Authored by Yuhong Dong via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), Since the unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic that started in January 2020, humans have been in a constant battle with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.  

  A series of vaccine versions have been developed and administered globally, beginning in January 2021 when an mRNA vaccine based on the original Wuhan strain was implemented. Subsequently, a bivalent mRNA vaccine was developed based on the Omicron offspring. Currently, the most updated version is based on XBB.1.5 and is ready to be injected into people's arms. Bivalent vaccines contain two different components. One component is to protect us against the original viral strain, while the other targets the most recent variants. The vaccine is based on the gene code of a known virus, whereas the lead time for vaccine development normally takes an average of 10 years. Even with the current "green-light" policies for COVID-19 vaccines, it takes almost one year for the first generation to launch and a couple of months for the second and third generations. However, due to the basic survival skills of SARS-CoV-2, the virus is always mutating in order to escape from a vaccine. Even before a vaccine is ready to launch, there are always a few mutants that have already found a way to escape from the antibodies induced by the sluggish vaccine, creating the next wave. Regardless, the unprecedented speed of vaccine development won't be able to compete with the speed of viral mutation, as the virus is always taking the lead and will be one step ahead of the vaccine. In June 2021, when more than 50 percent of the U.S. population had received two doses of these vaccines, the stage was set for various mutants to take over, including the well-known alpha and delta variants. A key mutation in spike protein called N501Y, which can escape from vaccine protection, was discovered in alpha. It was also found in two other major variants prevalent during that time and significantly increased in the rate at which it spread. Shortly thereafter, Delta (B.1.617.2) emerged and presented even more enhanced transmissibility and vaccine escape ability with its intriguing spike protein double mutations of L452R and E484Q, refreshing the viral spreading and escaping records. It was designated as a "variant of concern" by the World Health Organization (WHO) on May 11, 2021. These double mutations in the spike protein cause the vaccine-induced antibodies to significantly lose their ability to bind to delta, resulting in immunological evasion and causing major global havoc. The increased binding affinity caused by delta makes it much easier to replicate in human cells. It was reported that patients infected with delta had a viral load 1000 times greater than patients with the original strain. It's also been able to spread twice as fast as the original SARS-CoV-2 virus. In July 2021, preliminary data from Israel showed that Pfizer's vaccine efficacy was significantly reduced at five and six months after vaccination to 44 percent and 16 percent, respectively. In a July 2021 outbreak in Massachusetts, 74 percent of breakthrough infections occurred in fully vaccinated persons, and the delta variant was detected in 90 percent of them. Result: The vaccine failed. Time lapsed: Seven months from the first monovalent vaccine launched in January 2021 until the dominant delta wave in July 2021 in the United States. Almost all of Omicron and its subvariants have developed specific mutations that have made them spread more quickly while evading our immune response. It has been clearly defined as an immune escape strain according to this Nature review. A surprising virus, Omicron (B.1.1.529) surged more quickly than any previous strain and completely took over by April 2022. This emergence of hypermutated, increasingly transmissible Omicron variant significantly threatened the vaccine strategy. It harbors multiple amino acid mutations in the spike (including Q498R and N501Y), which significantly enhance binding to the ACE2 receptor. It has also altered the cell entry pathway which further contributes to its ability to escape from vaccine protection. In mid-2022, BA.4 and BA.5 lineages of Omicron were the dominant COVID-19 variants in the United States and were predicted to circulate in the second half of 2022. Thus, Pfizer and Moderna quickly took the initiative to develop bivalent boosters based on the original strain from Wuhan and Omicron BA.4 and BA.5. They made it within another miraculously short time frame of just a few months. On August 31, 2022, the FDA approved the bivalent booster shots of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines designed to target the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, with Pfizer only providing the data on eight mice. However, Omicron keeps quickly changing, splitting into even more diversified subgroups. Soon after the new bivalent vaccine was distributed, BA.4 and BA.5 became history. A new variant XBB.1.5 began appearing in October 2022 and reached its peak in April 2023. It combines two descendent lineages (BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75) of Omicron. The featured new spike protein mutation (F486P) leads to increased transmissibility and significant escape from the vaccine. Not surprisingly, the antibody levels to XBB.1.5 in bivalent mRNA-boosted individuals declined significantly to pre-booster levels after only three months. The bivalent booster vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19-associated hospitalization declined to as low as 24 percent at six months post-vaccination, according to CDC data collected from September 2022 to April 2023. Result: The vaccine failed. Time lapsed: Five months after the bivalent booster vaccine launched in September 2022 and was utilized until the U.S. dominant wave of XBB.1.5 in January 2023 emerged. Result: Vaccine doomed to fail. Time lapsed: Less than one month from the XBB.1.5 booster vaccine launch in October 2023 to the U.S. dominant wave of vaccine escape by EG.5 or other cousin variants in October 2023. Omicron continues to change from XBB to JN, HK.3, EG.5, and  HV.1—all belonging to the huge and diversified Omicron family. EG.5, carrying an additional F456L mutation, is significantly more resistant to neutralization by the sera from vaccinated people. That means even the most recent version of the COVID-19 vaccine based on XBB.1.5 is going to lose its protection with EG.5. Since the risk of breakthrough infection remains high, the WHO listed EG.5 as a "variant of concern" in early August. While HV.1 shares almost all spike mutations that EG.5 carries, it took on a surprising additional mutation (L452R) from a remote ancestor delta variant in 2011, which had normally disappeared in the omicron variant. HV.1 can further escape the XBB.1.5-based vaccine-induced immunity and is even more evasive than EG.5. The same detour trick of HV.1 is also used by JN.1 coming on the scene in August 2023. It gains an additional L455S mutation, switching from the XBB sublineage to BA.2.86 (Pirola). The HK.3 virus has played a novel trick. It has two mutations in the adjacent spike 455 and 456 positions (L455F and F456L), thus called a "FLip." Together, this virus binds even more tightly to ACE2 and is taking off slowly in Brazil and Spain. Both HK.3 (FLip) and JN.1 present even lower binding affinities, meaning the vaccine is even less effective than the current version, raising further concerns over vaccine strategy. Despite the extraordinary speed of vaccine development against COVID-19 and the continued mass vaccination program, the never-ending emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants threatens to significantly overturn the vaccine's intended effects. This is a tiring battle between vaccines and the virus. The winners and losers are clear. The microscopic tricks utilized by the SARS-CoV-2 virus variants are far superior to the vaccines' unproven technology. Alerts have been raised and major concerns have been discussed by scientists as early as 2021 in top-ranked journals including The Lancet and Nature in addition to Nature Reviews, eBioMedicine (part of The Lancet Discovery Science), and other publications through 2023. The common view is that the pressure exerted on viruses from repeated vaccination programs serves as a primary driver of the diversified variants of SARS-CoV-2. If humans continue to develop vaccines based on these emerging new variants, there will continue to be repeated failures. How many more failures will it take to realize that all of these vaccine efforts have been in vain? It is a time for rational deliberation to pause to reflect on finding the root cause of the viral infection. We already have a dynamic shield of protection against serious viral attacks—our natural immunity. Only by facing our own innate immunity will the virus find its tricks useless.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.” - Sun Tzu

China’s grand strategy to take its turn at dominance over the global scene depends on bogging down the USA in four wars at once. How’s it working so far? Pretty darn well. Amazingly, China hardly had to lift a finger to make it happen - though it did write some bank checks to the soulless old grifter sitting in the White House.  Our country has arranged its collapse and downfall masterfully on its own. War No. 1: There was absolutely no need to start the war in Ukraine, you understand, which has by now not only bled Ukraine’s young male population to the bone, but drained our own military of field weapons and ammunition. After the Soviet collapse, Ukraine existed as a poor backwater in Russia’s orbit, causing no trouble for anyone — except itself, due to world-beating corruption — until the USA started a push to include it in NATO. Our neocons made it clear that the purpose of this was to hem-in and weaken Russia. (Why? “Reasons,” they said.) This policy alarmed and infuriated the Russians who made it clear that NATO membership wasn’t going to happen. The US persisted, engineered a coup in 2014 against the Russian-leaning president Yanukovych, and spurred his replacements, first Poroshenko and then Zelensky, to pound the ethnic Russian provinces of the Donbas with rockets and artillery for years on end. Meanwhile, we trained, armed, and supplied a large Ukrainian army and refused to negotiate the NATO expansion in good faith until Mr. Putin had enough in 2022 and moved to put a stop to all this monkey business. After some initial mis-steps, the Russians began to prevail in early 2023. Now, there is a general consensus that Russia controls the battle space with its superior ordnance and troop strength, and the conflict is close to being over. Our NATO allies are not hiding their disgust over the fiasco. Ukraine is wrecked. What remains is how the “Joe Biden” regime reacts to yet another major overseas humiliation. As I see it, Mr. Putin must do his level best to not rub it in, since our country is in the throes of a psychotic fugue and might be capable of world-ending craziness. War No. 2: Little more than a month ago, the Middle East was thought to have reached a moment of praiseworthy stability, according to White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. We awaited an upgrade of the Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Then, the savage Hamas operation of October 7 blew it all up. The Israeli-Palestinian quandary seems to have no possible solution. The Palestinians want their own state, of course, but they push to establish it in the entire territory that Israel occupies now. (From the River to the sea….) The Israelis have no intention of being pushed out, and they resist other possible divisions of the land there that might serve to satisfy the Palestinians’ wish for a country of their own. Israel understands that a basic tenet of jihadi Islam, expressed clearly and often, is to exterminate the Jews, and there is no way around that. Israel’s adversaries don’t seem to understand the meaning of “never again.” Israel now must deal with the latest affront to its existence and its clear goal is to disarm and destroy the Hamas terror organization. To the world’s horror, they are going about it brutally in Gaza because Hamas is dug-in in a vast tunnel network under the civilian overlay of houses, shops, schools, and hospitals. What else might Israel do? Probably seal off the tunnel system with Hamas in it, creating a gigantic graveyard of Islamic martyrs — a recipe for future cycles of vengeance. As you can see, there appears to be no way this ends well for anyone. Other big Islamic players wait on the sidelines, making only threatening gestures so far. I doubt that Iran will risk its oil infrastructure and its electric grid to intervene. And despite Mr. Erdogan’s drum-beating and his large army, the Turkish economy and currency (the lira) would collapse if he jumped in. Egypt has zero appetite for war. That leaves Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, on Israel’s northern frontier. If they amp things up enough, Damascus and Beirut could become ashtrays. So, I would expect that Israel grinds on methodically to put Hamas out of business and the region returns to its miserable stalemate status quo until the next generation of angry Palestinians starts a new cycle of violence. Meanwhile, Israel has its own fractious internal political problems to contend with. And also meanwhile, the Palestinians and Israelis compete by birth-rate to out-populate the other side — a contest that might stop suddenly with the economic collapse of the US and Europe, and the end of current global economic relations, including an orderly oil trade, that has produced nearly a century of global super-prosperity allowing populations to expand as they have. (There is also Israel’s 90-percent Covid vaccination rate to consider, with its detrimental effects on health and reproduction.) In a desperate scramble for resources that follows, things that can’t go on, stop. Bringing us to War No. 3: The US Government’s war against its own citizens. This has been going on since Mr. Trump stepped onto the scene, and has included a semi-successful war against Mr. Trump personally — except that not only has it failed to put him out of business as a politician, it has substantiated many of the claims he made about corrupt and perfidious government that resulted in his election in 2016. All of that has only enhanced his polling numbers. And the lawless, bad faith court cases lodged against him have demonstrated the US government’s grievous fall into willful malfeasance that has the DOJ arresting and unfairly persecuting hundreds of innocent Americans that support Mr. Trump. A big part of the government’s war against US citizens has been the bizarre Covid-19 episode and the long-running effort by public officials to deceive the population about it, including lockdowns and destruction of small businesses, the dishonest suppression of viable treatments, gross censorship about the harms of the mRNA vaccines, and trickery around the origins of the vaccines in the back rooms of our Department of Defense. Another front of this war is the wide-open Mexican border, a lawless state of affairs created as deliberate policy by our cabinet secretaries, and done at a time when there is tremendous animus against the US from many other nations who send thousands of sketchy young men into our country with no attempt by our border officials to determine who they are. It looks like “Joe Biden’s” hash will be settled shortly when the House, reorganized under a young and vital new speaker, reveals the Biden family’s bank records and begins the process of impeaching the president for bribery. “Joe Biden’s” party pretends that this is not happening and appears to have no plan to deal with consequences. For the moment, they still stupidly tout him as their candidate for the 2024 election, another arrant falsehood you can add to the thousand-and one affronts against the public that this party has tried to put over. Many Americans suspect there will not be a 2024 election, specifically that whoever is president in the coming year will invoke yet another national emergency order to postpone it on spurious grounds. Many are also far from persuaded that the 2020 election that installed “Joe Biden” was honest and legitimate. Which brings us to War No. 4: The American peoples’ war against a government gone rogue. Obviously, it is not underway yet, but it’s easy to see how it might develop. I think it could commence in the aftermath of a financial calamity that is visibly brewing in the debt markets. The net result will be a collapsed standard-of-living for everyone in the USA, the breakdown of supply lines and daily business, and a very sharp loss of legitimacy for the people who have been in charge of anything in this country. We emerge from this catastrophe a nearly medievalized society with a steeply-reduced population, unable to resist China’s attempt to colonize us. Pretty scary, huh? Just let’s keep doing what we’re doing. *  *  * Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

Authored by Raymond Ibrahim via AmericanThinker.com, What is ultimately behind so many of the (manufactured) ills currently plaguing the West, from leftist lunacy and gender insanity to unnecessary lockdowns and wars? In a word, the ultra-rich -- the billionaire elite.  So argues bestselling author Hanne Nabintu Herland in her latest book, The Billionaire World: How Marxism Serves the Elite. In a series of brisk chapters, Herland -- a historian of religions and founder of The Herland Report -- traces all the world’s major problems back to the billionaire elite and their use of Marxist repression and social engineering.  While this may seem counterintuitive, Herland makes -- and documents -- several powerful arguments. The fact that a tiny elite control much can be seen in that  even seemingly opposing and competing brands, such as Coke and Pepsi, are usually owned by the same company, says Herland.  The same applies to supposedly opposing “leftist” and “rightist” media. Six corporations control 90% of all U.S. media. As for the political arena, the “richest 0.01% have accounted for 40% of all campaign contributions through corporate donations.” In short, “These mastodonte private companies completely dominate our way of life, what we eat, drink, watch on TV, what we wear, and who we vote for.” Little wonder that, no matter what happens in the world, and no matter how such developments are detrimental to the average person, the ultra-rich tend to only get richer. According to Herland, “82% of all wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1% among us, while the poorest world population of 3.7 billion saw no increase in wealth.” But it’s worse than that; there seems to be a direct correlation between how much poorer the average man gets and how much richer the billionaires get.  Writes Herland,

[T]he richest among us made billions of dollars on the COVID-19 world tragedy, while the world’s poor plunged into unimaginable poverty…  The shutdown strategy made the billionaires’ profit soar.  In the span of just a few months in 2020, Bill Gates made $75 billion, Jeff Bezos $67.9 billion, Mark Zuckerberg $37.8 billion, and Elon Musk $33.6 billion.

Meanwhile, 48% of small business owners in America experienced severe economic turmoil -- with fully one-third of them going bankrupt, and with Black-owned businesses suffering disproportionately -- due to this lockdown that otherwise profited the billionaires. From a macro-historic perspective, the  West is slowly regressing, and the ultra-rich are becoming “the globalist version of feudal lords, as the new Western slave class emerges beneath them.” But how did this lamentable state of affairs comes to pass in the first place?  Marxism -- in its myriad forms and iterations -- is Herland’s answer.  Since the 1960s, beginning with the “free sex and drugs” movement, Marxism, especially in the guise of godless materialism, has wormed its way into Western culture, poisoning, corrupting and destroying everything that originally made the West great, and therefore making it ripe for the most powerful -- meaning the richest -- to manipulate and control.   Writes Herland,

The Marxist attack on historic Western values has weakened the very core of our culture, destroyed social stability and the family, quenched free speech and silenced the people -- and thereby removed the obstacles for the billionaire class to gain centralized control… The combination of strong private corporations coupled with political socialist ideologies has pushed for a radical groupthink model in which the population is expected to agree with the consensus -- not unlike that which we witnessed during National Socialism in Germany before and during World War II.”

Marxism is especially apt at exploiting any environment where freedom and liberty erode and are replaced with groupthink.  In the words of Vladimir Lenin:

We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth... We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion and scorn towards those who disagree with us.

It needs no great expounding to say that these tactics dominate all social and political discourse today -- more than a century after they were first written down. There is much more to recommend Herland’s Billionaire World. Almost every pressing topic -- including the politicization of science, the rise of (openly Marxist) groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), the global persecution of Christians, the stoking of racial tensions, and the rewriting of history -- is connected to the overlooked role of the billionaire elites and their self-serving agendas. *  *  * Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.