America's War
De-patterning and Re-patterning the West
In 2002, with a little help from National Defence, we brought to McGill the (then) president of the Club of Rome, Prince Hassan, who made a contribution to the Pluralism, Religion, and Public Policy conference I was co-chairing and to the book that came out of it, Recognizing Religion in a Secular Society. Our then chief justice, Beverley McLachlin, also made a contribution. Through another keynote speaker, Richard John Neuhaus, I afterward had the privilege of becoming acquainted with Avery Dulles, one of America's best theologians and a very fine man.
This fine man, the late Cardinal Dulles, was a convert to Catholicism, a religion now undergoing a de-patterning and re-patterning experiment I have begun describing elsewhere. With the death this morning of another fine man, Benedict XVI, requiescat in pace, that experiment will doubtless be accelerated, but this is not the time to discuss it. Avery Dulles also happened to be the son of John Foster Dulles and nephew to Allen Dulles, who made up the other half of the famous Dulles duo—Secretary of State and Director of the CIA, respectively—that in the post-war period determined much of American foreign policy. Volumes have been written, and protest songs sung, about their political ideas, financial interests, manipulation of foreign states, and dastardly deeds during the cold war, in the struggle between the emergent empires of America and the Soviet Union.
It is a particularly dastardly deed I have in mind here. It sprang from Allen Dulles's concern over intelligence that the Soviets were experimenting in mind control. The attitude he adopted was this: If they are doing it, we also must do it, and do it more effectively. That, of course, was a quite common attitude, the same that had led through two world wars, or one long one, to the blasphemously named Trinity project—to high-altitude bombers obliterating unarmed civilians and, with them, the remaining shreds of the West's commitment to Just War theory, learned long ago from that great defender of the Americas, Francisco de Vitoria.
With that obliteration went any obvious claim to moral superiority over its enemies and with it came, inevitably, the re-wilding of the West (prophesied by Heinrich Heine and appraised by Elizabeth Anscombe) even in America. Power would now be maintained there, as in Russia, without justice. Bellum would be turned back into duellum. Witness the Kennedy assassinations. That oxymoron, utilitarian ethics, would prevail, permitting the Pentagon to experiment more freely on the citizenry it is supposed to protect, or on its friendly neighbours. Porton Down had been doing that in England for some time. In 1959, it chemtrailed the south coast, with devastating effects on the Dorset population; the Pentagon did the same thing in Canada, whatever it may have been doing at home.
Now, the deed in question was of that type. It took place here in Montreal. It involved no planes or explosives, though it did involve chemicals. It was conducted quietly in Ravenscrag, a building nestled at the foot of Mount Royal that houses the Allan Memorial Institute. There bombs were set off in the brains of unsuspecting subjects by sensory deprivation, hallucinogenic drugs, and electro-shock therapy, under the direction of Professor Donald Cameron, founding director of the Allan. Cameron, an American who came to McGill in 1943 with an intelligence background, eagerly conducted experiments on human subjects from 1957 to 1964, experiments so obviously illegal and immoral that even Dulles thought them better performed on foreign soil.
These were, as Cameron himself called them, de-patterning experiments that fit with his work of inducing amnesia with a view to selectively recovering memories in such a way as to substantially alter human behaviour. They belonged to a larger mind control project dubbed MKUltra, about which one can read briefly in the McGill Tribune or at greater length in David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government.
Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron (1946)
McGill, as I may have mentioned before, suddenly deleted the web pages devoted to the Pluralism, Religion, and Public Policy project when it was discovered that I had been chronicling the rise of the transgender madness, the rapid progress of euthanasia, and other matters deemed embarrassing by friends of our former principal. I was spared any treatment at the Allan—today a much different sort of place, thankfully—but that deletion was a sign, however tiny and insignificant a sign, of our ongoing need for amnesia: our need to forget what we once were, and what the transitioning process actually looks like, so that we might more easily become whatever it is our corporate handlers mean us to become.
The contents of those ramshackle pages were spared, not that it matters, but things were otherwise with MKUltra. In 1973, then CIA director, Richard Helms, destroyed the agency's records of the project. It simply wouldn't do for people ever to know what had transpired. For, if they did know, they would also know what we are becoming.
And what is that? Besides fools, I mean, fools in both the intellectual and the moral sense. I'll tell you. We are becoming the experimental subjects of greedy corporations and power-hungry imperialists lacking all moral scruple. What’s worse, we are becoming complicit in their immoral experiments, just as McGill was complicit in MKUltra experiments. Our behaviour is being altered. We are being de-patterned and re-patterned to suit purposes foreign to our own.
Nullifying Nuremberg
Cameron's intelligence background included being sent by Dulles, who was then OSS director for Switzerland, to Nuremberg in November 1945. He was not there to learn medical ethics, to which he was impervious, but to make an assessment of Rudolph Hess, for reasons uncertain. One thing quite certain is that there was a great deal of hypocrisy at Nuremberg, for the same countries that were holding the Nazis to account were cutting deals to learn everything they could about how their medical crimes were conducted and what useful information had been gleaned along the way. This was not for the supposed good of humanity, but for the good of the intelligence community and the pursuit of national interests.
The arc of Dulles's own intelligence career ran from Berne in 1941 to the Bay of Pigs in 1961. He was fired for that fiasco by JFK, who two years later was shot in Dallas by his deep-state opponents. Kennedy lay quietly in Arlington while Dulles served on the Warren Commission that whitewashed his murder with the "lone gunman" lie. It would be just as much a lie to pretend that what America did under Dulles was simply the work of a renegade CIA director. MKUltra, which continued for some time after his departure, was symptomatic, not aberrational. Men had licenced men to operate beyond the laws of God and man; even men of medicine, men like Cameron. Not only in Russia or Germany, but also in America and Canada.
The myth of progress would have us think that we are getting better and better. The truth is that we are getting worse and worse. We have built a culture of death in which the unwanted and unloved are attacked with lethal force. We have made abortion and euthanasia routine. We are on the side of Herod, not of the Wise Men. The slightest health deficiency, or even none at all, is sufficient to justify the killing of the vulnerable. The most threadbare claim to national security, or to the interests of a fictitious entity called global health—to which every university is scrambling to build a temple with pharma or world bank money—is justification enough for turning whole populations into experimental subjects. Even in Israel, of all places, Benjamin Netanyahu brags, in the name of medical progress, of having turned his country into a giant Pfizer laboratory; or rather, he speaks quite calmly of having done so, as if it were the obvious thing to do. Whatever would Hannah Arendt say of that?
An important milestone in the emergence of this culture, as Walker Percy observed in The Thanatos Syndrome, was marked by the 1920 contribution of Binding and Hoche, themselves men of medicine: Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens, on permitting the destruction of life unworthy of life. But the beginnings go back further than that, to the Social Darwinists in the late nineteenth century and their eugenics movement.
Launched with lofty-sounding phrases by men of great accomplishment, including the polymath Sir Francis Galton, this movement from the outset showed itself to be mean-spirited, avaricious, power-hungry. Its first successful legal expression was the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, which Josiah Wedgwood MP rightly fingered as the product of "the horrible Eugenic Society which is setting out to breed up the working class as though they were cattle." Yet the bill passed with little opposition. Its most vocal opponent outside the House was G. K. Chesterton, who insisted that eugenics—that novel and exceptionally vague "science," as Galton mislabeled it, which purported to deal with "all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race”—was a deadly thing, "a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning." The Nazi era proved Chesterton right. Hence Nuremberg.
Yet we are still bargaining about it today. Enormous strides are being taken down the path marked out by Binding and Hoche. Euthanasia, we have discovered, can cure even the common cold—there’s no cure more effective!—and do wonders for budget deficits while freeing up hospital beds for those who still want them. But euthanasia is just one side of the eugenics programme. Read Robert Jay Lifton's The Nazi Doctors, or Richard Weikart's From Darwin to Hitler, then go back and read Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils, beginning with his Note to the Reader. (If you’re short on time, you’ll find a condensed version in the second part of Anarchy from Above, but you really ought to read Chesterton for yourself.) A good many things in the daily newscasts will begin to sound eerily familiar. For we are indeed constructing a health tyranny, under which we will be told by public officials when we are sick and when we are well, or when we might become sick and how that must be prevented, and what must be sacrificed in order to prevent it. Soon, one suspects, we will be told whether we can be at all, how many of us there can be, and under what conditions. Already we are being told what we may and may not say about such things without being cancelled or prosecuted.
Canada’s Binding and Hoche, or is it Wither and Frost? Whoops—it’s the PM and his new JM in 2019. The latter is wearing his McGill tie. The pair quickly set about fulfilling an election promise to expand MAID legislation.
The defeat of Nazism never was a defeat of eugenics. It wasn't even a setback, really, at least not in the national security community or among its cultured collaborators. Experiments in eugenics have continued unabated, with little effort to say what idea of the human, or whose idea of improvement, is operative. Consideration of such matters is undesirable, for several reasons.
First, because the whole movement is built, as Chesterton argues, on equivocation and artful euphemisms; that is how its humanitarian pretences are maintained. Second, because it won't do, from a security point of view, to look too closely at either the means or the ends; those remain cabinet secrets or even secrets from the cabinet. Third, because we have become cynical, not only in the political but also in the philosophical sense. Too few expect to find answers to questions of moral substance; too many do not even enquire after them, lest they should learn that there are moral limits. Fourth, because any serious search for answers must take us into theological territory, and we don't do theology any more. Or, rather, we like to keep our theology below the radar, like our anthropology. "What is man, that Thou are mindful of him?" is also a question no longer asked.
The improvement of humanity is a meaningless concept, however, where there is no standard by which to measure it. The military, for its part, prefers to speak of human enhancement or augmentation, and its measure is, as always, advantage over the enemy. Here there must be no limits, or at least none to which the enemy is not himself presently committed. So the masters of bio-defence and bio-offence have been augmenting the “augmentation” playbook with end runs around Nuremberg.
Now, it may be granted that the seventh article of the code requires some attenuation where the military is concerned. What must not be granted is that enhancement or augmentation is not subject to the code. Nor should we grant the underlying premises one detects in a recent Germano-British white paper:
What is certain is that the field of human augmentation has the potential to transform society, security and defence over the next thirty years. We must begin to understand the implications of these changes and shape them to our advantage now, before they are thrust upon us.
Something like the Dulles doctrine remains operative here: If they are doing it, or might do it, we also must do it—do it first, if possible, and more effectively. Which means that the military must provide leadership in the transformation of society; that "society, security, and defence" must be aligned, if not amalgamated.
To such a doctrine, and such a vision, Nuremberg is an unacceptable impediment. The Chinese model of military-civilian fusion will have to be emulated. That entails something more than a proliferation of public-private partnerships within a military-industrial complex. It entails the capture of minds through fifth generation warfare, and of bodies through genetic tinkering and implanted devices. With everything, as they say, to be done at scale.
Priming the Pump
Consider in that light this interview, from 17 December 2020, with Regina Dugan: "How DARPA seeded the ground for a rapid COVID-19 cure. Former Director of DARPA, Regina Dugan, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss this secretive government agency behind COVID-19 vaccines."
Dugan had become CEO of Wellcome Leap in May of that year, after working with Google and Facebook in the interim. Two things are noteworthy, besides the trajectory of her career and the timing of the interview, which took place just as the mRNA roll-out began: first, that so much of what was going to happen was already known; second, that the questions, as well as the answers, were scripted to inoculate people's minds against further disturbing developments by pre-establishing the idea that the "vaccines" were a world-altering miracle that it would be impious to question. Here is a major excerpt, lightly edited for clarity and interspersed with my own remarks...
YFL: We have seen the Pfizer rollout. We've also seen some of the concerns about ... the myth about whether or not ... it can alter your DNA, but then also some of the side effects. And so I wonder ... based on what you're seeing and based on your understanding of the technology ... is this something we can expect? Is it normal to ... go through this process of side effects, et cetera, with the vaccine?
DUGAN: I think that's a normal progression in the investigation of safety for vaccines.
In truth, there's nothing normal about this progression at all. Confidence that there will not be serious side-effects is supposed to be established from animal trial data before products reach the market. And if there are unforeseen side-effects that appear after marketing, the products are supposed to be pulled from the market. Here there were no animal trials, but the Pfizer testing on human subjects had revealed to the regulatory agencies, though not to the public, that an abundance of SAEs must be expected. It was determined in advance that these would be overlooked. But let's continue with Dugan:
Now remember, our charge was to create the possibility [of a covid antidote], and I think we need to understand how remarkable an achievement this is. We went from virus sequence to first dosing in humans in 63 days. It's unprecedented. Now, we still have the hard work to do to determine efficacy and to understand distribution and all of those things, but the first step is to have a vaccine candidate that creates an immune response and offers protection... This will be one of the most important scientific achievements of our generation and certainly in the top-five contributions for DARPA, which was also responsible for the early investments in the internet and GPS.
If the work establishing safety and efficacy has yet to be done, however, how can the "vaccine candidate" (which is not actually a vaccine) be headed to market with a "safe and effective" label? And how can she know that it will be successful, so successful as to rank right up there with the internet and GPS and the data mining they facilitate? Her interviewers do not enquire. Instead they simply endorse, then shift focus to the new alliance between business and government for warp-speed health interventions.
Absolutely! Regina, when we're talking about ... health care right now and the speed at which this was done, we know that this administration specifically focused a lot on public-private partnerships dealing with, not just the health-care companies, but also the tech companies for the rollout of software that will track some of these adverse events and the safety monitoring. You have been part of that world before and I just wonder: what is your sense of the ability for big tech to ... walk into this health-care space that has been ... technologically slow but also is so complex?
To put the question rather more sharply: Do they know what they're doing? Can we trust them? Should health care be handed over to the military-industrial complex? It is true, by the way, that a great deal of money was laid out in advance, and still more after the fact, to track adverse events in products already declared safe and effective! What is not true is that this monitoring was allowed to call that declaration into question; there was too much at stake for that.
Listen to Dugan's response, which addresses none of this but instead takes up the invitation to promote cooperative "health" interventions between the military and private corporations, despite the fact that the historic model for this is precisely the Fascist model to which Nuremberg was meant to be the remedy. "I firmly believe in public-private partnerships," she states, offering up Moderna as an example.
When we made the investment in Moderna at DARPA, they were three people. And these early investments are important, and now we see what's happened with the investment of private capital. We now also have to consider what other established tech companies might bring to the table in terms of their reach, in terms of their scale. These are very important considerations. But I think central to the question is also: What do we need by way of new breakthroughs? How do we ask the new "what if?" questions for public health and human health. And, in fact, it's the reason I accepted the CEO role at Wellcome Leap, which was formed by the Wellcome Trust with an initial funding of $300 million and a specific mandate. And that is to ask the next "what if?" questions, to create the next round of breakthroughs for human health. We need to do those things at scale, and we need to do them in partnership.
I don’t know about the investment of private capital; it was BARDA that followed up DARPA’s original investment. Her interviewers invite her to take the next step, however, which involves parrying partisan attacks on the deep state while lauding its progressive agenda. Any concern about the deep state should be a concern, her questioners suggest, not with its agenda but with overcoming impediments to its agenda.
Regina, I love reading these stories because, to me, this is ... like "Mission Impossible." It's kind of like what I thought was going to be happening if we were ever hit by a pandemic. And then it didn't exactly go by the movie script, and a lot of that blame has been laid at the Trump administration, whether or not it's what happened with the CDC or following [the] pandemic handbook...
Now there's a classic case of taking Marx's advice to charge your enemy with the very things you are doing while you are doing them! But let's hear the question out. Can the progressives truly break free from the regressives?
What you're talking about actually worked with DARPA. So are those "what if?" questions still being asked, because there's a lot of concern about ... the deep state and what's been able to be taken down and what survived the last four years. Are you confident that the government and DARPA are still asking those questions and going to come up with the solutions for the next time this happens?
Before hearing Dugan's response, let's concede that what she's talking about worked just fine, if "worked" means that the deep state survived the previous administration's inept assault on it. In fact, it worked so well that the previous administration was almost completely taken in before it was taken out. And it will continue to work if government agencies and private organizations cooperate to achieve a new vision of health as global, rather than personal, and a corresponding moral vision that will back the requisite changes to decision-making in the sphere of health.
A quick aside: Have you noticed how sexual differentiation, which was always objective and universal, is now subjective and personal; while health, which once was subjective and personal, is now putatively objective and universal? To effect this reversal is one motive for the contradictory promotion of identity changes in the name of autonomy and of a needle in every arm in the name of the common good, autonomy be damned. Another motive is to disorient the public to such a degree that it can no longer tell what makes either for private or for public good; just as it can no longer tell what is private, and what is public, a conundrum well illustrated by Moderna. Anyway, Dugan again takes the cue, puffing both sides of the key PPP to which she is privy.
Well, I think DARPA is in steady state, and DARPA has historically had about 0.5% of the DoD budget. It's an amazing organization with respect to the leverage it offers—small investment but right at these pivotal places where we need ... risk-tolerant investments. But in health we also see private organizations like Wellcome Trust, like the Gates Foundation, others stepping up and beginning to ask those kinds of "what if?" questions as well. We definitely need to do that at scale. And I think it's clear human health, global health, is going to require that of us. It is not only a moral investment. It is also an economic investment, as we're seeing in this current pandemic.
Dugan tells us that DARPA "was formed after Sputnik in 1958 with the goal of preventing and creating strategic surprise." She doesn't tell us that Moderna, a failing company with no viable portfolio, was rescued by a total investment of one and a half billion dollars from DARPA and BARDA—that is, from Defence and the HHS—as a front for their mRNA ambitions. What, we may wonder, was to be prevented here and what strategic surprise was to be created? Was SARS-CoV-2 or some other "surprise" candidate already in the works when that front was created a decade ago?
Dugan: more than just a pretty face
A few months after this interview, the facts about the mRNA products—namely, that they were neither safe nor effective at stopping covid—were beginning to appear in public. Yet major media outlets, subsidized by government or big business, were still pumping the narrative, as most of them are today. Here's another puff-piece, this one from The Economist on 3 June 2021:
Using messenger RNA to make vaccines was an unproven idea. But if it worked, the technique would revolutionise medicine, not least by providing protection against infectious diseases and biological weapons. So in 2013 America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gambled. It awarded a small, new firm called Moderna $25m to develop the idea. Eight years, and more than 175m doses later, Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine sits alongside weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet on the list of innovations for which DARPA can claim at least partial credit. It is the agency that shaped the modern world, and this success has spurred imitators. In America there are ARPAs for homeland security, intelligence and energy, as well as the original defence one. President Joe Biden has asked Congress for $6.5bn to set up a health version, which will, the president vows, “end cancer as we know it”. His administration also has plans for another, to tackle climate change. Germany has recently established two such agencies: one civilian (the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, or SPRIN-D) and another military (the Cybersecurity Innovation Agency). Japan’s interpretation is called Moonshot R&D. In Britain a bill for an Advanced Research and Invention Agency—often referred to as UK ARPA—is making its way through Parliament.
Here the sunny horizons are extended still further, with nary a cloud in the sky to dampen enthusiasm. Indeed, the sky is so clear that the merciless sun is just about our only remaining enemy. One notes the confidence placed in the new Administration, which will defeat the powers of heaven and earth, from global warming to cancer. (Everyone wants to see the end of cancer, right? That's why we didn't screen for it while we waited for mRNA products known to cause cancer, or cancer relapses.) A veritable ARPA blitzkrieg will effect these victories!
That, and a little tough love at home. Or perhaps we should say, a little kinky love, the kind that feeds a bureaucrat's dominatrix fantasy, in which covid can be fought by chaining us to our beds or by deploying masks like condoms. Just think of it! All those compliant clergy sporting face condoms as they broadcast to their parishioners’ bedrooms and living rooms—no wonder Dr Fauci was laughing. But it's no laughing matter. As Will Jones pointed out, there has been a cross-party lust for this sort of thing that goes back to the post-9/11 period. If we learned it from the CCP, we learned it well before covid.
Recently the role of CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) in producing key lockdown guidance for America in March 2020 came to light. Now, a pandemic plan from 2007 produced by the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) and currently hosted on the CISA website has emerged. The plan contains the original list of pandemic ‘essential businesses’ that was used by CISA in 2020 to lock down America. The 2007 plan (which was itself based on a Department of Homeland Security plan from the previous year) clearly states the intention to ban large gatherings 'indefinitely', close schools and non-essential businesses, institute work-from-home, and quarantine exposed and not just sick individuals. The aim is simple and clear: to slow the spread to wait for a vaccine.
Lock 'em down till you can shoot 'em up, in other words, as I said or tried to say two years ago. (The editor didn't think anyone would laugh, or even keep reading, so he struck that line, which is no longer contentious.)
So, then: Defence, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security were all involved in bringing us covid relief, though who brought us covid is still in dispute. And these public agencies, together with their private partners at home and abroad, were preparing for this long before covid hit. Sure, they ran into a bit of a snag with the Trump administration, but didn't we all? They dealt with it, as with him, even if that meant enlisting their media partners to help keep Hunter Biden's laptop sealed and performing a few other dirty tricks at election time—tricks the Twitter papers show to have extended right through the pandemic, with no sign of being shelved.
Well, you say, that's their job, or a big part of it. Bio-defence, like bio-offence, if there's a meaningful difference, requires anticipation and preparation. It also requires a few dirty tricks, no doubt, a little liberty with the law, though blatant interference with a presidential election is perhaps beyond the pale. The truth, however, is that nothing is beyond the pale. If it's okay to do evil for a putatively good end—to obliterate civilian populations, or blast the brains of your patients, or cut up babies in the womb for their organs and cell lines, or promote suicide, turn hospices into killing fields—election interference is small potatoes. But if such things are okay, what isn't okay? If such things are permitted, everything is permitted.
The Casualties of War
My colleague, Catherine Ferrier, reminds us that 10,000 Canadians died with "medical assistance” in 2021 alone. Another case, I guess, of “safe, legal, and rare.” And how far did pandemic management contribute to that morally hideous statistic?
That there was an utterly unprecedented response to covid everyone knows: lockstep media propaganda, complete with fear porn and censorship of anything off-narrative; repeated lockdowns, with the partial or complete cancellation of ordinary social and economic life; denial of rights and interference in religious practices, as in business practices; coercive vaccination mandates and other forms of violence, both psychological and physical, against dissenters, who are still being targeted; safe medical products banned for those who desperately needed them and unsafe medical products urged on those with absolutely no need of them; severe adverse reactions and deaths anticipated from the latter, but denied or ignored when they actually happened; doctors and scientists defamed, fined, or even de-licenced for questioning aloud what was happening, if (as too rarely) they had the courage to do so; public health officials, entirely unqualified for the task, ruling the smallest details of life; emergency powers routinely renewed week after week, year after year, without scrutiny or debate; constitutions and bills of rights suddenly shelved as if they had never existed; pastors jailed for preferring to obey God rather than man; every face hidden for months at a time, with nary a smile to be seen, even by children; no child left behind to enjoy the normalcy children need; infants and pregnant mothers injected with products said to be safe and effective, but known not to be.
What, again, was that first principle of Nuremberg? Something about "the voluntary consent of the human subject" being "absolutely essential" in human experimentation? Yes, which means that
the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment. The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs, or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.
How fares this principle today? Like Cameron at Ravenscrag, the pandemic management team on the Potomac, with the thoroughly unprincipled Fauci as its First Mate, though not perhaps at its helm, rolled out a deliberately disorienting combination of therapies to test on unsuspecting subjects: sensory deprivation (masking and lockdowns), sensory overload (incessant media messaging, like Cameron's looped tapes), potentially fatal products and procedures (from midazolam to ventilators, from remdesivir to the clot-shots), and repeated violent shocks to the collective and the individual psyche. All the while, it told lies too large to question, accompanied by promises it had no intention of keeping. It wounded; it demoralized; it punished. It killed and is still killing, if the excess death toll is the signal some think it is. It violated virtually every note of Nuremberg. That Fauci himself is said to be quadruple-jabbed does not change any of that, though it does call into question his sanity.
Those of us who have lived through previous pandemics, such as the Hong Kong flu, or anyone who took the least trouble to discover what was evident from the very beginning—that covid kills only the very old and frail or the heavily compromised—knew or should have known that the supposed cures were worse than the disease by far. The general readiness to be deceived, or to become collaborators in the deception, displayed the hollowness of our souls, so easily filled with fear; of mainstream religion, which offered no antidote to fear; and of our political life, which simply collapsed. It revealed the sham culture of the universities, which likewise put up little resistance, proving themselves haunts of hopelessly naïve students, cowardly professors, and corrupt administrators who simply went with the flow, paying down their debts to pharma-tech and other partners, including China. And what shall we say of the medical profession? Primum non nocere, if it still means anything at all, means: "Do no harm to yourself. Keep your head down. What we have called safe and effective, you must call safe and effective. Woe to you if you won't." Few there were, alas, who rejected that counsel.
Ravenscrag
Nothing, Nothing, None
Let's come back to McGill for a moment, where that counsel was embraced without hesitation.
Last July, I put some initial access-to-information questions to my university about the work of the bodies charged by the P7 (our top management team) with handling pandemic affairs, the Emergency Operations Centre and the Recovery and Operations Resumption Committee. Here are those questions:
What was said in these committees about the possibility or actuality of serious adverse reactions or vaccine injury (fatal or otherwise) among those who were being encouraged to take the shots?
What was said about (a) the emerging relationship between McGill and Moderna and (b) other possible conflicts of interest generated by financial relationships with donors or partners to the university or members of the university?
What reasons were provided for adopting masking, distancing, and proof of vaccination policies stricter than those required by the government of Quebec?
As far as I can tell from the documents received, the answer to the first two questions is nothing at all. The answer to the third is none. So we must, unless we probe the P7 itself, be content with McGill's public announcements.
As recently as 14 January 2022, the EOC was still claiming that "three doses of vaccine prevent upwards of 70% of transmission." This was false, as was its claim a month earlier that "masking is more important than ever" and that "masks have been working at McGill to prevent the spread of the virus." There was not a shred of evidence for the latter claim, nor has anything emerged to collapse the mountain of data showing that masking is ineffective against airborne viruses. As for the former, the following justification was offered on 18 January 2022:
Analyses from Britain give a vaccine effectiveness against Omicron of about 70-75% for people having three doses of vaccine and about 88% vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization for Omicron. (See the December 10, 2021 Technical Briefing and December 31, 2021 Technical Briefing from the U.K. Health Security Agency, for example.) This figure of 88% for vaccine effectiveness against hospitalizations means that the number of hospitalizations in vaccinated people will be only 12% of the number in the unvaccinated group.
We can't hold institutions—or doctors for that matter, but the people advising us to "vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate" are not doctors and have no business disseminating such advice, much less introducing sanctions against those who won't follow it—responsible for things that were not known to them at the time, things such as the hugely increased risk, from the jabs, both of infection and of hospitalization. Mounting evidence for that has shown claims about "a pandemic of the unvaccinated" to be nothing more than official disinformation deflecting attention from policies that were themselves undermining hospitals and health care, and will continue to undermine them for the foreseeable future. We can, however, hold institutions like McGill accountable for tendentious treatment of such evidence as they had. On page ten of the second Technical Briefing linked in that McGill memo, we find this:
In all periods, effectiveness was lower for Omicron compared to Delta. Among those who had received two doses of AstraZeneca, there was no effect against Omicron from twenty weeks after the second dose. Among those who had received two doses of Pfizer or Moderna effectiveness dropped from around 65–70% down to around 10%... Two to four weeks after a booster dose vaccine, effectiveness ranged from around 65–75%, dropping to 55–70% at five to nine weeks and 40–50% from ten+ weeks after the booster.
Details, details! To which we might add another, namely, that the "unvaccinated" category includes those who have been "vaccinated" for two weeks—two weeks in which there is an uncommonly high rate of infection. This was a common dodge for skewing statistics in favour of the vacina salva narrative, as some of us had already observed.
Anyway, a couple of months later McGill finally dropped, without fanfare, the claim that injections prevented infection and transmission. On 25 March 2022, we were told that "the focus is now on preventing serious illness and hospitalisations through vaccination and new treatments for COVID, rather than on restrictions and lockdowns that try to prevent any new cases." So those who had been claiming scientific support for one objective—mass vaccination to prevent infection and transmission—now shifted to another: mass vaccination to prevent serious illness requiring hospitalization.
The second is as false as the first, but they had to make some sort of shift, not only because it had become too difficult to hide or distort the scientific evidence but also because the failure to prevent infection and transmission was perfectly obvious to the ordinary person. What did not change was the underlying goal, mass vaccination itself. And McGill was already working with Moderna (that is, with DARPA and BARDA) on a deal to make these "new treatments" a staple both in its financial diet and in our idea of heath care. The U.K. has just concluded a similar deal, on a larger scale, promising to become "a life sciences superpower."
It turns out that the mRNA products had never even been tested for prevention of infection or reduction of transmission. They are non-sterilizing and do not even reduce the viral load significantly. So all those claims about keeping people safe by preventing transmission were nothing more than lies. Not only were they lies, but they were lies used to attack those who knew or suspected they were lies and to dupe people into taking products they did not need and might well injure them or compromise their immune systems.
None of this has McGill yet admitted. No word of apology has been issued. Has it, then, utterly abandoned its vocation as a place for independent scientific research and critical analysis to become an arm of the military-industrial complex? Has it again been conscripted into America's war? Has it no institutional conscience, nor any memory of past violations of conscience?
McGill, I learned, resisted certain excesses urged on it by its own School of Population and Global Health, headed by Professor Evans, a man with deep roots in the requisite pieties. But there is no more excuse for nothing, nothing, none than for a zero-covid or zero-carbon policy. It is a betrayal of trust that requires independent investigation into its causes and consequences. There are real victims here, as there were at Ravenscrag, even if some do not yet know they are victims or do not regard themselves as victims.
Who has deceived us?
Returning to the larger theatre, to the world stage, we must ask a much more important question: Who or what has the power to turn the minds of men, or the spines of men, to mush, operating simultaneously in so many different spheres, professions, and institutions? Who can generate a deluding influence with such reach, and to so thorough an effect? Who, indeed, but the Father of Lies, who—to judge from the state of the church as well as the world—is already out on parole. I'll try to explain that another time. We'll stick here with those of our own kind.
Many candidates have been put forward: the main shareholders of big corporations, especially in pharma-tech sectors, which have so hugely profited; the Davos imperialists (are they capitalists or communists or fascists? perhaps the difference is now academic) who spawned the public-private partnerships of which they are so proud; the global governance advocates, who find nation-states inconvenient; the Malthusians, who find people in general inconvenient, or the transhumanists, who think them outmoded; the CCP, which wants to eradicate freedom in the West, and kindly shared with us both the virus and a tyrannical model for response to the virus. Or was it we who shared the virus with them, capitalizing on the opportunity to import that model? That hypothesis, at present, is as good as any.
That there are multiple agents with overlapping agendas goes without saying, but which is the master agenda and what is its primary nature? Some say it is financial, as if the pandemic were only a smokescreen to hide the true causes of an impending economic collapse. Others say it is technocratic, preparation for a global coup by elites that have decided against democracy and for a managerial model of governance. Still others that it is bellicose, all part of the old cold war with Russia—now hot again in Ukraine—and the new cold war with China, which some even suppose to be the final war. A few think it precautionary, as if the covid crisis has only been pandemic war-gaming, this time with live biological rounds, in preparation for something more serious. But many, understandably suspicious of theories about master agendas and super culprits, think it undesigned, a perfect storm brewed by chance out of a lab accident, international groupthink, an increasingly rootless and insecure population susceptible to authoritarian measures, and the predictable heavy-handedness of panicked authorities responding to a crisis.
These theories are not, for the most part, mutually exclusive, when not construed in reductionist terms, but let's push back against each in turn. The first has this against it: that there must surely be easier ways, and ways hopeful of better outcomes, if a full rebuild of the world economy is required; there are certainly less wicked ways. The second goes much further, in my opinion, towards a satisfactory account of the orchestrated chaos of the pandemic; what it has difficulty explaining, as does the first, is the sudden evaporation, not everywhere but in so many places, of those national interests that would normally cause saner heads to prevail. (Can the alleged coup really have progressed quite so far? Perhaps it can, and has.) The third, which rests on conflicting national interests between the two super-powers, begs questions about cooperation between them in gain-of-function research, pandemic planning, and pandemic measures. The fourth, despite deep roots running back into the Bush administrations, seems weak; for pandemic war-gaming with live ammunition makes no sense if it exhausts the public purse, produces high casualties, destroys morale, and undermines the very nation it is supposed to protect. The fifth, though it can be supported by appeal to the stupidity factor, indeed to the widespread insanity of our times, is falsified by the many signs of forethought we have been noticing.
While it may be comforting to rule out any truly malicious design, apart from the familiar pharma monkey business, what are the facts? There have been decades of pandemic war games, culminating in Crimson Contagion (run by Robert Kadlec, bio-defence insider and ASPR director from 2017–2021) and in Event 201, both of which took place just before the real action began. There have been games played with the very word "pandemic," and prior attempts to produce a pandemic. There has been wholesale resort to NPIs that run completely contrary to conventional wisdom, whose one real achievement was to advance prior plans to introduce health passports, digital IDs, CBDCs, and other instruments of surveillance and control. Elaborate funding has been provided over many years for projects faithful to the Gavi/CEPI ambition to make frequent vaccination a universal norm. There has been patient and thorough regulatory capture and infiltration of professional associations, to say nothing of the journals on which they rely. The very inefficiency, indeed irrationality, of covid defences, taken in concert with the ruthless efficiency of authoritarian measures, militates against any perfect storm scenario from which human design has been excluded. So do the secret contracts with Pfizer, which were made not only with Israel but around the globe; the prompt deployment of false modeling, psy-ops, and 5GW; the constantly moving targets of public policy coordinated across multiple countries; the data collection, data withholding, and data manipulation; the gross violations of medical ethics and all those other matters mentioned earlier.
When these things are taken into account, it seems more reasonable to postulate a storm designed and produced with a view to changing the conditions under which we all live and to alter the patterns of our behaviour. And for the source of that we must look to one or more of the first three proposals: the financial, the technocratic, and the bellicose. My money is on all three, working in concert, which puts the third in a different light.
War on the People
To see intent and design where there is none may be a sign of paranoia; refusal to see intent and design, where it manifests itself, is a sign of willful blindness. Just as individual components of Cameron's experiments in mind control might, under other circumstances, be given a more or less innocent interpretation, while their appearance in concert under the actual circumstances cannot be, so also here. One can argue till the cows come home (if the climate change fear-mongers will let them come home) about individual aspects of the crisis, pointing to this or that quite ordinary explanation for the phenomenon in question, but that would be to lose sight of the herd for the cows. Let's not deceive ourselves. Lockdowns, masking, and coercive mandates are not health measures. They are de-patterning and re-patterning devices. Since only governments have the power to impose them, and since only the Americans and the Chinese have the reach that allows them to be imposed across multiple jurisdictions, and since China cannot impose them on America, it seems to me that we cannot answer the question about design and control without speaking of America's war—not its hot war against Russia or its cold war with China, but its war against its own citizens and the peoples of the West.
Now, when I say America, I mean deep-state America, led by the intelligence community and its private partners—"business and government," as they like to say at Davos, working together in harmonious fashion for the benefit of both. This is certainly not everyone's America! Increasingly, it comprises those who despise the people and have grown impatient with their unreadiness to become, in Lewis's phrase, willing slaves of the welfare state. Hence the covid exercise, which serves the dual purpose of setting China on its heels while breaking down the opposition at home. The latter function makes feasible a pivot to climate change and population reduction, a sacrifice pleasing unto Gaia, while serving the goal of political control. For it sets the governance-by-emergency-powers precedent that climate fear-mongering, by itself, could not have achieved. It does an end run around democracy and, as far as possible, the constitution.
Remember Ludlow? The late John D. Rockefeller Jr, friend of Mackenzie King and founding father of just about everything, from the Bureau of Social Hygiene to the Council on Foreign Relations to the Rockefeller Foundation; and Peter Schwartz, the futurist who has worked with just about everyone, including the said Foundation.
How far all this was anticipated by those responsible for given sectors of the pandemic war theatre is difficult to say, but Peter Schwartz—an MKUltra associate at Stanford in the seventies, and the scenario man par excellence—seems to have anticipated it, in broad outline, even before authoring big philanthropy's detailed self-indictment: the Rockefeller Foundation's Scenario for the Future of Technology and International Development. (This 2010 document contains the notorious Lockstep section, though that is not its most interesting feature.) Schwartz, who had earlier written on sudden climate-change emergencies, is said to have taken an interest in government-sponsored research into social control through the weakening of family and tribal loyalties. (If so, I hope he later enjoyed Nation of Bastards and “The Audacity of the State.”) He also partnered with Kadlec in key pandemic planning exercises.
To be honest, it's hard to keep track of all this public-private partnering, which seems to be quite promiscuous and its conquests to be a cause of considerable friction. But just here we must press a question. In the dance, are representatives of nation-states to lead or are they to follow? Another Rockefeller production, this one from the 2013 Global Health Summit in Beijing, suggests that they are to follow: "The power of states and their ability to provide an effective nexus between the local and global levels may diminish in the face of growing megacities, local identity politics, increasing social exclusion, increasing private influence on all spheres of life, widening liberalisation and stronger global networks." (In such contexts, “may” often means “we’re trying our best.”)
That diminishment is foreseen for America, too, but America must meanwhile play a leading role in the creation of world governance, as John D. Rockefeller Jr himself did. Whatever is to emerge at the head of a new world order—I call her Shelob, and doubt not that she already exists embryonically—will do so by way of a web that cannot be spun without America's assistance. The web itself is woven from industry and philanthropy; or, more truly spoken, from seduction and insecurity, from desire and fear. These have been made to converge, ironically, in health. Dreaming the Future of Health for the Next 100 Years provides a blueprint for the idolization of "health" the world over, and this new loyalty, though at first state-based, will soon lift the burden of national loyalties. The current treaty proposal, transferring various powers from member states to the WHO, belongs to that process.
A word of advice: Do not call liberalization everything philanthropists call liberalization, and do not call health what they call health. The whole dream is a dream of conquest, a dream of a web well stocked with the world's flies. In the biblical metaphor, it is a dream of Babel. But it does need the American deep state in order to get off the ground, and the American deep state needs it, for two reasons—to retain its hold on power at home and to make certain that competitors abroad, especially in Beijing, are not embedded at a more fundamental level.
Ah, but wait! The dreaming is all very innocent. Surely there's no shame in having a sharp eye for promising developments, or for potential hazards, along the trajectory of human progress. The keenness of that eye should not be held against it, nor read conspiratorially, as the Rockefeller reminded us in 2020, during the thick of the pandemic:
In the 1930s, Warren Weaver, who led The Rockefeller Foundation’s programs in natural sciences, had a hunch that chemical and physical explanations of life would lead to a whole new world of research and discovery. He coined the term “molecular biology” and a field was born. In 1956, The Rockefeller Foundation supported the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, which was the first use of “artificial intelligence” as well. After some fits and starts, that field exploded too. And now, artificial intelligence has combined with molecular biology to accelerate the development of vaccines and therapeutics for the world’s worst pandemic since 1918. Could any of this have been predicted? Absolutely not. However, both molecular biology and artificial intelligence were guided by visions of positive futures where both fields contributed to improving people’s well-being. Unfortunately, we must also plan for futures that aren’t as bright—be it due to a disease outbreak or natural disaster—to minimize harm and prepare for recovery.
The comparison with 1918 should not go unremarked; that very construal is conspiratorial. Neither should the claim that the 2010 Scenario was simply a bit of what if? speculation that proved prescient. "Now that we're well into a real pandemic," the authors concede, we do "see some chilling similarities between our current Zoom-centered world and Lockstep." We see, for example, that it accurately "predicted that telepresence technologies would 'respond to the demand for less-expensive, lower bandwidth, sophisticated communications systems for populations whose travel is restricted.'" Other predictions, we are told, were off target, "including the emergence of MRI technologies to detect abnormal behavior with anti-social intent." As if variations in the technology of choice somehow put to rest the idea that anything was engineered in advance! Oh, and try turning those two sentences around, beginning the one with travel restrictions and the other with detection of anti-social behaviour. You will find that both read rather more chillingly, particularly if you concur that such measures were themselves decidedly anti-social.
Only a fool would suppose that the reality was unconnected to the dreaming. The surveillance technology may change, but the plan to apply the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes, both at home and abroad, remains the same. Those chilling similarities are the new normal by which the abnormal is being calculated, just as our innocent dreamers predicted. Their 2010 map of the alternatives, in which Clever Together is the clear winner, is quite compelling evidence of that. Clever Together, of course, is for clever people. Ordinary folk require the discipline of Lock Step before they can learn to be clever. As for those who mistakenly fancy themselves clever, their Smart Scramble has been anticipated. It will not go so smoothly as they like to think.
The Rockefeller Foundation does not wish to be misunderstood, mind you. It never has anything but our best interests at heart, as the 2020 document insists. "While baseless posts have circulated recently calling the exercise part of a 'diabolical plan for world domination', we see it as further evidence of the importance of scenario planning in helping governments, institutions and others navigate near-term decisions that can have long-term impact. Our hope then—as it is now—was to focus on what we don’t know so we could make better plans to address a real pandemic, such as the one we’re facing today." Not war, then, just philanthropy. It’s all in how you look at it.
Philanthropy? Remember that the Serpent was the original philanthropist! All he wanted to do was help humanity learn to deify itself. And he did know something about the process. How had he had become the Serpent if not by dreaming the process and himself attempting the process? But if we are going back only to the 1930s, rather than to the year naught—if it really is those "chemical and physical explanations of life," not some putative Serpent, that suggested new ways of regarding and treating life—what then? Giorgio Agamben can explain. He makes a much more reliable guide here, whether to the 1930s or to the present day, than does the Rockefeller Foundation.
Every time a value is ascertained, a non-value is, necessarily, established: the flip side of protecting health is excluding and eliminating everything that can give rise to disease. We should reflect carefully on the fact that the first case of legislation by means of which a state programmatically assumed for itself the care of its citizens’ health was Nazi eugenics. Soon after his rise to power in July 1933, Hitler promulgated a law for the protection of the German people from hereditary diseases. This led to the creation of special hereditary health courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte) that decreed the forced sterilisation of 400,000 people. Less well known is that, long before Nazism, a eugenic politics was planned in the United States—particularly in California—with robust funding from the Carnegie Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation, and that Hitler explicitly referenced this model. If health becomes the object of a state politics transformed into bio-politics, then it ceases to concern itself first and foremost with the agency of each individual and becomes, instead, an obligation which must at any cost, no matter how high, be fulfilled.
Agamben knows what Chesterton and Lewis knew. Therefore he, too, dreads government in the name of science and especially in the name of health. He does not want us to make the mistake of thinking that law and life, or law and medicine, can be conflated with impunity, as the Planners intend.
Medicine has the task of addressing ailments according to the principles irrevocably sanctioned by the Hippocratic Oath, principles which it has followed for centuries. If medicine, making a necessarily ambiguous and indeterminate pact with governments, presents itself instead as a legislator, not only does this not lead to positive results in the field of health—as we have witnessed in Italy during the pandemic—but it can result in unacceptable limitations on individual freedom. It should be evident to everybody that the medical reasons behind these limitations could offer the ideal pretext for an unprecedented control over social life.
It should indeed be evident! One further caution, however, before leaving this section. Artificial intelligence is much touted in medicine today, especially by those waging war on the people through their Global Health cult. But just as there is no such thing as global health, there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, nor ever will be. There are only very powerful computers in the service of very powerful men, most of whom are less clever than they imagine and some of whom are more wicked than we imagine. Whether speaking to us of health or of things other than health—a shrinking category—they say that we have crossed the Rubicon, that we have no choice now but to move forward into territory shaped and governed by algorithms. What they do not tell us is that their struggle for dominance within that territory is a struggle that can only mean total war.
Total war requires massive data mining and data manipulation. It requires the biosecurity state that Aaron Kheriaty has so helpfully described for us, within which we all become little more than data-points. This requires in turn public-private partnerships of a monopolistic nature, capable of enforcing the will of these same men. Identity by numbers, and governance by algorithms, is the end of freedom—its terminus, not its telos—as many are beginning to recognize. Pragmatically speaking, the war against the people, and the war of the people, will be won or lost just there.
Recapitulation and Rejoinder
As I was bringing this essay to its conclusion, in draft form, I come across a piece, published on Christmas day, proposing that the pandemic "was the result of an American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran)" and that this had been covered up through a conspiracy on the scale of the Kennedy killings. Ron Unz, it turns out, has been arguing this line since April 2020; how I managed to overlook it for so long, I don't know. Anyway, it will be clear by now that I do not think we are dealing merely or primarily with an attempt to cover up a backfiring bioweapon. That theory, like the perfect storm theory, leaves far too much out of account. Measures that advance big government and big business but don't actually mitigate viral and "vaccine" damage—that indeed risk its exponential expansion—suggest a plan of greater proportions and of earlier origins. So let me recapitulate and try to bring all this into focus.
We know that the kind of men we are dealing with have set themselves above the law, and that they have resorted to repeated shock waves in order to break down opposition and achieve compliance. The covid war we have been in, the climate change war we are entering, the data war to which these phoney wars are connected, are backed, like the war in Ukraine, by an elite in places of real institutional and financial power, centred where it has always been centred, in the bowels of the beast where Allen Dulles once dwelt, whence also the World Economic Forum emerged.
This elite is not afraid to experiment on the people, biologically and psychologically, or even to disrupt the supply chains on which they depend. It means, by way of its experiments, to induce cultural amnesia and to re-program the collective memory for purposes of its own. The casualties do not much concern it. Nor do those men and women who belong to it, or cooperate with it, ponder the fact that they have created a culture of lies and deceit from which they themselves can never hope to escape.
Those whose consciences are not yet completely seared must tell themselves, as Dulles doubtless did, that it is all necessary for the common good. But that too is a lie. They are not serving the common good. They are not even serving national or international interests. They are serving themselves. Ultimately, they are serving a diabolical agenda to subjugate the human race, to reduce it to manageable numbers, to possess and manipulate it like any other product.
And who are they exactly? Some are well known, others unknown, even perhaps to each other. One could be a bishop of the Church of Rome and belong to them, or a president of the Club of Rome and not belong. One could be planning smart cities, the better to serve humanity, without understanding that the real purpose of smart cities is to regiment humanity. But those who do belong, who really belong, are building an anti-city, a city implacably opposed to the city being built by God. They do not wish the numbers of the latter to be filled up, or the design of its Architect to be realized. They are committed, if necessary, to the slaughter of the innocents and to planned parenthood. They are Malthusians, Masons, Modernists. They are eugenicists and transhumanists and ESG enthusiasts. They are the rich, the clever, and the quite mad, though there is method in their madness. They are the self-proclaimed saviours of the world, and its judges too. They are not only the new communist capitalists and capitalist communists, they are the new catholics.
But we old catholics who celebrate Christmas, and the feast of the Holy Family, know that the Architect's design will be fulfilled. Neither man nor devil can prevent it. We are determined to live by its laws and principles, not by theirs. We will resist them, sometimes with their own technology and sometimes by refusing to deploy it. But we will not take up their habits or tools of manipulation, seeking to best them at their own immoral game. We will take up weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left. We will speak the truth, which is far more effective than being pragmatic. Indeed, it is far more practical than being pragmatic. We will tell of the city whose builder and maker is God, and rejoice at its prospect. For God has already intervened to save the people. He has already established the Man by whom he will judge the nations. America's war is in vain.
“The Lord wins in the end,” as Benedict XVI reminded us in 2017. And that, I think, is a good note on which to enter Anno Domini 2023.
Incredibly powerful and moving essay , I must thank Aaron Kheriaty for the referral.
I agree with the other two comments here (two! there should be two thousand). I am blown away by your erudition and analysis. Thank you for such a careful and humane synthesis of so many seemingly disparate but inter-related facets of our world. I will need to read this again.