caesar file reveals mass killings – by a brutal armed opposition</h3>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Though the full contents of the supposed Caesar file has never been made public, <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/08/billionaire-human-rights-watch-sanctions-nicaragua-venezuela/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Human Rights Watch</a> (HRW) was able to view the documents in full in 2015. In a <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/12/16/if-dead-could-speak/mass-deaths-and-torture-syrias-detention-facilities#" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">lengthy report</a> hyping the photos and attempting to reinforce the push for regime change, HRW inadvertently demolished Washington’s narrative.</span></div>
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In a virtual footnote in its lengthy report on the Caesar file, HRW acknowledged that nearly half of the entire file – some 24,568 photos – depicted the bodies of government soldiers who had been killed by the armed opposition, “including [by] incidents of terrorism, fires, explosions and car bombs).”</div>
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<img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-26220" data-attachment-id="26220" data-comments-opened="0" data-image-description="" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"}" data-image-title="HRW" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/HRW.png?fit=742%2C385&ssl=1" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/HRW.png?fit=300%2C156&ssl=1" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/HRW.png?fit=742%2C385&ssl=1" data-orig-size="742,385" data-permalink="https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/25/us-qatari-intelligence-deception-produced-the-caesar-sanctions-syria-famine/hrw/" height="385" sizes="(max-width: 742px) 100vw, 742px" src="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/HRW.png?resize=742%2C385&ssl=1" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/HRW.png?w=742&ssl=1 742w, https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/HRW.png?resize=300%2C156&ssl=1 300w, https://i0.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/HRW.png?resize=150%2C78&ssl=1 150w" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; height: auto; margin: 0px auto 1rem; max-width: 100%; padding: 8px; vertical-align: middle;" width="742" /></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">As <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2016/03/the-caesar-photo-fraud-that-undermined-syrian-negotiations/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Rick Sterling </a></span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">noted</span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">, “nearly half the [Caesar] photos show the opposite of what was alleged. These photos, never revealed to the public, confirm that the opposition is violent and has killed large numbers of Syrian security forces and civilians.” </span></div>
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HRW openly acknowledged its wholesale disinterest in this explosive fact, stating, “This report focuses on deaths in detention.” However, the organization’s researchers were unable to prove that the photos they were focused on showed the bodies of those who died in government prisons and not on the battlefield, or in other circumstances. In fact, it was able to verify only 27 cases in which individuals who appeared in the photos had been arrested.</div>
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The initial Qatar-sponsored <a href="https://www.carter-ruck.com/images/uploads/documents/Syria_Report-January_2014.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Carter-Ruck investigation</a> falsely claimed that the 11,000 individuals who appeared in the Caesar file had been killed in Syrian government custody. In an <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/20140315-interview-david-michael-crane-co-author-report-on-syrian-prisoners-torture-killing-assad-regime" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">interview with France24</a>, David Crane, the lead author of that report, noted that the bogus number was a only a “statistical estimate.”</div>
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HRW also revealed that though its researchers “sought an interview with Caesar through groups that identified themselves as representing him, the organization did not manage to meet with him.”</div>
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Despite these disclosures, <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/20/human-rights-watch-bolivia-coup-massacre/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">HRW’s hyper-interventionist director Ken Roth</a> continued to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=878283728875451&id=147079088662589" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">rattle off</a> calls for US military intervention in Syria.</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Others entities and individuals promoting the Caesar file, such as the New York Times and the directors of CIJA, similarly omitted HRW’s stunning revelation that at least half the photos depicted government soldiers killed in the hands of foreign-backed opposition militias. In doing so, they preserved the Western narrative of the Syrian conflict as a one-sided, unprovoked slaughter carried out by President Assad against the whole of “the Syrian people.”</span></div>
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As Caesar works Congress, sanctions begin killing the Syrian people</h3>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">In November 2016, Congress expanded its sanctions on Syria while authorizing more funding for groups like CIJA focused on planning the prosecution of Assad and his officials. <a href="https://www.congress.gov/member/eliot-engel/E000179?q=%7B%22sponsorship%22%3A%22sponsored%22%7D" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Co-sponsored</a> by Rep. Eliot Engel, the <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/eliot-engels-caesar-syria-civilian-protection-act/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">aggressively pro-war</a>, AIPAC-backed Democrat serving at the time as ranking chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the bill was called the Caesar Civilian Protection Act.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">“Caesar” was shepherded by his handler, Mouaz Moustafa, to meet personally with Engel and his Republican counterpart on the Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ed Royce, in July 2018. As usual, the mysterious figure was shrouded in his blue Patagonia hooded jacket.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">The meeting in Washington coincided with several new rounds of unilateral sanctions on Syria, meting out unprecedented economic punishment on the country’s civilian population.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Nabih Boulos of the LA Times </span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">documented</span> how t<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">he US and EU economic war against Syria had been especially <a href="https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-syria-sanctions-20181212-story.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">harsh on the medical sector</a>, </span><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">making radiology equipment, chemotherapy drugs, and even basic pharmaceuticals increasingly difficult to obtain. One doctor told Boulos that 10 percent of his kidney patients had died due to faulty or inaccessible dialysis machines.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Sanctions also </span><a href="https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/syria-s-fuel-crisis-is-only-hurting-civilians-not-the-assad-regime-1.855981" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">spurred a fuel crisis</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> that made heating oil difficult to obtain during the winter of 2018, and brought ground traffic in several cities to a near-hault by the following Spring.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Rebuilding the war-torn country had also been slowed by the impact of the coercive measures, as the Caesar Act explicitly imposed costs on companies that participated in reconstruction, even threatening to punish Gulf states which dare to normalize relations with Damascus. </span></div>
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Congress signs off on Syrian misery, plunging the country’s currency</h3>
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On March 11, 2020, the usual suspects of the Caesar production assembled on Capitol Hill for one final lobbying push. This time, the full-time regime-change lobbyist Mouaz Moustafa delivered a self-described former prisoner from Syria’s Saydnaya complex named <a href="https://twitter.com/omarAlshogre/status/1237842393778380800" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Omar Alshogre to the House Foreign Affairs Committee</a> to make the case for escalating the economic war.</div>
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Alshogre’s dramatic performance demonstrated his background as a <a href="https://www.consultancy-me.com/news/1943/omar-alshogres-remarkable-journey-to-bcg-via-a-syrian-prison" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">business consultant</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> at the Boston Consulting Group and a motivational speaker </span><a href="http://www.omaralshogre.com/en-GB" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">managed by an elite speaker’s bureau</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> to secure Ted X lecture gigs. (Back in March 2019, </span><a href="https://freebeacon.com/politics/ex-syrian-prisoner-hits-gabbard-on-defense-of-assad-i-have-a-video-of-my-father-being-killed/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Alshogre was brought onto CNN</a><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"> to attack Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, the maverick Democratic presidential candidate who had made opposition to regime-change wars a centerpiece of her campaign.)</span></div>
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Finally, this June, Congress passed the most crushing round of sanctions on Syria in history, imposing penalties on anyone conducting sovereign economic relations with any entity overseen by the Syrian government. “Anyone doing business with the Assad regime, no matter where in the world they are, is potentially exposed to travel restrictions and financial sanctions,” said Secretary of State <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/faq-what-are-the-new-us-sanctions-on-syria-and-how-might-they-hurt/2020/06/16/71dba58a-af32-11ea-98b5-279a6479a1e4_story.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Mike Pompeo</a>.</div>
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As the Caesar sanctions began to sink their teeth into the Syrian economy, the Financial Times acknowledged in a June 24 report, “The first and biggest act of the Caesar act was felt, not by regime insiders, but <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/378d29ae-fca2-4d3c-bdb2-052bbce5a060" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">by ordinary Syrians</a>, who saw prices spike as the threat of sanctions roiled the country’s currency market.”</div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">A civilian population that has suffered through nearly a decade of war is being denied a peacetime recovery. For them, it marks another chapter in a tragic conflict imposed by outside powers.</span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box;">But for the operatives behind the Caesar deception, the economic pain felt by average Syrians provides another regime-change “opportunity.”</span><br />
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<a href="https://thegrayzone.com/author/max-blumenthal/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;"><img alt="" height="109" itemprop="image" src="https://i2.wp.com/thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/GZ-headshot.png?w=845&ssl=1" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-radius: 50%; border: none; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5) 1px 1px 5px; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline-block; height: auto; max-width: 100px; padding: 8px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle;" width="100" /></a></div>
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<a class="vcard author" href="https://thegrayzone.com/author/max-blumenthal/" itemprop="url" rel="author" style="box-shadow: none; box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Max Blumenthal</a></div>
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Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Republican-Gomorrah-Inside-Movement-Shattered/dp/1568584172" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Republican Gomorrah</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Goliath-Life-Loathing-Greater-Israel/dp/1568586345" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Goliath</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/51-Day-War-Ruin-Resistance/dp/156858511X" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">The Fifty One Day War</a>, and <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/2868-the-management-of-savagery" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">The Management of Savagery</a>. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including <a href="https://killinggaza.com/" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #d7121f; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Killing Gaza</a>. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.</div>
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<a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/25/us-qatari-intelligence-deception-produced-the-caesar-sanctions-syria-famine/" target="_blank">SOURCE</a> | https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/25/us-qatari-intelligence-deception-produced-the-caesar-sanctions-syria-famine/
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-21160763959545616842020-05-31T22:57:00.004+10:002021-02-06T00:20:54.643+10:00Preventing 'cytokine storm' may ease severe COVID-19 symptoms<h1 class="headline" id="headline" style="background-color: white; border-radius: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #004276; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 24px; font-weight: 500; line-height: 1.1; margin: 0px;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6w8ejNX2u8uzLkPKxeBfKDqXm7VeqNMAN6PyOChiWSCowkxLvdW0EM-5mkmv2IFeGmEhcp-QiQvNwxvs8n8w-1j_OzZXRtlBP69WquQVaGEDzFrFbaq0XRAeQJnWHjhnmGv-j8zD7Fo00/s899/cytokine+storm.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="899" data-original-width="685" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6w8ejNX2u8uzLkPKxeBfKDqXm7VeqNMAN6PyOChiWSCowkxLvdW0EM-5mkmv2IFeGmEhcp-QiQvNwxvs8n8w-1j_OzZXRtlBP69WquQVaGEDzFrFbaq0XRAeQJnWHjhnmGv-j8zD7Fo00/w488-h640/cytokine+storm.webp" width="488" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /><br />Cytokine Storm - <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/cmi201574" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">image Nature.com</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /></h1>
<div><h3 style="text-align: left;">Summary: A clinical trial in people with the new coronavirus is testing a drug that may halt an overactive immune response before it ramps up.</h3><div> <br />For some COVID-19 patients, the body's immune response may be as destructive as the virus that causes the disease. The persistent high fevers, severe respiratory distress, and lung damage seen in some critically ill patients are all signs of an immune system in overdrive. <br /> <br /> Now, a new clinical trial will test a treatment that targets this overactive immune response, says Howard Hughes Medical Investigator Bert Vogelstein. He and his team at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are currently recruiting individuals for the trial, which includes patients ages 45 to 85 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital who have COVID-19 but who aren't on a ventilator or in the ICU. <br /> Their treatment, a common type of prescription drug called an alpha blocker, might break a cycle of hyperinflammation before it ramps up, their findings from mouse studies and a recent analysis of medical claims data suggest. </div><div><br /></div><div> "The approach we're advocating involves treating people who are at high risk early in the course of the disease, when you know they're infected but before they have severe symptoms," says Vogelstein. If the trial's results suggest the drug is safe and effective against COVID-19, it could potentially help many people recover safely at home and lessen the strain on hospital resources, he says.</div><div> <br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">Runaway reaction</h3></div><div> <br />A hyperactive immune response isn't unique to COVID-19. People with autoimmune diseases and cancer patients receiving immunotherapy can experience similar symptoms. These responses are referred to as macrophage activation syndrome, cytokine release syndrome -- or simply "cytokine storms."</div><div> <br />When macrophages (and some other kinds of immune cells) detect virus particles, they send out alert messages by releasing various proteins known as cytokines. Those cytokines recruit other immune cells to the scene - an inflammatory response that, in moderation, helps the body fight off a virus. But macrophages can also release other signaling molecules, called catecholamines, that amplify this response further, triggering the release of more cytokines. The result is a runaway feedback loop, like a snowball getting bigger as it barrels down a hill. </div><div><br /></div><div> "It seems that once this process starts, there's this inability to properly switch it off," says Maximilian Konig, a rheumatologist at Hopkins who is helping to coordinate the trial.</div><div> <br />Before COVID-19 hit, Vogelstein's team was already exploring ways to ease the hyperinflammatory immune response in cancer patients treated with immunotherapy. The researchers were interested in drugs called alpha blockers, which are widely prescribed for prostate conditions and high blood pressure -- and also interfere with the cell signaling that triggers cytokine storms. In theory, alpha blockers might stop a cytokine storm before it starts.</div><div> <br />Giving mice with bacterial infections an alpha blocker lessened cytokine storms and decreased deaths, Vogelstein's team reported in the journal Nature in 2018. And, the researchers found, the treatment didn't seem to harm other aspects of the immune response.</div><div> <br /><h3 style="text-align: left;">Staving off the storm </h3></div><div><br /></div><div> As the COVID-19 pandemic escalated in the United States over the past few months and severely ill patients presented with cytokine storm symptoms, the idea of testing alpha blockers in humans has become more urgent, Vogelstein's team recently argued in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. <br /> To obtain approval for an alpha blocker clinical trial, Vogelstein's team first surveyed medical claims data. They combed through records from people hospitalized for pneumonia and acute respiratory distress and analyzed whether patients' outcomes were better if they had been taking alpha blockers for unrelated conditions. The team's tentative conclusion: taking alpha blocker drugs correlated to a lower risk of death from respiratory distress.</div><div> <br />On its own, that's not strong enough evidence to prescribe the drug for a wholly new disease like COVID-19, says Susan Athey, an economist at Stanford University who collaborated with Vogelstein's team on the claims analysis. But it helps bolster the case for the team's clinical trial.</div><div> <br />In the trial, COVID-19 patients will take gradually increasing doses of an alpha blocker called prazosin, sold under the brand name Minipress, over six days, says Chetan Bettegowda, a neurosurgeon at Hopkins who is helping to design and run the trials. Then, the team will evaluate whether people who received this treatment had a lower ICU admission rate or ventilator use than patients who received the standard treatment. They'll follow each patient for 60 days, but preliminary data from the first patients could be available within weeks to months, Bettegowda says.</div><div> <br />If the trial's results suggest alpha blockers are safe and effective, the team hopes to run a second trial with patients who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 but are not yet hospitalized. They're also encouraging colleagues at other hospitals to join their clinical trial efforts, to gather patient data more quickly. </div><div><br /></div><div> This treatment, if it works, would be a secondary form of prevention, Vogelstein says, mitigating symptoms before they become severe, rather than stopping infection in the first place. "Eventually, hopefully, a vaccine will be produced, and that will be the essence of prevention," he says. "But until vaccines are available, secondary prevention makes a lot of sense."</div><div><br /></div><div>Date: May 21, 2020 <div>Source: Howard Hughes Medical Institute </div><div><br /></div><div id="text" style="background-color: white; border-radius: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
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<a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200521165706.htm" target="_blank">SOURCE</a></div>
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</div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-57888722788599050562020-05-17T00:34:00.002+10:002020-05-17T00:51:16.696+10:00CoronaVirus: Flu Vaccine Risks<div class="date" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 14.4px; letter-spacing: 0.1em; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;">
APRIL 16, 2020</div>
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Pentagon Study: Flu Shot Raises Risk of Coronavirus by 36% (and Other Supporting Studies)</h1>
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<div class="at-above-post addthis_tool" data-url="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130oe_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/vaccine-misinformation-flu-shots-equal-health/" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 14.4px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Chairman, Children’s Health Defense</strong></div>
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On March 12<span style="border: 0px; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; position: relative; top: -0.5em; vertical-align: baseline;">th</span>, 2020, Anderson Cooper and Dr. Sanjay Gupta held a global town hall on “Corona Facts and Fears. During the discussion, Anderson said to the viewing audience, “And, again, if you are concerned about coronavirus, and you haven’t gotten a flu shot…you should get a flu shot.</div>
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Setting safety and efficacy of influenza vaccination aside, is Anderson’s claim that the flu shot will help people fight COVID-19 remotely true? The short answer is no.</div>
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In fact, the results of many peer-reviewed, published studies prove that Anderson’s recommendation may have been the worst advice he could have given the public.</div>
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In searching the literature, the only study we have been able to find assessing flu shots and coronavirus is a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X19313647?via%3Dihub" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #038bb3; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2020 US Pentagon study</a> that found that the flu shot INCREASES the risks from coronavirus by 36%. “Receiving influenza vaccination may increase the risk of other respiratory viruses, a phenomenon known as “virus interference…’vaccine derived’ virus interference was significantly associated with coronavirus… Here are the findings:</div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">2020 Pentagon study: Flu vaccines increase risk of coronavirus by 36% </strong></h2>
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Examining non-influenza viruses specifically, the odds of coronavirus in vaccinated individuals were significantly higher when compared to unvaccinated individuals with an odds ratio (association between an exposure and an outcome) of 1.36. In other words, the vaccinated were 36% more likely to get coronavirus.</div>
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<img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-83347" height="720" sizes="(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Pentagon-study-Flu-vaccines-increase-risk-of-coronavirus-by-36.jpg" srcset="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Pentagon-study-Flu-vaccines-increase-risk-of-coronavirus-by-36.jpg 1280w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Pentagon-study-Flu-vaccines-increase-risk-of-coronavirus-by-36-300x169.jpg 300w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Pentagon-study-Flu-vaccines-increase-risk-of-coronavirus-by-36-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Pentagon-study-Flu-vaccines-increase-risk-of-coronavirus-by-36-768x432.jpg 768w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Pentagon-study-Flu-vaccines-increase-risk-of-coronavirus-by-36-196x110.jpg 196w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Pentagon-study-Flu-vaccines-increase-risk-of-coronavirus-by-36-600x338.jpg 600w" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="1280" /></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Many other studies suggest the increased risk of viral respiratory infections from the flu shot:</strong></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">2018 CDC Study: Flu shots increase risk of non-flu acute respiratory illnesses (ARI) in children.</strong></h2>
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This <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Rifkin-2018-5-ARI-after-flu-vaccine-in-children.-Vaccine-2018.pdf" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #038bb3; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">CDC supported study</a> concluded an increased risk of acute respiratory illness (ARI) among children <18 years caused by non-influenza respiratory pathogens post-influenza vaccination compared to unvaccinated children during the same period.</div>
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<img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-83350" height="720" sizes="(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/CDC-Study-Flu-shots-increase-risk-of-non-flu-acute-respiratory-illnesses-ARI-in-children.jpg" srcset="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/CDC-Study-Flu-shots-increase-risk-of-non-flu-acute-respiratory-illnesses-ARI-in-children.jpg 1280w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/CDC-Study-Flu-shots-increase-risk-of-non-flu-acute-respiratory-illnesses-ARI-in-children-300x169.jpg 300w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/CDC-Study-Flu-shots-increase-risk-of-non-flu-acute-respiratory-illnesses-ARI-in-children-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/CDC-Study-Flu-shots-increase-risk-of-non-flu-acute-respiratory-illnesses-ARI-in-children-768x432.jpg 768w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/CDC-Study-Flu-shots-increase-risk-of-non-flu-acute-respiratory-illnesses-ARI-in-children-196x110.jpg 196w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/CDC-Study-Flu-shots-increase-risk-of-non-flu-acute-respiratory-illnesses-ARI-in-children-600x338.jpg 600w" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="1280" /></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">2011 Australian Study: Flu shot doubled risk of non-influenza viral infections and increased flu risk by 73%.</strong></h2>
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A prospective case-control study in healthy young Australian children found that seasonal flu shots doubled their risk of illness from non-influenza virus infections. Overall, the vaccine increased the risk of virus-associated acute respiratory illness, including influenza, by 73%.</div>
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<img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-83349" height="720" sizes="(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Australian-Study-Flu-shot-doubled-risk-of-non-influenza-viral-infections-and-increased-flu-risk-by-73.jpg" srcset="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Australian-Study-Flu-shot-doubled-risk-of-non-influenza-viral-infections-and-increased-flu-risk-by-73.jpg 1280w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Australian-Study-Flu-shot-doubled-risk-of-non-influenza-viral-infections-and-increased-flu-risk-by-73-300x169.jpg 300w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Australian-Study-Flu-shot-doubled-risk-of-non-influenza-viral-infections-and-increased-flu-risk-by-73-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Australian-Study-Flu-shot-doubled-risk-of-non-influenza-viral-infections-and-increased-flu-risk-by-73-768x432.jpg 768w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Australian-Study-Flu-shot-doubled-risk-of-non-influenza-viral-infections-and-increased-flu-risk-by-73-196x110.jpg 196w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Australian-Study-Flu-shot-doubled-risk-of-non-influenza-viral-infections-and-increased-flu-risk-by-73-600x338.jpg 600w" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="1280" /></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">2012 Hong Kong Study: Flu shots increased the risk of non-flu respiratory infections 4.4 times and tripled flu infections.</strong></h2>
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A randomized placebo-controlled trial in Hong Kong children found that flu shots increased the risk of non-influenza viral ARIs fivefold (OR 4.91,CI 1.04—8.14) and, including influenza, tripled the overall viral ARI risk (OR 3.17, CI 1.04—9.83).</div>
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<img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-83346" height="720" sizes="(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Hong-Kong-Study-Flu-shots-increased-the-risk-of-non-flu-respiratory-infections-4.4-times-and-tripled-flu-infections.jpg" srcset="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Hong-Kong-Study-Flu-shots-increased-the-risk-of-non-flu-respiratory-infections-4.4-times-and-tripled-flu-infections.jpg 1280w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Hong-Kong-Study-Flu-shots-increased-the-risk-of-non-flu-respiratory-infections-4.4-times-and-tripled-flu-infections-300x169.jpg 300w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Hong-Kong-Study-Flu-shots-increased-the-risk-of-non-flu-respiratory-infections-4.4-times-and-tripled-flu-infections-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Hong-Kong-Study-Flu-shots-increased-the-risk-of-non-flu-respiratory-infections-4.4-times-and-tripled-flu-infections-768x432.jpg 768w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Hong-Kong-Study-Flu-shots-increased-the-risk-of-non-flu-respiratory-infections-4.4-times-and-tripled-flu-infections-196x110.jpg 196w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Hong-Kong-Study-Flu-shots-increased-the-risk-of-non-flu-respiratory-infections-4.4-times-and-tripled-flu-infections-600x338.jpg 600w" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="1280" /></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">2017 Study: Vaccinated children are 5.9 more likely to suffer pneumonia and 30.1 times more likely to have been diagnosed with Allergic Rhinitis than unvaccinated children.</strong></h2>
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Vaccinated children were 30.1 times more likely to have been diagnosed with Allergic Rhinitis and 5.9 times more likely to have been diagnosed with pneumonia than unvaccinated children.</div>
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<img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-83348" height="720" sizes="(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Vaccinated-children-are-5.9-more-likely-to-suffer-pneumonia-and-30.1-times-more-likely-to-have-been-diagnosed.jpg" srcset="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Vaccinated-children-are-5.9-more-likely-to-suffer-pneumonia-and-30.1-times-more-likely-to-have-been-diagnosed.jpg 1280w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Vaccinated-children-are-5.9-more-likely-to-suffer-pneumonia-and-30.1-times-more-likely-to-have-been-diagnosed-300x169.jpg 300w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Vaccinated-children-are-5.9-more-likely-to-suffer-pneumonia-and-30.1-times-more-likely-to-have-been-diagnosed-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Vaccinated-children-are-5.9-more-likely-to-suffer-pneumonia-and-30.1-times-more-likely-to-have-been-diagnosed-768x432.jpg 768w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Vaccinated-children-are-5.9-more-likely-to-suffer-pneumonia-and-30.1-times-more-likely-to-have-been-diagnosed-196x110.jpg 196w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Vaccinated-children-are-5.9-more-likely-to-suffer-pneumonia-and-30.1-times-more-likely-to-have-been-diagnosed-600x338.jpg 600w" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="1280" /></div>
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<img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-82140" height="1080" sizes="(max-width: 1080px) 100vw, 1080px" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/3-Flu-Meme_3.jpg" srcset="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/3-Flu-Meme_3.jpg 1080w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/3-Flu-Meme_3-300x300.jpg 300w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/3-Flu-Meme_3-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/3-Flu-Meme_3-150x150.jpg 150w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/3-Flu-Meme_3-768x768.jpg 768w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/3-Flu-Meme_3-196x196.jpg 196w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/3-Flu-Meme_3-600x600.jpg 600w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/3-Flu-Meme_3-100x100.jpg 100w" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="1080" /></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">2014 Study: Influenza-vaccinated children were 1.6 times more likely than unvaccinated children to have a non-influenza “Influenza-like-illness” (ILI).</strong></h2>
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<img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-83351" height="720" sizes="(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Epidemiology-of-respiratory-viral-infections-in-children-Slide.jpg" srcset="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Epidemiology-of-respiratory-viral-infections-in-children-Slide.jpg 1280w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Epidemiology-of-respiratory-viral-infections-in-children-Slide-300x169.jpg 300w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Epidemiology-of-respiratory-viral-infections-in-children-Slide-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Epidemiology-of-respiratory-viral-infections-in-children-Slide-768x432.jpg 768w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Epidemiology-of-respiratory-viral-infections-in-children-Slide-196x110.jpg 196w, https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Epidemiology-of-respiratory-viral-infections-in-children-Slide-600x338.jpg 600w" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="1280" /></div>
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<img alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-83345" height="959" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130im_/https://childrenshealthdefense.org/wp-content/uploads/Epidemiology-of-respiratory-viral-infections-in-children-e1587059686692.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="1044" /></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Even more published science</strong></h2>
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The well-respected Cochrane Collaboration’s comprehensive 2010 meta-analysis of published influenza vaccine studies found that the influenza vaccination has<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> “no effect </em>on hospitalization, and that there is<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> “no evidence that vaccines prevent viral transmission or complications. </em><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200424225130/https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001269.pub4/full" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; color: #038bb3; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Cochrane Researchers concluded</a> <em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">that the scientific evidence “seem[s] to discourage the utilization of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure.</em><em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </strong></em></div>
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In their meta-analysis, the Cochrane researchers <strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">accused the CDC </strong><em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">of deliberately misrepresenting the science in order to support their universal influenza vaccination recommendation</em><strong style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">.</strong> Nevertheless, CNN and other mainstream media outlets continually broadcast CDC pronouncements as gospel and, ironically, ridicules those of us who actually read the science as “<em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">purveyors of ‘vaccine misinformation”</em>.</div>
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<a href="https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/vaccine-misinformation-flu-shots-equal-health/" target="_blank">SOURCE</a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-24158548979628962632020-04-26T22:19:00.000+10:002020-04-27T00:31:09.462+10:00Did This Virus Come From a Lab? Maybe Not – But It Exposes the Threat of a Biowarfare Arms Race<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Dangerous pathogens are captured in the wild and made deadlier in government biowarfare labs. Did that happen here?</span></div>
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by <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/author/shusseini/">Sam Husseini</a> - <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/shusseini/2020/04/24/did-this-virus-come-from-a-lab-maybe-not-but-it-exposes-the-threat-of-a-biowarfare-arms-race/">April 25, 2020</a><br />
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<img alt="China's scientists unite in COVID-19 fight" height="426" src="https://www.thepharmaletter.com/media/image/coronavirus_structure_large.jpg" width="640" /></div>
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There has been no scientific finding that the novel coronavirus was bioengineered, but its origins are not entirely clear. Deadly pathogens discovered in the wild are sometimes studied in labs – and sometimes made more dangerous. That possibility, and other plausible scenarios, have been incorrectly dismissed in remarks by some scientists and government officials, and in the coverage of most major media outlets.</div>
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Regardless of the source of this pandemic, there is considerable documentation that a global biological arms race going on outside of public view could produce even more deadly pandemics in the future.</div>
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While much of the media and political establishment have minimized the threat from such lab work, some hawks on the American right <a href="https://www.salon.com/2020/03/13/sen-tom-cotton-threatens-china-claims-beijing-inflicted-coronavirus-on-world_partner/">like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark</a>., have singled out Chinese biodefense researchers as uniquely dangerous.</div>
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But there is every indication that U.S. lab work is every bit as threatening as that in Chinese labs. American labs also operate in <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/06/23/undisclosed-cdc-lab-incidents/86305700/">secret, and are also known to be accident-prone</a>.</div>
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The current dynamics of the biological arms race have been driven by US government decisions that extend back decades. In December 2009, Reuters <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-arms-biological/u-s-rejects-biological-weapons-checks-idUSTRE5B82DG20091209?type=politicsNews">reported that</a> the Obama administration was refusing even to negotiate the possible monitoring of biological weapons.</div>
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Much of the left in the US now appears unwilling to scrutinize the origin of the pandemic – or the wider issue of biowarfare – perhaps because portions of the anti-Chinese right have been so vocal in making unfounded allegations.</div>
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Governments that participate in such biological weapon research generally distinguish between “biowarfare” and “biodefense,” as if to paint such “defense” programs as necessary. But this is rhetorical sleight-of-hand; the two concepts are largely indistinguishable.</div>
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“Biodefense” implies tacit biowarfare, breeding more dangerous pathogens for the alleged purpose of finding a way to fight them. While this work appears to have succeeded in creating deadly and infectious agents, including deadlier flu strains, such “defense” research is impotent in its ability to defend us from this pandemic.</div>
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The legal scholar who drafted the main US law on the subject, Francis Boyle, warned in his 2005 book “<a href="https://bookshop.org/a/2464/9780932863461">Biowarfare and Terrorism</a>” that an “illegal biological arms race with potentially catastrophic consequences” was underway, largely driven by the US government.</div>
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For years, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/politics/us-germresearch-policy-is-protested-by-758-scientists.html">many scientists</a> have raised concerns regarding bioweapons/biodefense lab work, and specifically about the fact that huge increases in funding have taken place since 9/11. This was especially true after the anthrax-by-mail attacks that killed five people in the weeks after 9/11, which the FBI ultimately blamed on a US government biodefense scientist. A 2013 study found that biodefense funding since 2001 had <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih.html">totaled at least $78 billion</a>, and more has surely been spent since then. This has led to a <a href="https://fas.org/programs/bio/research.html">proliferation of laboratories</a>, scientists and new organisms, effectively setting off a biological arms race.</div>
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Following the Ebola outbreak in west Africa in 2014, the US government <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-funding-for-risky-biological-study.html">paused funding</a> for what are known as “gain-of-function” research on certain organisms. This work actually seeks to make deadly pathogens deadlier, in some cases making pathogens airborne that previously were not. With little notice outside the field, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih.html">the pause on such research was lifted in late 2017</a>.</div>
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During this pause, exceptions for funding were made for dangerous gain-of-function lab work. This included work jointly done by US scientists from the University of North Carolina, Harvard and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This work – which had funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance not originally acknowledged – was published in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985">2015 in Nature Medicine</a>.</div>
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A different Nature Medicine article about the origin of the current pandemic, authored by five scientists and <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9">published on March 17,</a> has been touted by major media outlet and some officials – including current National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins – as definitively disproving a lab origin for the novel coronavirus. That journal article, titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” stated unequivocally: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.” This is a subtly misleading sentence. While the scientists state that there is no known laboratory “signature” in the SARS-Cov-2 RNA, their argument fails to take account of other lab methods that could have created coronavirus mutations without leaving such a signature.</div>
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Indeed, there is also the question of conflict of interest in the Nature Medicine article. Some of the authors of that article, as well as a February 2020 <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30418-9/fulltext">Lancet letter</a> condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin” – which seemed calculated to minimize outside scrutiny of biodefense lab work – have troubling ties to the biodefense complex, as well as to the US government. Notably, neither of these articles makes clear that a virus can have a natural origin and then be captured and studied in a controlled laboratory setting before being let loose, either intentionally or accidentally – which is clearly a possibility in the case of the coronavirus.</div>
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<img alt="Coronavirus: 25 new COVID-19 cases confirmed in Hunter New England ..." height="360" src="https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/crop/frm/rG8fTaJSn3KqLFJaeg5yPn/9d5e6cc2-80c2-4b93-89e5-a4ecac20eec7.jpg/r0_0_1200_675_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg" width="640" /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Facts as “rumors”</span></div>
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<a href="https://husseini.posthaven.com/questioning-the-cdc-is-it-a-complete-coincidence-that-chinas-only-bsl4-is-in-wuhan">This reporter raised questions</a> about the subject at a news conference with a Center for Disease Control (CDC) representative at the now-shuttered National Press Club on Feb. 11. I asked if it was a “complete coincidence” that the pandemic had started in Wuhan, the only place in China with a declared biosafety level 4 (BSL4) laboratory. BSL4 laboratories have the most stringent safety mechanisms, but handle the most deadly pathogens. As I mentioned, it was odd that the ostensible origin of the novel coronavirus was bat caves in Yunnan province – more than 1,000 miles from Wuhan. I noted that “gain-of-function” lab work can results in more deadly pathogens, and that major labs, including <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/17/reports-of-incidents-at-bioterror-select-agent-labs/14140483/">some in the US, have had accidental releases</a>.</div>
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CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat said that based on the information she had seen, the virus was of “zoonotic origin.” She also stated, regarding gain-of-function lab work, that it is important to “protect researchers and their laboratory workers as well as the community around them and that we use science for the benefit of people.”</div>
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I followed up by asking whether an alleged natural origin did not preclude the possibility that this virus came through a lab, since a lab could have acquired a bat virus and been working on it. Schuchat replied to the assembled journalists that “it is very common for rumors to emerge that can take on life of their own,” but did not directly answer the question. She noted that in the 2014 Ebola outbreak some observers had pointed to nearby labs as the possible cause, claiming this “was a key rumor that had to be overcome in order to help control the outbreak.” She reiterated: “So based on everything that I know right now, I can tell you the circumstances of the origin really look like animals-to-human. But your question, I heard.”</div>
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This is no rumor. It’s a fact: Labs work with dangerous pathogens. The US and China each have dual-use biowarfare/biodefense programs. China has major facilities at Wuhan – a biosafety level 4 lab and a biosafety level 2 lab. There are leaks from labs. (See “<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/preventing-biological-arms-race">Preventing a Biological Arms Race</a>,” MIT Press, 1990, edited by Susan Wright; also, a partial review in <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-journal-of-international-law/article/preventing-a-biological-arms-race-edited-by-susan-wright-cambridge-london-the-mit-press-1990-pp-xviii-446-appendices-index-cloth-25-paper-1750/3DDE23565C945EA31256B1E87B94AC3B">Journal of International Law</a> from October 1992.)</div>
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Much of the discussion of this deadly serious subject is marred with snark that avoids or dodges the “gain-of-function” question. ABC <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/conspiracy-theorists-study-concludes-covid-19-laboratory-construct/story?id=69827832">ran a story on March 27 titled</a> “Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists. Study Concludes COVID-19 ‘Is Not a Laboratory Construct.'” That story did not address the possibility that the virus could have been found in the wild, studied in a lab and then released.</div>
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On March 21, USA Today <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/03/21/fact-check-did-coronavirus-originate-chinese-laboratory/2881150001/">published a piece</a> headlined “Fact Check: Did the Coronavirus Originate In a Chinese Laboratory?” – and rated it “FALSE.”</div>
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That USA Today story relied on the Washington Post, which published a widely cited article on <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotton-coronavirus-conspiracy">Feb. 17</a> headlined, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” That article quoted public comments from Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard Ebright, but out of context and only in part. Specifically, the story quoted from Ebright’s tweet that the coronavirus was not an “engineered bioweapon.” In fact, his full quote included the clarification that the virus could have “<a href="https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1229255646350127104">entered human population through lab accident</a>.” (An email requesting clarification sent to Post reporter Paulina Firozi was met with silence.)</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Bioengineered ≠ From a lab</span></div>
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Other pieces in the Post since then (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-did-covid-19-begin-its-initial-origin-story-is-shaky/2020/04/02/1475d488-7521-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html">some heavily sourced</a> to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/">US government officials</a>) have conveyed Ebright’s thinking, but it gets worse. In a private exchange, Ebright – who, again, has said clearly that the novel coronavirus was not technically bioengineered using known coronavirus sequences – stated that other forms of lab manipulation could have been responsible for the current pandemic. This runs counter to much reporting, which is perhaps too scientifically illiterate to perceive the difference.</div>
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In response to the <a href="http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/2020/03/there-are-many-ways-novel-coronavirus.html">suggestion that the novel coronavirus could have come about through various methods</a> besides bioengineering – made by <a href="http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/2020/04/why-are-some-of-us-top-scientists.html">Dr. Meryl Nass</a>, who has done <a href="https://www.ippnw.org/pdf/mgs/psr-2-4-nass.pdf">groundbreaking</a> work on <a href="https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/reactions-to-the-case-against-anthrax-suspect/">biowarfare</a> – Ebright responded in an email:</div>
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The genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 has no signatures of human manipulation.</div>
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This rules out the kinds of gain-of-function (GoF) research that leave signatures of human manipulation in genome sequences (e.g., use of recombinant DNA methods to construct chimeric viruses), but does not rule out kinds of GoF research that do not leave signatures (e.g., serial passage in animals). [emphasis added]</div>
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Very easy to imagine the equivalent of the Fouchier’s “10 passages in ferrets” with H5N1 influenza virus, but, in this case, with 10 passages in non-human primates with bat coronavirus RaTG13 or bat coronavirus KP876546.</div>
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That last paragraph is very important. It refers to virologist Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, who performed research on intentionally increasing rates of viral mutation rate by spreading a virus from one animal to another in a sequence. The New York Times wrote about this in an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/opinion/sunday/an-engineered-doomsday.html">editorial in January 2012,</a> warning of “An Engineered Doomsday.”</div>
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“Now scientists financed by the National Institutes of Health” have created a “virus that could kill tens or hundreds of millions of people” if it escaped confinement, the Times wrote. The story continued:</div>
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Working with ferrets, the animal that is most like humans in responding to influenza, the researchers found that a mere five genetic mutations allowed the virus to spread through the air from one ferret to another while maintaining its lethality. A separate study at the University of Wisconsin, about which little is known publicly, produced a virus that is thought to be less virulent.</div>
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The word “engineering” in the New York Times headline is technically incorrect, since passing a virus through animals is not “genetic engineering.” This same distinction has hindered some from understanding the possible origins of the current pandemic.</div>
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Fouchier’s flu work, in which an H5N1 virus was made more virulent by transmitting it repeatedly between individual ferrets, briefly sent shockwaves through the media. “Locked up in the bowels of the medical faculty building here and accessible to only a handful of scientists lies a man-made flu virus that could change world history if it were ever set free,” wrote Science magazine in 2011 in a <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/11/scientists-brace-media-storm-around-controversial-flu-studies">story titled</a> “Scientists Brace for Media Storm Around Controversial Flu Studies.” It continues:</div>
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The virus is an H5N1 avian influenza strain that has been genetically altered and is now easily transmissible between ferrets, the animals that most closely mimic the human response to flu. Scientists believe it’s likely that the pathogen, if it emerged in nature or were released, would trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with many millions of deaths.</div>
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In a 17th floor office in the same building, virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center calmly explains why his team created what he says is “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make” – and why he wants to publish a paper describing how they did it. Fouchier is also bracing for a media storm. After he talked to ScienceInsider yesterday, he had an appointment with an institutional press officer to chart a communication strategy.</div>
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Fouchier’s paper is one of two studies that have triggered an intense debate about the limits of scientific freedom and that could portend changes in the way U.S. researchers handle so-called dual-use research: studies that have a potential public health benefit but could also be useful for nefarious purposes like biowarfare or bioterrorism.</div>
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Despite objections, Fouchier’s article was published by Science <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6088/1534.abstract">in June 2012</a>. Titled “Airborne Transmission of Influenza A/H5N1 Virus Between Ferrets,” it summarized how Fouchier’s research team made the pathogen more virulent:</div>
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Highly pathogenic avian influenza A/H5N1 virus can cause morbidity and mortality in humans but thus far has not acquired the ability to be transmitted by aerosol or respiratory droplet (“airborne transmission”) between humans. To address the concern that the virus could acquire this ability under natural conditions, we genetically modified A/H5N1 virus by site-directed mutagenesis and subsequent serial passage in ferrets. The genetically modified A/H5N1 virus acquired mutations during passage in ferrets, ultimately becoming airborne transmissible in ferrets.</div>
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In other words, Fouchier’s research took a flu virus that did not exhibit airborne transmission, then infected a number of ferrets until it mutated to the point that it was transmissible by air.</div>
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In that same year, 2012, a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10831">similar study</a> by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin was published in Nature:</div>
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Highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza A viruses occasionally infect humans, but currently do not transmit efficiently among humans. … Here we assess the molecular changes … that would allow a virus … to be transmissible among mammals. We identified a … virus … with four mutations and the remaining seven gene segments from a 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus – that was capable of droplet transmission in a ferret model.</div>
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In 2014, Marc Lipsitch of Harvard and Alison P. Galvani of Yale <a href="https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/06/commentary-case-against-gain-function-experiments-reply-fouchier-kawaoka">wrote regarding Fouchier and Kawaoka’s work</a>:</div>
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Recent experiments that create novel, highly virulent and transmissible pathogens against which there is no human immunity are unethical … they impose a risk of accidental and deliberate release that, if it led to extensive spread of the new agent, could cost many lives. While such a release is unlikely in a specific laboratory conducting research under strict biosafety procedures, even a low likelihood should be taken seriously, given the scale of destruction if such an unlikely event were to occur. Furthermore, the likelihood of risk is multiplied as the number of laboratories conducting such research increases around the globe.</div>
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Given this risk, ethical principles, such as those embodied in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code">Nuremberg Code</a>, dictate that such experiments would be permissible only if they provide humanitarian benefits commensurate with the risk, and if these benefits cannot be achieved by less risky means.</div>
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We argue that the two main benefits claimed for these experiments – improved vaccine design and improved interpretation of surveillance – are unlikely to be achieved by the creation of potential pandemic pathogens (PPP), often termed “gain-of-function” (GOF) experiments.</div>
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There may be a widespread notion that there is scientific consensus that the pandemic did not come out of a lab. But in fact many of the most knowledgeable scientists in the field are notably silent. This includes Lipsitch at Harvard, Jonathan A. King at MIT and many others.</div>
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Just last year, Lynn Klotz of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation wrote a <a href="https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-biocontainment-labs-a-likely-pandemic-threat/">paper</a> in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists entitled “Human Error in High-biocontainment Labs: A Likely Pandemic Threat.” Wrote Klotz:</div>
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Incidents causing potential exposures to pathogens occur frequently in the high security laboratories often known by their acronyms, BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3) and BSL4. Lab incidents that lead to undetected or unreported laboratory-acquired infections can lead to the release of a disease into the community outside the lab; lab workers with such infections will leave work carrying the pathogen with them. If the agent involved were a potential pandemic pathogen, such a community release could lead to a worldwide pandemic with many fatalities. Of greatest concern is a release of a lab-created, mammalian-airborne-transmissible, highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, such as the airborne-transmissible H5N1 viruses created in the laboratories of Ron Fouchier in the Netherlands and Yoshihiro Kawaoka in Madison, Wisconsin.<br />
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<img alt="Corona: Caught in corona crossfire: How the current crisis has ..." height="480" src="https://m.economictimes.com/thumb/msid-74665367,width-1200,height-900,resizemode-4,imgsize-980841/from-the-trumpet-shaped-protrusion-at-the-centre-of-a-daffodil-or-narcissus-to-a-part-of-a-cornice-with-a-vertical-face-to-the-most-popular-shape-of-chandeliers-corona-has-long-been-an-acceptable-part-of-society-.jpg" width="640" /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Crazy, dangerous”</span></div>
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Boyle, <a href="https://law.illinois.edu/faculty-research/faculty-profiles/francis-boyle/">a professor of international law at the University of Illinois</a>, has condemned Fouchier, Kawaoka and others – including at least one of the authors of the recent Nature Medicine article in the strongest terms, calling such work a “criminal enterprise.” While Boyle has been embroiled in numerous controversies, he’s been especially dismissed by many on this issue. The “fact-checking” website <a href="https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/">Snopes</a> has described him as “a lawyer with no formal training in virology” – without noting that he wrote the relevant U.S. law.</div>
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As Boyle said <a href="https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2002/S00184/us-biowarfare-programs-have-13000-death-scientists-hard-at-work.htm">in 2015</a>:</div>
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Since September 11, 2001, we have spent around $100 billion on biological warfare. Effectively we now have an Offensive Biological Warfare Industry in this country that violates the <a href="http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/bwc/text">Biological Weapons Convention</a> and my <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/101st-congress/senate-bill/993/text">Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989</a>.</div>
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The law Boyle drafted states: “Whoever knowingly develops, produces, stockpiles, transfers, acquires, retains, or possesses any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system for use as a weapon, or knowingly assists a foreign state or any organization to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both. There is extraterritorial Federal jurisdiction over an offense under this section committed by or against a national of the United States.”</div>
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Boyle also warned:</div>
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Russia and China have undoubtedly reached the same conclusions I have derived from the same open and public sources, and have responded in kind. So what the world now witnesses is an all-out offensive biological warfare arms race among the major military powers of the world: United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, inter alia.</div>
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We have reconstructed the Offensive Biological Warfare Industry that we had deployed in this county before its prohibition by the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, described by Seymour Hersh in his groundbreaking expose “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Biological-Warfare-Americas-Arsenal/dp/0261631500/?tag=saloncom09-20">Chemical and Biological Warfare: America’s Hidden Arsenal</a>.” (1968)</div>
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Boyle now states that he has been “blackballed” in the media on this issue, despite his having written the relevant statute. The group he worked with on the law, the Council for Responsible Genetics, went under several years ago, making Boyle’s views against “biodefense” even more marginal as government money for dual use work poured into the field and critics within the scientific community have fallen silent. In turn, his denunciations have grown more sweeping.</div>
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In the 1990 book “<a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/preventing-biological-arms-race">Preventing a Biological Arms Race</a>,” scholar Susan Wright argued that current laws regarding bioweapons were insufficient, as there were “projects in which offensive and defensive aspects can be distinguished only by claimed motive.” Boyle notes, correctly, that current law he drafted does not make an exception for “defensive” work, but only for “prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.”</div>
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While Boyle is particularly vociferous in his condemnations, he is not alone. There has been irregular, but occasional media attention to this threat. The Guardian ran a piece in 2014, “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/11/crazy-dangerous-creation-deadly-airborne-flu-virus">Scientists condemn ‘crazy, dangerous’ creation of deadly airborne flu virus</a>,” after Kawaoka created a life-threatening virus that “closely resembles the 1918 Spanish flu strain that killed an estimated 50m people”:</div>
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“The work they are doing is absolutely crazy. The whole thing is exceedingly dangerous,” said Lord May, the former president of the Royal Society and one time chief science adviser to the UK government. “Yes, there is a danger, but it’s not arising from the viruses out there in the animals, it’s arising from the labs of grossly ambitious people.”</div>
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Boyle’s <a href="https://www.uticaphoenix.net/2020/03/24/is-the-recent-corona-virus-covid-19-a-biological-weapon/">charges beginning early this year</a> that the coronavirus was bioengineered – allegations recently mirrored by French virologist and <a href="https://www.theweek.in/news/world/2020/04/19/coronavirus-man-made-in-wuhan-lab-says-nobel-laureate.html">Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier</a> – have not been corroborated by any publicly produced findings of any US scientist. Boyle even charges that scientists like Ebright, who is at Rutgers, are compromised because the university got a <a href="https://phri.njms.rutgers.edu/programs-and-resources/rutgers-biocontainment-laboratory/">biosafety level 3 lab in 2017</a> – though Ebright is perhaps the most vocal eminent critic of this research, among US scientists. These and other controversies aside, Boyle’s concerns about the dangers of biowarfare are legitimate; indeed, Ebright shares them.</div>
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Some of the most vocal voices to discuss the origins of the novel coronavirus have been eager to minimize the dangers of lab work, or have focused almost exclusively on “wet markets” or “exotic” animals as the likely cause.</div>
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The media celebrated Laurie Garrett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, when she declared on Twitter on March 3 (in a since-deleted tweet) that the origin of the pandemic was discovered: “It’s pangolins. #COVID19 Researchers studied lung tissue from 12 of the scaled mammals that were illegally trafficked in Asia and found #SARSCoV2 in 3. The animals were found in Guangxi, China. Another virus+ smuggled sample found in Guangzhou.”</div>
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She was swiftly <a href="https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1246245488892039170">corrected</a> by Ebright: “Arrant nonsense. Did you even read the paper? Reported pangolin coronavirus is not SARS-CoV-2 and is not even particularly close to SARS-CoV-2. Bat coronavirus RaTG13 is much closer to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% identical) than reported pangolin coronavirus (92.4% identical).” He added: “No reason to invoke pangolin as intermediate. When A is much closer than B to C, in the absence of additional data, there is no rational basis to favor pathway A>B>C over pathway A>C.” When someone asked what Garrett was saying, Ebright <a href="https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1246246600487337985">responded</a>: “She is saying she is scientifically illiterate.”</div>
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The following day, Garrett corrected herself (<a href="https://twitter.com/samhusseini/status/1246478490611957760">without acknowledging Ebright</a>): “I blew it on the #Pangolins paper, & then took a few hours break from Twitter. It did NOT prove the species = source of #SARSCoV2. There’s a torrent of critique now, deservedly denouncing me & my posting. A lot of the critique is super-informative so leaving it all up 4 while.”</div>
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At least <a href="https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1238111898828066823">one Chinese government official</a> has responded to the allegation that the labs in Wuhan could be the source for the pandemic by alleging that perhaps the US is responsible instead. In American mainstream media, that has been reflexively treated as even <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-china-conspiracy-theory.html">more ridiculous</a> than the original allegation that the virus could have come from a lab.</div>
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Obviously the Chinese government’s allegations should not be taken at face value, but neither should US government claims – especially considering that US government labs were the apparent source for the <a href="https://www.wired.com/2011/03/ff_anthrax_fbi/">anthrax attacks in 2001</a>. Those attacks sent panic through the US and shut down Congress, allowing the Bush administration to enact the <a href="https://www.salon.com/2016/09/11/the-patriot-acts-ugly-legacy-the-u-s-normalized-xenophobia-after-911-and-planted-the-seeds-for-trumps-rise/">PATRIOT Act</a> and ramp up the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, in October 2001, media darlings like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/18/opinion/who-made-the-anthrax.html">Richard Butler</a> and <a href="http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2001/10/17/the-coming-conflict/">Andrew Sullivan</a> propagandized for war with Iraq because of the anthrax attacks. (Neither Iraq nor al-Qaida was involved.)</div>
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The 2001 anthrax attacks also provided much of the pretext for the surge in biolab spending since then, even though they apparently originated in a US or U.S.-allied lab. Indeed, those attacks remain <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/washington/18anthrax.html">shrouded</a> in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PquqlX8wnT0">mystery</a>.</div>
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The US government has also come up with elaborate cover stories to distract from its bioweapons work. For instance, the US government infamously claimed the 1953 death of Frank Olson, a scientist at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/06/from-mind-control-to-murder-how-a-deadly-fall-revealed-the-cias-darkest-secrets">LSD experiment gone wrong;</a> it now appears to have been an execution to cover up for US biological warfare.</div>
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Regardless of the cause of the current pandemic, these biowarfare/biodefense labs need far more scrutiny. The call to shut them down by Boyle and others needs to be clearly heard – and light must be shone on precisely what research is being conducted.</div>
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The secrecy of these labs may prevent us ever knowing with certainty the origins of the current pandemic. What we do know is this kind of lab work comes with real dangers. One might make a comparison to climate change: We cannot attribute an individual hurricane to man-made climate disruption, yet science tells us that human activity makes stronger hurricanes more likely. That brings us back to the imperative to cease the kinds of activities that produce such dangers in the first place.</div>
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If that doesn’t happen, the people of the planet will be at the mercy of the machinations and mistakes of state actors who are playing with fire for their geopolitical interests.</div>
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<b>Sam Husseini</b> <i>is senior analyst at the <a href="http://www.accuracy.org/">Institute for Public Accuracy</a>. He’s also set up <a href="http://votepact.org/">VotePact.org</a> – which helps break out of the two party bind. His latest personal writings are at <a href="http://husseini.posthaven.com/">http://husseini.posthaven.com/</a> and tweets at <a href="http://twitter.com/samhusseini">http://twitter.com/samhusseini</a>. </i><br />
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<a href="https://original.antiwar.com/shusseini/2020/04/24/did-this-virus-come-from-a-lab-maybe-not-but-it-exposes-the-threat-of-a-biowarfare-arms-race/" target="_blank"><span id="goog_559488985"></span>SOURCE</a><span id="goog_559488986"></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-77127163165587643142020-04-12T10:03:00.002+10:002021-01-30T19:59:46.218+10:00What an infectious disease specialist learned about the virus — from getting it <br />
By Michael S. Saag | April 6, 2020<br />
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<div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td><img height="400" src="https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2020/04/11/saag_custom-2f7951dc8278e7dc4babd5ed066b5a572ce41f62-s600-c85.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="341" /></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption"><span face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #767676; font-size: 12px; text-align: start;">Dr. Michael Saag, seen at his clinic at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.<br /><br /></span></td></tr></tbody></table>
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[Michael S. Saag is associate dean for global health and the director of the Center for AIDS Research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.]<br />
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"Nearly a month ago, on March 12, I was taking the train from Boston to New York City where I was meeting my son, Harry, a physician in Manhattan, for a long drive back to Alabama. On the train, I wrote an op-ed for the Birmingham News warning that the coronavirus was coming to our region and that we were not ready. The piece was published the next day.<br />
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When we pulled into our driveway in Birmingham that evening, Harry spiked a fever. We looked at each other and, as physicians, knew what this likely meant: covid-19. By Saturday afternoon, I, too, developed symptoms.<br />
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We both tested positive on Monday. Harry’s symptoms were mild and lasted five days, as might be expected for a young, otherwise healthy 34-year old. At 64, I was more concerned. My initial symptoms were mild — fatigue, cough, headache, fuzzy thinking and loss of my sense of smell.<br />
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By day six, things took a big turn for the worse. I began a daily cycle of afternoon chills, fever (101 degrees), profound muscle aches, loss of appetite, inability to concentrate and hypesthesia — numbness — on the top of my head. The symptoms would largely dissipate by the morning, leading me to believe I had “turned the corner,” only to cruelly, relentlessly, return the next afternoon. And the next. And the next. It was like “Groundhog Day.”<br />
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The cumulative effect over time was draining, both physically and spiritually. My fear of going to the hospital and being placed on a ventilator led to a desperate move: I started #hydroxychloroquine plus #azithromycin on day seven, based on anecdotal reports of 20 patients who received this treatment in France. I took the medication for five days. I couldn’t tell whether it worked, which is why we need clinical trials to prove its efficacy and safety, as Anthony S. Fauci has stated repeatedly.<br />
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After 14 days of battling the Mephistophelean virus, I finally won. The symptoms left completely a week ago.<br />
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What did I learn? First, despite all of my knowledge of infectious diseases and how this virus was predicted to behave, I was not prepared for the personal battle and the toll it takes. The horror of going through the symptoms is less about how I felt moment to moment, but rather the fear of the unknown. During those long, Rod Serling-like nights, I wasn’t sure whether I would make it to the next morning without having to be hospitalized, and worse, end up on a ventilator. This fear of what might lie ahead lurks in the nighttime fog of every Covid-19 patient.<br />
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I also was plagued by my knowledge of what was happening biologically. I knew that my symptoms were caused by my immune system’s over-exuberant response to the virus. The immune system coordinates its response to pathogens through the release of what are called #cytokines, chemicals released by immune cells that stimulate other cells of the immune system to counter-attack. These cytokines cause the symptoms of infection — the fever, muscle aches, fuzzy thinking and fatigue. The overproduction of these chemicals in response to this virus creates a so-called cytokine storm, sometimes of hurricane proportions. The battle with the cytokines is what leads to the intensive care unit and ventilators. It is almost more than the body can take.<br />
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Lying in bed, praying for morning to come as quickly as possible, I knew my cytokines were being produced in prodigious amounts to fight the virus.<br />
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Fortunately for me, the cytokine storm spared my lungs. I never became short of breath. I monitored my blood oxygen levels hourly; the value never went below the critical level of 90 percent saturation. But during the dark nights I wasn’t sure whether the values would hold.<br />
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The illness also taught me we need interventions that can stop the pathogen. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, has no known treatment. We desperately need one. Like most viruses, SARS-CoV-2 replicates at high rates (as in, billions of viruses a day), and it is the unchecked viral replication that the immune system is at work trying to shut down.<br />
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I know from my years as an AIDS researcher that we need antiviral drugs that stop the replication. We have this type of treatment for HIV and hepatitis C. Given early enough after infection, antiviral therapy shuts down viral replication completely, giving the host a chance to clear the virus without requiring a cytokine storm, thereby preventing the worst symptoms and minimizing death.<br />
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We won’t have a vaccine for at least 18 months. All we have in our armory to mollify the virus now is our knowledge that social distancing (staying at home and going out only for essential activities) is the only way to control virus transmission and limit the carnage.<br />
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This will not be the last time a virus skips from animal to human. It should be the last time we are so unprepared. But even for a doctor like me, the experience has been a humbling lesson that medicine has limits. Mother Nature rules. We can modify and lessen the symptoms, but her power is far greater than ours."<br />
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<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/06/what-an-infectious-disease-specialist-learned-about-virus-getting-it/">https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/06/what-an-infectious-disease-specialist-learned-about-virus-getting-it/</a><br />
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Dr. Saag also says that :<br />
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"To be honest, I can't tell if it (using hydroxychloroquine) did a hill of beans difference for me. Later, as I looked more into this, I've sort of regretted my decision because these drugs, especially when used together — the hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin — can have electrocardiogram abnormalities, and that puts somebody at risk for sudden death. So in retrospect, I'm a little ashamed of myself that I was so cavalier.<br />
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<b>How does this end:</b><br />
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Here's my thought. People are always asking, "Well, when can we let up, go back to life as we used to know it?" And the answer really isn't when; that's the wrong question. The correct question is how — how do we stop the stay-at-home?<br />
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My opinion is that if we just, let's say, pick a date — June 1, July 1, it doesn't matter to me. You pick your time when you pull back and you let people return to normal. I don't see how anything has changed from March 1. It's just that we've had a period where we were able to control transmission.<br />
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But why would the virus suddenly be different, and why would people's susceptibility be any different on July 1 than it is on March 1?<br />
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Rather, I think what we need to do is spend the next two to two and a half months preparing for the release of the stay-at-home restrictions and start aggressive case contact tracing — exactly like we do with tuberculosis, where a new case is identified and quickly a team comes in, tests that individual, gets them into care, gets them isolated. And then do tracing of every individual that has come into contact with them in the last two weeks. And then those individuals, depending on how their tests go, will either get into care if they're positive or be quarantined for another 14 days.<br />
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That's what we have to do. If we just release folks back into the community and do what we were doing in February, why would it be any different?"<br />
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(The second part above is extracted from here:-><br />
'Everything Broke Loose': A Doctor And COVID-19 Survivor Recalls His Ordeal - April 11, 2020 <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/11/832529963/everything-broke-loose-a-doctor-and-covid-19-survivor-recalls-the-ordeal" target="_blank">https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/11/832529963/everything-broke-loose-a-doctor-and-covid-19-survivor-recalls-the-ordeal </a>)</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-69618399312413760262020-04-03T09:42:00.000+10:002020-04-03T10:12:54.680+10:00Pandemic and socialism : a masterful political Lesson!by <a href="https://www.facebook.com/bruno.guigue.10" target="_blank">Bruno Guigue</a> - 1 April 2020<br />
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<img alt="main article image" height="259" src="https://www.sciencealert.com/images/2020-02/processed/processed/1280px-2019-nCoV-CDC-23311_1_1024.png" width="640" /><br />
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Decomposed western democracies, on the verge of a health implosion, incapable of dealing with the epidemic when we are only at the beginning, and whose versatile leaders told us in January that there was no problem, in February that it was only a bad flu, and at the beginning of March that it was necessary to go to vote and we agglutinate in chorus on the terraces of the bistros.<br />
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Western leaders who count on collective immunity synonymous with the extermination of our elders to put an end to the epidemic, but who are careful not to say it and invoke a war they have already lost for want of winning it; incompetent and corrupt sold to Big Pharma who are reluctant to admit results that seem to be proven and that deserve to be massively tested; whether it is confinement, screening or treatment, indecision and cacophony which gives the impression that there is no pilot on the plane.<br />
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In the spotlight of curious doctors who, failing to go to the front in white coats, spend their time perouring on TV sets in the company of journalistic scoundrels whose vileness transpires in the slightest of their words; far from the spotlight, on the other hand, nursing staff who heroically fight under the contempt of this ruling class who demanded the dismantling of the public hospital to increase its profits.<br />
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A healthcare system which was the pride of the nation, and which has been sacrificed on the altar of capital with neoliberal reforms; exemplary social security created by the communists in 1945, which saved millions of lives, but which the oligarchy has dismantled at the expense of public health; a massive abandonment of populations to the logic of individual profit, today, when it is necessary to mobilize the spirit of solidarity and firmly seize the wealth where it is found.<br />
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A blatant failure, a massive neglect of the so-called democracies in the face of the challenges that this pandemic which is not the first and which will not be the last presents to us; the unilateral disarmament of the most vulnerable populations in the face of the disease orchestrated by governments which have delivered the people of France to their worst enemies; who offered it as pasture to an oligarchy which would sell its mother to thicken its wallet with the illusory aim of filling an empty and plunged existence, as Marx says, "in the icy waters of selfish calculation".<br />
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At the other end of the world, the Chinese are relentlessly vilified by our media, shamelessly slandered by the leaders of the United States, while they have done everything to curb the epidemic, in two months, under the aegis of 'a state for which public health is a national priority and solidarity is something other than an election campaign slogan sponsored by business bankers; Asian powers which succeed in stemming the evil by mobilizing colossal means, leaning on collective values which have not undergone there as with us the neoliberal rolling; a huge country, Russia, which has managed to contain the spread of the epidemic on national soil.<br />
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Chinese, Cuban, Venezuelan and Russian medical teams who fly to the rescue of Italy, a European country betrayed by its partners; a European Union whose uselessness is patent, pathetic impotence, dilapidated exposed to the eyes of all in this inability to use the least mechanism of solidarity; Cuban doctors authorized to intervene in Martinique, a veritable snub for a great capitalist power forced to call to the rescue the only socialist state in the Caribbean.<br />
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This same country, Cuba, which contains the epidemic by mobilizing an exemplary health system, praised by the WHO, and which is worth to the Cuban people a life expectancy of 80 years, now greater than that of the United States; the indisputable success, therefore, of countries with a strong, sovereign and concerned with public health; States ready to agree to slow growth, if necessary, to save human lives; while Western leaders make the opposite choice, at the risk of sacrificing both the economy and health, ultimately, letting the situation get worse.<br />
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A formidable lesson of things administered to the people, a masterful political lesson, in the end, on the comparative virtues of the so-called democracies which abandon them to their fate and of the so-called dictatorships which do everything to save them from an announced death; a lesson on the superiority of Chinese or Cuban socialism, and to tell the truth of real progressism, on regimes which have only human rights in their mouths, but which act as if the pandemic were the effect of laws natural and have their eyes riveted on the stock market prices while the hecatomb continues.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">Translation of the post below: "For those who believe that freedom of speech exists in capitalist countries, I would like to point out that my article "Pandemic and socialism: a masterful political lesson" has just been censored on Facebook after having 1028 shares. You can check it out." </span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-74227115484919714882020-03-23T21:08:00.002+10:002020-03-23T23:14:20.766+10:00Potential treatments for COVID-19<img height="426" src="https://img2.chinadaily.com.cn/images/202003/19/5e72eafaa3101282065f19c8.jpeg" width="640" /><br />
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By Ma Chi | Updated: 2020-03-19<br />
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So far there are no specific medications for COVID-19. But some drugs and therapies have been proven to be effective in treating patients. Let's have a look at them.<br />
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<b>1. Favipiravir</b><br />
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<b>It is an antiviral drug developed in Japan to be used against many viruses built around ribonucleic acid - a substance essential for human life - including the novel coronavirus</b>.<br />
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Chinese researchers have completed clinical studies of Favipiravir, which shows promising clinical efficacy in treating novel coronavirus pneumonia, Zhang Xinmin, head of the China National Center for Biotechnology Development, said on March 17.<br />
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Experiments have shown that patients treated with Favipiravir recovered more quickly and their lung conditions improved better than patients in the control group.<br />
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The Third People's Hospital of Shenzhen in Guangdong province conducted a clinical trial on 80 patients, with 35 receiving the drug. The results showed that patients who took Favipiravir tested negative within four days of treatment, whereas patients in the control group needed 11 days to test negative.<br />
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The lung conditions of 91.4 percent of the treated group improved as shown in chest imaging, compared with 62.2 percent of the control group, Zhang said.<br />
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In terms of safety, Zhang said it has shown no obvious adverse effects.<br />
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<figure class="image" style="background-color: white; color: #414040; display: table; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px auto 20px; text-align: center; width: fit-content;"><img data-from="newsroom" data-mimetype="image/jpeg" height="426" id="img-5e72eafaa3101282065f19ca" src="https://img2.chinadaily.com.cn/images/202003/19/5e72eafaa3101282065f19ca.jpeg" style="border: 0px; height: auto !important; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" width="640" /><figcaption style="caption-side: bottom; display: table-caption; font-size: 12pt; max-width: 100%; text-align: left; width: 684.8px;">A worker checks tablets on a chloroquine phosphate production line in Nantong, Jiangsu province, in February. [Photo/Xinhua]</figcaption></figure><br />
<b>2. Chloroquine phosphate</b><br />
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Developed in the 1950s to <b>treat malaria</b>, the drug has shown the potential to inhibit coronavirus growth during in vitro tests.<br />
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Zhong Nanshan, China's leading epidemic control expert, said early clinical results show that severe patients have recovered more quickly after taking the medicine compared to other drugs.<br />
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The medicine is included in the latest guideline on diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 patients released by the National Health Commission.<br />
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<figure class="image" style="background-color: white; color: #414040; display: table; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 18px; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: fit-content;"><img data-from="newsroom" data-mimetype="image/jpeg" height="426" id="img-5e72eafaa3101282065f19cc" src="https://img2.chinadaily.com.cn/images/202003/19/5e72eafaa3101282065f19cc.jpeg" style="border: 0px; height: auto !important; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" width="640" /><figcaption style="caption-side: bottom; display: table-caption; font-size: 12pt; max-width: 100%; text-align: left; width: 684.8px;">A patient who has recovered from novel coronavirus infection donates plasma at Hubei General Hospital in Central China's Hubei province, on Feb 16, 2020. [Photo by Zhu Xingxin/China Daily]</figcaption></figure><br />
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<b>3. Plasma transfusion therapy</b><br />
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Convalescent plasma collected from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 contains <b>antibodies</b> that are effective in combating the virus.<br />
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Plasma transfusion therapy has been used to treat critically ill patients infected with the novel coronavirus in China. As of March 8, more than 1,000 recovered patients have donated more than 350,000 milliliters of plasma to help save other patients.<br />
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About 200 to 300 milliliters of pure plasma are drawn from donors each time.<br />
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As plasma donated from recovered patients is in short supply and involves a complicated processing procedure and high costs, its use is mainly limited to the treatment of severe patients.</div>
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<figure class="image" style="background-color: white; color: #414040; display: table; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px auto 20px; text-align: center; width: fit-content;"><img data-from="newsroom" data-mimetype="image/jpeg" id="img-5e72eafaa3101282065f19ce" src="https://img2.chinadaily.com.cn/images/202003/19/5e72eafaa3101282065f19ce.jpeg" style="border: 0px; height: auto !important; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" /><figcaption style="caption-side: bottom; display: table-caption; font-size: 12pt; max-width: 100%; text-align: left; width: 684.8px;">Infected patients are given Remdesivir, a drug undergoing trials, at a hospital in Wuhan, Hubei province, in February. [Photo by CHEN ZHUO/FOR CHINA DAILY]</figcaption></figure><br />
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<b>4. Remdesivir</b><br />
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Remdesivir is an antiviral medication developed by US biotechnology company Gilead Sciences as a treatment for <b>Ebola</b>. It is not being tested as a potential COVID-19 treatment.<br />
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Cao Bin, who leads the trials in China, said studies have shown that Remdesivir is effective in arresting the growth of the coronavirus in vitro, which means the procedure was conducted in a controlled environment outside of a living organism.<br />
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<figure class="image" style="background-color: white; color: #414040; display: table; font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 18px; margin: 0px auto 20px; text-align: center; width: fit-content;"><img data-from="newsroom" data-mimetype="image/png" id="img-5e72eafaa3101282065f19d0" src="https://img2.chinadaily.com.cn/images/202003/19/5e72eafaa3101282065f19d0.png" style="border: 0px; height: auto !important; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" /><figcaption style="caption-side: bottom; display: table-caption; font-size: 12pt; max-width: 100%; text-align: left; width: 684.8px;">Pharmacists dispense medicines according to Lung Cleansing and Detoxifying Decoction prescriptions at Anhui University of Chinese Medicine on Feb 21, 2020. [Photo/Xinhua]</figcaption></figure><br />
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<b>5. Traditional Chinese medicine</b><br />
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Traditional Chinese medicine has also played a big role in the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. More than 90 percent of patients infected with the novel coronavirus in China have been treated with TCM.<br />
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"<a href="https://covid-19.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202003/17/WS5e702f52a31012821727fa19_3.html">Three formulas and three medicines</a>" have been proven to be effective in curbing the virus.</div>
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<a href="http://covid-19.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202003/19/WS5e72e741a3101282172806a4_1.html" target="_blank">SOURCE</a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-79799483949486982942020-03-19T09:57:00.000+10:002020-03-19T09:57:05.405+10:00The Sober Math Everyone Must Understand about the Pandemic<div class="gt gu ea bi gv b gw gx gy gz ha hb hc hd he hf hg ci" data-selectable-paragraph="" id="cc71" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.58; margin-bottom: -0.46em; margin-top: 2em; word-break: break-word;">
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<span style="color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.83921568627451); font-family: medium-content-serif-font, Georgia, Cambria, Times New Roman, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: 21px; letter-spacing: -0.084px;">by Jason S Warner - March 17, 2020</span></span></div>
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This is a long post addressing two underlying issues with the current response to the pandemic that leave me concerned. It’s the longest post I’ve ever written.</div>
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For those of you not taking action, or believing the pandemic to be “over hyped”, you can make fun of me as much as you want now or when this is over. You can make me the subject of memes and post it everywhere. I will pose for the picture. I am not trying to convince you, but I do feel compelled to share information that I deem critical to all of us, which is why I am posting this at all.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">WHY YOU SHOULD TAKE 5 MINUTES TO READ AND CONSIDER THE INFORMATION I AM SHARING:</span></div>
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As of 3/15/20 at 9 am PST this post has been shared over 50k times since it was posted 2 days ago. So a lot of people find value in the post and although it’s a long read, I believe you will find this information valuable too.</div>
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For those of you who don’t know me well, I am analytical and metered. I don’t freak out nor do I respond emotionally. I also don’t post a bunch of bullshit or political or controversial stuff on Facebook. I founded and am CEO of a successful software company that provides SaaS based data, analytics, and dashboards to recruiting departments at companies we all know. As you would expect, I am data driven and fact based. Before founding my company I held executive roles leading very large recruiting teams at some of the world’s fastest growing companies such as Starbucks and Google. At Google I was fortunate enough to report to Sheryl Sandberg before she took the Facebook COO role. I was a Chemical Engineering major in college and have a business degree from a top undergraduate business school. I am not one for hyperbole or histrionics. <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">My bullshit factor is close to zero.</span></div>
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I share all this personal information only to help solidify that this post may be worth reading and sharing with others. I would encourage you to forward or share this post at your discretion. Many people do not understand what is happening with the pandemic to the degree required which is why I took the time to write this and share this on Facebook.</div>
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Now that I’ve gotten the introduction out of the way, here are two issues I want to bring to everyone’s attention.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">ISSUE ONE: SOCIAL NORMS ARE POWERFUL MOTIVATORS AND GETTING IN THE WAY OF PEOPLE TAKING THE RIGHT STEPS IN RESPONSE TO THE PANDEMIC:</span></div>
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One of the current problems with addressing the pandemic is the social pressures of taking action today. It’s awkward, and feels like an over-reaction. The reason it feels like an overreaction is that most people OVERWEIGHT the currently reported cases and inherently UNDERWEIGHT the mathematics of how the virus is spreading and what will happen in about 30 days time. This is because our brains tend to think linearly as opposed to logarithmically. It’s the same reason many people don’t save for retirement or understand compound interest.</div>
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To create a new social norm, human beings like to see behavior modeled. This serves as a signal that says, “oh, someone else is doing it so I should do it also.”</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">SO HERE IS A SOCIAL BENCHMARK FOR REFERENCE — THIS IS WHAT I’VE DONE FOR MY FAMILY TO DATE:</span></div>
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I have already isolated my family. We have canceled EVERYTHING. We have canceled previously scheduled doctor visits. Social get togethers. No play dates. Normal routine meetings. Everything has been canceled. It’s difficult and socially awkward. Some of you think I’m crazy, but I’m doing it not because I am afraid, but because I am good at math (more on that in part 2). I had to have my 16 year old daughter quit her job coaching junior gymnasts at the local gym, with one day’s notice and also tell my kids they can’t attend youth group at church. Both of those were tough discussions. I told a very close friend he shouldn’t stay at my house this weekend even though he was planning to and had booked his flight from the Bay Area. I canceled another dear friend’s visit for later this month to go snowboarding on Mt Bachelor.</div>
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We are not eating out. Our kids are already doing online school so we don’t have to make changes there. I would not send my kids to school even if they were in public or private school. We have eliminated all non-essential contact with other people. We will only venture out to grocery shop when required. We will still go outside to parks, go mountain biking, hiking, and recreate to keep ourselves sane and do other things as a family, just not with other people. We have stocked up on food and have a supply for ~2 months. We have stocked up on other goods that if depleted would create hardship, like medicines and feminine hygiene products. We have planned for shortages of essential items.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">THE REASON I HAVE CHOSEN THIS ROUTE FOR MY FAMILY IS MULTI FACETED:</span></div>
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1. Although my family is considered low risk (I’m 49 in good health, Angi is 46 and in good health, and our kids are 14 and 16), <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">we must assume that the healthcare system cannot help us, because the hospitals will become overwhelmed very quickly.</span> <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Most American hospitals will become overwhelmed in approximately 30 days unless something changes.</span> More on this in part 2 below. So although we are in great health and unlikely to become gravely ill, the risk is greater if you do not have access to the medical care that you need. This is something for everyone to consider. As a society we are accustomed to having access to the best medical care available. Our medical system will be overwhelmed unless we practice social distancing at scale. That said, the medical teams in Italy are seeing an alarming number of cases from people in their 40s and 50s. Triage tents are already going up in the parking lots at many hospitals close to the epicenters in the United States.</div>
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2. <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">It’s not a matter of if social distancing will take place, it’s a matter of when.</span> This is because social distancing is the only way to stop the virus today.</div>
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As I will explain in part 2 below, <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">starting now is FAR more effective than starting even 2 days from now or tomorrow. </span>This has been proven by Italy and China (and soon to be France and other European countries who have been slow to respond.) [updated as of 3/14 France is now on lockdown mandated by the government]. Wuhan went on lockdown after roughly 400 cases were identified (and they had access to testing that America has systematically failed to do well to date). The US already has more than 4 times this number of known infected cases as Wuhan did when it was shut down, and our citizens are far more mobile and therefore spreading the virus more broadly when compared to Wuhan. Yet our response is tepid at best.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">If hand washing and “being smart” were sufficient Italy would not be in crisis. </span>So I pray the draconian measures are coming from our government, because they are required to stop the spread of the virus. It’s better to start sooner than later as the cost is actually far greater if we wait. I pray they close all schools and non-essential services the way that Italy and China have done.</div>
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3. <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Spreading the virus puts those in the high-risk category at much greater risk. This is the moral argument.</span> It’s a strong argument because there are only two ways, as of today, that the virus can be stopped: let it run its course and infect 100s of millions of people, or social distancing. There is no other way today. If you don’t practice social distancing, people downstream from you that you transmit the virus to will die, and many will suffer.</div>
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4. <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">The risk of infection is increasing exponentially, because the quantity of infected people, most who will not show symptoms, is doubling every three days. </span>So the longer you wait to self-isolate, the greater the chance of you or someone you love becoming infected and then you infecting others because more of the population is becoming infected. There are twice as many infected people today as there was on Tuesday.</div>
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5. <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">The virus is already in your town. It’s everywhere. </span>Cases are typically only discovered when someone gets sick enough to seek medical attention. This is important as it typically takes ~5 days to START showing ANY symptoms. Here’s the math: For every known case there are approximately 50 unknown cases. This is because if I become sick, I infect several people today, and they infect a few people each tomorrow (as do I), and the total count of infected people doubles every 3 days until I get so sick I get hospitalized or get tested and become a “known case”. But in the time it takes me to figure out I am sick 50 others downline from me now have the virus. So every third day the infection rate doubles until I get so sick that I realize I have the virus an am hospitalized or otherwise tested. Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital estimate that there are 50x more infections than known infections as reported (citation below). The implication of this is that the virus is already “everywhere” and spreading regardless if your city has zero, few or many reported cases. So instead of the 1573 reported known cases today there are likely 78,650 cases, at least, in the United States. Which will double to 157,300 by this Sunday. And this will double to 314,600 cases by this coming Wednesday. So in less than 1 week the number of total infected in the United States will quadruple. This is the nature of exponential math. It’s actually unfortunate that we are publishing the figures for known cases as it diverts attention away from more important numbers (like the range of estimated actual cases). [Update as of 3/15/20 — I’ve been sent more research that may add clarity to the ACTUAL cases vs CONFIRMED cases and will update this post with any conclusions]</div>
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6. <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Some people cannot, or will not, practice social distancing for a variety of reasons and will continue to spread the virus to many people. So everyone else must start today.</span></div>
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The reasons above are why I have begun to practice social distancing. It’s not easy. <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">But you should do it too.</span></div>
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The hospitals will be at capacity and there are not enough ventilators. You will hear a lot about this issue in the coming few weeks… the shortage of ventilators.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">ISSUE TWO: MANY PEOPLE ARE FOCUSED ON THE WRONG NUMBERS:</span></div>
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Yes, the virus only kills a small percentage of those afflicted. Yes, the flu kills 10s of thousands of people annually. Yes, 80% of people will experience lightweight symptoms with COVID19. Yes the mortality rate of COVID19 is relatively low (1–2%). All of this true, but is immaterial. They are the wrong numbers to focus on…</div>
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The nature of exponential math is that the infection rates start slowly, and then goes off like a bomb and overwhelms the hospitals. You will understand this math clearly in the next section if you do the short math exercise. Evergreen hospital in Seattle is already in triage. I have heard credible reports from people on the ground that they are already becoming overwhelmed. And the bomb won’t really go off for a few more days. Probably by Wednesday, March 18th (next week). In just a few days from now we will hear grave reports from Seattle hospitals. [update as of 3/15/20 — see the comments section below for an update from a staff member at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland, WA]</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">You should assume the virus is everywhere at this point, even if you have no confirmed cases in your area.</span></div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">YOU SHOULD DO THIS SIMPLE 2 MINUTE MATH EXERCISE (NO REALLY TAKE TWO MINUTES AND DO IT):</span></div>
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To further understand exponential growth, take the number of confirmed cases in your area and multiply by 10 (or 50 if you believe Harvard and Massachusetts General estimations) to account for the cases that are not yet confirmed. If you have no confirmed cases choose a small number. I’d suggest 10 cases in your city, if no cases are yet reported. But you can use whatever number you like. This number of infected people doubles every ~3 days as the infection spreads. So literally take your number, and multiply by 2. Then do it again. Then do it again. Then do it again. Do this multiplication exercise 10 times in total.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x (the number of estimated infections in your city today (not just the reported cases)).</span></div>
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This result is the estimate for the actual cases in your area 30 days from now. The math will take 30 seconds to complete with a calculator and it’s worth doing the math to see how it grows. This end number is the number of cases in your city 30 days from today if a large percentage of the population do not practice social distancing.</div>
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2 to the 10th power is 1024. When something doubles 10 times, it’s the same as multiplying by 1024. The infection rate of the virus doubles every 3 days. <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">In thirty days there will be 1,024 times the number of infected people in your area as there is today if your community does not immediately put social distancing into practice. One thousand and twenty four times as many infected people as there is today, in just 30 days.</span></div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Next, divide the final number (the scary big one) you just calculated by the current population of your city and you will be able to get the percentage of people THAT YOU KNOW PERSONALLY who will be infected 30 days from now.</span></div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">THIS PART IS IMPORTANT: </span>Next take 15% (multiply by 0.15) of that final 30 day number of total infected people (the number you calculated by multiplying by 2 ten times). This will provide an estimate of the serious cases which will require hospitalization, and compare it to the number of beds and ventilators available at your local hospital. Google the “number of beds” and the name of your local hospital now. It takes 2 seconds and the number of beds is easy to find. 65% of beds are already occupied by patients unrelated to the coronavirus. St Charles in Bend, Oregon where I live, has 226 beds and the town is roughly 100,000 people. Most hospitals have on average, 40 or fewer ventilators. 5% of patients require ICU treatment. There are very few ICU beds compared to regular beds in hospitals. There are very few negative pressure areas in any hospital to deal with the containment of airborne diseases.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">These numbers you just calculated are the Big Problem: Too many patients, not enough beds, and a serious shortage of ventilators (the biggest problem) if we don’t immediately begin social distancing. More on this biggest problem related to the insufficient quantity of ventilators is below.</span></div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">COUNTRIES AND CITIES THAT GET OVERWHELMED WILL HAVE A MUCH GREATER MORTALITY RATE BECAUSE THEY WON’T BE ABLE TO ADEQUATELY PROVIDE MEDICAL CARE.</span></div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">And by medical care I mean not just coronavirus patients. </span>Your son or daughter that needs acute care surgery this May for his badly broken leg will be attended to by an orthopedic doctor that has been working at maximum capacity and working 18 hour shifts for 7 days every week for 6 weeks because it was required to care for all the coronavirus patients at her hospital. Or the orthopedic surgeon will be sick with the virus and your son or daughter will be operated on in a tent in the hospital parking lot by a non-expert or a member of the National Guard. Your elderly Mom that has diabetes and goes into acute distress next month may not receive ANY medical care because the doctors are consumed and have to prioritize patients based on triage guidelines based on success rate probabilities. Your sibling’s family that are all injured in a terrible car crash in June will have diminished care. If one of them needs a ventilator there will be none available because all of them will be in use by critical coronavirus patients. Your young friend with cancer and a compromised immune system from treatment will succumb even though the cancer was curable and the treatment was working, because their body was too fragile to combat the coronavirus due to the chemotherapy and they couldn’t receive the customized, acute care required due to the hospital being overwhelmed. All of the above is currently happening in Italy, who had the same number of infections we have today just 2 weeks ago. You must start social distancing today.</div>
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The count of actual virus infections doubles every ~3 days. The news and government agencies are lagging in their response. So we hear that the US only has 1573 cases today (3/12/20) [update as of 3/15/20: 3115 confirmed cases), ( see <a class="ar dt du dv dw dx" href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.worldometers.info%2Fcoronavirus%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR32FJP6dwhHaIcYUPFYcCBDjYQZTGD-_KWjdwhkfPBVm7iBy4MJFd4H6C0&h=AT20xQ5uB9X0yGo5jmb_qtmES-wDhLnAnc5DRIFs-nVQjGLCpA4j4Itkn3r_8xXYp9COeklakmPuzfCjd4ODUU_LYoTqkIRsRFG7yXt6wSwLobrNjNXuTfnakvXuIrKfWY_9yNxSa8Oc8ZU_05RZvN4cFjLv" rel="noopener nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-image: url("data:image/svg+xml; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 1px 1px; box-sizing: inherit; http: //www.w3.org/2000/svg\"><line x1=\"0\" y1=\"0\" x2=\"1\" y2=\"1\" stroke=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.84)\" /></svg>"); text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/</a>) and it doesn’t seem like a lot. It would be better to report the estimated actual cases, since reported cases don’t tell us much. However, we know from China that the actual number of cases are at least an order of magnitude greater than the reported cases, because people get infected and do not display symptoms. In math, an “order of magnitude” means ten times difference, or put another way, a factor of 10. 100 is 10 times greater than 10, so it’s an order of magnitude greater.</div>
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Harvard Medical School / Massachusetts General Hospital just released their estimate (recording is here: <a class="ar dt du dv dw dx" href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fexternalmediasite.partners.org%2FMediasite%2FPlay%2F53a4003de5ab4b4da5902f078744435a1d%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR3-HS64-QB9AEbJdxV7ovcCB6nDXGgOkEawgTOYtQx-b720cIKVaJVPq-k&h=AT0cFGJ2kVgvRvBxtnR5jEpK-oXjP_j6ftEMmJsss_XdAtuIcNv__ZI5DUnIBnDk_z6p5vbToAEW842x6PI8kDF1xTkSpq1-i3F8V-9JG1gCHFA4nzJFXdQp-RnPIDM3wsZSQre1yNTOcBphYNbM1i1CuwG7" rel="noopener nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-image: url("data:image/svg+xml; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 1px 1px; box-sizing: inherit; http: //www.w3.org/2000/svg\"><line x1=\"0\" y1=\"0\" x2=\"1\" y2=\"1\" stroke=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.84)\" /></svg>"); text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://externalmediasite.partners.org/…/53a4003de5ab4b4da5…</a>) that the actual cases are 50x greater than the reported cases. So we likely have 75,000 cases in the United States already. The number of reported cases is not that important.</div>
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But let’s assume the current number of cases is only 10,000 ACTUAL cases in the United States just to be conservative and model out what will happen:</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">If we don’t stop the virus from spreading, in 30 days we will have 2 to the 10th power more cases of infected people because the infection count doubles every 3 days (the virus doubles every 3 days and there are 10, 3 day periods in 30 days).</span></div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">This math is familiar if you did the exercise above. If not, go up and do the math exercise.</span> The math: 2 to the 10th power means 1,024 times as many cases as we have today (2 times 2 repeated 10 times).</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">This number is a catastrophically big problem for all of us:</span> We will have 10 million+ actual cases (10,000 actual cases today x 1,024) in the United States in just 30 days’ time if we continue without extreme social distancing. 10 million people with the virus. And it will keep doubling every 3 days unless we practice social distancing.</div>
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15% of cases require significant medical attention, which means that 1.5 million people will require significant medical attention if 10 million people get infected (15% of 10 Million total infections = 1.5 million people requiring hospitalization).</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">1.5 million hospitalizations is way more than we have beds for at hospitals in the United States. </span>And 65% of all beds are already occupied in our hospitals. But many patients (5%) with the virus need ICU beds, not just any old hospital bed. Only about 10% of hospital beds are considered intensive care beds. So we will have a huge bed shortage, but that is not the biggest problem, as we can erect temporary ICU shelters and bring in more temporary beds, as Italy has already done, and California and Washington hospitals have already done. Evergreen Hospital in Seattle has already erected temporary triage tents in the parking lot as of 3/13/20. All regular beds are full at Evergreen Hospital as of yesterday.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Once the government of China, Norway, and Italy came to understand this math, they reacted accordingly and shut EVERYTHING down.</span> [update as of 3/15/20 now France has done the same lockdown]. Extreme social distancing is the only response available to stop the virus today. The United States is not responding well nor are other countries like the UK. Countries that do not respond well will pay a much larger, catastrophic price.</div>
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But hospital beds are not the big problem. <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">The lack of ventilators is the big problem.</span> Most estimates peg the ventilators in the United States at roughly 100,000 to 150,000 units. See the study from last month: <a class="ar dt du dv dw dx" href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.centerforhealthsecurity.org%2Fresources%2FCOVID-19%2F200214-VentilatorAvailability-factsheet.pdf%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR3I6D-Nn5q22OiIvZhENtMzCmZQ8bAy8cfSt7GOkJMvaJmGYVBraqb0w10&h=AT22rXd3EP58NSUIdMQqDZH860ETpOT6I-dLnNSnhkPLpXIPcuXr37BembJYzjsZTV3IGXJpcUPjmziEsE20HEn7Ki-H7cqJVCW9XPonfDHpwZBr5FuiC4Y6vJZ5Te23zX6hCdVTnrSGxF9_iVsvZsF-4zdX" rel="noopener nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-image: url("data:image/svg+xml; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 1px 1px; box-sizing: inherit; http: //www.w3.org/2000/svg\"><line x1=\"0\" y1=\"0\" x2=\"1\" y2=\"1\" stroke=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.84)\" /></svg>"); text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/…/200214-VentilatorA…</a></div>
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The primary and most serious comorbid (comorbid is a medical term that means co-existing or happening at the same time) condition brought on by the Coronavirus is something called bilateral interstitial pneumonia which requires ventilators for treatment of seriously ill patients. So if 1.5M people of the 10 million infected 30 days from now require hospital care (15% of the 10M estimated total infections), 1.3M may not get the care that they need because we don’t have enough ventilators, beds, and ICU beds in the United States. And remember, this is only if ALL OF US EFFECTIVELY start social distancing by April 11th (30 days from today). This increases the mortality rate significantly.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">BUT IF WE START EXTREME SOCIAL DISTANCING BY MARCH 23 (12 days from original writing), WE AVOID OVER 1.4 MILLION PEOPLE GETTING CRITICALLY ILL AND OVERWHELMING THE HOSPITALS:</span></div>
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If everyone takes extreme measures to social distance, and the United States can dramatically reduce the spread of the virus 12 days from now, the math is very different, as the exponential growth will only be 2 to the 4th power (12 days divided by the doubling rate of every 3 days equals the exponent of 4):</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16</span></div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">So instead of 10 Million cases in the United States if we wait 30 days, if we act 18 days sooner, we will have only 160,000 cases</span> (16 times the estimated 10,000 actual cases as of today), of which 15% are likely to require hospitalization. This is 24,000 critical patients (a huge difference compared to 1.5 million acute patients). The difference between taking extreme measures now, versus waiting even a few days, is very large due to how exponents work in math.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">THE OUTCOME IS EVEN BETTER IF WE TAKE ACTION IN THE NEXT 6 DAYS:</span> If the vast majority of the population self isolates and implements social distancing in only 6 days from now the exponential math is 2 to the 2nd power (6 days divided by the 3 days it takes the virus to double means the exponent is only 2). In math this is “two squared”.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">2 x 2 = 4</span></div>
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Multiplied by the estimated 10,000 ACTUAL cases as of today (3/12/20) that means only 40,000 total cases will develop, 15% of which may be critical which is 6,000 critical patients.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">This is why you should share this post broadly. If people begin social distancing in the next 6 days it will greatly reduce the impact on all of us. It’s why they say a “post goes viral”.</span></div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">SOCIAL DISTANCING WILL REDUCE THE FINANCIAL IMPACT TO YOU AND YOUR FAMILY:</span></div>
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Finally, the longer everyone waits to practice significant social distancing the greater the economic hardship will be on all of us. Lost jobs. Mortgage defaults. Closed businesses. Bankruptcies. All will be minimized if you start social distancing today.</div>
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Some of the reasons the economic impacts will be reduced are worth mentioning: If we stop the virus now the overall duration of the outbreak will be far shorter. The stock market will normalize more quickly and recover more quickly. Businesses and people will be able to survive a shorter duration outbreak vs a longer duration outbreak. More companies will avoid bankruptcy if we begin to practice social distancing now.</div>
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This is a big financial reason to begin social distancing if you are employed by any company: if companies see that the virus is being slowed, they will be less likely to conduct layoffs. You will be more likely to be laid off or experience a job-related event if we don’t practice social distancing immediately. As an HR executive, I’ve been involved in many, many layoffs. It’s the last thing companies want to do. But if they see that the pandemic will be shorter lived vs long and drawn out, they are less likely to make the permanent decision of laying off staff.</div>
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The overall economic impact that hits your bank account will be greater if you wait or you don’t practice social distancing. This is why Norway acted now, because it’s less economic impact to take drastic measures early than to do them later, and it saves a lot of lives and suffering by doing so. And Norway has only one confirmed death as of this writing.</div>
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Many people have suggested they want to support local restaurants and other businesses, who have seen sales drop by 50–90%. Stopping by and visiting them won’t save them. What will save them is social distancing and what you do after the pandemic is over. If you are concerned, call them and buy a gift certificate over the phone.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">START TODAY. I CAN’T STRESS THIS ENOUGH. YOU MUST START TODAY.</span></div>
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Finally, the article that I posted yesterday written by Tomas Pueyo has been read 30M times in the last few days and has been updated with new information. It’s worth reading again.</div>
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Here’s that link:</div>
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<a class="ar dt du dv dw dx" href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2F%40tomaspueyo%2Fcoronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0En_350-hVCZ5R4_4ujbJQtn6sT7sNRI5hEHIUljXb29xVzj8IIRL3A0s&h=AT02-YrEUtkyCMkhIruvJdWMV3X_Ey4o20qbwUn_CBcPhPA0YFiJncOrSPaphEF8E4IVYhTPKTf8Vxs8u2QKd6L4QBDMcNqoHSggwxGmUdQv0ZEa0QlWzX8upYhgbiiiUrz1PsqN4Ad30VvjP1Vv9IBvC_GG" rel="noopener nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-image: url("data:image/svg+xml; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 1px 1px; box-sizing: inherit; http: //www.w3.org/2000/svg\"><line x1=\"0\" y1=\"0\" x2=\"1\" y2=\"1\" stroke=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.84)\" /></svg>"); text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://medium.com/…/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-d…</a></div>
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Other up to date data I frequently consult regarding the pandemic is here:</div>
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<a class="ar dt du dv dw dx" href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.worldometers.info%2Fcoronavirus%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0ZG924MkXrTx9hYEMBt-22arg6QHbn0QLqtOqJs7_mMBx1UfBxNeUDnoE&h=AT0tKuMTrOCO0e5QaxGAkFY-MgOcWgsj7BeIklzd1HquiIdN0vIjgTVa8pNw8YPvMMn29d08RTBQcZKiJR-jsyIswq-wWk8yst0ZwiQxfBxjg3cgBkh0gOEndrrbHQVKf0gaQfR4hgTjR9Xb3kxrdrWjcI7d" rel="noopener nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-image: url("data:image/svg+xml; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 1px 1px; box-sizing: inherit; http: //www.w3.org/2000/svg\"><line x1=\"0\" y1=\"0\" x2=\"1\" y2=\"1\" stroke=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.84)\" /></svg>"); text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/</a></div>
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I hope this is helpful and useful. My brain focuses on the math and I try and be fact based in my analysis and interpretation of how I should respond.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">THERE IS MORE INFORMATION IN THE COMMENTS ON </span><a class="ar dt du dv dw dx" href="https://www.facebook.com/jason.scott.warner/posts/10163742243430144" rel="noopener nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-image: url("data:image/svg+xml; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 1px 1px; box-sizing: inherit; http: //www.w3.org/2000/svg\"><line x1=\"0\" y1=\"0\" x2=\"1\" y2=\"1\" stroke=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.84)\" /></svg>"); text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank"><span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">THE FACEBOOK POST</span></a><span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;"> WORTH READING AND I WILL BE UPDATING THAT POST, AND THE COMMENTS, WITH MORE INFORMATION, (AS OPPOSED TO CREATING NEW POSTS).</span></div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">MY FINAL PARTING THOUGHT:</span> <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Please share or forward this post at your discretion. If everyone shares this post and two of your friends share this post and so on, we use the power of exponential math to work in our favor, which seems appropriate given the virus is using that same exponential math against us.</span></div>
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HOW YOU CAN REALLY HELP: If you know people who have large numbers of followers, or people in the media, please leverage your personal relationship with them and ask them to amplify this post by sharing it.</div>
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It would be useful to get the post on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you know people in government this fact-based post may help inform them to make the best decisions. <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">I am not active on Twitter.</span></div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">It’s time for us humans to go on the offensive against the virus.</span> We must fight back.</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">There is only one way to do so:</span> <span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Social Distancing.</span></div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">Do it today.</span></div>
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<em class="hi" style="box-sizing: inherit;">NOTE: Anyone, including the media, is free to use this post, any related content, in all or in part, for any purpose, in any format, with no attribution required. Please direct message me if you have other ideas for how to raise awareness.</em></div>
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Finally, I can no longer keep up with friend requests given how much this post has been shared. To receive updates or follow me, please use the “Follow” button on Facebook. My page Facebook page is <a class="ar dt du dv dw dx" href="https://www.facebook.com/jason.scott.warner" rel="noopener nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-image: url("data:image/svg+xml; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 1px 1px; box-sizing: inherit; http: //www.w3.org/2000/svg\"><line x1=\"0\" y1=\"0\" x2=\"1\" y2=\"1\" stroke=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.84)\" /></svg>"); text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">here</a>, or follow me here on Medium (or both!).</div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">My facebook page:</span> <a class="ar dt du dv dw dx" href="https://www.facebook.com/jason.scott.warner" rel="noopener nofollow" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; background-image: url("data:image/svg+xml; background-position: 0px calc(1em + 1px); background-repeat: repeat-x; background-size: 1px 1px; box-sizing: inherit; http: //www.w3.org/2000/svg\"><line x1=\"0\" y1=\"0\" x2=\"1\" y2=\"1\" stroke=\"rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.84)\" /></svg>"); text-decoration-line: none;" target="_blank">https://www.facebook.com/jason.scott.warner</a></div>
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<span class="gv hh" style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700;">If anyone wants to translate this into any other language please do so and contact me and I’ll repost it in that language.</span></div>
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3/16/20: I am preparing a second post, now that 4 days have gone by since the first post. To receive it please follow me on FB. I can not keep up with the friend requests.</div>
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<img height="480" src="https://miro.medium.com/max/1024/0*fiXG-RwZfGtErF18.jpeg" style="letter-spacing: -0.004em;" width="640" /></div>
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<a href="https://medium.com/@Jason_Scott_Warner/the-sober-math-everyone-must-understand-about-the-pandemic-2b0145881993" target="_blank">SOURCE</a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-61109593364633557152020-03-17T10:37:00.001+10:002020-03-17T10:39:42.260+10:00 A Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="640" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/12/20/science/20VIRUS/20VIRUS-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="492" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">A colorized electron micrograph of the coronavirus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS. Federal officials ended a moratorium imposed on funding research that alters viruses like this one to become more lethal.Credit...Reuters</span></td></tr>
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By <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/donald-g-mcneil-jr">Donald G. McNeil Jr.</a> | Dec. 19, 2017<br />
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Federal officials on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal.<br />
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Such work can now proceed, said Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, but only if a scientific panel decides that the benefits justify the risks.<br />
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Some scientists are eager to pursue these studies because they may show, for example, how a bird flu could mutate to more easily infect humans, or could yield clues to making a better vaccine.<br />
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Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.<br />
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Now, a government panel will require that researchers show that their studies in this area are scientifically sound and that they will be done in a high-security lab.<br />
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The pathogen to be modified must pose a serious health threat, and the work must produce knowledge — such as a vaccine — that would benefit humans. Finally, there must be no safer way to do the research.<br />
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“We see this as a rigorous policy,” Dr. Collins said. “We want to be sure we’re doing this right.”<br />
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In October 2014, all federal funding was halted on efforts to make three viruses more dangerous: the flu virus, and those causing Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).<br />
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But the new regulations apply to any pathogen that could potentially cause a pandemic. For example, they would apply to a request to create an Ebola virus transmissible through the air, said Dr. Collins.<br />
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There has been a long, fierce debate about projects — known as “gain of function” research — intended to make pathogens more deadly or more transmissible.<br />
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In 2011, an outcry arose when laboratories in Wisconsin and the Netherlands revealed that they were trying to mutate the lethal H5N1 bird flu in ways that would let it jump easily between ferrets, which are used to model human flu susceptibility.<br />
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Tensions rose in 2014 after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention accidentally exposed lab workers to anthrax and shipped a deadly flu virus to a laboratory that had asked for a benign strain.<br />
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That year, the N.I.H. also found vials of smallpox in a freezer that had been forgotten for 50 years.<br />
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When the moratorium was imposed, it effectively halted 21 projects, Dr. Collins said. In the three years since, the N.I.H. created exceptions that funded ten of those projects. Five were flu-related, and five concerned the MERS virus.<br />
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That virus is a coronavirus carried by camels that has <a href="http://www.who.int/emergencies/mers-cov/en/">infected about 2,100 people</a> since it was discovered in 2012, and has killed about a third of them, according to the World Health Organization.<br />
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Critics of such research had mixed reactions. “There’s less than meets the eye,” said Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist and bioweapons expert at Rutgers University.<br />
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Although he applauded the requirement for review panels, he said he would prefer independent panels to government ones.<br />
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He also wanted the rules to cover all such research rather than just government-funded work, as well as clearer minimum safety standards and a mandate that the benefits “outweigh” the risks instead of merely “justifying” them.<br />
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Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist who directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health, called review panels “a small step forward.”<br />
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Recent disease-enhancing experiments, he said, “have given us some modest scientific knowledge and done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet risked creating an accidental pandemic.”<br />
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Therefore, he said, he hoped the panels would turn down such work.<br />
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Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said he believed some laboratories could do such work safely, but wanted restrictions on what they could publish.<br />
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“If someone finds a way to make the Ebola virus more dangerous, I don’t believe that should be available to anybody off the street who could use it for nefarious purposes,” he said.<br />
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“Physicists long ago learned to distinguish between what can be publicly available and what’s classified,” he added, referring to nuclear weapons research. “We want to keep some of this stuff on a need-to-know basis.”<br />
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A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 20, 2017, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Lifts Ban On Modifying Lethal Viruses. <br />
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih.html" target="_blank">SOURCE</a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-29569797465364386292020-02-23T20:17:00.002+10:002020-02-23T20:17:20.274+10:00Opinion: Is Turkey going into war with Russia?<br />by Kemal Okuyan - 21 Feb 2020<br /><br /><img height="426" src="https://news.sol.org.tr/sites/default/files/styles/newsimagestyle_615x410/public/resized_fc6b6-8768243abbef0fac07c8e177d839bc5b.jpg?itok=1vQ0P8Yt" width="640" /><br /><br />The AKP government sides with Israel in Syria. According to the statements, Israel’s concern is to eliminate Iran’s presence in Syria. But Iran’s political and military support is crucial for Syria. Israel’s missile attacks on some targets, sometimes irrelevant to Iran, strengthen Erdoğan’s hand, who is possessed by a desire to weaken and topple down Assad. <br /><br />Hence, have you ever heard that the Chief [Erdoğan], who never misses the opportunity in polemics with the Israeli administration, reacted to the missiles hitting Syria? You see, the “one-minute” incident [the then-PM Erdoğan’s verbal clash with former Israeli President Shimon Peres in Davos in 2009] has not any substantial reflection in real life!<br /><br />The AKP government also sides with the US in Syria. In the beginning, they planned everything together, they developed a strategic partnership. Then the Syrian people decisively took a step to repel this imperialist plot as the US administration realized that AKP exaggerated the force of Ikhwan in Syria, Russia brought its power into play, and the partnership in the Greater Middle East Project got damaged. There was an ongoing tension in some other issues between the US and Erdoğan; there was a cat among the pigeons, then the tapes and the coup attempt came. The tension escalated so much that the government purchased the S-400 defense system from Russia. <br /><br />It bought the system yet could not install it yet. There was no answer to the question, “Against whom did you buy them?” Russia has allied with the Syrian government that Erdoğan wanted to overthrow; S-400s against the Russian jets would be highly fantastic. As a NATO member, Turkey’s use of S-400s against the NATO countries would not be less fantastic. S-400s were part of the bargaining to say: “See how we are hell-bent on this issue.” Things changed so much that now they are brooding over “how to conclude the situation”. <br /><br />Now it seems that they have reached a solution. Bring the Patriots considering that they cannot activate the S-400s against Russia’s Sukhoi! The allegations came yesterday that they hastily wanted Patriots from the US. Although denied later, it was revealed that the bargaining for the Patriots is heated at the moment. <br /><br />In brief, we are going back to the beginning in some aspects. The agreements signed with Russia and Iran, the de-escalation zones, and the observation post have lost value. They are siding with the US again as they declared it as the “imperialist America” until a few months ago. They have taken a break in their discourse on the [Kurdish] PYD, now it is time for Idlib!<br /><br />Yes, let us repeat that Turkey, the US, and Israel are performing a war dance on the same platform. But why?<br /><br />Some may be impressed by the discourse, “Millions of refugees have flooded into the border”, which is not very relevant. Today’s “warfare” has little to do with the developments in Syria. Little to do with despite the Turkish government’s jihadist perspective. The war in Syria now is the reflection of the sharpening struggle in Turkey.<br /><br />Some are talking about a “one-man rule”, yet one man cannot rule such a big country. Some may try to show as if he is ruling since this impression serves their purposes, yet the truth is somewhere else. The picture is clear. The government is messy after all that suppression, oppression and liquidations. Let alone any integrity, at least six or seven centers are vehemently struggling with each other within AKP and the state as it is generally shaped by the ruling party. <br /><br />All the centers have different international links. We can talk about the Europeanists but they are also separated as the axes of the UK and Germany. The Americanists are overt but a dispute is ongoing between those who have links with the Trump administration and those who rely on the elements disregarding Trump.<br /><br />As a major part of the nationalists are resorting to a pro-NATO stance at full speed, a small part of them can offer “to continue approaching Russia”. More interestingly, one section, which is doubtlessly Americanist and has a serious influence over the civilian/military bureaucracy, can accuse Erdoğan’s Syria policies of adventurism! <br /><br />Indeed, some monetary clashes of interest behind the curtain of ideological/cultural distinctions have broken out within the rule of the AKP government as some of these clashes look like a competition between the religious cults. The period has rapidly terminated as everyone thought that they were managing Erdoğan while Erdoğan could manage everyone. We have witnessed the symptoms of this fact for a long time, but now things have gotten out of control. The Gezi Trial and the following surprising affairs signal this disintegration. <br /><br />Who is on what side in this disintegration, who defends what, what Erdoğan wants to do… all these are ineffective. The point is that this is a crisis of rule. The crisis of rule is a heavy and deep concept. However, it is necessary to use this concept in a simple manner this time. The one-man Erdoğan is unable to manage the ruling block at the moment. From a different viewpoint, the capitalist class and the imperialist centers have also lost their ability to manage Erdoğan who has greatly served them so far. We are talking about a government that cannot rule and cannot be managed. <br /><br />Do not worry, I will return to the War of Syria. Let us look at the opposition first. There is a very broad opposition block in Turkey. Almost everyone is in this block, needless to count them one by one. This opposition block is pro-NATO, pro-US and pro-Europe. Although they sometimes talk about “labor” in the environment of crisis, this opposition block is supporting the pro-market economy. Libertarianism and democratism are just sauces. We are tired of saying that no freedom and democracy can come from imperialism, the market, the bosses, and the monopolies! <br /><br />Erdoğan is desperate against this block because it completely agrees on the “Western alliance” and repels all the moves against itself; Erdoğan, a master in spoiling the alliances, could not blow a hole in this grand coalition this time despite all efforts. Erdoğan will apparently lose the elections in this current electoral model.<br /><br />Therefore, Erdoğan thinks that he can get rid of this challenging situation if he reaches an agreement again with the US and the EU. He cannot take the desired guarantee although he has been making attempts and sending messages in this way for some time. He cannot take it because the local and foreign monopolies are also tired of managing Erdoğan. <br /><br />However, both Erdoğan and the influential figures of AKP think that the coalition against them may collapse if they accomplish this maneuver. On the other hand, [Erdoğan’s ally, the leader of ultranationalist party MHP] Bahçeli’s statement as almost a declaration of war against Russia should be read as the small partner’s message, “now it’s high time”, to AKP while Bahçeli has made a soft statement contrary to his previous judging message in domestic affairs. <br /><br />The disintegration within the ruling block, however, is reducing the chance of success of this manoeuvre. The weakening in domestic affairs has a negative impact on foreing affairs as the chaos in foreign affairs is leading to errors in domestic affairs. <br /><br />There is a tremendous alienation among the people of Turkey amidst the conflicts with Syrian and Russian armies. The pro-government media is storming around yet there is not any social reflection in this respect. As the opposition stood behind the government and pumped it up with pro-US rhetoric last week, the opposition has suddenly left the government alone in Syria by knowing that it achieved a goal. <br /><br />Such statements come and go, “40-50-80 regime troops have been neutralized” yet no one pays attention to these statements. These figures are null and void as even the most anti-Syria publications in the international arena do not report such allegations. <br /><br />For the first time, nationalism has lost value on such a large scale. What can be the reason for the reluctance to war with Russia while the wind of Americanism is blowing among the country’s government and opposition? Is realism the only reason? No!<br /><br />As we have said, Turkey’s internal political fight has also a reflection in Syria. Stuck in Turkey, Erdoğan is trying to attract NATO to Syria but NATO would not dare to engage in an extensive war with Russia in Syria. The ground in Syria is very weak for NATO. Contrarily, NATO is essentially pushing Turkey for a little bit of a fight with Russia. In doing so, they aim to invalidate AKP’s Russian trump card and discipline Erdoğan while they also aim at a continuing instability and war in Syria. <br /><br />In the meantime, people will die, waves of migration will occur, and the possibility for the conflicts to get out of control will appear. But, do these have any importance in a system of monopolies?<br /><br />Erdoğan and his friends have fallen into this trap intentionally. They couldn't find another exit.<br /><br />Of course, they have no intention and energy to go into a fight with Russia. Here, it is necessary to talk about the risks caused by the clumsiness of a power that has lost its management and governance qualities. These risks should be taken seriously while it is clear that things cannot be managed globally.<br /><br />It seems that reducing this risk will fall on Lavrov and his team, one of the greatest chances of Russian capitalism struggling with a number of problems. It is obvious that Lavrov, who had been responsible for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the past in the gigantic diplomatic mission in the USA, realized, as Putin did, that Erdogan's big leap westward could not be prevented. Relationships are never reset. Take an example; while Turkey was attacking the Syrian army and the Russian aircraft were bombing the Turkish Armed Forces' positions, some state officials of Turkey were fervently continuing visa liberalization talks with the Russians!<br /><br />Moreover, the war does not only include soldiers, weapons, rifles, tanks, and aircraft. Wars require the mobilization of all resources of a country. For this, they need legitimacy, credibility, and “benefit” to be shown to the public. None of this is there. While people are struggling with economic difficulties, they are completely alienated from the subject due to the constant change of the enemy.<br /><br />There are so many enemies. Greece is stable, Armenia is always there but then, it is complicated. USA, France, Israel, India, Egypt, Iran, Hafter. Muscovite was on the permanent enemies' list but the relations in the world got complicated, so the lines in Turkey. The whole country cannot go to war with this mess.<br /><br />Could Erdoğan say "We just had a mutual artillery fire with my friend Putin?"<br /><br />Physical and mathematical logic are currently telling us Turkey and Russia will not go into a war now.<br /><br />History, another great science, on the other hand, says wars are inevitable in the imperialist world. Nevertheless, Turkey's war with Russia, which it can afford only by confronting Russia with the United States, is quite unlikely when the fact that Russia is currently not willing to clash with NATO directly.<br /><br />A new concept has appeared recently: "moderate military opposition". This is how jihadists are called in Syria. If we start to think from here, Russia will have to show a way out to Erdoğan in order Turkey to position itself as a "moderate pro-American".<br /><br />The history also says other things like that foreign policy and domestic policy are a whole and sometimes pressure in domestic policy can be resolved on the basis of foreign policy.<br /><br />It seems that the long period in which Erdoğan is relieved inside the country by using foreign policy is slowly coming to an end. Turkey's interesting disintegration in the political sphere does not allow for a comprehensive war with one of the world's biggest powers in military terms, but the tension over Syria accelerating has a potential to voltage to trigger the emergence of a new balance by accelerating the internal disintegration.<br /><br />What a world!<br /><br />Wars, dirty bargains, insidious calculations, bloody maneuvers… On the other hand, the high cost of living, unemployment, no future.<br /><br />There is no liberation if the real enemy cannot be clearly identified and if this enemy is not treated as it deserves.<br /><br />The enemy is imperialism, the rule of monopolies, the order of exploitation, and that enemy should not be allowed to make the poor peoples across different nations fight each other.<div>
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Kemal Okuyan is the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP)<br /><div>
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<a href="https://news.sol.org.tr/opinion-turkey-going-war-russia-176562">https://news.sol.org.tr/opinion-turkey-going-war-russia-176562</a><br /> <div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-40691691121875891382020-02-04T22:31:00.000+10:002021-02-10T01:04:40.936+10:00Brisbane Botanic Gardens<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5tUkTv1UFrlg_xgrLKPiA97z6Ldi4H7qvGhnTN9ZFx-hZlM-lRJ1NkEnglZS0nUmqdm87lcWYhUbm_y0WX5I4d6n5FvaINjsobgRFsu65HuWHdSZeoBEJIU5g1bbXzxzRwP_lxEbggKtJ/s2543/20210204_093944.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1236" data-original-width="2543" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5tUkTv1UFrlg_xgrLKPiA97z6Ldi4H7qvGhnTN9ZFx-hZlM-lRJ1NkEnglZS0nUmqdm87lcWYhUbm_y0WX5I4d6n5FvaINjsobgRFsu65HuWHdSZeoBEJIU5g1bbXzxzRwP_lxEbggKtJ/w640-h312/20210204_093944.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Brisbane Botanic Gardens - © 2021 | Sarah Deniz</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p>I truly enjoy walking along the river under these trees, </p><p>Imaging walking under their epic branches, in their shades; enjoying the river breeze in a balmy Brisbane summer day. Heavenly!.. </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-53514064174398204882020-02-04T22:23:00.000+10:002021-02-10T01:05:05.343+10:00Lotus<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg__A9iqTc5VveBEHiyR18KPELO0AtsHe0FxQLjFTMQmnGgVGF5SLctX083B1ZiT0VElqYKUBiw_ij2En0HJR5KIm88NYwJf1ZQ5JhatHeAmmOb6RvrfqFp6XEnKIWCxOCNq7LdhTSz9zRf/s2543/20210204_100038.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1236" data-original-width="2543" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg__A9iqTc5VveBEHiyR18KPELO0AtsHe0FxQLjFTMQmnGgVGF5SLctX083B1ZiT0VElqYKUBiw_ij2En0HJR5KIm88NYwJf1ZQ5JhatHeAmmOb6RvrfqFp6XEnKIWCxOCNq7LdhTSz9zRf/w640-h312/20210204_100038.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lotuses in Brisbane Botanic Gardens - © 2021 | Sarah Deniz</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-61515954032295090002020-02-04T22:21:00.000+10:002021-02-10T01:05:26.259+10:00Centenary Lakes Park - Caboolture<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmMMaNbCtNamZfTz3Rg6swdORkJcqOEO-TbaiU-dmN0hriLHHSTDsZ1FffVGpInU6Yr_YCBUWvla2yjwFd1FCAq7C0Ju34Y_MyOYuPnv54f1zowDkOs33_iUiNq3tddbwEIlIFsMRFuDr-/s2543/20200909_162215.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1236" data-original-width="2543" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmMMaNbCtNamZfTz3Rg6swdORkJcqOEO-TbaiU-dmN0hriLHHSTDsZ1FffVGpInU6Yr_YCBUWvla2yjwFd1FCAq7C0Ju34Y_MyOYuPnv54f1zowDkOs33_iUiNq3tddbwEIlIFsMRFuDr-/w640-h312/20200909_162215.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Centenary Lakes Park / Caboolture - © 2021 | Sarah Deniz</td></tr></tbody></table><br /> <p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-77226043144889083592020-02-04T22:19:00.000+10:002021-02-10T01:05:52.717+10:00Centenary Lakes Park, Caboolture<p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgADayAneR3qARVDq0n4rplp0eP-EhG5e9OxNxbHibM2DncLSfMn7oaRnqENheRPmrOJveEaRA52Sxv40o__4ipBa318Ir7YhFg3Z4D5MkhL2OruJ_PK09MYJO341TtaY3_69k8NAUO0Hw/s2543/20200821_150920.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1236" data-original-width="2543" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgADayAneR3qARVDq0n4rplp0eP-EhG5e9OxNxbHibM2DncLSfMn7oaRnqENheRPmrOJveEaRA52Sxv40o__4ipBa318Ir7YhFg3Z4D5MkhL2OruJ_PK09MYJO341TtaY3_69k8NAUO0Hw/w640-h312/20200821_150920.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Centenary Parks in Caboolture - Copyright: Sarah Deniz</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p><p>I took this stunning shot in one of our daily walks in this beautiful park. Such a stunning sky with white clouds on a bluer than blue sky.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6439101371176030506.post-14629411661832689702020-02-04T22:14:00.000+10:002021-02-10T01:06:19.583+10:00Sunset at Bribie Island<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ6l_MgIQ6IxrepjGnu1lo0PU8HLXn5Z69LhQxzZimGcwkFTdfHblAT3q9C9Imu8gBfy_KHIK0VobjaS73oQKau16L520wiXEDFiB1t_2E6p-2_kbAmI-pfFHb57R9eMWEaOqObc0VeBC5/s2048/IMG_3161.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJ6l_MgIQ6IxrepjGnu1lo0PU8HLXn5Z69LhQxzZimGcwkFTdfHblAT3q9C9Imu8gBfy_KHIK0VobjaS73oQKau16L520wiXEDFiB1t_2E6p-2_kbAmI-pfFHb57R9eMWEaOqObc0VeBC5/w640-h360/IMG_3161.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Heavenly sunset at Bribie Island - © 2021 | Sarah Deniz<br /><br />Watching the sun set in Bribie Island is nearly always is a tremendous delight!.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0