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  1. #61
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    Default Recognizing Reality: A New Study Documents the Chinese Regime’s Aggression




    Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of COVID-19, in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)




    Recognizing Reality: A New Study Documents the Chinese Regime’s Aggression




    Bradley A. Thayer


    July 5, 2022 Updated: July 6, 2022

    Commentary


    Audio PDF


    In the sweep of history, there are moments in time that capture the true nature of a regime.


    The great good that the United States has accomplished in international politics was well captured by the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in the wake of World War II or the support provided to Southeast Asian nations in the wake of the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami.

    In stark contrast to the benefits the United States has provided, the Chinese regime defines the opposite. Its human rights abuses, genocide committed against Muslims in Xinjiang, and obfuscation and dissembling about the origins of COVID-19, and subsequent pandemic, are indicators of the nature of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

    While the world still does not know the full origins of COVID, many believe it almost certainly leaked from the laboratory in China’s Wuhan city. Yet, as long as Xi Jinping and his camarilla are in power, the world will never know its origins. Chinese authorities destroyed evidence of COVID’s origin and facilitated the travel of their citizens to the rest of the world. At the same time, they locked down Wuhan and failed to share information with other governments.

    Beijing intentionally lied to the World Health Organization regarding person-to-person transmission, which then repeated this misinformation to health authorities worldwide with untold consequences for global health. Accordingly, epidemiologists and global health authorities will lack a complete understanding of the pandemic and the ability to prevent future ones, as well as additional adaptations of the virus that causes COVID.



    A laboratory technician working on samples from people to be tested for COVID-19 at the “Fire Eye” laboratory in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei Province on Feb. 6, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

    An insightful analysis that clearly and compellingly documents the Chinese regime’s responsibility for the pandemic is a new study: “The CCP is at War with America: A Team B Report on the Covid 19 Biological Warfare Attack.”

    The group of analysts from the Center for Security Policy—termed the Team B III group, after the original 1976 Team B rightfully anticipated the Soviet Union’s intentions and continued Soviet arms racing and expansion, and the later 2010 Team B that addressed Islamic terrorism—have provided the complete account of Beijing’s responsibility for the pandemic.

    As with their predecessors, Team B III provided an insightful analysis of the CCP’s belligerence toward the United States and the role COVID played in this aggression. One of the authors, Steven Hatfill, notes that the virus was perfectly adapted to infect humans, which is extremely curious if the virus were a product of nature.

    Hatfill notes that since 2007, the Chinese regime has been conducting gain-of-function research to make the virus more lethal to humans. The hideous fruits of this labor are shown in COVID.

    The study also notes the adverse and lasting economic consequences for the U.S. economy, including increasing debt, inflation, the supply chain crisis, and, of course, on the U.S. political system—most notably profound effects on the 2020 U.S. election and possible impact on 2022 and even 2024.

    The study is significant not only because of its arguments, the attention called to COVID within the context of a biological weapons (BW) attack, and the empirical evidence presented, but also because of its realism. It assigns culpability for the pandemic to the Chinese regime.

    Second, it places the CCP’s behavior during COVID in the context of its war against the United States and its allies. While the CCP has been at war with the United States since it came to power in 1949, the 2019 declaration of a People’s War against the United States is a more recent reminder of the regime’s unrelenting aggression against America.



    Customers wait in line to buy water and other supplies, fearing that COVID-19 will spread and force people to stay indoors, at a Costco in Burbank, Calif., on March 6, 2020. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

    Third, the lack of a sufficient response from the U.S. government is that the American people have been betrayed by some of their political elites, who are corrupted by their association with the CCP.

    Fourth, there is willful blindness in the U.S. government toward the nature and scope of the threat from the Chinese regime and the lack of a desire within the intelligence community to tell the truth to those in power. As a result, while the American people have a clear grasp of the China threat, the country’s elites have failed in their responsibilities to protect the country from its enemy.

    Reflecting on its lasting contributions, the study has provided an accurate and realistic assessment of the motivations and actions of the Chinese regime. It compels analysts to think of the present confrontation with China, not through the lens of the last Cold War with the Soviet Union. Instead, the study lets Americans understand that this current cold war is significantly more challenging to fight for two major reasons.

    First, it seems that most of the American elite are sanguine about China’s rise and see it as a partner. During the Cold War, the American elite overwhelmingly was able to assess the Soviet Union for the threat it was.

    Second, the book compels us to consider the nature of the CCP’s attack against the United States. This certainly includes the military, economic, ideological, and social confrontation that defined the Cold War. But China consistently employs asymmetric means like facilitating the spread of COVID, shipping precursor chemicals to Mexico to fuel the opioid crisis, dominating the market in antibiotics, or making agricultural land purchases against the United States to weaken it and hasten its defeat.

    The study’s authors deserve great credit for calling attention to the nature, scope, and urgency of the threat. The CCP is indeed at war with America, and America’s response is long overdue.

    Bradley A. Thayer is a founding member of the Committee on the Present Danger: China and is the co-author of “How China Sees the World: Han-Centrism and the Balance of Power in International Politics.”



    https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinio...n_4572799.html

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  2. #62
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    Default Biden Must Walk His Talk in Asia




    President Joe Biden waves as he participates in a virtual meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington on Nov. 15, 2021. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)




    Biden Must Walk His Talk in Asia


    Canceling China’s military base in Cambodia would be a start

    Anders Corr

    August 17, 2022


    Commentary Audio PDF

    President Joe Biden reportedly agreed to a meeting with China’s dictator, Xi Jinping, to be held on the sidelines of an upcoming conference in Southeast Asia. One of two upcoming summits in November—the Group of 20 nations (G-20) summit in Indonesia and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Thailand—will be the likely location.

    Biden agreed to the meeting in the context of Xi calling him to deliver a warning against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan. Reportedly, there was a Chinese threat against her air force plane. This raises questions about whether Biden granted Xi the meeting under duress and whether he broadcast American weakness in doing so.
    It will likely burnish Xi’s public image and help him gain the third term he seeks at the upcoming Chinese Communist Party (CCP) congress. Conversely, it could make Biden look even softer than he is on China.

    In agreeing to the meeting, perhaps Biden wants to get trade with China flowing again to reward his corporate backers. He has been looking for an excuse to remove the Trump administration’s tariffs on China, and a meeting with Xi could be that moment. Any improvement to China’s human rights or decrease in territorial aggression is unlikely under Xi’s leadership.

    Biden’s agreement to the meeting thus indicates that he is willing to look past Xi’s genocides, including against Uyghurs and the Falun Gong, and military threats, including against U.S. allies Japan, Taiwan, Australia, India, and the Philippines, to try for minor gains that could ultimately empower Beijing.

    A perimeter fence is constructed around what is officially known as a vocational skills education center in Dabancheng in Xinjiang, China, on Sept. 4, 2018. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

    While Taiwan and India are not official allies, Biden’s repeated assertions that he would defend Taiwan militarily arguably make it a de facto ally. Likewise, planned U.S.-India joint exercises in the Himalayan mountains near the border with China, and joint membership in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the “Quad”) with Australia and Japan, make the U.S.-India relationship into a de facto alliance.

    Biden’s meetings in Southeast Asia, doubtless to include leaders from the region, will be a litmus test as to whether the Democrats can achieve concrete gains against the increasingly powerful regime in Beijing.

    Despite significant resistance from both political parties in the United States and U.S. allies closing ranks against the CCP, Xi has demonstrated a stubborn and dangerous pursuit of what Beijing calls its “core interests.”

    This core has expanded over the years from the original claims over Taiwan to those in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as the regime’s authoritarian “development” model. Some ranking officials in China have also called the South and East China seas a core interest of China.

    The implication is that, unlike “important” and “secondary” interests, Beijing is willing to go to war over core interests.

    Both leaders will be competing for influence among Southeast Asian countries, where they could meet Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders from Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, and Brunei.

    ASEAN makes decisions by consensus, and two of those countries—Cambodia and Laos—have traditionally vetoed any proposals, for example from the Philippines and Vietnam, seen to go against Beijing’s interests.

    Cambodia has recently gone a step further to allow the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to start building a military base on Cambodian territory. This should be a particular focus of Biden’s negotiations with not only Cambodia but other ASEAN members that could pressure Phnom Penh, the capital.

    The base in Cambodia is the PLA’s second on foreign territory, after one approved by Xi in 2013 in Djibouti, East Africa. The Djibouti base is indicative of how the Cambodia base could be used against the United States and its allies.

    This photo taken on Aug. 1, 2017, shows Chinese People’s Liberation Army personnel attending the opening ceremony of China’s new military base in Djibouti. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

    The PLA finished construction of the Djibouti base in 2017. The following year, it was used to shoot lasers at a U.S. air force plane, injuring two U.S. airmen. Apparently, the U.S. military did not significantly respond, bringing into question our willingness to retaliate in the face of aggression.

    Both Beijing and Phnom Penh have lied about the PLA’s base construction in Cambodia, which is at the country’s Ream Naval Base on the Gulf of Thailand. Chinese military personnel at the base, parts of which are now for the exclusive use of the PLA, have gone so far as to wear Cambodian military uniforms to conceal their presence.

    The base will move China toward achieving a network of global bases to support its military power projection. In addition to Cambodia and Djibouti, China is likely seeking military basing rights in Indonesia, Pakistan, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Thailand.

    This network of PLA bases could support its global intelligence collection and offensive operations against the United States and its allies.

    In 2021, U.S. intelligence learned that the PLA was secretly building a base in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). U.S. officials were able to pressure Abu Dhabi to halt construction. If Biden is right about the superiority of his foreign policy approach in Asia, he should be able to prove it by getting the PLA’s base in Cambodia canceled as well.

    But the opposite is occurring. Perhaps due to China’s increased influence in Cambodia, or because of Democrat foreign policy weakness relative to that of Republicans, U.S.-funded facilities at the Ream Naval Base were demolished, according to a 2021 Pentagon report.

    Likewise, a “Joint Vietnamese Friendship” building on the base has been removed to another location so as not to conflict with China. (Vietnam and China are in a relatively tense standoff over Beijing’s increasingly expansive maritime claims in the South China Sea.)

    Biden’s trip to Southeast Asia will be a litmus test as to whether the Democrat’s foreign policy is seen as weak relative to the Republicans, or whether Biden’s ally-focused foreign policy can achieve concrete results against China.

    Chief among these should be the cancellation of China’s military base in Cambodia. If all of America’s international development funding, Asia-Pacific alliances, and market power as the world’s biggest economy cannot achieve results in Cambodia, what can it achieve under the Democrats?

    Anders Corr has a bachelor’s/master’s in political science from Yale University (2001) and a doctorate in government from Harvard University (2008). He is a principal at Corr Analytics Inc., publisher of the Journal of Political Risk, and has conducted extensive research in North America, Europe, and Asia. His latest books are “The Concentration of Power: Institutionalization, Hierarchy, and Hegemony” (2021) and “Great Powers, Grand Strategies: the New Game in the South China Sea” (2018).


    https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-...a_4667243.html




    Red Dragon Menacing

  3. #63
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    Default Communist China Establishes Global Presence Through Local Police Overseas Stations

    Communist China Establishes Global Presence Through Local Police Overseas Stations



    The America ChangLe Association in New York on Oct. 6, 2022. An overseas Chinese police outpost in New York, called the Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, is located inside the association building. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)



    Communist China Establishes Global Presence Through Local Police Overseas Stations



    Peter Dahlin
    December 11, 2022

    Commentary

    Audio PDF




    00:00
    The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in a multipronged campaign to establish its power overseas, especially over the ever-growing Chinese diaspora.

    It started for real with the launch of Fox Hunt, a campaign to hunt down Party members, state functionaries, and those working in or with public entities, and it seems to have been launched following CCP leader Xi Jinping’s “anti-corruption” campaign.

    The message being sent is clear: You will not be safe just because you leave China. At the same time, and growing in strength since, the CCP’s United Front Work Department has been hard at work co-opting local Chinese media organizations around Asia, Australia, North America, and Europe. In Australia, about 95 percent or more of all local Chinese language media toe the Party line.

    With the migration from China increasing and the number of asylum seekers having shot up almost 800 percent since Xi took power in 2012, it is not surprising that the Chinese regime is working hard to establish a clear presence overseas. The latest development of this campaign is the establishment of overseas Chinese police service stations.

    When Safeguard Defenders first exposed this operation with its “110 Overseas” investigation, some 54 stations had been identified, mostly in Western countries, and are run by two local police jurisdictions. New information continues to trickle in, and on Dec. 4, the Spain-based human rights NGO released a follow-up investigation—“Patrol and Persuade”—and the number of stations now identified has reached over 100, with several more police jurisdictions in China running such stations. The purpose is becoming more apparent, with one such jurisdiction claiming it was “using overseas Chinese to govern overseas Chinese.”

    In fact, since first revealing this information, additional stations in both New York and Los Angeles have been uncovered, as well as in Vancouver and one unknown location in Canada, bringing the total number of stations in the United States and Canada to eight—but the actual number is likely higher.


    Fox Hunt



    The international manhunt for high-value targets, Fox Hunt, is carried out by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) under the leadership of the CCP’s “anti-corruption” watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI).



    FBI Director Christopher Wray attends a virtual news conference at the Department of Justice in Washington on Oct. 28, 2020. Eight people have been arrested as part of “Operation Fox Hunt,” an effort by the Chinese regime to threaten people to return to China. (Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)

    At the Party Congress in late October, the CCDI presented new data showing that since its start in 2014—a consequence of Xi’s domestic “anti-corruption” campaign—Fox Hunt has successfully forced over 11,000 Chinese nationals back to China, several thousand of whom returned during the pandemic. Methods range from using extraditions and INTERPOL red notices, although very rare, to the more common involuntary return methods, such as “persuasion” by going after family members living in China, sending agents abroad to harass and intimidate targeted individuals in their new home country, and kidnappings.

    So far, some 84 cases of these stations playing a role in “persuasion” operations to force people back to China against their will have been identified. This reveals that the Chinese regime lied about the purpose of these stations, claiming that they assist the local diaspora community in renewing driver’s licenses and other minor administrative tasks.

    To stop these stations from operating, and to ensure that the activities themselves do not continue to go unnoticed in a different form, a number of steps need to be taken.

    Overseas Chinese Police Service Stations



    The stations, which, as far as is known, started appearing in 2016 and expanded in 2018—in direct contravention of Beijing’s statement that these stations were established, without the host country’s knowledge or approval—to assist Chinese citizens during the pandemic.

    The way it works is that police in a certain jurisdiction—particularly those that have seen significant emigration, such as Fuzhou—reach out to local trade or cultural associations in those cities and areas where many people from the city or region happen to live. Chinese emigration, after all, tends to be group-oriented; if many from Fuzhou have settled in one region, others who emigrate tend to want to go to those places for a support network, shared language, culture, and food.

    The police will thus approach an existing association and ask them to take on the task of running the stations. Here is when things get a bit more complicated. As these are run by local police, the stations vary significantly in their appearance. In some cases, like in Budapest and Dublin, they will establish a proper office, hang out signage and plaques declaring they are overseas police service stations—always without informing the host country government, and have a more strict physical presence. In other cases, the office of the association itself will be used, while the address and phone number announced will go to a front, which can be an auto mechanic, as in Porto, Portugal, a convenience store, like in Toronto, Canada, or a restaurant, as in Glasgow, Scotland.

    Similar operations also exist around Asia and particularly Africa, but such establishments are done in public, with the full cooperation of the host government; otherwise, the operations are strikingly similar to the clandestine stations in the democratic world.

    To understand the overall purpose and the role they play, this quote from the Nantong is illustrative: “At present, representatives of overseas Chinese and overseas students have been hired in the United States, Australia, South Korea and other places as overseas liaison officers to cooperate with domestic officers both internally and externally.”



    A Chinese state media outlet lists this single-story commercial building in Markham, Ont., as one of three overseas Chinese police stations in Canada. Human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders said the outposts in the Greater Toronto Area are part of the first batch of Fuzhou overseas police service stations. (Michelle Hu/The Epoch Times)

    Here alone, without going into the use of such stations to assist police back in China with “persuasion” operations of targets China wants to be returned, a number of issues arise. As the Netherlands, Ireland, and Canada have shown, they consider the establishment of such stations, regardless of their duty, to be illegal and in violation of the Vienna convention. All three countries have ordered them to shut down. The fact that they have been established secretly—without informing host governments and their presence is almost only known in the Chinese language–has allowed them to operate undetected for so long.

    The associations that actually run the stations, per command from the local police jurisdictions, are also in breach of administrative regulations. Any association needs to be registered, and Safeguard Defenders believes most of them are, as they have existed for a long time. However, they are not registered to perform these duties or act in any way as a liaison for the Chinese police or government. Hence, regulatory action can and must be taken against any association found to violate administrative regulations.

    More importantly, to avoid simply shutting down the stations, only for their actual activities to be carried out clandestinely, via, for example, United Front Work Department-affiliated associations, means that security service needs to launch a formal investigation, and where evidence allows, bring forth criminal charges.

    That some 84 cases of “persuasion” operations have been carried out, including two cases related to Fox Hunt operations, is likely just the tip of the iceberg. The targets are often low-profile and low-value targets, and if returned, they are rarely heard from; if they refuse, they likely go silent. Finding such cases is very hard, and dedicated investigations are required. Safeguard Defenders sees such cases in Canada, Portugal, Sweden, Scotland, and the United States. But in many other countries, they are being treated merely as a political issue via the foreign ministries—this is not enough and risks allowing the activities to continue.

    Since Safeguard Defenders’ initial investigation, several more stations have been identified in the United States and Canada. An initial investigation by security police has already identified many others, at least in Europe. Further investigation will reveal more and is an essential step forward.

    After Safeguard Defenders exposed one case of such “persuasion” operations carried out by one of the stations in Madrid, Spain, the Chinese foreign ministry responded by saying that “bilateral treaties [extraditions] are cumbersome,” and that some European countries turn down such requests–offering this as an excuse for why it found it acceptable to carry out such “persuasion” operations nonetheless. And that is despite Spain maintaining an extradition treaty with China and often approving such requests.

    In the United States, the FBI, in late October, unsealed two more indictments concerning Fox Hunt operations in the country, as well as in Canada, bringing the total number of known indictments to three. This is a very positive step, but with China claiming to have successfully concluded over 11,000 of them, it is a drop of water in a large sea. No other country has so far undertaken any similar action. Since Beijing claims to have persuaded 230,000 people to return to China between April 2021 and July 2022 alone—and only related to those wanted for fraud and related crimes—it is hard not to assume that such persuasion operations are carried out on a large scale not just in the United States and Canada, but also in Europe and elsewhere.

    On the plus side, the websites of these associations that run the stations often post incriminating information, and tracking down the individuals hired or appointed to run the stations is relatively straightforward. That the police back in China sometimes feel the need to publicize their work to secure the approval of their superiors also help, as open source research using Chinese police bulletins, police newspaper, and local media can be very helpful.

    Ordering the stations to shut down by explicitly stating they violate the law, launching formal investigations into the operations of these stations, and filing criminal charges where possible while evaluating the legality of the associations’ registration are all key steps to move forward. Until such is done, the Chinese diaspora across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere will live in fear, be unable to speak out freely, and be denied their democratic rights in their new homeland. For them, it is a matter of basic democratic freedoms that are being denied to them due to communist China’s growing presence overseas, where these stations are yet another tool in “using overseas Chinese to govern overseas Chinese.”

    Peter Dahlin is the founder of the NGO Safeguard Defenders and the co-founder of the Beijing-based Chinese NGO China Action (2007–2016). He is the author of “Trial By Media,” and contributor to “The People’s Republic of the Disappeared.” He lived in Beijing from 2007, until detained and placed in a secret jail in 2016, subsequently deported and banned. Prior to living in China, he worked for the Swedish government with gender equality issues, and now lives in Madrid, Spain.



    https://www.theepochtimes.com/commun...s_4914412.html






    State Of Mankind – Documentary Films(podcast)

  4. #64
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    Default China Trolls the World

    China Trolls the World



    WHO team members Marion Koopmans (L), Peter Daszak (3rd R), and Peter Ben Embarek (2nd R) pose for a picture in Wuhan, a city in central China’s Hubei Province on Feb. 10, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)


    Thinking About China

    China Trolls the World



    Jeffrey A. Tucker

    December 26, 2022

    Commentary

    Audio PDF


    And then just like that, COVID controls are gone in China. So far as we can tell, it has all come to an end, without explanation and of course without apology. For almost 3 years now, China has faced random and draconian lockdowns and testing requirements, complete with extreme quarantines, all based on the myth that a respiratory pathogen can be controlled by a powerful government.

    In many ways, Chinese leader Xi Jinping regarded his use of these methods as his greatest triumph. He punished people in the CCP who raised doubts. He incentivized many local officials to lie about cases and deaths. He bragged publicly and privately about his glorious achievement. All except for one thing: it didn’t actually work.

    So far as we can tell, the policy end was forced on Xi because it became too expensive. Local governments were running out of money for mass and frequent testing. The population was becoming very restless, even protesting in the streets, which is risky in China beyond anything people in the West can imagine.

    Plus, it’s possible that Xi feels politically safe enough to do this now, whereas he did not six months ago. In addition, even if he cannot claim to have stopped COVID, he can at least take credit for having trolled the entire planet Earth to destroy their own economies. Even if China’s GDP took a huge hit, he inspired most governments of the world to undermine human rights, violate privacy, engage in massive censorship, and demoralize their populations.

    The trolling began in January 2020 with a series of fake videos that gave a wildly incorrect impression of the deadliness of the disease. Bots were spamming the world with videos of people dropping dead in the streets, hospitals overwhelmed, and terror in the population. The gullible West believed it all and began to prepare for the onslaught in case the virus made its way here, which it did.

    Then the CCP locked down Wuhan for a few weeks and claimed that it had magically made the virus disappear. It invited a delegation from the World Health Organization, which came to Wuhan and other countries in mid-February. Among them were representatives from the United States, UK, and Europe. They released a disgusting report that said:

    “Achieving China’s exceptional coverage with and adherence to these containment measures has only been possible due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat. At a community level this is reflected in the remarkable solidarity of provinces and cities in support of the most vulnerable populations and communities. Despite ongoing outbreaks in their own areas, Governors and Mayors have continued to send thousands of health care workers and tons of vital PPE supplies into Hubei province and Wuhan city.

    “At the individual level, the Chinese people have reacted to this outbreak with courage and conviction. They have accepted and adhered to the starkest of containment measures—whether the suspension of public gatherings, the month-long ‘stay at home’ advisories or prohibitions on travel. Throughout an intensive 9-days of site visits across China, in frank discussions from the level of local community mobilizers and frontline health care providers to top scientists, Governors and Mayors, the Joint Mission was struck by the sincerity and dedication that each brings to this COVID-19 response.”

    Those words are nothing short of treason. And the United States signed off on it, as if the lying Communist Party knew more about mitigating a respiratory pathogen, a mild one for most of the population, better than trained scientists in the U.S. who had actually studied this. Anthony Fauci’s own deputy assistant was on the trip and bragged about the China response. This favorable report echoed the previous words of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the WHO who had told the world that China is “setting a new standard.”

    In a matter of weeks, most of the world had adopted the tactics of destruction that China itself has now abandoned. And what do the disease mitigators have to say for themselves now? They are trying to pretend like it never happened, even as whole social orders have been traumatized beyond anything previously imaginable.

    And what of China today? The whole population has a vast immunity debt to pay, which will mean massive sickness for the better part of a year. You might say: oh this was smart because now the variant on the loose in the world is more mild. But please get this straight: what is a mild versus what is a serious variant is largely contingent on pre-existing and acquired immunity. A pathogen that you and I might shake off in a day or two could kill a member of a native tribe in an Amazon rainforest who had never been previously exposed.

    So after two years of trying to suppress this virus, China is going to face a very hard time in the coming year. But of course under the Chinese political system, no one will pay the price for this economic and public health disaster. Xi and the CCP will continue to rule and pretend that they did everything right.

    One might think that this situation would amount to a complete humiliation for the likes of Fauci and the NIH, not to mention dozens of U.S. agencies that were involved in this fiasco, to say nothing of the hundreds of governments around the world that went along with the ridiculous and evil CCP methods of virus control. But we are not seeing it, and that is simply because the whole of the Western media played along with this and denounced anyone who resisted the absurdities.

    Not only that: Xi and the CCP have managed to bring practices to the West with which we have been previously unfamiliar. Only three years ago, a person in a mask would have been regarded as a danger and probably a robber. No one ever wore them but perhaps crazy people or surgeons standing over open bodies, or perhaps miners wanting to filter the air. Regular people would never wear a mask in the normal course of life. Somehow we survived.

    But today, we see between 10 and 50 percent of the population masking up despite the lack of any evidence that they achieve anything to stop the spread of a respiratory pathogen. Not to put too fine a point on it but the holes in the mask are vastly larger than the virus itself. Wearing them is nothing short of a superstition and a tacit homage to Xi Jinping. It is not the way of the West!

    Also we are careening fast into a world of vaccine passports. Why do you suppose that the United States retains them for visitors from other countries? It is because certain elites want to hold on to some vestige of control in hopes of implementing them here on the way toward a China-style social credit system. This is also why social media censorship survives everywhere except Twitter among the major platforms.

    Despite all the failures, the CCP has something to be proud of from its COVID response. It utterly and completely flopped as a measure to control a virus but it did troll the entire planet earth but for a few nations to go along with its totalitarian measures, thus reducing economic growth for the whole world and giving China a leg up in its struggle to be the world’s leading superpower. The complete failure of a policy then becomes its greatest moment of success.

    And even today, we see nothing like honesty from any ruling-class elites on what they did to freedom here and all over the world. Meanwhile, China seems to have given up its battle for Zero COVID, just washing its hands of the whole operation as if it never happened. Very clever.

    We in the West need to get wise as to what happened. There should be hearings and some kind of justice for those who went along. We need retractions of lying interviews and articles plus some kind of coming to terms instead of continued coverup about what happened. Finally, we need the complete elimination of all censorship and controls that came about over three years. The only way to beat tyranny is with the practice of freedom. We need to embrace that now before it is too late.

    Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.


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    Default CCP Proves ‘Climate’ Fight Not Really About Climate

    CCP Proves ‘Climate’ Fight Not Really About Climate



    A worker uses a torch to cut steel pipes near the coal-powered Datang International Zhangjiakou Power Station at Zhangjiakou, in China’s northern Hebei Province on Nov. 12, 2021. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)


    Viewpoints
    CCP Proves ‘Climate’ Fight Not Really About Climate


    Alex Newman
    January 10, 2023

    Commentary Audio PDF

    You don’t have to be a climate scientist to know the ringleaders of the “climate change” bandwagon don’t truly believe the narrative they’re selling.

    And it’s not just because they jet around the world in private jets to lecture you about your car and your hamburgers.

    In fact, if the people at the top bought into the notion that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are really “pollution” producing a “climate crisis,” they would be doing exactly the opposite of what they’re actually doing.

    Examining climate policy and communist China proves the point.

    Consider the UN Paris Agreement. Negotiated at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in 2015, the global deal calls on national governments to make their own national pledges about what they force on their populations to combat the alleged “climate crisis.”

    Under the deal, the Obama administration unilaterally pledged to slash CO2 emissions in the United States by more than 25 percent by 2025. This was to be imposed on Americans through executive orders and federal regulations to avoid involving Congress. Other Western governments made similar promises.

    The Chinese communist regime, by contrast, was already emitting far more CO2 than the United States and now spews more than the entire Western world combined by far—and yet it pledged only to keep increasing its emissions for the next 15 years. Seriously.

    In its submission to the UN (pdf), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agreed “to achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions around 2030.”

    In other words, the regime proudly announced to the world that its CO2 output would continue to grow for at least 15 years, at which point nobody will even remember the Paris pledges.

    When I asked members of the Chinese delegation for comment at the UN summit, instead of responding, they sent one of their minions to follow me around the conference and take pictures of me, something I promptly reported to UN security and the French police.

    It’s a good thing for the CCP that nobody will remember its promises by 2030, because virtually every analyst who has looked at the regime’s coal-fired power-plant construction binge has acknowledged there’s no way its emissions will “peak” by 2030. Communist promises have never been worth the paper they’re printed on anyway, as history has shown.

    The CCP wasn’t kidding about increasing its emissions, though: Beijing is currently bringing more coal-fired power plants online just between now and 2025 than the United States has in total.

    According to Global Energy Monitor’s February 2021 briefing (pdf), the CCP built more than three times as much coal-power capacity as the rest of the world combined in 2020. And it already has about half of all the world’s coal power capacity, according to Global Energy Monitor’s “Boom and Bust 2020: Tracking the Global Coal Plant Pipeline.”

    Already, China emits more than twice as much CO2 as the United States, according to data from the Global Carbon Project. Its emissions are rising meteorically even as U.S. emissions and emissions from other Western nations continue to plunge.

    In 2021, Americans released about 5 billion tons of CO2, while China released about 11.5 billion. If current trends continue, the CCP may release more CO2 than the rest of the world combined in the not-too-distant future.

    Think about this. If one was truly concerned about CO2 emissions producing “climate hell,” as world leaders claimed at the latest UN “climate” summit in Egypt that I attended, they would be panicking, not celebrating.


    Moving Production



    Again, all of the production being moved out of the West and into China will result in vastly more CO2 entering the atmosphere than if that production had remained in the United States, Canada, or Europe.

    And yet, Western governments, tax-funded climate activists, UN leaders, and their media allies all celebrated and continue to celebrate the Paris Agreement and subsequent follow-ups as a huge success in saving the climate.

    Perhaps Donald Trump was on to something when, in 2012, he wrote on Twitter, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

    That’s exactly what happened, of course, as electricity rates got pushed higher and higher over time. In 1975, electricity was averaging around 3 cents per kilowatt hour, helping U.S. industry remain competitive globally. By 2010, thanks in part to Obama’s policies, it had tripled. And by 2021, it was approaching 15 cents.

    For perspective, electricity prices in China are about half that.

    There are many reasons for the shifting of production from the United States to China—many of them directly related to U.S. policy—but one key factor has been the cost of energy.

    Yet higher energy prices were openly touted as a policy objective by Obama. As he with the San Francisco Chronicle, “under my plan … electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

    Later that year, he expressed similar sentiments as gas prices soared to around $4, saying only that he would have “preferred” a “gradual adjustment” instead.

    Faced with higher labor costs and a tougher regulatory environment, American companies and entrepreneurs were already struggling to keep production in the United States amid a rigged global trading regime benefiting the CCP at America’s expense.

    Soaring energy costs in many cases pushed firms over the edge, forcing them to shift production to China or shut down in the face of Chinese competition.

    Again, if you truly believe CO2 is pollution, the worst possible outcome of “climate” negotiations would be to transfer even more production to China, where CO2 emissions per unit of economic production are massively higher.

    But this is precisely the result of the much-celebrated UN “climate” process.

    The shift into so-called “renewable energy” being engineered by the Biden administration and federal policymakers has been and will continue to be a huge boon to the CCP, too—and not just because it will force prices higher while making the U.S. energy grid more unstable.

    Almost 80 percent of solar cells produced in 2019 were made in China, according to Bloomberg data (pdf). The CCP dominates production in the wind sector and battery industries as well. It also controls the supply chain for rare-earth materials needed to produce all of these “green energy” products.

    The U.S. government, for its part, is offering massive subsidies to these CCP-dominated industrial sectors while forcing Americans into dependence on them through regulations, mandates, subsidies, and other policies. How this is supposed to help the environment is never made clear.

    For some perspective on the economic carnage inflicted on America by Obama’s Paris scheme, which he claimed was an “executive agreement” and thus not subject to Senate ratification as required by the Constitution, the Heritage Foundation crunched the numbers in a 2016 study.

    Among other findings, the conservative-leaning think tank said Obama’s Paris pledges would increase electricity costs for a family of four between 13 and 20 percent annually while vaporizing almost half a million jobs, including around 200,000 in manufacturing.

    That damage translates to about $20,000 in lost income for American families by 2035 and a reduction in GDP of over $2.5 trillion.


    Who Benefits?



    Who benefits from all this? Certainly not the “climate.” Again, shipping U.S. industry to China will result in more CO2 in the atmosphere, not less. And in any case, based on the UN’s own debunked “models,” complete elimination of all U.S. CO2 emissions would result in virtually no reduction in global temperatures.

    According to a peer-reviewed paper by Dr. Bjorn Lomborg published in the Global Policy journal, even if all the significant pledges made in Paris were fulfilled, global temperatures would be just 0.05 degrees C (0.086 degrees F) cooler by 2100—a statistically insignificant rounding error.

    The big winner, of course, was the CCP, which has been laughing all the way to the bank as it absorbs the factories, jobs, and wealth production that U.S. and other Western authorities are shutting down to “save the climate.”

    This appears to be deliberate, as statements by leading officials in the Obama administration and the UN have made clear.

    Obama’s “Science Czar” John Holdren openly advocated a de-industrialization of the United States in his 1973 book “Human Ecology.”

    “A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” Holdren and his co-authors wrote. “De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology.”

    Then consider seemingly bizarre comments made by then-UN Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres.

    Speaking to Bloomberg a few months after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed his unsettling admiration for the CCP, Figueres claimed that the regime in Beijing—overseeing about one third of global CO2 output—was “doing it right” on climate policy.

    In separate comments while pushing for major climate policies, Figueres also suggested the goal of “climate” policy was really economic transformation.

    “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said on Feb. 4, 2015.

    Five years before those comments, one of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s top officials, Ottmar Edenhofer, revealed a similar agenda in comments to Germany’s NZZ Online.

    “One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” he said. “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

    Wealth redistribution? Changing the economic model of the world? De-developing the United States? And here Americans are being told this is about “saving the climate.”

    Remember, too, that when Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement, climate alarmists from around the world declared that Beijing was the new global “leader” of the effort to save the climate—the same regime that oversees the most CO2 emissions, is building coal plants faster than they can be counted, and that promised to keep increasing CO2 emissions until 2030.

    If this is really about saving the climate from CO2, how can the CCP be the new leader? It’s beyond absurd.

    Despite all this, the Biden administration continues to intensify “cooperation” on “climate action” and the Paris Agreement with Beijing, no doubt causing amusement and joy among members of the CCP’s Politburo.

    It’s not just China that benefits. In fact, congressional researchers that state-backed Russian energy interests were funding U.S. “green” groups opposed to U.S. energy via a shell company in Bermuda called Klein Ltd.

    The regime in Venezuela, too, is laughing all the way to the bank as the Biden administration sabotages U.S. energy and begs the Maduro dictatorship to send oil to America.

    To be clear, I don’t begrudge the CO2 emissions of China or anyone else. In fact, many scientists have told me that more of this “gas of life” would be enormously beneficial for the planet and humanity.

    Retired Princeton physics professor Dr. William Happer, who served as Trump’s climate adviser, told me years ago at a climate conference we both spoke at that the planet needed more CO2 and that plants were designed to live in an atmosphere with quite a bit more CO2 than the planet currently has.

    Plus, human emissions of CO2 make up a fraction of 1 percent of all the so-called “greenhouse gases” present naturally in the atmosphere.

    To summarize, if one truly believes that CO2 is bad for the climate, shipping U.S. production and industry to China is the worst possible way to deal with it. Logically, then, the policymakers behind this must have an ulterior motive.

    Of course, the CCP loves the Paris deal: They do nothing but build more coal plants to power the industries and factories fleeing America for China as the U.S. government forces the United States to commit economic suicide.

    This isn’t just an economic or “climate” issue, either. As the United States is “de-developed,” the economic destruction produces a major threat to national security. A strong military can’t be funded without a strong economy, obviously.

    It’s time for lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives to shut down the administration’s “climate” policies that do nothing but expand CCP CO2 emissions and harm the United States.

    Alex Newman is a freelance contributor. Newman is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, and consultant who co-wrote the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.” He is the executive director of Public School Exit, serves as CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media, and writes for diverse publications in the United States and abroad.


    https://www.theepochtimes.com/ccp-pr...e_4971356.html

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    Haven't you heard? They've only got 10 years left.
    "when socialism fails, blame capitalism and demand more socialism." - A friend
    "You know the difference between libs and right-wingers? Libs STFU when evidence refutes their false beliefs." - Another friend
    “Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear.” - Paulo Coelho


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    Default China’s Tragedy of Errors: Pandemic Redux

    China’s Tragedy of Errors: Pandemic Redux



    Medical workers arrive with a patient on a stretcher at a fever clinic in Beijing on Dec. 9, 2022. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)



    Thinking About China
    China’s Tragedy of Errors: Pandemic Redux



    Ilana Freedman

    January 23, 2023

    Commentary

    Audio PDF


    When communist China unleashed the COVID-19 virus on the rest of the world in the winter of 2020, it knew what it was doing. Wuhan, a major industrial city of 11 million people and the capital of Hubei Province, was ground zero for the pandemic. In a level-four laboratory used by the communist Chinese military to develop bioweapons and pursue gain-of-function research, a new virus was released—likely by accident—and opened a Pandora’s Box.

    By mid-January 2020, the city was overwhelmed with people who were sick and dying from the virus, and the crematoria were running 24/7. China reported only 3,299 coronavirus-related deaths, with most taking place in Wuhan, the epicenter of the global pandemic. But one crematorium in Wuhan alone received two shipments of 5,000 urns over the course of two days, and overall, the massive number of orders for burial urns ran into the tens of thousands. The government’s reported numbers of deaths were ridiculously low.

    From Jan. 3, 2020, to Jan. 11, 2023, China reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) that there had been 10,803,226 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 33,343 deaths. Yet by mid-January 2023, estimates from multiple cities throughout China suggest that they are experiencing as many as 10,000 COVID-19 deaths daily—per city. An internal estimate was leaked from the government that 250 million people in China may have caught COVID-19 in the first 20 days of December alone. Another leak reported that on Dec. 21, 37 million people were newly infected with COVID-19 across China on that day alone. Compare that to the official number of 3,049 new infections that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reported for that day. Another report suggested that more than 75 percent of the population is already infected.

    The death toll in China was purposely underreported from the beginning. In 2020 alone, the WHO estimated the death toll at 1,813,188 COVID-19 deaths. China claimed approximately 30,000. But the real death toll in China was actually much larger. One startling fact was the disappearance of 21 million cell phones, which every Chinese citizen is required to carry. Did this reveal a much greater death toll than China was willing to admit?

    This new epidemic in China raises all the old questions again. Only this time, WHO and governments, now facing the possibility of a new pandemic, are demanding more openness from China. Finally, on Jan. 14, 2023, Chinese officials responded to accusations of lack of transparency. They reported that 60,000 people had died from COVID-19 in just over a month. That still doesn’t match the numbers they have been sharing in private meetings, but it is undoubtedly closer to the truth.



    Hospital workers wheel a body on a gurney in the busy emergency room at a hospital in Beijing on Jan. 2, 2023. (Getty Images)

    Learning From Experience, or Not


    At the end of January 2020, months after the first infections in Wuhan had brought the city to its knees and just before the Lunar New Year (a long holiday for Chinese citizens, who normally use the time to travel), the CCP intentionally allowed 5 million residents of Wuhan to travel before locking down the entire city, cutting off all roads, trains, and planes in and out of Wuhan. Five million people, many of whom were carrying the virus, were allowed to leave Wuhan and travel internationally to expose the rest of the world to COVID-19, while at home, the CCP confined the remaining residents of Hubei Province to their homes.

    This was a crime against humanity that has never been addressed. Chairman Xi Jinping unleashed a deadly virus that could kill millions of people. And that is exactly what happened. The virus spread like wildfire, racing around the globe to virtually every country. An incomplete number provided by the WHO for the COVID-19 deaths during the first round of the pandemic (2020–2021) exceeded 3 million. Still, as of Jan. 15, 2023, estimates of total COVID-related deaths (except in China, whose official numbers have been highly suspect from the beginning) exceeded 6,731,000 people.

    It could have been a lot worse, but it was bad enough. The Spanish Flu of 1918, caused by an H1N1 virus, is thought to have killed between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide. This was during the First World War, and it was the war itself and the massive transfer of troops from country to country that accounted for the high number of deaths from this pandemic. By contrast, an analysis by WHO suggests that COVID–related deaths worldwide have been between 16 million and 28.2 million. This number is only an estimate because China, with its population of 1.4 billion, has been massively undercounting its COVID-19 casualties.

    China’s Pandora’s Box Has Come Back to Haunt Its Creator


    The shutdown of Wuhan in January 2020 was the beginning of the zero-COVID policy that kept people locked in their homes for months on end, if even one case of COVID-19 appeared in cities of millions. One case could trigger widespread food shortages, medicine, and other essentials. The people were subjected to repeated testing, and homes were commandeered for some, while the residents were forcibly sent to quarantine centers that housed hundreds.

    This ended abruptly in December 2022, when a raging apartment fire in the city of Urumqi in China’s Xinjiang region triggered demonstrations in major cities throughout China. That fire killed 10 people, including a three-year-old child. It took firefighters three hours to put the fire out because the government blockade of the building prevented them from getting close to the flames.

    The news of the fire spread rapidly, and within hours, the demonstrators were in the streets, demanding the end of the lockdowns and calling for the CCP and Xi Jinping to step down. The demonstrations were unprecedented in a country that had been locked down by a tyrannical government for two years. It worked, but the cure was as bad as the disease.

    Within days, the CCP lifted the lockdown completely, and the people were once again free to leave their homes and go about their lives. But because of the lockdowns, a majority of the population had not been exposed to the virus, and new variants struck the Chinese people with a vengeance. The predominant strains of the Omicron variant that are now ravaging the population, BA.5.2 and BF.7, now represent 97.5 percent of the infected population. But unlike the variant now spreading in the United States, this one is deadly to people with no prior exposure or immunity.



    Funeral workers load bodies into vans to be taken for cremation at a busy local funeral home in Shanghai, China, on Jan. 13, 2023. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

    As expected, the Chinese authorities claimed that daily COVID-19 deaths were in single digits, but reports coming out of China told a different story. Satellite pictures have captured images of the long lines of hearses in every city, and crematoria have reported being overwhelmed by the flood of incoming dead bodies. Sick patients crowd hospital hallways where bodies line the walls, and there seems to be no end to the dying.

    Needless to say, as the virus continues to spiral out of control, China is in a critical situation and is still trying to figure out what to do about it. Xi has been uncharacteristically quiet on the subject, but his policies continue to be Machiavellian. His zero-COVID policy, which he was so proud and so adamant about keeping in place only a month ago, is now in shambles. The street demonstrations that called for his removal must have been a humiliation in a country where saving face is paramount. But this is far from the end of Xi. He still has enormous power, and senior members of his party are rallying around him. But his policies spell great danger to the rest of the world.

    China has now reopened to foreign tourists, and travelers can enter the country without quarantine. All they need is a negative PCR result within 48 hours before departure. China also restarted its visa-free policy, which means one can travel to China without applying for a new visa. In other words, China is not only making it easy for the Chinese to travel abroad, but it is also encouraging foreign travelers to come to China.

    Even more chilling is the news that after releasing the Chinese people from the long COVID-19 lockdowns, Xi also opened up the Chinese ports for international travel at precisely the same time as he did in 2020. The Chinese New Year falls on Jan. 22 this year, and celebrations culminate with the Lantern Festival on Feb. 5. China is reopening its ports and has begun reissuing passports. This is exactly the same time that 5 million people from Wuhan left the city in 2020 to travel internationally. And once again, they are carrying a dangerous virus.

    Xi has learned nothing from recent history. But one question remains: Will the cruelty that Xi continues to inflict on the world turn back on him and destroy the very power structure that he has worked so hard to build? Will his massive mistakes come back to haunt him and bring down his dream of world supremacy? Or will the power infrastructure he created protect him and allow him to destroy the world?

    The CCP is about to unleash another pandemic on the world, and this one may be far more lethal than the last. Closing national borders to all Chinese travelers and preventing our own from traveling to China would seem to be only common sense. It must be done—immediately. But the world seems uncommonly devoid of anything approaching such basic wisdom. If so, it’s time to prepare for another storm.

    Ilana Freedman is an intelligence analyst with more than thirty years in the field. Ilana has authored hundreds of articles on global threats and the geopolitical landscape. She has written four books on Islamic terrorism, and is currently working on a comprehensive volume on the rise and fall of China.



    https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas...x_4999638.html





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    Default Is the West Too Gullible When It Comes to China

    Is the West Too Gullible When It Comes to China


    The CCP is not a normal law-abiding government






    Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meets China’s President Xi Jinping in a bilateral meeting during the 2022 G20 summit in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia, Australia, on Nov. 15, 2022. (AAP Image/Mick Tsikas)



    David Flint contributor
    January 25, 2023Updated: January 26, 2023


    Commentary Audio PDF



    The controversy over Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform to a party was repeated recently when a 40-year-old prominent Australian politician, Dominic Perrottet, revealed that he had worn a Nazi uniform to his 21st birthday party.

    A newspaper reader wondered if people would be so outraged if someone had worn a Mao uniform. A good point.

    Since President Richard Nixon’s 1971 visit to Beijing, preceded by the Australian opposition leader Gough Whitlam, the overwhelming approach of Western leaders has been to treat the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as just another normal law-abiding government. They also often treat communist leaders, including the mass murderer Mao Zedong, with respect and, at times, even awe.

    When Mao died in 1976, Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and opposition leader Gough Whitlam led the Australian House of Representatives in the condolence motion that no one, even for a moment, had ever thought appropriate for those other mass-murderers, Stalin and Hitler.

    Indeed, when the head of the Irish government Taoiseach Éamon de Valera, called on the German ambassador in 1945 to express his condolences on Hitler’s suicide, this was greeted with widespread international commendation.

    What was it about Mao? It was surely not that he murdered more than anyone else. Was it that big business and its political allies realised that by exploiting the downtrodden Chinese and slave labour and with a consequently rising domestic market, a fortune could be made?

    Losing their manufacturing, handing over intellectual property or even having it stolen, or becoming dependent on the communists was, apparently, of no concern.

    ‘Law-Abiding’ Isn’t in Beijing’s Vocabulary



    Relations between Australia and Beijing spiralled downwards in 2020 when the previous centre-right Liberal-National Morrison government dared call for an international investigation into the origin of COVID-19.

    After all, the world had suffered drastic consequences following the release of what seems to be an experimental virus produced in a Wuhan military laboratory assisted by funding from Dr. Anthony Fauci, such research being forbidden in the United States.




    Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to U.S. President Joe Biden, during a hearing in Washington on May 17, 2022. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

    Added to this was the shocking failure of Beijing to warn airlines, other countries and the World Health Organization of the travel of large numbers across the world at the conclusion of the 2020 Lunar New Year.

    An inquiry into this is still needed and should obviously extend to assessing liability for the massive damages suffered.

    Each state should then be able to recoup some decent contribution towards those damages from CCP-controlled assets in its jurisdiction.

    As to questions of proof, when dealing with recalcitrant law-breaking communists, we can obtain some valuable assistance from the 1947 World Court Corfu Channel Case between the UK and Albania.

    Beijing already has a poor record in observing international law, as demonstrated by the 2016 South China Sea Case before the Hague Tribunal, which had ruled that Communist China could not use rocky outcrops—some exposed only at low tide—as the basis for territorial claims against the Philippines.

    Rather than insisting on Beijing observing this judgement, President Barack Obama unwisely compromised by accepting Xi’s promise not to militarise the South China Sea.

    In imposing sanctions on Australia, Beijing remains in massive breach of international trade law. But the fact that we are dealing with law-breakers does not mean that an international inquiry of interested powers should not go ahead. It would be wrong to assume that damages could not be recovered.

    For this purpose, Australia should encourage other countries, especially our close allies, to legislate to allow damages established under a specified inquiry to be available to be recouped from assets under the control of the CCP.

    Good legal drafting could ensure that separate proof of the accessibility of assets in each case should not be necessary and that, in the interim, assets are frozen.

    Of course, the communists will retaliate, but they are already doing this for no more than Australia’s suggesting an international inquiry.




    Basket of live western rock lobsters in Fremantle in Western Australia. (Trevor Collens/Getty Images)

    And why should the people of countries such as Australia, who have suffered so terribly from the unilateral actions of the communists in developing a dangerous virus, in its escape and in not warning of its dangers, especially in the early period?

    How Did the West Become so Dependent?



    Now, the current prime minister, Anthony Albanese, appears to want to curry favour with the communists.

    First, he, initially at least, declined to follow our closest allies in imposing testing on those travelling from China where the authorities could not be relied on to be truthful as to the state of the virus.

    Then, boasting that Australia and China are “talking again,” he said: “We are undoing so much of the damage done by the LNP government.”

    So, is he saying that the opposition is to blame for COVID and the trade boycott or just for the trade boycott? Is he saying the former government should not have asked for an independent inquiry?

    At the last G20 meeting, the prime minister was allowed to shake Xi’s hand while the illicit trade sanctions stayed in place.

    Then, he seemed elated when the foreign minister, Penny Wong, was permitted to go to Beijing to pay her respects to one of the regime’s apparatchiks again while the illicit trade sanctions stayed in place.




    Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong (L) meets with Australian Ambassador to China Graham Fletcher at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, China, on Dec. 21, 2022. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch)

    Now, he seems to be waiting for a summons from Beijing when the communists will possibly abandon some of their illegal sanctions, but only because they have proven counter-productive.

    When it comes to Beijing, a far too common weakness among Western ruling elites is that they seem to have learnt nothing from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. At least Chamberlain realised his error.

    The Western ruling classes are still trying to treat the brutal Beijing dictatorship as a normal government, and they are still letting their countries become dependent on the dictatorship, just as the German ruling class became dependent on Russia for energy.

    So, how could so many in the West be so gullible as to make us so dependent on the communists?

    According to some reports, Henry Kissinger actually realised at the time of the 1971 visit that the communists would turn on the U.S. once they had the economic and military capacity to do so.

    Gough Whitlam was even more accommodating to the monster, abandoning Taiwan well before the Americans did, at least diplomatically, in 1979.

    President Bill Clinton’s unconditional admission of Beijing to the World Trade Organization in 2000 led to the transfer of manufacturing jobs away from the U.S., the forced transfer and theft of IP, and continuing and serious breaches of trade law.

    We saw recently how tenuous the hold of the dictatorship is when the Chinese people revolted against the Maoist lockdown policy that was copied, unwisely, by Western politicians.

    At some stage, probably sooner than later, communist China will follow the Soviet Union into oblivion, and the Chinese people will be liberated as they deserve.

    True leadership emerges occasionally in the West where those of the calibre of Churchill, Reagan, and Thatcher not only make the West great. They do not allow dictators to ride roughshod over the West nor the West to become dependent on them.
    David Flint is an emeritus professor of law, known for his leadership of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy and for his tenure as head of the Australian Broadcasting Authority. He is also a former chairman of the Australian Press Council and the World Association of Press Councils.


    https://www.theepochtimes.com/is-the...a_5008971.html



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    Default COVID and the 3 Tests of Compliance

    COVID and the 3 Tests of Compliance



    (GrandeDuc/Shutterstock)




    Jeffrey A. Tucker
    February 9, 2023




    Commentary

    Audio PDF


    Jesus in the wilderness faced three temptations from the Devil himself: material comfort, fame, and power. Needless to say, he declined every temptation and passed all three trials.

    So too did the couple seeking to enter the order of virtue in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” They blasted right through the tests of silence, isolation, and fear. In the opera, much celebration ensues.

    Fairy tales too are often framed by three chances. The Miller’s daughter is given three chances to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name, for example, and I’m sure you can think of other instances.

    The final movement of the 6th “Tragic” Symphony by Gustav Mahler features three hammer blows, the third of which was later removed by the composer for superstitious reasons: the fear that the third signifies death. To this day, audiences wait in anticipation to see if the conductor will motion the percussionist to deploy the third or not. When he does not, the blow is even more conspicuous in its absence.

    And here we are in year three of the times after the pandemic response sent our lives and those of billions into extraordinary upheaval. To most of us, it seems like a crazy blur of edicts, propaganda, revelations, fear, confusion, division, and shock, so much so that it is hard to keep the history straight. Indeed, many people just want everything forgotten or at least completely mis-remembered.

    Daily, we are bombarded by fake history that we know is wrong. We lived through it. Brownstone has been accumulating all the receipts: the emails, speeches, edits, threats, impositions, demands, and so on. In the face of all this attempted revisionism, it’s hard to keep one’s bearing.

    One way to think about these last three years is a succession of compliance tests: how much liberty and good sense are we willing to surrender to the regime and on what terms? The policies seem to be constructed for just that purpose.

    As if to fit the model, they came in three great waves: lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates. Let’s examine all three stages and reflect on their demands and terms. It begins to make sense, at least from the point of view of those in control.

    Lockdowns



    “Thank goodness for the lockdowns; this will end the pandemic.”

    The lockdowns hit us hard from mid-March 2020 and onward, imposed as if they were a conventional response to a circulating new pathogen, though they literally had no precedent in history. They were sweeping, closing churches, schools, small and medium-sized businesses, civic clubs like AA, bars and restaurants plus gyms, and even venues that host weddings and funerals. Many states imposed stay-at-home orders. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, while medical services were reserved for only COVID cases and other extreme emergencies while everything else was shut.

    All of this was based on the astonishing announcement by the Trump administration: “Governors should close schools in communities that are near areas of community transmission” and “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

    At the March 16, 2020, press conference, not one reporter asked a critical question. Even if this was only for two weeks, as was promised, how is any of this compatible with law and the Bill of Rights? How is it that bureaucracies, without any vote of any legislature, can simply “shut down” an entire country? It was completely bizarre, so much so that most people figured that there had to be some legitimate underlying rationale.

    Not everyone went along. Some hair salons, bars, and churches remained open but found themselves pilloried by the media. Then the cops arrived, even SWAT teams, closing them by force. The kids had to stay home too, and moms and dads were forced to leave the workforce to care for them at home, splitting their days pretending to work on Zoom calls while their children pretended to be in school on Zoom too. It was a massive crush of technology and everyone had to adapt.

    There was nowhere to go and most American towns suddenly looked like ghost towns. President Trump announced that it would surely all be over by Easter but this itself was something of a shock: Easter was more than two weeks away, so his announcement amounted to extension of lockdowns. His advisers Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx seized the moment and successfully talked Trump into another full 30 days of lockdowns.

    These weeks were excruciating. Many if not most people knew that there was something very wrong but it was unclear what. We could no longer meet with friends and neighbors to discuss. Plus many people in our online communities seemed to be all in on the lockdowns, fully believing that this was the way to control and eventually stop a pandemic.

    And yet there we were, all of us living in this surreal scene, asked to believe the implausible and give up what we loved the most by deference to a handful of people who said that they knew more than we knew. Those who did not do the right thing were considered horrid and unscientific, insufficiently credulous toward our betters.

    Masks



    “Thank goodness for masks; this will end the lockdowns.”

    In these early days, there was no thought put into universal masking. It was never part of our history. There was a moment during the 1918 pandemic that one city tried masks but not only did it not work; it produced a massive political revolt. Not since then had masks for the general population ever been tried. Plenty of countries in the Far East had used masks to filter out smog on bad days but that problem had never been something that affected the US enough to make them a norm.

    Plus, in those days, the experts told everyone not to bother with them. The masks should be saved for medical personnel. In any case, they don’t really work to control the spread of viruses like this. They are not the equivalent of using condoms to avoid infection from AIDS. A respiratory virus is something else entirely, and we are a people informed by evidence and science. The evidence was nowhere in sight that masks achieve any real purpose.

    Practically overnight, that advice changed. Part of the deal was that masks were the key to getting out of lockdown. We could leave our home again if only we would wear a mask. For those who don’t like lockdown, now is your chance to leave it behind. You only needed to comply with this second round of edicts. The first round, true, was pretty rough, but who can object to putting a cloth on your face? Surely no one. As Bill Gates said, we wear pants so why not cover our faces too? It only makes sense.

    People went along, and we went through a whole season or two in which we did not see smiles. Even the children had their faces covered. If you desire to breathe freely, you could fully expect to be denounced by strangers for daring to reject the demands of authorities. You could get thrown off a plane, and put on a list never to travel again. The hate was apparent everywhere, even in outdoor markets where gatekeepers would sternly instruct you slap that cloth on your face.

    Those who resisted the masking demands were—like those who refused the lockdowns—regarded as miscreants and political rebels. I personally found the whole demand of masking to be so preposterous (masking has long been a sign of subservience) that I spoke out against them, only to find myself attacked viciously in many public forums as a grandma killer and a disease spreader. And this came from from venues that previously had celebrated civil liberties.

    This demand for masking was later nationalized once the Biden administration took over. It was to be 100 days of masking to defeat the virus. But by now no one believed anything coming from Washington. We knew for sure that the claim that it was only for 100 days—why 100?—was propaganda.

    It eventually took a major court case to end the mask mandate for all travel: buses, trains, and planes. Even that is still being litigated to this day, as the Biden administration claims it has the power to impose such an order by virtue of the quarantine power of the federal government, first granted in 1944.

    Looking back, the deal was pretty obvious: you can get out of lockdowns by masking. If you don’t like complying with the first round of tests, here is another test for you: comply with this and all your kvetching about lockdowns can come to an end. Just go along! What kind of pathology do you have to keep from continuing to indulge this pointlessly rebellious habit? You are probably a conspiracy theorist or QAnon or hanging around people from the radical right.

    Just do what you are told and then everything will be fine. Things are not fine because you irrationally cling to your “freedumb.”

    Of course, the government broke the deal. Masking didn’t really end the restrictions. They continued on anyway. And many are still with us, even the track-and-trace surveillance and restrictions on movement. The signs that demand we socially distance still festoon airports and malls even if everyone ignores them.

    Vaccines



    “Thank goodness for the vaccines; they will end the lockdowns and the masks.”

    Eventually, there came a third test of compliance. This time it was more explicit: if you don’t like lockdowns and masking, the way out is pretty simple: get the shot. If you get the shot, you can travel around freely and you can even take off your mask. This is the way we end this pandemic but there must be broad compliance. Everyone authorized to get the vaccine under the “emergency use authorization” should do it.

    New York City shut down to everyone but the vaccinated. Refuseniks could not go to restaurants, bars, theaters, libraries, or any other public house. Boston and New Orleans followed suit. The mayors said that they were keeping the city safe and reviving the economy because the only way to avoid getting COVID was to be around only vaccinated people. We were further told that the unvaccinated were prolonging the pandemic. Their patience was running thin: get the jab or lose your job.

    Many had to get it, and thousands were fired for refusing. Millions were displaced because of all this. And this only intensified the campaign, which was then extended to children. Then came the booster and the bivalent. All the while, the news concerning their effectiveness got grimmer. It did not stop transmission, thus removing all “public health” rationale behind the mandates. Moreover, it did not stop infection. You would get COVID anyway. In fact, by virtue of immunity imprinting, you could be even more vulnerable.

    The thinking behind the third hammer blow turned out to be a lie too. Your decision to surrender your bodily autonomy to the vaccine that did work did not gain back your freedom any more than the mask or the lockdowns did. All three compliance demands, each predicated on the idea that it would make the virus go away and gain back rights and liberties, turned out to be ruses of one sort or another.

    Crucially, the new demand came with the promise that if you just believe in and comply with the newest thing, the older thing that you hated will go away. So what’s the problem? Just give in to this new thing and all will be well.

    And yet the vaccine mandate was the most egregious by some measures. If lockdowns were the war, the vaccine mandate was conscription. It took hold of your own body and demanded you allow—via a needle in your skin—in a government-funded and indemnified potion about which you knew nothing. It was the equivalent of drafting young people out of their prime to kill and be killed in a foreign land, and we know how that has ended for states that have tried it: not only riots but revolutions.

    So the third test for many was the very act that flipped the switch in many people’s minds. It was a bridge too far and the act that caused millions to rethink everything about the pandemic response and their compliance all along. Even for those who went along with it, the bitterness remains and grows.

    From legend and literature, this is how things usually are presented, not with one inviting temptation to go along but rather with three chances to comply, each with assurance that all will be well if we just give up our recalcitrant desire to think and act for ourselves. At each stage, every one of us faces enormous pressure, and not just from government but also from family, friends, and coworkers.
    • “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread” ~ material comfort
    • “If You are the Son of God, throw yourself down” ~ fame and social approval
    • “All these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me” ~ power

    The three tests in this case turned out to be more like the hammer blows in Mahler’s symphony, signifiers of disaster and death, in this case pertaining to our rights and liberties.

    Sure enough, even now, the remnants of all three are still with us. There are still capacity restrictions in place as remnants of the original lockdowns. Masks are still required in many cities and venues. And the vaccine mandates are still being enforced. And the pandemic emergency is still in place and will be for several more months.

    Just as one is ending, you can be sure that another is beginning. The New York Times just sounded the alarm about H5N1 bird flu, which they say could kill half of humanity if it crosses over from birds to humans. And we can be certain that the three trials will be visited upon us again.

    Have we learned? What will be our response in the next round of trials?

    From the
    Brownstone Institute


    Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.


    https://www.theepochtimes.com/covid-...e_5046458.html


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    Default Owning America

    Owning America

    The CCP’s security and intelligence agents have had access to the highest levels of the US government for decades



    The sun sets over the U.S. Capitol building in Washington on Jan. 5, 2023. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)


    By James Gorrie
    February 23, 2023


    Commentary Audio PDF


    Who would’ve imagined that a Chinese military surveillance balloon could cross the North American continent from Alaska to beyond the Atlantic coast of South Carolina unmolested by American military response?

    But that’s exactly what happened under the Biden administration. Given the Biden family’s alleged extensive business ties to China, it shouldn’t surprise anyone.

    One can’t help but wonder, if that balloon had been of Russian origin rather than Chinese, would it have gotten the Nord Stream 2 pipeline treatment as soon as it crossed into Alaskan airspace?

    CCP
    Deeply Embedded in America



    By all appearances, China can do what it wants with minimal, if any, U.S. response. The inescapable fact is that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its intelligence arm, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), are deeply embedded in our media, political, and military establishments.

    Why wouldn’t they be?

    The United States has been the primary target of the CCP for a long time. Contrary to what the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) would have us believe in a recent piece that “Beijing’s heightened efforts in the United States are relatively new,” it just isn’t so. The CCP has been running freely in the United States for decades, successfully targeting the highest levels of the American government.

    It may be old news, but given current events, it bears repeating.

    Clinton Administration and China



    The Clinton administration is allegedly responsible for much of the technological advancements the Chinese have made over the past 25 years. In exchange for millions of dollars in alleged illegal campaign funding provided to the 1996 Clinton campaign by China’s military and intelligence services, then-President Bill Clinton gave Beijing access to technologies that enabled China’s rapid ascent into a nuclear-armed adversary of the United States.

    Clinton allegedly relaxed security measures that allowed Chinese agents access to multiple militarily significant technologies. According to The Wall Street Journal in 1998, “Beijing has stolen U.S. design data for nearly all elements needed for a major nuclear attack on the U.S., such as advanced warheads, missiles, and guidance systems.”

    But wait; there’s more.


    U.S. President Bill Clinton signs the U.S.-China Trade Relations Act of 2000 during a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on Oct. 10, 2000. With him are (left to right): Sen. William Roth (R-Del.), U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, U.S. Trade Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, and Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.). (Mario Tama/AFP via Getty Images)

    Clinton also allegedly gave China a 20-year quantum leap in technological advancement by waiving export bans on supercomputers that are crucial for nuclear weapons development and missile guidance systems. A Washington Post editorial noted that “in the first three quarters of 1998, nine times as many [supercomputers] were exported [to China] as during the previous seven years.”

    Get the picture?

    Chinese influence, if not outright control, over many of our top political leaders was in full swing by 1996. It went on from there by targeting other members of Congress for influence and control in 1998.

    But today, not only does the MSS has a long record of penetrating U.S. intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and the FBI, among others, but Beijing has also successfully hollowed out U.S. spy activities in China.

    How that came to be is a question that’s worth pursuing on its own.

    Influencing American Public Opinion and Elections



    In the meantime, the CCP also enjoys unprecedented influence over information in the United States. It dominates all Chinese-language media in the United States. It has regular “reports” published in major news outlets such as USA Today, CNN, Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Policy.

    Furthermore, the CCP has focused on local elections in the United States over the past several years to gain influence at the grassroots level of American life. According to a report by the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center released in July, the CCP’s focus includes governors, state legislators, and even mayors and city councils.

    In short, your last local mayoral election may have been decided for you in Beijing, not in your hometown.

    The implications of this kind of power are staggering.

    Too Little, Too Late?



    In April 2021, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) introduced H.R.2329–Countering Chinese Communist Party Malign Influence Act. The specific purpose of the act authorizes “activities to counter globally the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including CCP attempts to undermine the free and open international order or the sovereignty of the United States or other countries.”

    In other words, McCaul introduced the bill because such a bill is needed. But will it be enough?

    It doesn’t look like it.

    Recall that as president, Donald Trump withdrew U.S. funding and membership from the World Health Organization (WHO) over its deep connections to the CCP and its misguided COVID-19 policies.

    But upon taking office in 2021, Biden reversed Trump’s decision, and the United States rejoined and re-funded the WHO. As of Feb. 18 this year, the Biden administration is getting ready to sign an agreement with the WHO that could effectively eliminate American sovereignty.

    The reality is that the CCP’s influence over America’s leaders, institutions, and culture is not as bad as it seems.

    It’s much worse.

    https://www.theepochtimes.com/owning...a_5077188.html

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    Default Why Legislators Should Reject the WHO’s Proposals for Pandemics

    Why Legislators Should Reject the WHO’s Proposals for Pandemics




    (Butenkov Aleksei/Shutterstock)


    By David Bell
    April 4, 2023

    Audio
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    Commentary

    Democracies and sane societies are built on rationalism and honesty. They may not always exhibit this, but these values must underpin major decisions. Without them, neither democracy nor justice are sustainable. They are replaced by a structure in which the few dictate to the many, and the excesses of feudalism, slavery, or fascism rise to dominance. This is why so many fought so hard, for so long, in defense of these ideals. People in democratic countries then elect representatives to the privileged position of guardians of their freedom.

    The World Health Organization (WHO) is promoting a pandemic treaty (“CA+”), and amendments to the existing International Health Regulations (IHR), to increase its power during health emergencies. These proposals also broaden the scope of emergencies to include potential rather than actual harm. The draft treaty suggests a definition of “One Health” that encompasses any occurrence in the biosphere that could impact human well-being. This decision-making power will be placed in the hands of a single person, the WHO Director General. The WHO will require countries to sign on to these agreements to suppress and censor the voices of those who question the Director-General’s dictates.

    The two proposals, detailed elsewhere, aim to expand an international bureaucracy for health emergencies with an additional annual budget estimated by the World Bank at three times the WHO’s current budget. This program is heavily backed by the WHO’s major individual and corporate sponsors, entities that will directly benefit through the commodity-centered responses that are proposed. However, it will be mainly funded by taxpayers.


    This is a new model for the WHO and for public health. The WHO was originally intended to serve countries, not instruct them. The proposals aim to reduce individual and national decision-making power, or sovereignty, replacing this with obedience to the WHO’s recommendations. When the WHO Director-General recently suggested that the above was untrue, he was not reflecting the WHO’s proposals, but a separate, public messaging campaign. In WHO parlance, he was spreading misinformation.

    Individual sovereignty and human rights were once central to public health. These concepts are commonly exercised through elected representatives, and through retention of inalienable rights of a person in decisions over their own body. Anti-fascist agreements such as the Nuremberg Code are based on this understanding. These alone are compelling reasons to oppose these WHO proposals. But there are other compelling reasons why these proposals are both ridiculous and dangerous.

    Developing a Drug Cartel



    Much of the WHO’s funding comes from private and corporate sponsors, who specify how their money will be used. The companies have responsibility to their shareholders to use this relationship to increase profits, whilst individuals are directly invested in companies that will gain from the WHO’s health emergency proposals. We saw this during COVID-19.

    A lack of interest from major media, which derive their largest private advertising revenue from the same companies, should not be taken as a reason to ignore it. The WHO’s sponsors seek to profit by it taking control of potentially profitable aspects of health away from representative governments, so that their products can be mandated for use more broadly, and more often.

    Undoing Democracy



    It is right and fair that all countries should be represented at the World Health Assembly. However, much of the world’s population lives under authoritarian governments and military dictatorships. The current WHO Director-General was a minister in a dictatorial government. This is fine for an organization that convenes meetings and names diseases. But it is obviously inappropriate for a democratic country to cede authority over its own citizens to such an entity, and to unaccountable international officials subject to conflict of interest, influences, and biases.

    Public health responses should depend entirely on a population’s own values and priorities, not that of foreign dictators or their appointees. It would be stupid to give control to those espousing quite opposite values.

    Obvious Incompetence



    Before entrusting one’s health to others, it is essential to know that they are competent. Despite having previous evidence-based guidelines for pandemics, the WHO lost the plot disastrously with COVID-19. It supported policies that have worsened such diseases as malaria, tuberculosis and malnutrition, and increased debt and poverty to lock in poorer health for the next generation. These policies increased child labor and facilitated the rape of millions of girls forced into child marriage, whilst denying formal education to hundreds of millions of children. Sick elderly people were unable to get care, while healthy people were confined at home. They have promoted the largest upwards concentration of wealth, and its consequent mass impoverishment, in history.

    For the past two years, the WHO has embarked on a project to mass vaccinate 70 percent of African populations, despite half the population being under 20 years of age so at minimal risk, and the WHO’s own study showing the vast majority had already had COVID-19. This program is the most expensive, per year, that the WHO has ever promoted. It is now seeking powers that will enable them to repeat these types of responses, often.

    Disdain for Human Rights


    Countries adopting the proposed IHR amendments will accept WHO recommendations as obligatory. The list covered in the IHR includes border closures and refusal of individual travel, isolation of “suspect” persons, required medical examinations and vaccination, exit screening and requirements of proof of testing. These will be imposed on a country’s own citizens when an individual in this organization sponsored by large multinational corporations and wealthy investors decides, independently, that an undefined health “threat” poses a risk to other countries.[For more see PDF]

    From the Brownstone Institute

    https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-le...s_5171621.html


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    Default The New York Times Finally Warms to Sweden’s Pandemic Response—Three Years Later


    People have lunch at a restaurant in Stockholm, Sweden, on April 22, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images)




    By Jonathan Miltimore
    April 7, 2023

    Commentary

    Audio PDF


    Last week The New York Times published an article that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

    “How Did No-Mandate Sweden End Up With Such an Average Pandemic?” the headline asked.


    Times writer David Wallace-Wells doesn’t accept claims that Sweden—which drew intense criticism for refusing to go into lockdown in 2020—had the lowest excess death rate in Europe, with just 3.3 percent more deaths than expected, the lowest percentage among OECD countries. But he does concede that “it’s hard to argue on the basis of Sweden’s epidemiological experience that its policy course was a disastrous one.”

    This might not sound like much of a concession, but it is.

    The Grey Lady reported in 2020 that “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale” for its COVID response, and the NY Times was joined by a chorus of media outlets (and President Donald Trump) who alleged Sweden had “botched the pandemic” and amplified the virus.


    Today we know this wasn’t the case. And though Wallace-Wells seems to begrudge Anders Tegnell—the architect of Sweden’s policy—taking a “victory lap through the media,” it’s worth pointing out that the epidemiologist received death threats for his pandemic response, which looks better with each passing week.

    Just how successful Sweden’s approach was is still subject to debate. While Wallace-Wells is skeptical of Swedish claims that the country had the lowest excess mortality in Europe—he says the data set is imperfect and isn’t adjusted for demographics—it’s clear Sweden performed better than many lockdown nations. World Health Organization data he references show Swedes had an excess death rate average of 56 out of 100,000—far better than Italy (133), Germany (116), Spain (111), and the UK (109).


    Whatever data one chooses, one fact is undebatable: This isn’t what modelers predicted.

    It’s important to remember that one of the reasons nations went into lockdown in the first place was that Imperial College London predicted as many as 40 million people would die in nine months if the virus was left unchecked. Those same modelers predicted that Sweden would suffer 96,000 deaths by July 2020 if the nation didn’t close.

    That didn’t happen. (The actual death count by July 2020 was 5,700.)


    So whether one accepts claims that Sweden had the lowest excess death toll in Europe or merely performed “averagely,” it’s clear modelers were horribly wrong.

    While Wallace-Wells doesn’t address these modeling errors, he does highlight the ineffectiveness of government regulations, conceding that “mandates may matter somewhat less than social behavior and the disease itself—and surely less than we want to believe.”

    People will continue to debate mandates, of course. They’ll point out that countries such as Finland and Norway had lower COVID mortality than Sweden, ignoring that (as Wallace-Wells also notes) these countries actually had policies less stringent than Sweden for much of 2020, according to Oxford’s Coronavirus Government Response Tracker. (Neighbors were apparently quick to adopt Sweden’s “lighter touch” approach.)

    This doesn’t mean we don’t have clear answers, however. Early in the pandemic, I asked a proactive question: “Could Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus actually work?”



    Though Wallace-Wells never quite says yes, he includes a telling quote from Francois Balloux, the director of the UCL Genetics Institute and a professor of computational biology at University College London.

    “What the ‘Swedish model’ really suggests is that pandemic mitigation measures can be effectively deployed in a respectful, largely non-coercive way,” writes Balloux.

    This is as close to an admission of “Sorry, we were wrong” as we’re likely to see in the New York Times.

    After all, the non-coercive measures Balloux mentions are precisely what proponents of Sweden’s approach, including signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, had advocated all along. (Wallace-Wells is correct when he notes that Sweden never adopted a “let it rip” approach, as many claim.)

    Sadly, most countries instead adopted highly coercive measures, even tyrannical ones, believing they had the knowledge to plan society. In doing so, they ignored the warning of Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek, who cautioned that “if man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of events possible.”

    This is the biggest lesson of the pandemic: Central planners don’t possess the knowledge to effectively organize society, but they do possess the power to wreck the social order—quickly. This is precisely why Hayek said it was imperative that those with power approach society with humility.



    Some people appear to have learned this lesson. Wallace-Wells said it’s “humbling to acknowledge” that mandates simply were unable to do what many believed they could.

    Let’s hope others learn this lesson as well—and offer the Swedes and Dr. Tegnell a well-deserved apology.

    https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-ne...r_5178997.html


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    Default EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Pentagon Report Forensically Dismantled Fauci-Led Natural Origin St

    EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Pentagon Report Forensically Dismantled Fauci-Led Natural Origin Study




    The U.S. Department of Defense seal is seen on the lectern in the media briefing room at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 12, 2013. (Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images)

    By Hans Mahncke
    May 16, 2023 Updated: May 17, 2023

    News analysis
    Audio PDF


    Researchers at the Department of Defense wrote a devastating takedown of the Proximal Origin study, which was used by Dr. Anthony Fauci as proof that the COVID-19 virus had come from nature.


    The takedown, dated May 26, 2020, was written in the form of a working paper called “Critical analysis of Andersen et al. The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” It was authored by Commander Jean-Paul Chretien, a Navy doctor working at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Dr. Robert Cutlip, a research scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency. The paper came to light on May 15, when it was leaked to the public via virus origins search group DRASTIC (Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19).

    The working paper forensically dismantles the natural origin case made in Proximal Origin and concludes, “The arguments that Andersen et al. use to support a natural-origin scenario for SARS-CoV-2 are based not on scientific analysis, but on unwarranted assumptions.”

    The existence of this internal Pentagon paper is crucial, as it proves that government officials were well aware in the early months of the pandemic that there was no evidence in support of a natural origin of the COVID-19 virus. Additionally, given the crushing discrediting of Proximal Origin, Pentagon officials would also have been aware of Fauci’s efforts to seed a false narrative about the origin of COVID-19.

    Proximal Origin was initially conceived by Fauci during a secret teleconference held on Feb. 1, 2020. The ostensible purpose of the teleconference was to deflect attention from a possible lab origin of COVID-19 and to shift the focus to a natural origin theory. Fauci directed a number of scientists, led by Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and Robert Garry of Tulane Medical School, to pen a study that could be used to discredit the lab leak theory. Despite being directly involved in the inception of the paper, as well as in shaping its arguments, Fauci’s role was concealed from the public. Fauci later bestowed Andersen and Garry with lavish taxpayer-funded grants.

    The defects in Proximal Origin were immediately noticed by reviewers at science journal Nature. This fact only became known late last year from emails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by independent journalist Jimmy Tobias. However, with the help of Jeremy Farrar, who now is the chief scientist of the World Health Organization and who had helped Fauci shape the natural origin narrative, Proximal Origin was accepted for publication in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. It boldly concluded that no “laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”


    On April 17, 2020, President Donald Trump confirmed that the COVID-19 pandemic likely started in a Wuhan laboratory in China. On the same day, while attending a White House press conference, Fauci categorically dismissed the possibility of a lab origin of COVID-19, citing Proximal Origin as corroboration. Fauci feigned independence, telling reporters that he could not recall the names of the authors. What was not known at the time was that Fauci not only knew the authors well, but had personally led the effort to have Proximal Origin written.

    Proximal Origin became the media’s go-to natural origin authority, repeating Fauci’s claim that the paper provided dispositive proof that COVID-19 had come out of nature. It also became the most-read article on COVID-19 and one of the most cited academic papers of all time.

    Yet, while the public was being told by Fauci and the media that Proximal Origin had settled the origin debate, Pentagon researchers came to a very different conclusion.




    National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci waits for the beginning of a hearing before the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies of Senate Appropriations Committee at Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 17, 2022. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

    Chretien and Cutlip found that COVID-19’s features, which Proximal Origin ascribed to natural evolution, were actually “consistent with another scenario: that SARS-CoV-2 was developed in a laboratory, by methods that leading coronavirus researchers commonly use to investigate how the viruses infect cells and cause disease, assess the potential for animal coronaviruses to jump to humans, and develop drugs and vaccines.”

    One of those features is COVID-19’s furin cleavage site, which makes the virus particularly infectious in humans. This feature has never been observed in any naturally occurring betacoronaviruses. Proximal Origin claimed that since this feature was not part of any known laboratory-generated virus, it had to have arisen through a “natural evolutionary process.” As Chretien and Cutlip point out, this argument is “not based on scientific analysis but on an assumption that the prior work would have been published if it had been done.”

    According to the Pentagon report, a similar argument made in Proximal Origin about COVID-19’s receptor binding domain, the part of a virus that allows it to dock to cells in humans or animals, was “not a scientific argument but rather an assumption of intent and methodology for a hypothesized scientist.”

    The Pentagon report also highlights a major logical flaw in Proximal Origin in that it relies on a lack of publications about particular aspects of coronavirus engineering as a reason to conclude that such engineering did not take place. For instance, Proximal Origin claims that “the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.” As Chretien and Cutlip point out, “The absence of a publication does not mean that the research was not done.”

    In what is perhaps the most notable portion of the Chretien and Cutlip paper, the authors note the collaboration between Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, a pioneer of gain-of-function experiments, and Shi Zhengli, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. As Chretien and Cutlip point out, Baric and Shi carried out an experiment in 2015 that mirrored how the COVID-19 virus would have been engineered in a laboratory. The direct link between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the know-how needed to make COVID-19 was not mentioned in Proximal Origin.

    While Chretien and Cutlip did not offer a definitive answer on the origin of COVID-19, they concluded that none of the arguments in Proximal Origin lessened the plausibility of a laboratory origin. Proximal Origin claimed to have done the exact opposite.

    Given the sweeping nature of the takedown of Proximal Origin, the question is why the public was not told about the Pentagon’s paper, which was fully paid for by taxpayers?

    Instead, the Pentagon, which was led at the time by Trump appointee Mark Esper, allowed Fauci’s false origin narrative to fester. One of the two authors, Cutlip, left the Department of Defense in 2021. The circumstances of his departure are not known. Cutlip’s bio states that he is currently a visiting professor at Fairmont State University in West Virginia. The bio also states that Cutlip was part of “the Corona Virus Task Force, providing intelligence to the President of the United States.” It is not known whether Cutlip shared his insights with either Trump or President Joe Biden.

    https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclus...y_5269475.html

    Podcasts:

    Covid Origin Quess(Audio)
    Covid Origin Quest(Video)

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