Authored by Michael Senger via The Brownstone Institute,

Former SAGE member Jeremy Farrar, one of the most influential pro-lockdown advisors in the United Kingdom and considered by some to be akin to the UK’s Anthony Fauci, has been given a major promotion to become Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization, one of the most powerful positions at the WHO alongside its director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Farrar is currently director of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s most influential nonprofits and largest investors in vaccines, with countless billions in offshore funding and close ties to the Gates Foundation.

Farrar is the second former SAGE member who has been rewarded by the WHO with a major promotion for advising the UK Government to enact lockdowns that were as long and strict as possible in 2020, the first being 40-year British Communist Party member Susan Michie, a behavioural psychologist with no background in epidemiology or infectious disease who earlier this year was promoted to lead the WHO’s nudge unit.

Shortly after Xi Jinping enacted the strictest lockdown in history in Wuhan, China, and long before that lockdown produced any results, Farrar echoed his new boss, Tedros, in praising China for “setting a new standard for outbreak response.”

Never forget. 7/ pic.twitter.com/L55Wz0YQ7I

— LLadany (@lladany) March 29, 2022

Like Former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx, one of the three most influential officials behind lockdowns in the United States, Farrar later wrote a book going into tremendous depth about his scorched-earth crusade to convince the UK Government to enact lockdowns that were as long and strict as possible:

Social distancing measures should be mandatory, not optional. A prime minister cannot ask people to lock down if they feel like it… that is not the way these sorts of public health measures work.

Farrar recalls his glee when he first managed to convince Boris Johnson’s Government to enact a lockdown in the UK.

The new restrictions meant people would be unable to leave home except for one of four reasons: to travel to and from work if work could not be done from home; to exercise once a day; to buy food and medicines; and to seek medical care. Shops selling non-essential goods would shut and gatherings of more than two people who did not live together would be banned. People were warned to keep two metres away from people they did not live with. Weddings, parties, religious services would stop, but funerals could still go ahead. SAGE, like so many other working groups around the world, switched to using Zoom.”

Yet, just like Deborah Birx, despite spending hundreds of pages describing his maneuvers to convince the UK Government to prolong and tighten restrictions, Farrar never gives any clear indication as to why he felt this was justifiable, necessary, or what the endpoint was supposed to be. And, just like Birx and his Italian counterpart Roberto Speranza, this is all despite readily admitting that lockdown had no precedent in public health in the modern Western world prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan.

Deciding to close an economy is unbelievably tough, Other than during wars, Western economies had never had a lockdown since the Middle Ages, to my knowledge; this is just not something governments do.

Mainstream reports about Farrar tend to focus on his role in the “cover-up” of the lab-leak theory in February 2020. To be sure, Farrar was one of several counterparts around the world who recalled secretly discussing the possibility of a lab leak with Fauci and others in early 2020:

By the second week of January, I was beginning to realise the scale of what was happening… In those weeks, I became exhausted and scared. I felt as if I was living a different person’s life. During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets… In the last week of January 2020, I saw email chatter from scientists in the US suggesting the virus looked almost engineered to infect human cells. These were credible scientists proposing an incredible, and terrifying, possibility of either an accidental leak from a laboratory or a deliberate release… This issue needed urgent attention from scientists—but it was also the territory of the security and intelligence services… The next day, I contacted Tony Fauci about the rumours over the origins of the virus … Depending on what the experts thought, Tony added, the FBI and MI5 would need to be told… Patrick Vallance informed the intelligence agencies of the suspicions; Eddie [Holmes] did the same in Australia. Tony Fauci copied in Francis Collins, who heads the US National Institutes of Health.

Yet the idea that these actions by Farrar and his counterparts represent a “cover-up” is belied by the fact that they immediately reported the possibility of a lab leak to all the major Western intelligence services—exactly the opposite of what one would do in a cover-up. In light of evidence that the lab leak theory is biologically impossible and may be being used as a controlled opposition narrative to justify the biosecurity state, Farrar’s informing intelligence agencies of the possibility of a lab leak may be better viewed as setting off a false alarm among national security officials to get them to buy into lockdowns.

Just weeks after informing intelligence services of the possibility of a lab leak, Farrar’s counterparts published a paper claiming to show the virus came from the Wuhan wet market, setting off the false dichotomy between the lab-leak theory and the wet market theory which, absurdly, continues to this day despite overwhelming evidence that COVID began spreading undetected all over the world by fall 2019 at the latest.

Ultimately, the lockdowns that Farrar worked so hard for failed to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus and led to the excess deaths of tens of thousands of young people in the United Kingdom and every other country in which they were tried. Yet few can say they did more to successfully bring totalitarianism to the UK than Jeremy Farrar. Perhaps for this reason, the WHO has gone out of its way to take Farrar under its wing and make sure he gets his due.

Authored by Joseph Hanneman via The Epoch Times,

The Oath Keepers did not try to overthrow the U.S. government on Jan. 6 and are not a threat to national security because the group is anti-tyranny, not anti-government, a former FBI agent and Department of Defense analyst testified Dec. 15-16 in Alaska Superior Court.

John Guandolo, who handled counter-terrorism and criminal investigations during nearly 13 years as an FBI special agent, said he found “absurd” the idea that Oath Keepers tried to overthrow the federal government. Guandolo was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a personal capacity.

Some of the Oath Keepers might have broken federal laws on Jan. 6 for allegedly trying to delay the counting of Electoral College votes, Guandolo said, “but to conflate that to being the same as the entire organization wants to overthrow the U.S. government by violence … that’s absurd,” Guandolo said. “And I think it’s an unprofessional assessment.”

Guandolo’s testimony came on the third and fourth days of a state trial to determine if Rep. David Eastman (R-Wasilla) should be removed from office under the Alaska Constitution because he is a life member of the Oath Keepers. Eastman won reelection on Nov. 8 by a 24-point margin.

Alaska Superior Court Judge Jack McKenna issued a temporary restraining order preventing the state of Alaska from certifying the House 27th District election results until the trial ends.

Former GOP candidate Randall Kowalke—who left the Republican Party in 2019—sued Eastman personally in July, claiming a loyalty clause in the Alaska Constitution should bar him from office because the Oath Keepers allegedly advocate for the overthrow of the federal government.

Alaska State Rep. David Eastman (R-Wasilla) was sued in July 2022 in an effort to force him from office for being a member of Oath Keepers. (Photo courtesy of David Eastman)

Earlier in the bench trial before McKenna, two analysts from centers on domestic extremism testified that the Oath Keepers went into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and tried to overthrow the government.

‘A Far Cry’ from Insurrection

Testifying from his office in Dallas, Guandolo told the judge there is no evidence to support that accusation. He ripped the testimony of analysts Jonathan Lewis and Matthew Kriner as “grossly incomplete” and “wholly unprofessional.”

Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes III and Oath Keepers Florida leader Kelly Meggs were found guilty of seditious conspiracy on Nov. 29 for actions on Jan. 6, in a jury trial in U.S. District Court in Washington. Four other defendants were acquitted of seditious conspiracy, but convicted of other offenses.

“The phrase that I saw most often [in indictments] was that so-and-so intended to affect the government by stopping or delaying the congressional proceeding, which was to certify the election,” Guandolo said when questioned by defense attorney Joseph Miller.

“That is a far cry from overthrowing the U.S. government by force of violence.”

Guandolo said the plaintiff’s experts appeared to have pre-existing ideas about the Oath Keepers, because they failed to examine the good work the group does, such as hurricane relief and guarding a bakery against mob violence during protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014.

He noted their alleged lack of knowledge of Jan. 6 provocateur Ray Epps, and their failure to interview even one member of the Oath Keepers as evidence.

In earlier testimony, Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, claimed that Epps did not incite people to go into the Capitol on Jan. 6. He said that was a “discredited conspiracy theory.”

Viral videos showed Epps in downtown Washington on the evening of Jan. 5 saying: “Tomorrow—I don’t even like to say it because I’ll be arrested—we need to go into the Capitol.”

Guandolo said the plaintiff’s focus “was on only specific negative acts and opining on those specific negative acts, without any mention, and, again, based on their own testimony, no apparent knowledge of the positives and the mission statement across the country at the numerous operations the Oath Keepers have undertaken since their founding.”

After meeting and speaking with “hundreds” of Oath Keepers over the years, Guandolo said, he concluded the group has no bias against the government.

“They are not anti-government or anti-authority,” Guandolo said.

“They’re anti-tyranny and anti-anything that infringes on the natural rights and constitutional rights of American citizens.”

Guandolo expressed concern with the use of terms such as “domestic violent extremism,” used by academic experts and even in a recent FBI bulletin on domestic threats in America.

“There is no legal definition for violent extremism, which is exactly our adversaries’ intent,” Guandolo said. “And as a matter of fact, I heard yesterday the phrase ‘violent extremism’ defined by plaintiffs’ witness as somebody who’s willing to do violence in furtherance of achieving their goal.

Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, appears on a screen during a House Select Committee hearing to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol, in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 9, 2022. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

“And what’s problematic about that from a legal standpoint,” he said, “is that describes members of the U.S. military, that describes police officers, that describes U.S. citizens who are exercising their natural right to defend themselves, as well as their constitutional right to do so and their lawful right to do so.”

Use of the term domestic violent extremism is “an information operation,” Guandolo said, because “it doesn’t legally actually define anything. And the way the plaintiff’s witnesses defined it, it basically can be used against anybody that uses violence. And violence is neither good nor bad.”

‘I Couldn’t Tell You That’

Kriner, a senior research scholar at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, was asked by Miller on Dec. 15, “Why do we even have an oath to the Constitution?”

Kriner replied: “I couldn’t tell you that.”

Guandolo said he was troubled by that answer. “Again, I and I’m not trying to make any other kind of statement other than it tells me it’s either a grossly biased perspective that the witness is coming from, or they just don’t know,” Guandolo said. “And in either case, I think is really unprofessional.”

The oath to defend the Constitution against “all enemies, foreign and domestic,” is a crucial part of America, Guandolo said.

“… When police officers and military people and elected officials and judges take these oaths, it literally is the foundation for our entire system,” he said, “because our fidelity is to the Constitution.”

Guandolo said Oath Keepers Vice President Greg McWhirter, who also served as an FBI informant during the Jan. 6 investigation, would have been “duty-bound, if there was a known, organized effort to overthrow the U.S. government,” to report it.

McWhirter’s role as an FBI informant came out during the Rhodes trial. A former sheriff’s deputy in Marion County, Ind.,  McWhirter suffered a cardiac event just before his scheduled trip from Montana to Washington to testify in the trial.

“Mr. McWhirter, you know, obviously had access to Mr. Rhodes, knew … what Oath Keepers was doing and what they were up to,” Guandolo said, “and of course he would have been duty-bound to report something such as an organized effort to violently overthrow the government.”

Authored by J.B.Shurk via The Gatestone Institute,

The heavy perils we face today include centralized governments micromanaging society, the growing prospect of global war, the growing prospect of forced surrender, and the replacement of reasoned debate and free speech with state-sanctioned “narratives” and censorship: totalitarian governance seems not far behind. This is a new kind of war against civilians for control of their minds.

The torrents engulfing us appear to be potentially catastrophic. In a few short years, the world has endured the COVID-19 pandemic, forced government lockdowns, extreme economic volatility, commodity shortages, and the World Economic Forum’s attempts to exploit this cascade of crises as an excuse to usher in a structural “Great Reset” in which global food and energy consumption can be strictly regulated according to the “climate change” goals of an unelected cabal. Governments are relying increasingly on controlling public “narratives” and vilifying dissent.

While health bureaucrats and politicians claimed to be “following the science,” mandatory compliance with unilateral rule-making precluded reasoned, good-faith debate. The predictable result: the lethal consequences of the Wuhan Virus were exacerbated by the lethal consequences of misguided public policies imposed to fight the virus. Students whose schools were shuttered now suffer the lifelong effects of learning loss. Patients whose timely diagnoses and preventative care were forestalled now suffer the debilitating outcomes of untreated disease. Small businesses unable to endure prolonged closures are gone for good. Middle class savings once reserved for unexpected “rainy day” funds or children’s future educations have dried up. Credit card debt is on the rise, while more and more people struggle to survive on less. The “safety nets” of government welfare programs have ballooned to leave nation states more indebted than ever but have also proved too perforated with leaky holes (often draining needed resources straight into the bank accounts of corporate campaign donors, interest group lobbyists, and foreign hackers) to keep society’s most vulnerable afloat. Governments’ justifications for reckless fiscal, monetary, and credit policies during short-term emergencies have weakened nations’ prospects for long-term solvency and the likelihood that they will be capable of preserving stable currencies. Still, for all the harms their actions have caused, governments have issued no apologies for enforcing such life-altering policies while silencing critics. It is as if “narrative engineers” have adopted an official position that they are incapable of being wrong.

Geopolitical conflict is wrenching the post-WWII international order apart. While America’s and the European Union’s “climate change” policies have already inflated the costs of energy, food and much else, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has only added to ordinary Europeans’ financial pain and jeopardizes the continent’s security more broadly. China’s territorial ambitions threaten peace in Taiwan, Japan, across Southeast Asia and beyond. The United States’ efforts to enlarge NATO’s European membership, while expanding its mission objectives into the Indo-Pacific, all but ensure that the U.S., China and Russia remain on a collision course.

Policymakers cannot help seeing parallels to the quickly falling geopolitical dominoes that ushered in WWI and WWII over the course of a few fateful weeks. They cannot help looking at the unsustainable accumulation of government debt around the world and the avalanche of investment derivatives balancing unsteadily upon fragile currencies unmoored from any real value in gold or silver and fearing the risks of a severe depression. They cannot help seeing Russian revanchism and Chinese territorial expansion as signs that the Great Powers have set course down a dangerous path. The more nervous about the future policymakers are, the more committed they seem to enforcing a standard “narrative” they can control.

It was the detonation of two nuclear warheads over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of course, that brought combat in the Pacific Theater to a close and ended WWII with an exclamation point.

Now we stand on a new kind of battlefield. Just as with nuclear weapons, civilians have nowhere to hide from this war’s effects. Weapons systems are spread out across the Internet, deployed on mobile phones and active on every computer chip, tracking, sharing, and pushing digital information throughout the world. Instead of explosives and bullets, we have competing “narratives” whizzing past. The breadth of the campaign to control what information we see, how we process that information, and ultimately what we think and say makes even the most effective psychological operations of the past look antiquated and rudimentary. Whereas “mutually assured destruction” has so far succeeded as a deterrent against nuclear war, the tantalizing opportunities for governments to use programs of mass digital surveillance and communication to spread lies, manipulate opinion, and affect human behavior have created a kind of mutually assured dystopia, “where people lead dehumanized, fearful lives.”

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler spoke with boisterous energy and theatrical gesticulation before tens of thousands of stormtroopers, Hitler Youth, and Nazi Party faithful. Today, the dictator’s raised stage has been replaced with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and anywhere else a pop-up online audience can be found. The visual stimuli that enthralled Hitler’s crowds are now reproduced with the release of pleasure-causing endorphins rushing to the brain after every “politically correct” online statement is “rewarded” with approval from strangers providing instant fame. Online “influencers” have become the goose-stepping middlemen for campaigns of mass propaganda that touch more humans in a day than a decade of Hitler’s speeches. In an age when information has never been more easily accessible, the world is awash in lies.

Instead of encouraging public debate and rational argument, governments push the constant drumbeat of the “narrative” above all else. A citizen either obediently accepts the government’s vast and intrusive COVID-19 rules, or that person is labeled a “COVID denier.” A citizen either obediently accepts the government’s vast and intrusive “climate change” rules, or that person is labeled a “climate denier.” A citizen either accepts Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” as “Russian disinformation“, or that person is labeled a “Russian sympathizer.” Daring to say otherwise could get one banned from social media, professionally sanctioned, or even fired from a job. Except none of these established “narratives” has proved true.

In hindsight, it is clear that lockdowns unleashed more health, educational and economic problems than they solved. As Europe faces an expanding energy crisis that leaves its populations vulnerable to the cold, it is clear that “climate change” policies can kill those they are purportedly meant to protect. And as Elon Musk’s recent release of internal Twitter communications proves, Hunter Biden’s laptop was not only real news censored from the public during a presidential election. Political speech was also censored through the collaborative efforts of the FBI and more than 50 intelligence community agents in violation of the First Amendment. In each case, the “narrative” proved to be either misleading propaganda or an outright lie. Yet they were created and sustained by online communication platforms that pushed the lies and excluded the truths.

As global events increasingly threaten Western stability, governments have demonstrated no inclination to entertain a diversity of viewpoints or discussions along the way. Instead, the more serious the issue, the more committed to a single, overarching “narrative” they seem to become. Dissent is despised. Reasoned argument is lampooned. A citizen is expected to blithely accept government-approved messaging disseminated online, or risk the wrath of the technocracy.

This war for eight billion minds means that citizens must be more vigilant than ever in processing and evaluating what they see and read. Whether they like it or not, they are under attack at all times from those who seek to manipulate and control them. As in the last century, we are surrounded by totalitarian propaganda routinely disguised as “the truth.” In this century, though, the reach and scale of mass indoctrination seems endlessly expanding.

Since 2000, global investment in research and development (R&D) has tripled to $2.4 trillion.

R&D spend is also casting a wider global net. In 1960, the U.S. made up nearly 70% of global R&D spending, and by 2020 this had fallen to 30%. From job creation and public health to national security and industrial competitiveness, R&D plays a vital role in a country’s economic growth and innovation, impacting nearly every corner of society—either directly or indirectly.

Along with R&D spend, other key ingredients play an important role in driving progress and innovation. These include technological adoption, scientific research, and venture capital activity, among others.

In the infographic below, Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld ranks the world’s most innovative economies using data from the UN’s WIPO Global Innovation Index.

What Defines an Innovative Economy?

Innovation is inherently challenging to quantify, but the Global Innovation Index is a longstanding attempt to do just that.

The framework used for the index was designed to create a more complete analysis, comprising of 81 indicators across seven categories to calculate a country’s score:

As the above table shows, the framework aims to identify indicators that foster an innovative environment and breakthrough technologies.

It’s worth noting that each country’s overall innovation score is a mix of these categories, and countries with similar scores can be strong in different areas.

The 50 Most Innovative Countries in 2022

Switzerland ranks at the top⁠ for the 12th year in a row—above the U.S., South Korea, and Israel.

For many, this may come as a surprise. However, the country’s intellectual property rules are considered world-class, and they are complemented by strong collaboration between universities and industry. In addition, the country attracts top talent thanks to its high quality of living.

At second is the United States, which is a top spender on R&D at over $700 billion per year. Globally, four of the five top R&D spending companies are in America: Amazon ($42.7 billion), Alphabet ($27.6 billion), Microsoft ($19.3 billion), and Apple ($18.8 billion).

Countries across Europe also feature prominently in the top 10, including Sweden (#3), the United Kingdom (#4) and the Netherlands (#5).

South Korea (#6), is known for its high R&D intensity. This is driven by its industrial conglomerates, known as chaebols, that are generally family-owned. Samsung and LG are among its largest companies, known for their high degree of corporate-academic collaboration.

Below, we will take a closer look at the most innovative countries by region.

North America

In North America, the U.S. ranks highest. The country has long been known as a global leader in innovation, with a strong track record of introducing new ideas and technologies that have transformed the way we live and work. The U.S. ranks #1 in a number of indicators, including university-industry R&D collaboration and intangible asset intensity.

Ranking second in the region is Canada (Global rank: #15). Across all countries, it ranks first on measures of joint venture and strategic alliances per billion dollars of GDP (PPP) and number of venture capital (VC) recipients per billion dollars of GDP (PPP). In 2021, VC investment topped $14.7 billion across 752 deals.

Another interesting example is Honduras (#113). Driving innovation in the country is a new economic zoning experiment called Zones for Economic Development and Employment (ZEDEs).

To date, these zones have attracted about a quarter of a billion dollars in private investment funding and have created thousands of new jobs.

South America

Chile (#50) ranks first across the region, thanks to its promising tech sector. To date, it is home to an estimated 8,000 tech companies. The country also has the highest scale of mobile connectivity in the region. In late 2021, it launched the first 5G network in South America.

Following Chile is Brazil (#54), which saw a record number of IPOs in 2021 that were valued at nearly $7 billion.

Middle East and Central Asia

As the highest ranked in the region, Israel (#16) is the sole country globally that spends over 5% of GDP on R&D. Overall, it is a global leader in patent applications and information and communication technology (ICT) services exports.

For context, the country’s density of start-ups per capita is 16 times that of Europe.

The small island nation of Cyprus (#27) follows in second, supported by government funding focused on start-ups. Meanwhile, Turkey (#37) in third, is home to six unicorns*, fostered by its development of a megatech corridor through Istanbul to Izmir.

*A unicorn is a privately-held startup that has a valuation of over $1 billion.

Europe

With 15 of the top 25 economies in the world, Europe is a powerhouse for fostering innovative ecosystems.

The continent is also a leader in social progress, equality, and life satisfaction. The region scores 30 on inequality according to the Gini Index compared to 41 for America.

For many, technological output isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when they think of Europe, but VC deals surged over 53% in 2021. London, Berlin, and Paris were leading cities for VC activity.

East Asia and Oceania

South Korea (#6) ranks highest across East Asia and Oceania, and has established itself as a leader in technology and innovation on the global stage. Through its New Deal initiative, the government is spearheading projects on smart healthcare, AI, and smart industrial complexes. At the same time, it is accelerating the construction of eco-friendly infrastructure and renewable energy.

South Korea’s Hyundai and its subsidiary Kia have made considerable ground in electric vehicle (EV) production, comprising 9% of the U.S. EV market, the second-highest share after Tesla.

China sits just outside the global top 10, and now ranks #1 in multiple indicators, including labor productivity growth and trademarks by origin. China’s economic output per employed worker increased an impressive 4.2% annually from 2011 to 2019, on average.

Africa

The highest ranked in Africa is the island nation of Mauritius (#45).

Underscoring its rank is the strength of its institutions and market sophistication. Meanwhile, the government is accelerating investment in tech incubators, research-business collaboration, and tax incentives for R&D investment.

South Africa (#61) follows Mauritius on the list, with the city of Cape Town attracting a proposed $300 million Amazon headquarters.

Panasonic opened their headquarters in Cape Town in 2018. Oracle, IBM, Google, and Microsoft also have offices in the country’s expanding tech hub.

Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

Waiting for a government – any government – to release their “secret” files is a waste of your time, and reading anything they eventually publish is doubly so.

If you didn’t learn that from the nothing-burger that was the 28 pages on 9/11, or the pathetic exercise in revisionism that made up the Afghanistan Papers…you should definitely have learned it today.

Yes, Joe Biden’s administration has just released their promised “secret” JFK papers.

Turns out that Oswald acted alone.

I know, I was shocked too.

Further, the release dials back on the (very slight) anti-Russia messaging of last year’s release.

In December 2021, the previous batch of “secret” files revealed Oswald met with a KGB agent in the days running up to the assassination.

The latest batch reassures us that Oswald never worked for the KGB, and that the Russians thought he was “too crazy” to recruit.

One gets the impression that has as much to do with managing propaganda positioning over the war in Ukraine as anything else. Either way, its a ridiculously transparent attempt to reinforce the “lone wolf” lie.

“He was too crazy and unstable even for the Russians!”

Laughable.

Further, one particular “secret” memo claims…

the Central Intelligence Agency has no indication that Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald ever knew each other, were associated, or might have been connected in any manner”.

Yes, before Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald they were apparently “not connected in any manner”. He had never met Oswald before the assassination, and barely had any idea who he was when he shot him on November 24th.

This means the current “official story” is that Ruby randomly chose to attend the press conference where Oswald spoke on the evening of November 22nd, despite not being a member of the press.

During this press conference, Ruby correctly pointed out Oswald had joined the “fair play for Cuba committee” (presumably an inspired guess, seeing as they did not know one another).

Then, two days later and on a complete whim, he decided to sneak back into the police station carrying a gun and shoot a man he had never met for no reason at all, in the parking lot of a police station, while surrounded by police officers.

That’s what these “secret files” tell us…the same ridiculous story as the very unsecret Warren Commission.

So, yet again, we see just how pointless these long-awaited government releases are, and how they are only every used to reinforce the official narrative.

It was always going to be that way.

After all, JFK has been dead for six decades, that is more than enough time to redact, edit, censor and indeed forge documents ’til they tell the story you want to tell.

Hell, it’s possible these files didn’t even exist until a couple of days ago. Why on Earth should we give the CIA, FBI or National Archives the benefit of the doubt?

Supposing they are sitting on some cache of massively incriminating evidence…are they really likely to release it? Just because someone asks nicely?

Imagine the police rocking up to a murder suspect’s house, knocking politely, and asking if he wouldn’t mind going inside and fetching all the evidence that he killed his wife. Then quietly waiting sixty years for him to do it.

The entire process is a farce.

Authored by Daniel Y. Teng via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are betting on the New York-based Synchron as the answer to Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

Founded by Australian professors Tom Oxley and Nick Opie, the company on Dec. 16 announced it had closed a $110 million Series C funding round involving Bezos Expeditions, Gates Frontier, and ARCH Venture Partners.

The Synchron Switch is a “brain-computer interface” that is implanted in the blood vessels at the surface of the motor cortex of the brain via the jugular vein.

Once set, the interface will detect and wirelessly transmit information from the brain, allowing severely paralysed individuals to control personal devices without needing to use their hands.

The funds will be put towards a pivotal clinical trial.

“We have an opportunity to deliver a first-in-class commercial [brain-computer interface],” said Oxley, also the CEO of Synchron, in a statement.

“The problem of paralysis is much larger than people realize. 100 million people worldwide have upper limb impairment,” he added.

ARCH Managing Director Robert Nelson said Synchron was helping individuals with untreatable conditions “regain connection to the world.

“It is an exciting time for neurotechnology,” he said.

How Does it Compare to Musk’s Neuralink?

Clinical trials are currently underway in the United States and Australia with Opie saying the procedure was minimally invasive—a factor he believes sets it apart from Musk’s Neuralink.

“We don’t need to remove the scalp and skull or put electrodes directly into delicate brain tissue,” he said in comments obtained by AAP.

“We’ve come up with a clever way of getting to the right place in the brain just by using the body’s naturally occurring highways and blood vessels.”

He added this ensured patients recovered faster as well from the procedure.

So far, four Australian paralysis patients have received implants since undergoing the procedure at Royal Melbourne Hospital in 2020.

“All of those patients were able to control a computer with their mind,” he said. “And there were no serious device-related effects.”

The first U.S. patient was treated in July 2022 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York after Synchron received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year.

In contrast, Musk’s Neuralink has yet to receive approval from the body and is also facing questions over potential animal welfare violations.

Musk had wanted to start human trials in six months, yet the billionaire is also reported to have approached Synchron about a potential investment.

Opie says no deal is on the table.

Other investors include Reliance Digital Health, Greenoaks, Alumni Ventures, Moore Strategic Ventures, and Project X, as well as existing investors Khosla Ventures, NeuroTechnology Investors, METIS, Forepont Capital Partners, ID8 Investments, and Shanda Group.

AAP contributed to this article.

By Houze Song of MarcoPolo.org

With China’s upcoming Central Economic Work Conference (CEWC), markets will be looking for any pro-growth signals after a year of turbulence. But the most consequential action for growth has already happened: the decision to abandon Zero Covid.

The key questions now are

1. will the Zero Covid exit endure?

2. how much will property rebound?

3. will there be more significant stimulus?  

Here we briefly unpack our views on these three questions.

Covid: China Has Crossed the Rubicon Toward Coexistence

Although 4Q growth will still come in around expectations in our recent outlook, we underestimated the degree to which an about-face on Zero Covid would occur. One of the key factors is that the pre-Party Congress politics on Zero Covid have evaporated, making it much easier to shift course. Combined with bottom-up demands and an economy in dire straits, those advocating an exit have won. At this point, we expect China to embark on a swift exit and reach near full opening by the end of 1H2023.

If anything, the concern now is whether China is exiting hastily without much planning for case surges and ensuring sufficient hospital capacity. To be sure, the path from containment to coexistence will be paved with its share of chaos and setbacks, but we believe that China has passed the point of no return and is decisively moving to coexistence.

Fast-moving developments in the Chinese capital bear monitoring as a leading indicator. That’s because what happens in Beijing won’t stay in Beijing—that is, with the Chinese capital already confronting a bad surge, the government’s acceptance of case spread without reversing course will send a strong signal across the country for emulating the approach. At this point, even with infections mounting, we believe the government is unlikely to tighten controls again and will hold the line on reopening.

Property: From Rescuing Developers to Stimulating Demand

The property sector’s prospects have improved as of late because state banks have been quietly lending to property developers without resorting to a formal splashy bailout. But there is strong reluctance behind these actions, as the central government is serious about reducing banks’ exposure to the property sector and maintaining its fiscal prudence.

So Beijing will want to shift the burden of the property rescue from the state to households as soon as possible. And the Covid exit presents as good an opportunity as any for Beijing to seize on to unleash more household spending. We expect announcements on stimulating property demand during the CEWC, including measures such as reducing down payment and mortgage rates.

Skepticism on whether demand-side stimulus will work is warranted, since incentives for property purchases have been largely unsuccessful to date as sales declined by more than 20% through October. But at the same time, Chinese households have accumulated 6 trillion yuan (~$1 trillion) in excess savings this year, largely as a result of not buying homes. That pent-up demand is more likely to materialize this time because the Covid exit will lead households to reconsider their outlook as the economy reopens.

With households more willing to take on debt and resume property purchases, that will also improve the cash flow of property developers that depend on sales. That will lead the state sector to withdraw its lending once the sector appears more stable.

Fiscal Stimulus: Overly Conservative

While the Zero Covid exit and a potential property rebound are looking up, there remains the risk that stimulus will be withdrawn too quickly. While we believe that the on-budget fiscal deficit will modestly increase in 2023, the overall macroeconomic policy stance will likely be contractionary.

For one, any increase in the fiscal deficit will not be able to offset the ending of other stimulus measures such as the tax refund and the central bank’s dividend payments—together accounting for 3% of GDP in 2021. Second, the latest Politburo meeting once again puts financial risk as a top concern for 2023, effectively ruling out broad-based monetary easing.

The bottom line is that the move to Covid coexistence will be the biggest boon to growth in at least two years, even as a weaker stimulus will be a headwind to growth in 2023. We will have more detailed analysis of China’s economic prospects in our 1Q2023 Macro Outlook.

Authored by Kit Klatenberg via MintPressNews.com,

Leaked files reviewed by MintPress expose how intelligence services the world over can track cryptocurrency transactions to their source and therefore identify users by monitoring the movements of smartphone and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, such as Amazon Echo. The contents comprehensively detonate the myth of crypto anonymity, and have grave implications for individuals and states seeking to shield their financial activity from the prying eyes of hostile governments and authorities.

The documents are among a trove related to the secret operations of Anomaly 6, a shadowy private spying firm founded by a pair of U.S. military intelligence veterans.

The company covertly embeds software development kits, or SDKs, in hundreds of popular apps, then slices through layers of “anonymized” data in order to uncover sensitive information about any individual it chooses anywhere on Earth, at any time. In all, Anomaly 6 can simultaneously monitor roughly three billion smartphone devices – equivalent to a fifth of the world’s total population – in real-time.

Having previously hawked its wares to U.S. Special Operations Command, as this journalist revealed on December 6, Anomaly 6 is now using British private military company Prevail Partners – heavily involved in the West’s proxy war in Ukraine – to market and sell its product to a variety of Western military, security, and intelligence agencies the world over. This is despite the company’s own founders fearing its global dragnet could be completely illegal under national and international data protection regimes.

The company’s international surveillance reach could be more sweeping – and invasive – than even that of the C.I.A. and N.S.A. MintPress can reveal individuals, organizations, and states seeking to bypass traditional financial structures and systems loom prominently in Anomaly 6’s mephitic crosshairs, and spying on their transactions is a pivotal component of its sales pitch to government and private clients. This Orwellian technology leaves cryptocurrency users the world over nowhere to hide.

WHO WATCHES THE WATCHERS?

Ever since Bitcoin’s launch in 2009, anonymity has been an absolutely fundamental tenet of cryptocurrency. The ability to make and receive payments incognito through a secure, decentralized platform without needing to register a named bank account, or even interact with established financial gatekeepers at any stage, was and remains a unique selling point for the asset.

The principle of anonymity is taken so seriously by crypto practitioners and aficionados alike that industry platforms are graded according to their levels of privacy. Many crypto entrepreneurs, some of whom manage hundreds of millions of dollars for clients, conduct business without ever disclosing their names, or any identifying information at all. Venture capital firms have even invested vast sums in crypto ventures with wholly pseudonymous founders, an unprecedented sectoral development.

Anomaly Six’s website features no other data but the company name, contact and location

In recent years, however, there have been several clear indications that cryptocurrency anonymity is under significant threat, and indeed could already have been mortally compromised by the U.S. intelligence apparatus. In June 2021, it was revealed that the F.B.I. had successfully traced and recovered $2.3 million in Bitcoin extorted by hackers from Colonial Pipeline in a ransomware attack, which had shut down the company’s computer systems, causing fuel shortages and a spike in gas prices.

U.S. officials declined to reveal how they tracked where the ill-gotten funds had ended up, and identified the ultimate owners of 23 separate cryptocurrency accounts belonging to DarkSide, the hacking collective responsible for the cyberattack, although public statements by C.I.A. director William Burns in December that year may provide a clue. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal summit, he acknowledged that his Agency was engaged in “a number of different projects focused on cryptocurrency.”

“This is something I inherited. My predecessor had started this,” he said. “Trying to look at second- and third-order consequences as well and helping with our colleagues in other parts of the U.S. government to provide solid intelligence on what we’re seeing as well.”

While it’s certainly true that cryptocurrency’s anonymity is attractive to criminal elements and terrorist groups, there are a wide variety of entirely legitimate reasons for seeking privacy in financial transactions, and preventing regulators, big banks, and governments from keeping an eye on what one is doing.

For example, political and social movements of every stripe in all corners of the globe have embraced the asset, as they can be financially supported from overseas without any paper trail being left at either end. In turn, activists can send money to each other and make purchases in secret, and organize events and construct local and international support networks, leaving authorities none the wiser.

In Venezuela, cryptocurrency has provided vital respite to an entire country, as crippling U.S.-led sanctions have in recent years deprived both its government and citizens of access to, and the ability to buy, even basic necessities, including food and medicine. The national currency’s value reduced to almost zero, crypto transactions offer a literal lifeline by which goods and services can be accessed, and import and export restrictions imposed by Washington circumvented.

‘PATTERNS OF LIFE’ AND ‘BED DOWN LOCATIONS’

A February 2021 U.N. special rapporteur report on the impact of American sanctions on Venezuela ruled they were “collective punishment,” and Caracas lived on just 1% of its pre-sanctions income. The previous March, Alfred de Zayas, formerly an independent expert for the United Nations Human Rights Council, calculated that over 100,000 Venezuelans had died as a result of the restrictions.

Despite this monstrous human toll, and countless calls from prominent rights groups and international institutions to end the suffering, Washington rigidly enforces the sanctions regime, and seeks to harshly punish any individual or organization helping Caracas skirt restrictions. While measures have eased slightly following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Stateside prosecution of Colombian businessman Alex Saab, abducted from Cape Verde in October 2020, for selling food to the Venezuelan government is ongoing.

Saab could be soon joined in the dock, if Anomaly 6 has anything to do with it. One of the company’s leaked sales presentations provides several case studies showing how its spying technology can be used by security and intelligence services to “derive understanding of the actions of individuals associated with sanctions violations.”

By homing in on the location of the Venezuelan government’s sanctioned cryptocurrency exchange, the National Superintendence of Cryptoactives and Related Activities (Sunacrip), which manages all crypto activities in the country, Anomaly 6 identified two specific IoT devices “which show the value of the A6 dataset in this endeavor.”

Scouring data generated at the site back to January 1, 2020, Anomaly 6 found thousands of signals emitted by IoT devices and smartphones. From there, it “built out the pattern of life for the devices in that search” – in other words, the locations device owners traveled to and from, when, and where they lived. In all, these devices produced “over 593,374 geographic points of reference”, in Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela.

From this amorphous corpus, Anomaly 6 identified one device with “a unique travel pattern which makes it worth further investigation.” In particular, its movements indicated a “very well-defined pattern of life in and around Caracas” – although the company professed to be “much more interested in its travel to the Colombian border in the Cúcuta/San Antonio del Táchira border area.”

That Anomaly 6 was able to track this device while in flight was said to highlight a “unique aspect” of its dataset. The device “took a less than seven hour trip from Caracas to San Antonio del Táchira (Juan Vicente Gómez International Airport) which landed (or was on final approach at 0923 on 23 Feb).”

“With less than 10 flights a day on average to this airport (pre-Covid 19), it would not be difficult to ascertain a short list of personalities of interest with access to Venezuelan passenger name records,” Anomaly 6 bragged. “Additionally, we can see that this device transits to the border crossing locations in the short time it was located in the area.”

This border area was of note for Anomaly 6 as, “according to open source reporting, historically, Venezuelans have used border areas for cash pickup/drops to skirt sanctions put in place by the international community.” Such activities “provide access to hard currency to actors and governments which have been cut off from U.S. dollar trading platforms.”

A “second device of interest” was found to have traveled to Medellín, Colombia, and its “pattern of life” indicated its owner had “connections to the financial/banking environment.”

“Both of these devices exhibit [patterns of life] that warrant further exploration, especially when combined with fact [sic] they have been located at the Sunacrip HQ,” Anomaly 6 concluded. “Further investigation can find bed down locations as well as other insights for business locations, international travel, and other device co-location.”

THE DEVIL TURNS AROUND

Due to a highly successful mainstream media campaign over many years to demonize the government of Venezuela, and by extension its people, it is likely some American citizens will be entirely unsympathetic to Caracas’ plight, and approve of efforts to prevent the state bypassing sanctions. However, the ease with which Anomaly 6’s tools of mass surveillance could be domestically deployed, and the likelihood they already have, should give them pause.

As I revealed in my initial report, Anomaly 6 can identify U.S. smartphone users by name, address and travel history. Another leaked sales presentation details how by linking a single anonymous individual’s smartphone signal recorded in North Korea to a network of hotels, schools, and other sites, the company determined with pinpoint accuracy their identity, marital status, where they worked and lived, the names of their children and the schools and universities at which they study, and more.

Such capabilities would no doubt be of much interest to the C.I.A. and N.S.A. – both of which are in theory prohibited from spying on U.S. citizens, but have been recurrently embroiled in controversy for engaging in such activity.

Concerningly, it has been revealed that the C.I.A. for many years sought to bulk collect international financial data in service of tracking the Islamic State’s funding sources, and incidentally vacuumed up voluminous quantities of sensitive information on U.S. citizens in the process.

Heavily redacted records related to the connivance were unearthed due to pressure from senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Upon reviewing the material, they wrote to U.S. Director of Intelligence Avril Haines, righteously admonishing the C.I.A. for brazenly ignoring longstanding constitutional checks and balances on the Agency’s domestic activities.

“[The C.I.A.] has done so entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with FISA collection,” they fulminated.

Anomaly 6’s services, of course, mean the C.I.A. and N.S.A. can dodge restrictions at home, without fear of landing in hot water. Other agencies permitted to monitor Americans can likewise now do so without a warrant too. And there is no reason to believe that its spying would be restricted to financial transactions, either

“Anomaly 6 data can be used in multiple use cases to support cyber intelligence and operational use end states,” the leaked crypto sales deck declares. “By utilizing multiple targeting methodologies, this data can support the building of a far superior intelligence picture that enables clients to move towards actionable end states. Fusing A6 data with other classified and unclassified data sets places the client at the forefront of the cyber mission space.”

Other leaked Anomaly 6 files openly discuss how its technology is ripe for both “counterintelligence” and “source development” purposes, and it’s not merely U.S. citizens in the firing line. The firm boasts of having spied on the movements of “devices from other friendly countries,” including members of the Five Eyes global spying network, and France and Germany.

In other words, Anomaly 6 turns every citizen on Earth into a potential “person of interest” to intelligence agencies, and thus a target for recruitment, surveillance, harassment, and much, much worse, the most intimate details of their private lives easily accessible by shady actors with a few clicks of a button, and without their knowledge or consent.

While the mainstream media is yet to acknowledge the leak of the company’s sensitive internal papers, this has all the makings of an Edward Snowden-level international scandal of historic proportions. If Anomaly 6 is to be successfully stopped in its tracks, and Western intelligence agencies prevented from egregiously violating the privacy of innumerable individuals without compunction or oversight, it will require concerted collective action from concerned citizens worldwide.