Opinion
By Jeff Childers
05-09-23
Greetings, C&C, and good morning. It’s Tuesday! Your roundup today includes: a Taiwan Neo-Proxy War update featuring excess deaths and excess U.S. military aid that isn’t going to another Proxy War country; Kissinger predicts end of Ukraine war; Kiev professor predicts end of Ukraine war; Russia attacks Kiev and several other Ukrainian cities while corporate media looks the other way; Zelensky meets with more “business investors” to talk reconstruction; WSJ op-ed counts the cost of U.S. pandemic “health measures”; Newsweek op-ed celebrates SB252 and gives some advice to public health authorities; House Committee plans Biden corruption investigation reveal; a new preprint study shows spike-protein brain damage; and a valiant lapdog will give your day a boost.
🗞💬 *WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 💬🗞
🚀 Taiwan hasn’t been super prominent in corporate media lately — oddly — so I thought I’d check in with the beleaguered island nation and see how it’s doing lately.
First, Taiwan’s excess deaths, which coincidentally started around the time of its vaccine campaign, seem to be slowly falling from historically high levels:
The good news is the numbers are slowly coming down as jabbed Taiwanese die off, although the decrease could just be a reporting artifact, since the most recent deaths are not yet fully counted. But the trend line is optimistic, and not just for Taiwan. Let’s hope the decrease is NOT a reporting artifact.
Back to the Proxy War, the South China Morning Post ran a story yesterday headlined, “US And Taiwan in Talks for US$500 Million in Free Weapons After Arms Deliveries Stalled.” Whee! More free rockets and stuff! Note also that the sum is half of Congress’ recently-authorized $1 billion worth of weapons aid for Taiwan in the 2023 budget.
In other words, there’s a billion dollars of weapons aid that is NOT going to Ukraine.
Taiwan up, Ukraine down. “These extra weapons will be given to us for free and will not be deducted from the purchase list which has been delayed by the US,” Defense Minister Chiu Kuo said when pressed by Taiwanese lawmakers about the deal. Chiu admitted the US has already sent instructors to train Taiwanese soldiers on the new weapons and ‘observe’ military drills to make sure they can work them right.
In other words, those are U.S. military instructors who are NOT going to Ukraine.
You know that overused but still funny meme? The one with the guy walking down the street next to his girlfriend, and he’s glancing back over his shoulder at the more attractive girl going by, and his girlfriend looks understandably upset?
The distracted guy is the U.S., the attractive girl is Taiwan, and Ukraine is the scorned girlfriend.
It’s almost time to put the Taiwanese flag in your social media bio pic to show support! Get ready, downloads are available now.
🚀 With that $500 million in mind, consider the next headline. Yesterday, Newsweek ran a story headlined, “Kissinger Predicts China Involvement Will Lead to Ukraine Peace Talks.”
You probably didn’t even know Henry Kissinger, 99, was still alive and making the diplomatic rounds. But thanks to the blood of many infants — haha, just kidding — thanks to his healthy diet and exercise, the heavily-accented former Secretary of State is getting around better than a Transylvanian Energizer Bunny.
In a Sunday interview with CBS’s Ted Koppel, Kissinger said he was confident China will turn the tide of the ongoing war. “Now that China has entered the negotiation, it will come to a head, I think, by the end of the year,” Kissinger sonorously opined. “We will be talking about negotiating processes and even actual negotiations.”
Maybe it will be even sooner than the end of the year, who knows?
The ancient diplomat was referring to President Xi’s 12-point peace plan, which the U.S. has repeatedly rejected on behalf of Ukraine. Kissinger even offered to call Putin and Xi himself, saying he believed they’d take his call. But … isn’t that leaving someone out? What about Zelensky? Nobody seems to have thought of calling him, for some reason.
It’s almost like Zelensky doesn’t matter or something.
🚀 But wait, that’s not all. Last week, India’s Eastern Herald ran a story headlined, “Former Adviser To Kuchma Soskin Predicted When The United States Will Abandon Ukraine.”
The Standard reported that Oleg Soskin, a professor at Kiev University and former adviser to Leonid Kuchma (president of Ukraine until 2005), predicted that, in the coming months, Ukraine will completely lose U.S. military and financial support. “The United States is abruptly withdrawing from the field of support for Ukraine. Another month, two or three – and the United States will not finance Ukraine and will not supply weapons,” Soskin said.
According to independent reports, since then Soskin’s comments have grown increasingly critical of Ukraine’s chances, and he is calling for Zelensky to step down.
So it isn’t just us.
🚀 According to Forward Observer, Russian forces carried out historic levels of drone, missile, and manned aircraft strikes on the city of Kiev, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Odessa throughout Sunday night.
Other independent sources described fierce fighting in Bahkmut, a city that seems to be a strategic linchpin of some kind, and suggested that Russia is deploying more advanced weaponry than it has before. All sane predictions are that Russia will take Bahkmut any minute now; cue the Ukraine defenders saying it was a strategic retreat that cost Russia a lot of mercenary troops and tanks and stuff.
Regardless, there’s a whole LOT of significant fighting going on in Ukraine right now. But the Wall Street Journal has nothing on its web site about the Proxy War, nada, zip, until you get way down the page and discover one little puff piece headlined, “The Ragtag Army That Won the Battle of Kyiv and Saved Ukraine” — which sounds promising until you notice the story is dated September 20, 2022.
What on earth? Why is the Wall Street Journal running a six-month-old story about the war?
Slightly better, the New York Times ran a story yesterday about the Proxy War headlined, “‘Panic’ and Shortages in Parts of Occupied Ukraine Amid Russian Evacuation Orders.”
Unlike the Journal, the Times at least acknowledged the newest attacks on Ukraine’s capitol city. But they buried the news halfway down a story about Friday’s Russian evacuation of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, which is where Europe’s largest nuclear plant is located.
Observe how the Times described the latest Kiev attacks:
Russian forces unleashed their latest wave of aerial attacks on Ukraine overnight, including the biggest drone assault on Kyiv since the war began … Russia also fired 16 missiles at the cities of Kharkiv, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Odesa, the Ukrainian military said in a statement Monday.
Okay. So it was the “biggest” drone attack on the capitol city of Kiev “since the war began,” which means since EVER. So the biggest drone attack on Kiev in the war’s history doesn’t even merit a story of its own, much less its own headline? What gives?
And, where’s Zelensky? Is he still in Poland? Finland? Back on the green screen? It’s hard to say. Maybe he’s back in Ukraine. On Sunday, Breitbart ran a story headlined, “Zelensky Meets with BlackRock Vice Chairman as Globalists Salivate over Lucrative Reconstruction Contracts.”
Last week, Zelensky wrote on Telegram that he would meet with the mega-woke-investment firm to discuss “large-scale business projects in Ukraine,” whatever that means. You’d think the war was going great. Recall that Zelensky also met with Chevron and Exxon executives last week. I wonder if it’s the drones, the missiles, or the hiding out in bomb shelters that is attracting all these business investors to war-torn, corruptly-run Ukraine?
Somebody obviously thinks the war will be ending soon and there’s a lot of sweet U.S. reconstruction money to be made. But who thinks that? What do they know? Is reconstruction on the horizon because the U.S. will soon be dating Taiwan instead? Is it time to wrap it up in Ukraine?
You can’t tell WHAT is going on in Ukraine from the Times’ story, because they tossed the timeline into a micro-green salad and scrambled the eggs of emphasis, but here’s the recap: on Friday, Zelensky met with Blackrock to discuss rebuilding Ukraine while Russia was evacuating civilians from areas of Ukraine it controls, and then Sunday Russia kicked off a massive, countrywide attack on Ukraine with historic levels of drones and missiles.
But the counteroffensive is going to start any minute now, and then those pesky Russians will learn a lesson they’ll never forget.
🔥 The Wall Street Journal might not be reporting on Ukraine (why should it, that’s old news) but on Sunday, it did run a fascinating domestic op-ed by editor Allysia Finley headlined, “The Lockdowns Are Over, but the Damage Goes On.” The sub-headline explained, “Workforce dropouts and drug overdoses became more common as the world obsessed over the virus.”
Finley noted that U.S. drug deaths, which had been flat in the two years before the pandemic, spiked as the government locked down, only flattening out last year as life finally returned to normal following the Omicron surge and the end of shutdowns. Finley cited other discouraging statistics, like methamphetamine deaths, which more than doubled, and cocaine deaths that rose +54%. Adderall prescriptions increased +58% between 2018 and 2022 among young adults aged 22 to 44, so much so there’s now a shortage of that mind-altering drug.
Also up were healthcare visits for anxiety disorders (+48%), alcohol and substance abuse (+27%) and depression (+24%). During the first eight weeks of 2023, deaths among young adults aged 25 to 44 were running about +25% higher than in 2019.
So, great job. Thanks, Dr. Fauci! And Dr. Walensky! Thanks, Public Health Establishment! Whatever would we do without them?
🔥 In related news, Newsweek ran an op-ed yesterday by actual-expert Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya headlined, “It’s Time for Laws Limiting the Power of Public Health Institutions.”
Bhattacharya made the obvious point, the point Wall Street Journal editor Allysia Finley was only hinting at:
Using emergency power that most people never realized an American government possessed, public health violated Americans’ most fundamental civil rights in the name of infection control. We endured three years of useless and divisive policies, including lockdowns, church and business closures, zoom schools, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates and discrimination.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a public health policy expert from before the pandemic, celebrated the passage of Florida’s new health-freedom law, SB 252, observing that the pandemic has changed his mind about the role of public health:
Before the pandemic, I naively thought that a commitment to basic ethical principles constrained public health actions, and would therefore have opposed the Florida bill banning discrimination based on vaccination status. Now, I see the bill’s wisdom. I have learned not to trust public health authorities with expansive power anymore.
Us too. The highly-credentialed Stanford professor also said that public health has a choice to make, a choice that will determine whether anyone ever trusts it again:
[P]ublic health authorities face a choice that will decide whether the public will ever trust public health again. They can fight a partisan political battle against these laws, and the collapse of public trust in public health will continue apace. Or they can gracefully accept limits to their power in light of their pandemic failures.
If public health opts for the latter, rejects authoritarian power, and restores its commitment to basic ethical principles, it may regain the public’s trust so that it can creatively address the challenges to health that the American people now face.
I was blessed with an opportunity to meet Dr. Bhattacharya (by phone and zoom) during the pandemic. He graciously provided — for free — affidavits for my anti-mandate cases, and volunteered to testify at my groundbreaking lawsuit against the very first government vaccine mandate in Florida. Dr. Bhattacharya is one of the smartest, and humblest, people I’ve ever met.
Do you think the Public Health Establishment will take Jay’s advice?
🔥 Over the weekend, Fox News broke the sordid story that the House Oversight Committee says it will reveal its case against Joe Biden tomorrow (Wednesday).
In the clip, Comer explained that the House Committee intends to unveil a substantial case against former Vice-President Biden:
”On Wednesday, we are going to present to the American people all the information that we’ve received thus far pertaining to bank records. … You are looking at potential money laundering… [Hunter] was essentially an unregistered foreign agent for China. Those are serious crimes. You got possible racketeering. The list goes on and on. More and more evidence is pointing towards Joe Biden… This thing is much bigger than anyone would have ever predicted and it all points towards Joe Biden… it’s not just going to be lying on a gun application or not paying taxes for one or two years. I don’t think they realize how much LLCs and how much money the Biden family laundered into their personal accounts.”
Thank goodness the democrats’ endless January 6th show has been replaced by real government. I know everyone’s thinking about what will, or won’t, happen once the information gets out. But let’s take it one step at a time.
🔬 Last month, BioRxIV published a headache-inducing pre-print study on the accumulation of covid spike protein in the brain. The researchers confirmed their results both in live mice as well as in cadavers of dead humans.
The researchers explained their troubling findings:
Our results revealed the accumulation of the spike protein in the skull marrow, brain meninges, and brain parenchyma. The injection of the spike protein alone caused cell death in the brain, highlighting a direct effect on brain tissue. Furthermore, we observed the presence of spike protein in the skull of deceased long after their COVID-19 infection, suggesting that the spike’s persistence may contribute to long-term neurological symptoms.
Notice how they said, “injection of the spike protein alone.” Meaning, without the virus. They didn’t come right out and say it, but they basically said it. The researchers explicitly reported they found the damaging brain injuries even in subjects that were not covid infected, leaving only one other potential source of spike, and you know what that is:
However, even without detectable virus RNA in the brain parenchyma, signs of widespread immune activation could be detected. The lack of evidence for the viral presence and especially viral replication in the brain led to the hypothesis that virus-shed proteins circulating in the bloodstream may promote an inflammatory response independent of direct viral infection of the affected organs, including the brain. Notably, the highly immunogenic spike protein, also used in COVID-19 vaccines, might be a candidate for triggering infection-independent effects.
Uh oh. Other studies have concluded that free spike, such as produced by the jabs, can cross the blood-brain barrier. But this study found another, different way for spike to get into the brain — through cerebral bone marrow.
As a sort of bonus, the researchers dyed the spike protein and found that it accumulates in lots of humanized mouse organs, including but not only the brain:
The researchers were diligent and careful. Their preprint is twenty-five pages long, and included 115 footnoted references and nine linked videos.
Spike-induced brain damage could explain a whole lot, don’t you think?
🔥 Finally, enjoy this short dashcam video clip showing a dauntless little sausage dog saving a wandering baby:
Have a totally terrific Tuesday! I’ll see you back here tomorrow, for more.
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© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
