The Aug. 9, 1945 nuclear bombing of Nagasaki

75 years ago before dawn on July 16, 1945, a cataclysmic explosion shook the New Mexico desert as scientists from the top-secret Manhattan Project tested their nightmarish creation: the first atom bomb, called the Gadget.

This birth of the Nuclear Age, was quickly followed a few weeks later, first on August 6 by the dropping of a U-235 atom bomb on Hiroshima, a non-military city of 225,000, and then, three days after that on Aug. 9, by the dropping of a somewhat more powerful Plutonium atom bomb on Nagasaki, another non-military city of 195,000. The resulting slaughter of some 200,000 mostly civilian Japanese men, women and children naturally leads to talk of the horrors of those weapons and to discussions about whether they should have been used on Japan instead of being demonstrated on an uninhabited target.

What goes unmentioned, however, as we mark each important anniversary of these horrific events the initial Trinity test in Alamogordo, the Little Boy bombing of Hiroshima and the Fat Man plutonium bombing of Nagasaki is that, incredibly, in a world where nine nations possess a total of nearly 14,000 nuclear weapons, not one has been used in war to kill human beings since the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

And thats not all. Over those same 75 years, despite seven and a half decades of intense hostility and rivalry, as well as some major proxy wars, between great powers like the US and USSR, and the US and China, no two superpower nations have gone to war against each other.

The reason for this phenomenal and almost incomprehensible absence of catastrophic conflict of the type so common throughout human history is the same in both cases: No country dares to risk the use a nuclear weapon because of the fear it could lead other nuclear nations use theirs, and no major power dares to go to war against another major power because it is obvious that any war between two such nations would very quickly go nuclear.

Things could have gone very differently, however, with the dawn of the nuclear age.

At the end of WWII, the US was the worlds unchallenged superpower. It had emerged from war with its industrial base undamaged while Europe, the Soviet Union, Japan and much of China and were all smoking ruins, their dead numbering in the tens of millions. The US also had a monopoly on a new super weapon the atom bomb a weapon capable of vaporizing a city. And the this country had demonstrated that it had no moral compunction about using its terrible new weapon of mass destruction.

Some important scientists involved in the creation of the bomb urged the sharing of its construction secrets with Americas ally in the war against the Axis powers, the Soviet Union. These scientists, many of them Nobel-winning physicists, said negotiations should begin immediately at that point to eliminate nuclear weapons for all time, just as germ and chemical weapons had already been banned (successfully as the history of WWII showed).

But military and civilian leaders in Washington balked at the idea of sharing the bombs secrets. In fact, after Bohrs visit, President Roosevelt reportedly had the FBI monitor Nobelist Nils Bohr, one of the Los Alamos scientists who directly pleaded with him to bring the Russians into the bomb project, and even considered barring him from leaving the US. The Truman administration considered deporting Leo Szilard, and after Robert Oppenheimer proposed to Truman the sharing of the bomb with the Russians, his top-secret security clearance was revoked.

Instead of sharing the bomb with the USSR, which, remember, was Americas ally in World War II, and then working for its being banned, the US began producing dozens and eventually hundreds of Nagasaki-sized atom bombs, moving quickly from hand-made devices to mass produced ones. The US also quickly started pursuing the development of a vastly more powerful bomb the thermonuclear Hydrogen bomb a weapon that theoretically has no limits to how great its destructive power could be. (A one-megaton bomb typical of some of the larger warheads in the US arsenal today is 30 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.)

Why this obsession with creating a stockpile of atomic bombs big enough to destroy not just a country but the whole earth at such a time as the end of WWII? The war was over and American scientists and intelligence analysts were predicting that the war-ravaged Soviet Union would need years and perhaps a decade to produce its own bomb, yet the US was going full tilt building an explosive arsenal that quickly dwarfed all the explosives used in the last two world wars combined.

What was the purpose of building so many bombs? One hint comes from the fact that the US also, right after the war, began mass producing the B-29 Super Fortress planes like the Enola Gay that delivered the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima and de-mothballing and refurbishing hundreds that had been built and declared surplussed right at the wars end. A B-29 could only carry one plutonium or two uranium bombs for any significant distance. But the US was building several thousand of them in peacetime. Why?

The answer, according to a 1987 book, To Win a Nuclear War authored by nuclear physicists Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, is that the US was planning to launch a devastating nuclear first strike blitz on the Soviet Union as soon as it could build and deliver the 300 nuclear bombs that Pentagon strategists believed would be needed to destroy the Soviet Union as an industrial society and its Red Army as well, eliminating any possibility of the USSR responding by sweeping over war-ravaged western Europe. And the B-29 was at the time the only plane it had which could deliver the bombs.

This genocidal nightmare envisioned by Truman and the Pentagons nuclear madmen never happened because the initial slow pace of constructing the bombs meant that the 300 weapons and the planes to deliver them would not be ready until early 1950. Meanwhile, Russias first bomb, a plutonium device that was a virtual carbon copy of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, was successfully exploded on August 29, 1949, in a test that caught the US by complete surprise. At that point the idea of a deadly first strike was dropped (or at least deferred indefinitely) by Truman and Pentagon strategists.

A new era of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) had arrived, and according to Kaku and Axelrod, just in time.

For that bit of good fortune, I suggest, we have to thank the spies who, for whatever their individual motives, successfully obtained and delivered the secrets of the atomic bomb and its construction to the scientists in the Soviet Union who were struggling, with limited success, to quickly come up with their own atomic bomb.

To most Americans, those spies, especially the US citizens among them like Julius Rosenberg and notably Ted Hall, the youngest scientist at the Manhattan Project, hired out of Harvard as a junior physics major at 18, were modern day Benedict Arnolds. The truth is quite different.

Hall, who was never caught, and who was not recruited to be a spy but volunteered plans for the plutonium bomb on his own initiative after searching for and finally locating a Soviet agent, and another spy, the young German Communist physicist, Klaus Fuchs, working independently of each other, both delivering critical plans for the US plutonium bomb to Moscow, clearly prevented the US from launching a nuclear holocaust.

By decisively helping the USSR develop and test its own bomb quickly by mid-1949, half a year before the US could attain a stockpile of 300 bombs, they forced the US to have to consider the unacceptable risk of retaliation. Had the Soviets taken longer to create their own atomic bomb, the US could have gone through with its criminal plans, which would have dwarfed Hitlers slaughter of the six million Jewish and Roma people. (Pentagon experts estimated that over 30-40 million Russians would be killed by a US nuclear blitz.)

Hall, in public statements made in the mid-1990s after de-encrypted Soviet spy codes became public and his name was identified in them, explained that he had acted to share the plans for the plutonium bomb because he felt that the US, coming out of WWII with a nuclear monopoly, would have been a danger to not just the Soviet Union, but to the entire world. (The Russian bomb exploded in August, 1949 was a virtual carbon copy of the Nagasaki plutonium bomb Hall had worked on in his two years at Los Alamos.)

Looking back to the US decision to use its first nuclear weapon not as a demonstration on an empty island or military base, but on two undefended civilian cities, and to catastrophic US carpet bombings using non-nuclear bombs, of North Korea and later Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, its hard disagree with Halls thinking. His concern about US nuclear intentions is further borne out by how close the US came to using its nuclear bombs in crisis after crisis during the late 40s and early 50s against China and North Korea during the Korean War, in support of the French expeditionary force trapped at Dien Bien Phu, by JFK in the 1961 in the Berlin crisis, in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. and later when US Marines were trapped by Vietnamese troops in Khe Sanh. Each time, it was fear of the Soviets responding with their own bomb that saved the day and largely kept American bombs on the ground (actually in the Khe San case in 1968 atom bombs were actually delivered close to the Indochina front, but President Johnson called a halt to the militarys plans).

The truth is, if the Soviets had not had their own bomb during any of the above listed crises, it is hard to imagine that the US, with a monopoly on the bomb, would not have used it to full advantage. If were honest, The MAD reality enabled by Russias Los Alamos spies proved to be a lifesaver for tens or perhaps millions of people around the world.

Americans may (and should!) decry the hundreds of billions of dollars (trillions in todays dollars) that have been poured into a massively wasteful arms race with the Soviet Union and later Russia and China money that could have done incalculable good if spent on schools, health care, environmental issues etc. need to consider what the alternative would have been to Cold War and MAD. With MAD (and considerable good luck) we have had no world wars, and no nuclear bombs dropped on human beings. Without it, with the US having a monopoly on the bomb for perhaps as long as a decade following WWII, this country would have nuked cities all over the world, almost certainly destroying the Soviet Union entirely, and the US would today be known today as the ultimate genocidal monster of history, rather than having Germany left holding that eternal badge of shame.

In reconsidering the work of Soviet atomic spies, Americans also need to know the truth about the goal of the Manhattan Project. While the push to develop the bomb began with a letter from Albert Einstein to Roosevelt warning that the Germans might develop such a weapon, by the time the program got underway, it was clear that the real target was Americas Ally in the fight against the Nazis: The USSR.

Of course we must work to ban nuclear weapons and war. Such weapons are incomparably evil and if the world agrees that germ warfare and poison gas weapons should not exist, certainly nuclear weapons a million times worse should not! But we should nonetheless, as we look back at the grim 75th anniversary of those three first nuclear bombs exploded by the US, admit a debt of gratitude to those spies at Los Alamos who kept the US from committing an atrocity that humanity would have never forgiven, and for giving us this amazing three-quarters of a century of no nuclear or world war.

Dave Lindorff is a 2019 winner of an Izzy Award for Outstanding Independent Journalism from the Park Center for Independent Media. He is a founder of the collectively owned journalism site ThisCantBeHappening.net

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Rethinking Manhattan Project Spies and the Cold War, MAD and the 75 years of no nuclear war that their efforts gifted us - ThisCantBeHappening!

Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Sunday dismissed a story published in an Australian news outlet on a Wuhan lab conducting alleged covert operations in Pakistan, calling it "politically motivated and fake".

"It is composed of distortion of facts and fabrications that quote anonymous sources," said a statement issued by the ministry, through the office of the Foreign Office spokesperson.

The Klaxon report, quoting unnamed "intelligence experts", claims Chinas Wuhan Institute of Virology has "set up operations in Pakistan as part of a broader offensive against India and Western rivals".

"The secret facility is allegedly making anthrax-like pathogens which could be used in biological warfare," the report published on July 23 alleges.

"There is nothing secret about the Bio-Safety Level-3 (BSL-3) Laboratory of Pakistan referred to in the report," said the statement by Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued today. "Pakistan has been sharing information about the facility with the States Parties to the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention (BTWC) in its submission of Confidence Building Measures.

"The facility is meant for diagnostic and protective system improvement by Research and Development (R&D) on emerging health threats, surveillance and disease outbreak investigation.

"Pakistan strictly abides by its BTWC obligations and has been one of the most vocal supporters for a strong verification mechanism to ensure full compliance by the States Parties to the Convention."

"The attempt to cast aspersions about the facility is particularly absurd against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has highlighted the need for better preparedness in the areas of disease surveillance and control and international collaborations in that regard, consistent with Article X of BTWC," added the statement.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology came under scrutiny in April with the US probing whether the virus actually originated in the virology institute located in Chinas coronavirus epicentre with a high-security biosafety laboratory.

Chinese scientists have said the virus likely jumped from an animal to humans in a market that sold wildlife. But the existence of the facility has fuelled conspiracy theories that the germ spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, specifically its P4 laboratory which is equipped to handle dangerous viruses.

The director of the laboratory, Yuan Zhiming, had said that theres no way this virus came from us. None of his staff had been infected, he told the English-language state broadcaster CGTN, adding the whole institute is carrying out research in different areas related to the coronavirus.

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FO dismisses story on Wuhan lab conducting 'covert operations' in Pakistan as fake - DAWN.com

AUDIOBOOK

Germs. They are too small to see with the naked eye, but they have killed more human beings than all the wars in history.

Before humans even knew that germs caused disease, they knew disease could be a weapon of war.

Germ Warfare traces the long, brutal story of those microscopic weapons. From the infected arrows of Bronze Age archers, to the plague factories of World War 2, up through the biological arms race of the Cold War into our modern age of genetically manipulated terrorism.

This graphic history is both a lesson from the past and a warning for the future. It reminds us never to take public health for granted, because we never know when, or how, the next pandemic will rise.

Max Brooks is the author of the novels World War Z, Minecraft: The Island and the graphic novel The Harlem Hellfighters. He is a non resident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point and the Atlantic Councils Brent Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

The Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense was established in 2014 to comprehensively assess U.S. biodefense efforts and issue recommendations to foster change. The Commissions 2015 report, A National Blueprint for Biodefense: Leadership and Major Reform needed to Optimize Efforts, identified capability gaps and recommended changes to U.S. policy and law to strengthen national biodefense while optimizing resource investments. Former Senator Joe Lieberman and former Governor Tom Ridge co-chair the Commission, and are joined by former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former Representative Jim Greenwood, former Homeland Security Advisor Ken Wainstein, and former Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor Lisa Monaco. Hudson Institute is the Commissions fiscal sponsor.

The rest is here:

Germ Warfare

"You'll never half catch me, half coppaaaaah!!!- Germ at MaeJeremy WartonNickname(s)

Germ, Germ Warfare

Jeremy Warton, more commonly known as 'Germ Warfare', is a character in the game Night in the Woods.

Germ is a dark blue bird with a yellow beak and very dark navy eyes. He wears black jeans, black canvas sneakers, a black nylon jacket (zipped up), and a black hat.[1]

Germ can be found just past the Clik Clak Diner near the abandoned Food Donkey during and after the foggy day. Talking to him everyday and hanging out when asked will grant the achievement "He's From Somewhere". Germ will mention that at some point in his life he was chosen as a sacrifice for the cult and was stalked by a member of it.

Germ had a brother who has passed away. When Mae talks to him about the ghost she saw during Harfest, Germ tells her he doesn't believe in ghosts. Mae asks him why not and he tells her that he figures if ghosts existed his brother would have visited. Embarrassed, Mae drops the subject.

Germ is seen living in the woods "in a tree". You never actually see his real house in the game until the Weird Autumn edition update was released.The well he saves the main gang from in the last chapter is apparently in his backyard.

Germ seems to care a lot about nature and the environment. He talks about foliage overgrowing the Food Donkey parking lot someday and adamantly insists on riding his bicycle over drivingas it's better for the environment.

Germ's house shown in deleted content sourced out from the game's files.

Germ and Gregg in Gregg's place

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Germ Warfare | Night in the Woods Wiki | Fandom

On September 20, 1950, a US Navy ship just off the coast of San Francisco used a giant hose to spray a cloud of microbes into the air and into the city's famous fog. The military was testing how a biological weapon attack would affect the 800,000 residents of the city.

The people of San Francisco had no idea.

The Navy continued the tests for seven days, potentially causing at least one death. It was one of the first large-scale biological weapon trials that would be conducted under a "germ warfare testing program" that went on for 20 years, from 1949 to 1969. The goal "was to deter [the use of biological weapons] against the United States and its allies and to retaliate if deterrence failed," the government explained later. "Fundamental to the development of a deterrent strategy was the need for a thorough study and analysis of our vulnerability to overt and covert attack."

Of the 239 known tests in that program, San Francisco was notable for two reasons, according to Dr. Leonard Cole, who documented the episode in his book "Clouds of Secrecy: The Army's Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas."

Cole, now the director of the Terror Medicine and Security Program at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, tells BusinessInsider that this incident was "notable: first, because it was really early in the program ... but also because of the extraordinary coincidence that took place at Stanford Hospital, beginning days after the Army's tests had taken place."

Hospital staff were so shocked at the appearance of a patient infected with a bacteria, Serratia marcescens, that had never been found in the hospital and was rare in the area, that they published an article about it in a medical journal. The patient, Edward Nevin, died after the infection spread to his heart.

Bacillus subtilis, then known as Bacillus globigii, was one pathogen that was used in testing. WMrapids/Wikimedia Commons

S. marcescens was one of the two types of bacteria the Navy ship had sprayed over the Bay Area.

It wasn't until the 1970s that Americans, as Cole wrote in the book, "learned that for decades they had been serving as experimental animals for agencies of their government."

San Francisco wasn't the first or the last experiment on citizens who hadn't given informed consent.

Other experiments involved testing mind-altering drugs on unsuspecting citizens. In one shocking, well-known incident, government researchers studied the effects of syphilis on black Americans without informing the men that they had the disease they were told they had "bad blood." Researchers withheld treatment after it became available so they could continue studying the illness, despite the devastating and life-threatening implications of doing so for the men and their families.

But it was the germ warfare tests that Cole focused on.

"All these other tests, while terrible, they affected people counted in the hundreds at most," he says. "But when you talk about exposing millions of people to potential harm, by spreading around certain chemicals or biological agents, the quantitative effect of that is just unbelievable."

"Every one of the [biological and chemical] agents the Army used had been challenged" by medical reports, he says, despite the Army's contention in public hearings that they'd selected "harmless simulants" of biological weapons.

"They're all considered pathogens now," Cole says.

Here are some of the other difficult-to-believe germ warfare experiments that occurred during this dark chapter in US history. These tests were documented in Cole's book and verified by Business Insider using congressional reports and archived news articles.

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US military released bacteria to test biological warfare ...

Around 3.5 billion years ago, something extraordinary happened in the realm of the observable universe. From non-living matters emerged living organisms that started to occupy the surface of planet earth. Tiny particles like quarks and electrons formed atoms to molecules in various sizes, in such combinations from which emerged living cells. These cells went on a journey of billions of years of evolution leading to numerous kinds of species. After a considerable length of time, life reached a certain species so capable that it could change the face of their home planet.

Humankind, a species that evolved out of the African savannah, has invaded their planet, polymerised it in every manner possible. Human species rose above all other species, and having no other beings to compete with, they developed a sense of superiority. But for thousands of years, humankind fought against many natural forces and even between themselves. They were helpless to famine, diseases, and even gruesome wars. Ultimately, thanks to human ingenuity and scientific development in the last century, humankind achieved amazing feats and found themselves in an unprecedented position. There are still natural threats to consider but those have largely transformed from being an uncontrollable force of nature into something preventable. The collective knowledge and the beginning of greater cooperation among nations have helped them significantly.

What, then, is the human civilisation trying to achieve or become? A plausible answer may lie in a model called the Kardashev scale. The Kardashev scale, proposed by Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, categorises advanced civilisations by taking into account their capacity to harness and utilise the energy available to them. It is a semi-quantitative way to define a civilisation's advancement. The energy consumption part is merely a guideline, and there are other factors as well.

"Type 0 Civilisation"is one that can harness the energy available to its home planet, but not to its full potential yet. Human civilisation is currently at 0.73 on this scale. It is expected that it will reach Type 1 in about a century. The Kardashev scale didn't have any civilisation categorised as Type 0, but this is where the human civilisation is currently poised. Moreover, most of the energy consumption of our civilisation largely depends on the low-tech harnessing of fossil fuels rather than renewable energy sources.

"Type 1 Civilisation" is a planetary civilisation that can harness all the energy available to its home planet at the fullest efficiency, keeping the planet habitable. A Type 1 civilisation can control a planet's weather, influence the climate, and prevent natural events like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and asteroid impacts. They are also capable of interplanetary travels.

"Type 2 Civilisation" is a stellar civilisation that can harness the total energy output of their home star. They are capable of building structures at a planetary scale and also capable of interstellar travel. They could avoid catastrophic events that may lead to their extinction, like a supernova explosion, by moving to other star systems.

"Type 3 Civilisation" is a galactic civilisation that can harness the energy of an entire galaxy. They can mine and transport stars and manipulate black holes. Type 3 is the most advanced stage of civilisation defined by Kardashev, with the ability of a galactic magnitude. Its people can make intergalactic voyages, and deal with energy levels of the magnitude of a galaxy. This civilisation could survive everything short of the end of the universe.

Currently, the human civilisation is set to make the transition from Type 0 to Type 1. But any attempt to measure how advanced the human civilisation is, and how advanced it might become in the future, must be linked to the factor of avoiding extinction. Eventually, the graduation from Type 0 and the intermediate period of "technological adolescence" is not going to be easy. It's not clear if we're going to make it. As per a mathematical equation, there should be thousands of Type 1, 2, and 3 civilisations in the galaxy but when we look at outer space, we detect no evidence of any whatsoever. Maybe they couldn't make it in the outer space eithersince the transition from Type 0 to 1 is the most arduous and important of all transitions, not because of the tremendous technological achievements that are needed but because of the challenges of building a planetary civilisation tolerant of many cultures. It's a race against time and tendency. As theoretical physicist Michio Kaku says, "On the one hand, we have the forces of integration, the forces of tolerance, a multi-cultural fabric emerging before our eyes. On the other hand, we have weapons of mass destruction, germ warfare, nuclear warfare, also the rise of international terrorism." Add to that the incompatible values of exponential growth and sustainability among nations and within cultures. These are the obstacles to reach Type 1 civilisation.

Ironically, there is no natural famine these days on the planet, but only political famine. If any human being dies on the planet earth because they don't have enough food to eat, it's not probably for any natural cause. At least not in its entirety. It may be because some political leaders or governments or ideologues want them to starve to death. Human civilisation has reached a point where there are more threats resulting from politics and incompetence than the uncontrollable natural forces. However, as always, there is recognition and denial at the same time. The tenuous attempts to reconcile and manage this contradiction of exponential growth and sustainability are falling apart.

The contradiction may not be as fallacious as it seems, however. Contradictions are civilisation's engines, pushing forward creativity and dynamism of human species. Incompatible values are still an essential feature of human civilisation. As historian Yuval Noah Harari put it: "Consider the gradual acceptance of two conflicting values like freedom and equality. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction." Since the industrial revolution, human civilisation has been dealing with questions of exponential growth and sustainability. Human civilisation teeters on the edges of these two imperatives in which it can be understood best. There is the urge for negotiation and dialogue between these imperatives but polarisation is surging as well.

This fury of polarisation left human civilisation baffled. Nations around the planet stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. The threat of these weapons is still severe, and stories of close calls over the past decades only show how lucky we have been. But luck doesn't protect a species indefinitely. Humankind has done embarrassingly little about global threats like climate change. The global population is going through a sense of horror as they are bombarded with news of the threats of climate change, environmental pollution, extremism, terrorism, technological disruptions, pandemics, and whatnot. Traumatised minds get further afflicted by the repetitive cultivation of talks about the problems created by humans instead of what human civilisation is capable of doing to negotiate with these civilisational crises.

What institutional and political preparations are there to overcome this? Are we expecting history to wait for us to reach an agreement? Is the delay due to our perpetual hunger for power? Or short-sighted nationalism? Can we handle the growth in physical power, survive our chaotic technological adolescence, and mature into a species with a chance of reaching old age? Or shall we become the reason for our own extinction because our technology has progressed more rapidly than our wisdom? Maybe there is a hidden urge for conflict in human nature leaving a wound on the face of human civilisation.

Debashish Chakrabarty is an artist and a photography graduate of the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka.

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What kind of civilisation do we want to be? - The Daily Star

Everything you need to know you can learn from zombies. Author Max Brooks pretty much laid out a lot of what we're been dealing with during this coronavirus pandemic in his novel "World War Z" that came out in 2006. He will have a virtual panel at this year's Comic-Con@Home called "Zombies and Coronavirus: Planning for the Next Big Outbreak." Brooks says of his panel, "People can expect to hear us discuss this real plague that we're dealing with. But through the metaphor of zombies, because the best tool of education is pop culture." His panel is at noon on July 24 but the YouTube link will remain on the Comic-Con Channel even after the convention ends, which allows anyone to watch the discussion any time. We also discuss his new book "Devolution." I know this is not cinema but it is zombies, which I love, and Brooks is the son of filmmaker/comedian Mel Brooks and film actress Anne Bancroft so there is a cinema connection!

In addition to his writing, Brooks holds duel fellowships at the Atlantic Councils Brent Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the Modern War Institute. Check out a podcast that aims for the head.

Speaker 1: 00:00 Zombies are a great metaphor for this pandemic because they spread just like a play. You have issues of infection, you have issues of protecting your loved ones. You also have big issues like a zombie plague shutting down the economy. People fearing for their livelihoods, as well as their lives. Unlike other horror monsters, which tend to be very small and isolated and intimate zombies are big. And so

Speaker 2: 00:26 That's right. Like I've been saying for years, everything you need to know, you can learn from zombies today. I'll be talking with max Brooks, author of world war Z and the new book devolution we'll discuss Sambisa Corona virus, Bigfoot and comic con at home.

Speaker 1: 00:54 [inaudible]

Speaker 2: 00:54 Welcome to another episode of listener supported KPBS cinema junkie podcast. I'm Beth Mondo. As a fan of zombies, I have to confess and love max Brooks because not only is he a great writer, but he gets how zombies are the perfect blank slate for social commentary. Something that George Romero established with the film that defined the modern zombie night of the living dead

Speaker 1: 01:29 [inaudible].

Speaker 2: 01:31 Brooke says world war Z perfectly predicted a lot of what is currently happening with the coronavirus pandemic. And he'll be hosting a panel called zombies and Corona virus planning for the next big outbreak because Corona virus forced Comicon to cancel its physical show for the first time in its 50 year history, the panel will be online as part of comic con at home. The good news is anyone can attend the panel for free and you don't need a badge. And the panel will be up on the Comicon YouTube channel even after the convention ends on July 26th. I know I've been straying from film a bit in the past few episodes, but in addition to loving movies, I love pop culture and how it can be a useful tool in spreading ideas. Plus Brooks is the son of filmmaker and comedian, Mel Brooks and film, actress, and Bancroft.

Speaker 2: 02:21 So there is a cinema connection. I need to take one quick break and then I'll be back with my interview with author max Brooks, max. So to start with, I just want to say that when the pandemic hit, my family kept meeting on zoom and we wanted to have a book to read for our family book club. And of course I suggested world war Z. I got voted down by all the academics and they chose Albert [inaudible] the plague, which is also fitting, but I felt like everything I needed to know about our pandemic current pandemic was in your book. And I saw that you were by a number of major

Speaker 3: 03:00 News outlets at the time. How did it feel to have written that and to kind of have it be so spot on for what was happening?

Speaker 4: 03:12 It felt disappointing. And, um, I guess very upsetting because I didn't really set out to predict the future. But what I did was draw on the past and disasters tend to come in very predictable cycles. So finding the patterns of disaster is a constant, no matter what time we're living in, because we're still people. Cause it doesn't matter where, and when we exist, we still exist as, as homo-sapiens with the same thought processes and emotions. And we tend to deal with disaster in a very predictable way. So of course I was always hoping that we would have done a better job this time around this is probably, I mean easily, the largest Homeland disaster in my lifetime.

Speaker 3: 04:04 I really feel like pop culture can always teach us a lot of things. What do you wish that maybe politicians or the general public could have learned from your book?

Speaker 4: 04:13 Look, this is why I write what I write you. You mentioned earlier that instead of reading my book, the academics in your circle, how we're reading Alvera Kendall, this is the problem with academics. This is why we are where we are. There is a massive gap between those in the know and the rest of us, the experts are trapped in a feedback loop of intellectual incest and they have lost the ability to communicate what the public needs to know. The voter, the taxpayer, the boss, my two think tank jobs, the Brent Scowcroft center for strategy and security through the Atlantic council and the modern war Institute at West point have shown me that we have a cultural divide as wide as the grand Canyon between the sheep dogs and sheep liked me. So what do we do? How do we educate the voters? How do we grow a thinking critical electorate that will take care of itself? Well, one way is pop culture. And I don't mean literally high literature. I don't mean the stuff of academia. I mean, what regular schmucks like me would read or watch or listen to popular culture because we need to engage the populace. That is why I write what I write. That is why I write the way that I write, because what I'm trying to do is talk about these big, important issues in a way that somebody like me would not only understand, but might also be interested in.

Speaker 3: 06:12 So in reaching that populace comic con seems to be a great way to do that. And this year you have a panel on zombies and Corona virus planning for the next big outbreak. So who are the other people on the panel with you and what can people expect from this?

Speaker 4: 06:29 Well, I'm not going to even pretend to introduce the experts on the panel and all their credentials. Uh, what I will say is our model, I think is, is it could be a very successful model because it's a fusion of people who understand the facts and then people who can communicate those facts. And that's what we're talking about on our panel. We're talking about coronavirus, we're talking about real virology. We're talking about public health because public health can be very different than medicine or science. Public health is really about mass psychology. And how do we engage the public with all these facts? So we're going to have a very lively discussion about what we're facing here and what do we do about it? Because especially in a pandemic, it's got to start from the ground up. And the problem is we've been, we've been hammering away at the experts in this country for too long and the experts have retreated. And therefore here we are, and we don't even know what to do. And certainly in my lifetime, I've seen two of the most important elections be lost by the smart person who can't talk to the person who can talk, but can't think

Speaker 3: 07:51 Talked about the stages of a pandemic. So explain what those are.

Speaker 4: 07:55 Initially, you have, uh, the great denial and this is a very, it's a very common thing. This was the middle ages. When the plague would come into villages, people would say, well, I'm a good Christian. Uh, it's not going to hurt me. It happened in my childhood with AIDS. Well, I'm not gay. I'm not an Ivy drug use. I'm not a Haitian. Can't happen to me. Uh, same thing with this, you know, Ooh, I'm young, I'm strong. Uh, it's like the flu. It's going to go away. It's a hoax, blah, blah, blah. Can't affect me. Right. Denial. And then you have a tipping point. Uh, and that would be say in the middle ages, when the local priest would get sick, Oh my God, if he can get sick, we can all get sick. It happened, uh, in a, with AIDS. When somebody like magic Johnson got HIV and it's happening now, it happened now where the virus just exploded, exploded across the country. And we've, we've had two great panics. The first was in the beginning. Oh my God, it is, we can't stop it. It's rolling out of control. We got locked down and, but we still had enough denial mixed in, well, the weather's going to get warm. Don't worry whether it's going to take care of it. Well, it's a hundred degrees where I am right now. And I don't see that killing any virus.

Speaker 3: 09:13 You've also talked about the role that fear or panic can play in it in a pandemic. And that it's just as infectious as the virus itself. And how does that complicate the situation?

Speaker 4: 09:24 Well, of course, panic always does more damage than the actual problem. And that's in everything. That's in war. That's an economic recession or depression. When Roosevelt said we have nothing to fear, but fear itself, he wasn't just being flowery and poetic. He was trying to communicate a basic fact, which is, Hey America, there's really nothing wrong. We're just afraid to engage in the economy. If we all just got out there and bought and sold and spent and invested, we could beat this, but the fear is holding us back in something like this. Panic has the potential to kill more people than the actual disease. Now that has not been the case in the beginning. I thought it was. I thought when I started to see people, you know, get in fights over toilet paper, I thought, here we go, food riots have started. But so far we've been pretty good at keeping our panic in check.

Speaker 3: 10:17 You recently wrote a comic called germ warfare.

Speaker 4: 10:20 There they are everywhere in the food. We eat the water. We drink the air we breathe. They cannot be seen with the naked eye. They are the microbes, the bacteria, the viruses, and while most are harmless or even helpful, the dangerous ones have killed or crippled more human beings than all the Wars in history. For most of human history, we had no idea where diseases came from or that microbes even existed. So cures ranged from utterly useless to absurdly harmful bleeding, leeches, drilling holes in the head.

Speaker 3: 11:10 How did that come about and why, why did you want to write that? What was kind of your goal?

Speaker 4: 11:16 Well, initially I, as, as part of my duties at the modern war Institute, I wrote an article on Zika. Remember when Zika was coming through, once again, that's the them disease. I'm not a pregnant woman. I'm never going to get pregnant. What do I care? And Congress was dithering when it came to funds to protect us all from Zika. And so I wrote an op ed saying, listen, your job is to protect us. And you've spent trillions of dollars trillions since nine 11 to protect us from a terrorist, watching a nuclear attack. Well, here's an actual threat right here on our shores that could kill people. What are you doing about it? What if Zika had started in a lab because a germ weapon is the exact same thing as a natural virus, the effect is the same. You get sick, you die. That caught the attention of the blue ribbon, bipartisan biodefense panel. And those are people like Tom Ridge and Donna Shalala and Joe Lieberman. And they asked me to come up to Capitol Hill to take part in their first hearing. Cause what they're trying to do is protect us from the next round of germ warfare.

Speaker 4: 12:29 And I noticed all the experts speaking there, wasn't a, uh, public outreach expert. And I said, what I'm saying to you, uh, that if you don't find ways to communicate what we're discussing here in this room, it's not gonna make any difference. So we put our heads together and we called out bearer Kemo wasn't available. So plan B was to write a comic book and try to reeducate the public about the history of germ warfare, because it's been happening since the beginning of civilization, since people in antiquity were dipping arrows into manure and blood to cause infection. Uh, when the Mongols catapulted plagued bodies over castle walls and world war II, the Japanese had a massive bio warfare program. Uh, while we were developing our Manhattan project, they actually were dropping plague bombs on China. And to this day, we don't know the casualties. We suspect in a hundred thousand and possibly a million debt. When you talk

Speaker 3: 13:35 About world war Z and also your own personal way of looking at things, you've mentioned how you look to connections and that's something like climate change, isn't merely an environmental issue. It can turn out to be something else. Same like a zombie outbreak is not just about the virus. It's about a lot of other things. So talk about that kind of approach to looking at these problems.

Speaker 4: 13:56 Well, I, I first started to think about these issues critically when I wrote zombie survival guide, because I thought, well, what if there were really zombies out there and how would I protect myself? And obviously I start with physical defense. You go to the George Romero night of living dead. Uh, okay. The coming for the farmhouse. Do you go in the basement or do you stay upstairs? Neither go up the stairs, break the stairs behind you. They can't climb. You're safe, but wait a minute. Now you're safe. What about dehydration? Starvation, malnutrition accidents, infection, regular disease. What about all these other things? Because I realized that, uh, most people, if zombies were real, would not die from contact with zombies, they would die from what the military calls second and third order effects because the greatest threat is to chew through the threads that keeps society together.

Speaker 4: 14:56 This is wonderful. First-world safety net that we all take for granted now of plumbing and sewage and refrigeration and vaccines. What's going to happen when the zombies break all that. And we're back in the middle ages. So starting along that line of thought brought me to world war II, which was big picture thinking, big strategic thinking, how do you fight a war? Because most people will not dive direct to enemy contact. And that took me to the modern war Institute and it took me to the Brent Scowcroft center and it really has affected everything I've written, which is seeing the connections, the big picture, because like you said, an environmental crisis is not just about dead polar bears. It's about millions, possibly billions of people not being able to feed themselves, which will crash into possibly their culture, uh, which will then become economic, which will then turn violent. And before you know it, you've got Wars on your hands. So that's how I look at problems. I look at the big picture and then I try to find a way of communicating that big picture. Uh, be it zombies, uh, even Minecraft or the new book Bigfoot. There's a great pop culture. Interesting, fun way to get people to think about the big picture.

Speaker 3: 16:21 Well, cause I was going to say it's difficult. You know, we've got people who have a 240 character, Twitter capacity or 32nd sound bytes on the news and making connections is a very complex kind of idea. And it seems like that's very hard to get people to think about that because it's not as tangible as like, Hey, I'm okay. I'm not seeing any problems.

Speaker 4: 16:46 Yup. It is hard. It is hard, but it's not impossible. In fact, we used to be really good at that in world war two, we were the best in world history at harnessing the power of storytelling. Our government reached out to Hollywood and said, listen, we were in the fight of our lives and our people are going to have to serve and sacrifice and change everything. And we need you to explain why even Walt Disney won't come here. Yeah. We know you love Hitler, but I'm sorry. You're going to have to, you actually have to talk about why he's the enemy. And we did that and we had a great president who was a great communicator. Franklin Roosevelt. When you talk about it being difficult, he know how to do it. Even before we got into the war, he tried to sell Lend-Lease the idea of loaning or basically giving weapons to the British, to fight the Nazis. How are you going to do that? And he said, listen, if my neighbor's house is on fire, I loaned him my garden hose. So he puts the out before the fire spreads to my house. And then when the fire is out, I want my hose back simple. And he was derided by the intelligentsia, the academics as talking like a child and you know what it worked and Lenley's went through and we gave the British a fighting chance

Speaker 3: 18:12 A little bit about your background. I mean, what led you to be this kind of person who can write pop culture books, like world war II, but also be part of the modern war Institute. I mean, it seems like very disparate things coming together. And what did you study in school or what's kind of your background for this?

Speaker 4: 18:31 A lot of this came starts with my dyslexia. I'm painfully dyslexic. So there's nothing wrong with that. But there is when you are educated in the late seventies, early eighties under the Prussian model, which most of us are still educated under. And what I mean by the Prussian model is memorization. And then time to regurgitation of facts. That is the industrial model of education. And my brain just wasn't wired for that. So school got in the way of my education. So I was, I was cursed and blessed with this curiosity. I wanted to learn about the world, but I wasn't getting anything from school. So I had to learn through entertainment and I learned through star Trek. I learned through Twilight zone. I learned through Tom Clancy books first time ever read for pleasure. The first time I ever had the guts to pick up a book and sit in a corner and read was, I was 16 red Hunter Rocktober.

Speaker 4: 19:26 And thank God Clancy was like me. Clancy wanted things to be realistic. He did his homework. So I walked away from his books feeling smarter, same way with star Trek. It's all based on real science. A Twilight zone was all morality, plays everything. I read my God, Robert Heinlein. I learned more from him than I probably ever did from any of my professors. And I sure as hell learned more from the genius of comedy of standup comedians than I did in any economics course. You want to break down the basic premise of the wage slave versus the owner of the means of production. Well, you can waste six months of your life or you can listen to one Chris rock joke who says, Hey, I'm not talking about rich. Talking about wealthy. Shaq is rich. The white man who signs his paycheck, that's wealthy. And so from all of this, I knew the kind of writer I want it to be. And so when I went to college, I studied history. And even in grad school, I studied obsolescence, which is film production. Everything I learned was obsolete. And then I just started to write and I knew the kind of writer I wanted to be, which was Tom Clancy. So I had to just do years and years of intense research in order to make my work grounded in facts. You mentioned

Speaker 3: 20:48 Your new book, a devolution, which is about Bigfoot,

Speaker 4: 20:52 Big foot destroys town. That was the title of an article I received not long after the Mount Rainier eruption. I thought it was spam. The inevitable result of so much online research at the time I was just finishing up what seemed like my hundredth op-ed on Rainier, analyzing every facet of what should have been a predictable and preventable calamity. Like the rest of the country. I needed facts, not sensationalism. Staying grounded had been the focus of so many op-eds because of all Rainier's human failures, political, economic logistical, it was the psychological aspect. The hyperbole fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people. And here it was again right on my laptop screen, big foot destroys town. Just forget it. I told myself the world's not going to change overnight. Just breathe, delete, and move on. And I almost did, except for that one word, big foot,

Speaker 3: 21:59 I only got to read a small excerpt that they sent me. So I didn't get through the whole book yet. But tell me, tell me about the project. And it does seem like you're trying to bring that same kind of level of realism to big foot that you brought to zombies in world war II.

Speaker 4: 22:14 Yeah. What I'm trying to talk about in devolution is our overreliance on technology specifically technology without a backup plan, because that's, that's where, uh, the great tech minds of our, of this new century are going there. They're moving fast and breaking things and they're not in considering what could go wrong. That's one theme. Another theme is, uh, urban people trying to anthropomorphize nature and put our own sense of what we think nature should be without respecting it. Because I don't think you can save this planet, uh, the natural balance of this planet until you get to know it first and start to play by its rules as a guest in his house. But if I did all this as a, as a Ted talk or a series of op EDS, or just a straight out book, what would read it? I would either bore people to death, piss them off or scare them away. But if I reach back to my childhood and use one of my deepest, darkest childhood fears, Sasquatch as a vessel for these ideas, then I can take readers on a great ride. And before they know it, they've learned something.

Speaker 3: 23:30 So devolution is your newest book. Tell me a little more about,

Speaker 4: 23:35 Well, the, the book begins in the high tech high end eco community of green loop, uh, nestled in the cascade mountains. And these are not off the built the hippies. Uh, this is the grid. Uh, this is telecommuting to work. This is drone deliveries of your groceries. Uh, this is all the modern technology, allowing people to live with the comforts of the upper East side of Manhattan, but while still living in the pristine, beautiful wilderness, uh, it's the model for the future. It's the green revolution through technology and it works until Mount Rainier erupts. And this community is not only cut off. It's forgotten because the eruption blows out in the other direction towards Seattle and they're outside the blast zone and they're out of groceries and winter is coming and these highly paid highly educated David Sedaris fans don't know how to change a light bulb. And that's not the least of their problems because the eruption has also driven a pack of very large, very hungry Sasquatch creatures away from their traditional foraging ground. And they have to stock up on food for the winter as well. And they come up against green loop, which to them essentially looks like a pen of sheep. So if you are going to distill my book into one sentence, it would be IRA, glass and Fran Liebowitz versus big

Speaker 5: 25:05 Journal entry. Number seven, October 6th, animals. They're everywhere. Squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits. I get little guilt shivers. Whenever I see rabbits look over at me, like they know I helped chop up their sister, their deer too. I've seen half a dozen. I can see their ribs. They look thin, hungry and nervous. All the animals seem skiddish. Three times I watched them freeze. Every single one, like someone hit pause on a movie and they all stared back in the same direction toward Rainier. At first I thought it might be something with the volcano. Animals are more sensitive to that stuff, right? Or how's pet supposed to know when an earthquake is coming. It didn't have anything to do with rainy or, I mean, nothing else happened each time they froze or they afraid of something besides the volcano, they're all moving in the same direction. Migrating. It looks like away from the eruption at the freezing are they being okay? I just had to stop before writing that word. It sounds melodramatic, but pursued. How far back does your fascination with big foot

Speaker 4: 26:21 Go? It goes back to when I was about six, maybe eight years old, uh, in the late seventies, early eighties during the height of the first Sasquatch craze, when all these fo Bigfoot documentaries were coming on TV and scaring the hell out of me. And I was always fascinated by it. And I was wanting to write a big foot book, but like all my books, I wanted to ground it in reality. So I went deep into the research, not just of the Sasquatch lore, but I wanted to study real primatology, real apes, because if Sasquatch did exist in my mind, it's nothing more than a species of great apes living in North America. So I had to study that I had to study the technology of green loop. How would an eco community really function? I had to study a real vulcanology how Mount Rainier would really erupt.

Speaker 4: 27:06 And it will someday the USDS has confirmed that. So a lot of book learning, a lot of talking to experts, but also a lot of hands on. I actually had to go to the area where I pinpointed really to see if my characters could walk out and let me tell you, they can't even walk in it's that punishing without a road it's brutal terrain. Uh, and I even had to make the kinds of weapons that my characters have to make just to see if it could be done, because remember these people, uh, they're intellectuals, they're weapons are wit, uh, so they've got to make physical tools to protect themselves.

Speaker 3: 27:43 Well, you mentioned that that was one of your fears. And I'm curious, how do you view your relationship to horror in the sense like I've interviewed people like Clive Barker and you know, he doesn't seem troubled by nightmares, but you seem to draw on kind of your own personal fears to fuel these stories that you're doing.

Speaker 4: 28:02 Oh yeah, no, I'm, um, I always write for me and I always read about things that scare me. Uh, but that being said, uh I'm I was sort of calling myself an anti horror person because whenever I see horror films or later in life, when I was actually reading her, uh, I was always thinking of how would I survive? So I was always trying to solve the problem. I'm a problem solver. You know, I don't look at horror the way my very first zombie movie, it was Italian zombie movie where everybody just got killed. I'm not, I'm not that I'm George Romero's proteges will not protege. I'm his student, I'm his disciple. George Romero set up a series of rules. Figure them out. You survive, make bad choices. You die, which guess what? That is life. So I'm always trying to put a hopeful, spin on everything I write and hopefully people get scared, but hopefully they also are hopeful.

Speaker 3: 29:01 Well, you bring them towards Romero. And do you think the fact that he invested the first kind of modern zombie film, the night of living dead with the sense of a social conscience, do you think that kind of has colored the genre ever since then? And, and zombie seemed to be this perfect blank slate to deal with so many things,

Speaker 4: 29:21 You know? Yes and no. I think that, I think more so than not the people that follow George, uh, don't listen and don't get it. And they just see the Gore and the violence and maybe throwing a little sex to titillate. Um, but they don't get the deeper meaning and they don't get the, what George was trying to do was hold up a mirror for ourselves. But some people do, some people fall directly in his footsteps like Edgar Wright and Simon peg, and gave us, I think one of the greatest, not zombie films, but films of the decade, which is Shaun of the dead, which was the British version of clerks.

Speaker 6: 30:00 Do you ever think modern life is not for you? You do the same dead end job every day. There's no I in team, but there is an I in PI and there's an eye in meat pie. The anagram of meat is team.

Speaker 4: 30:17 I think that was genius. It was insightful. And it taught us a lot about this generation of Britons, but it did it through a zombie story.

Speaker 3: 30:27 So for you, do you think that zombies are scarier than a virus? I mean the sense of a zombie, something you could see coming at you, but a virus is this invisible thing to the eye and people who can carry the virus may not show any symptoms, which do you find kind of scary or for you?

Speaker 4: 30:43 I think the zombies can be a perfect, um, zombies can be a perfect metaphor for a virus because to me the fast zombie is something like Ebola, which is so scary. It provokes a response when Ebola hit in West Africa a few years ago, it was so obviously terrifying that we marshaled the entire resources of the United States and sent the U S army to West Africa to hit that virus head on. And we want the SLOs zombie, the zombie that you can underestimate that you can blow off is this virus that we're facing right now because in order for a plague to be successful and be that plague to be airborne or waterborne or walking on two legs, it must have baked into its strategy, the ability to slip under our radar. That's why my zombies are always slows zombies because initially they have to be underestimated. The same thing with this virus.

Speaker 3: 31:48 Now, a lot of your book, a lot of world war Z is based on history in terms of your drawing on things that have happened in the past to kind of be predictive of what happens in this Somby apocalypse. Why do you think we are so unable to learn from history?

Speaker 4: 32:05 Honestly, I think one of the reasons that we're unable to learn from history is it's, uh, is it's not being taught better. And I'm sorry, I'm sorry to say that I'm a history major and some of my best professors were historians and I love historians, but for every amazing, interesting, insightful historian that I've met, I've just met a lot of, um, boring schlubs who just go through the motions and they teach us the, when the, where, and the whole and the, but they don't teach the why they don't make it human. They don't connect our hearts to the hearts of those who came before us. And I know that because I've been lucky enough to have history teachers who have done that from high school through college, whenever I've had a professor who has allowed me to walk in the shoes of those who came before me, I realized, wow, we're the same.

Speaker 4: 33:09 And the problems we're facing now, the problems that they've faced. And if we can learn from them, we can save ourselves the death and destruction that he fell down. But that takes a high quality of history teacher. And personally I would, and I wouldn't just go in college. Cause I think for a lot of people at the time you get to college, it's too late. I would start early. Should I start in kindergarten? I mean, personally, I think, uh, I think we need to overhaul the teaching system because too many teachers are not taught to actually teach. And what I mean is they know the facts, but they don't know how to reach these hearts and minds. And I would, I would raise up the profession and I would pay them a decent living wage for God's sakes and make teaching an exciting, attractive profession. So you can live a good life and still teach because it's one of our most important jobs. And I see too many teachers, we treat them like soldiers, they get shitty pay and they get no support and their budgets are always being cut and they're trying so hard and they're always being sabotaged. So I would put the resources behind our education the same way I would put it behind our national security

Speaker 3: 34:40 And talking about connections. What do you see this pandemic connecting to in terms of something in the past? Is there something, you know, early on, there were some comparisons made to the Spanish flu, but there were some, you know, scientists said, well, that's not really the same, but is there something we can look to in the past to give us some sort of direction, how to move forward now?

Speaker 4: 35:02 Well, I think that the, the best example we can look to is the plague of my childhood, which was AIDS. Uh, there's still no cure. And it took too long, far, far, too long for any kind of effective treatment. And far too many people died unnecessarily, but what turned it around was not some miracle of science. What turned the corner on this horrific blight was social consciousness. It was the people, it was changing our behavior and going from free love to safe sex and starting to understand what were the transmission parameters of AIDS? How do we protect ourselves? Uh, there was a massive public education program in the United States in the 1980s. And I was part of it. I was educated by that C a recoup, our surgeon general mailed out a pamphlet to every single American home to educate every single American, the facts about AIDS. Why can't we do this now, if we had a national education program about this virus, about this Corona virus, we'd stop. It. It's that simple. We do not need a vaccine. We do not need an effective treatment. We do not need a magic bullet. We just need everyone to do their part.

Speaker 3: 36:34 Well, and then additional connections. Cause you had mentioned, I listened to one of your talks that you had done, I think at the Naval war, um, Academy. Uh, but you talked about connections in terms of one thing turning into another. And in this case it feels like the pandemic with people sheltering at home and not having the same sort of distractions that they would have otherwise connected to George Floyd's death and going out to protest. So what kind of connections do you see in that realm of how we're at the point we are now?

Speaker 4: 37:11 Well, I used to try to predict the future. Exactly. It would make me a liar or an idiot. Uh, but I will say that you can see the potential second and third order effects of this plague. Uh, it's obviously already massive unemployment. We're having a huge recession now, which could very well tip over into a depression. If we don't solve the plague, we can't get the economy going. It's that simple. First you solve the public health crisis. Then you solve the economic crisis. If you try to do economics before you do public health, it's all just going to blow up in your face as we've seen. So we see the economic problems, which in turn will create more social problems because you're going to have the merchants of hate, uh, on radio and television and the internet, trying to blame people, trying to sell blame.

Speaker 4: 38:05 Like it's a product, Oh, you're, you're poor. You lost your house. You can't make your mortgage payments. Well it's cause because those in power are giving it away to somebody else blame them. So you're going to see more divisions because there's a lot of money in dividing us. You're going to see a national security issues because for the first time in my lifetime, a little germ has taken a nuclear aircraft carrier off the high seas. I think you're going to see a reorganization of weaponry around the world. Certainly more attention paid to German warfare. I think if we don't get our act together and pull our heads out of our asses and not only solve the plague here at home, but help our friends and allies around the world, somebody else will. And that will be China. And this plague may end up being the greatest threat to democracy.

Speaker 4: 39:03 We've seen since world war two, because if the Western democracies, RNA are unable to prove that democracy can keep their people safe and healthy, the Chinese will prove that their new version of fascist capitalism will. So I think that the, the ramifications are, are endless. And do you have any final words or closing comments you'd like to make? I'm always hopeful. And I think that over the course of my writing and research into conflict, what I've learned is that Americans are at their best when things are at their worst and that's not, that's not pie in the sky. That's not kumbaya. That's just the facts. We talked earlier about history. What we can learn from history. What I have learned is that no country has made this much social progress. This fast as the United States of America. Our last president could have been a slave of our first president.

Speaker 4: 40:18 And I dare anyone to challenge me on that. As far as any other country, making that much progress, what Americans have going for us is our ability to reinvent ourselves. Uh, we're living a certain way one day and then something gets in our way and we have to change ourselves. We have to change our behavior. Uh, we have to change our, uh, our way of doing things without art changing our core values. And Americans are very good at that. We, we are a freedom loving democratic people, and yet somehow we have changed our behavior over the years in order to face new crises, we did it with world Wars. We've done it with depressions. We did it to end slavery. Nobody forced us to end slavery. We did it in our own civil war. Uh, we have given rights to people who in 1776 weren't even allowed to exist. So Americans have the ability to dig ourselves out of any hole. And that's why I am infinitely proud and hopeful when it comes to solving this

Speaker 1: 41:34 Present crisis.

Speaker 2: 41:35 Well, I want to thank you very much for taking some time and I'm really looking forward to your comments.

Speaker 1: 41:40 Thank you, Brad. You were very patient with me,

Speaker 2: 41:50 Brooks, author of world war II and the new book devolution. Thanks for listening to another episode of the cinema junkie podcast. I hope you'll head over to comic dashcam.org and check out Brooks's zombies and Corona virus panel as well as more than 300 hours of other diverse programming. So till our next film fix I'm Beth Armando, your residents, cinema junkie

Speaker 1: 42:53 [inaudible].

Read more:

Aim For The Head: Max Brooks On Zombies And Coronavirus (Cinema Junkie) - KPBS

(Talking of the West) These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all.

- Arundhati Roy

Image: New York Times

Japanese internment camps were established during World War II by President Franklin Roosevelt. From 1942 to 1945, it was the policy of the U.S. government that people of Japanese descent would be put in isolated camps. This policy was enacted in reaction to Pearl Harbor and the ensuing war. The Japanese internment camps are now considered one of the most atrocious violations of American civil rights in the 20th century.

On December 7, 1941, just hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI rounded-up 1,291 Japanese community and religious leaders, arresting them without evidence and freezing their assets. Military zones were created and Roosevelts executive order commanded the relocation of Americans of Japanese ancestry. Canada soon followed suit, relocating 21,000 of its Japanese residents from its west coast. Mexico enacted its own version, and eventually 2,264 more people of Japanese descent were removed from Peru, Brazil, Chile and Argentina to the United States.

The plan was drafted after a report by the leader of the Western Defense Command containing falsehoods about the Japanese population, and initially included the rounding up of Germans, and Italians. Riots, and shootings occasionally occurred at the camps.

See more here:

Past in Perspective - The Nation

Representational image. | Image Courtesy: UZreport.uz

When we think of epidemics, smallpox comes to mind, but we remember it as a disease which was successfully eradicated by a vaccine; but it was also a virus used as a weapon for biological warfare 33 years before the vaccine was invented.

In India, we have grown up listening to stories of dreaded diseases and every family has a memory of some epidemic or the other. The most dreaded was the smallpox, a disease for which the only cure seemed to be desperate prayers to Sheetla Mata, the goddess of smallpox'.

Smallpox was one of the deadliest diseases known to humans and it affected people around the globe. But the history of smallpox holds a unique place in the history of medical sciences; it is the only human disease to have been eradicated by vaccination.

The smallpox vaccine was the first successful vaccine to be developed. It was introduced by Edward Jenner (1749-1823. He observed that milkmaids, who previously had caught cowpox, did not catch smallpox.

The global eradication effort initially used a strategy of mass vaccination campaigns to achieve 80% vaccine coverage in each country, and thereafter by case-finding, followed by ring vaccination of all known and possible contacts to seal off the outbreak from the rest of the population.

The vaccine was discovered in 1796 and in 1980 the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that the disease had been successfully eradicated from the world.

While so much effort had gone into the eradication of the dreaded disease, there were some people who saw the smallpox as a weapon for war; a weapon to defeat their enemies. In other words, smallpox was used as a biological weapon.

Sir Jeffrey Amherst, the commander of the British forces in North America, deliberately used smallpox to diminish the native American population hostile to the British. An outbreak of smallpox in Fort Pitt provided Amherst with the means to execute his plan. On June 24, 1763, Captain Ecuyer, one of Amhersts subordinate officers, gifted the Native Americans with smallpox-infected blankets from the smallpox hospital. He recorded in his journal: I hope it will have the desired effect. As a result, a large outbreak of smallpox occurred among the Native American tribes in the Ohio River Valley.

This was not the first use of a biological weapon in history and unfortunately not the last.

Biological warfare (BW)also known as germ warfarehas been defined as the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, insects, and fungi with the intent to kill or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war. The use of biological weapons is prohibited under customary international humanitarian law, as well as several international treaties. The use of biological agents in armed conflict is a war crime.

Biological warfare was banned by the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The Convention was the result of prolonged efforts by the international community to establish a new instrument that would supplement the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits the use but not possession or development of chemical and biological weapons.

The same year the Convention was passed by the United Nations, a young scientist-turned-journalist by the name of Dr K S Jayaraman (born 1936) read about some strange experiments on mosquito control being conducted in villages outside Delhi.

When Jayaraman contacted Rajendra Pal in WHO about the project since the international organisation was associated with it, he was told that there were orders from the WHO Director-General not to discuss the project with the Indian press. Dr. Pal showed Jayaraman a confidential letter addressed to Mr. Willard at WHO regional office in Delhi which said the project is considered sensitive to the Indian Press.

Jayaraman left the room, telling Dr. Pal that under these conditions, he could only write what he knew and the WHO Director-Generals injunction to keep Genetic Control Mosquito Unit (GCMU) out of the Indian press.

At this point Dr. Pal invited the correspondent back again and agreed to an interview. The interview ended with the first question of Jayaraman, namely, the reason why GCMU was studying yellow fever mosquitoes instead of malarial mosquitoes. As everyone knows, India does not have yellow fever.

Jayaraman was the science correspondent for the Press Trust of India, which was headed at the time by the formidable C Raghavan. I remember clearly that Raghavan had come to see my father, who had just retired from the Prime Ministers Office, to tell him about these experiments.

A Google search revealed that the New Scientist of October 9, 1975, carried a news report with a headline: Germ War allegations force WHO out of Indian mosquito project

The report stated: The PAC report declares that the Genetic Control of Mosquitoes Research Unit (GCMRU) project has been ill conceived and is of no utility whatsoever to India. It does, however, have a vital and direct bearing on biological warfare or is likely that the ultimate and only beneficiary of the GLMO experiment is the US machine.

However, the original PAC reports cannot be found on the internet so I wrote to Raghavan, now more than 90 years old, to ask whether my memory was right and he had indeed told my father about these bizarre experiments.

We did some extensive investigations - the PTI Science Correspondent, K.S.Jayaraman, and I - and did an expose of several foreign-funded "research" activities in India, most US-funded (PL-480 funds), and with some military significance, including biological warfare. We were denounced in Parliament by Health Minister Karan Singh, but inquiries by two Public Accounts Committees, vindicated us. I am attaching summary of their findings.

The PAC report is very lengthy but the first paragraph of the Conclusions shows how extensive were the experiments which were being conducted and how many institutions were involved in the projects under the auspices of the WHO.

7.1.1. The examination by the Committee of some of the research projects in the country conducted in collaboration with foreign organisations raise a number of interesting questions. The Committee find that the Genetic Control of Mosquitoes Unit Project, the bird migration and arbovirus studies at the Bombay Natural History Society, the Ultra Low Volume Spray experiments for Urban malaria control at Jodhpur, the Pantnagar Microbial Pesticides Project and some of the research projects undertaken in West Bengal and Nargwal in collaboration with the John Hopkins University establish beyond doubt a definite pattern. This is that agencies of foreign governments, in some cases explicitly military agencies of those governments (as in the case of the collaboration between the Bombay Natural History Society and the Miugratory Animal Pathological Survey - MAPS - of the United States Armed Forces Institute of Pathology have been conducting basic research through Indian scientists and Indian scientific organisations.

Even in cases where such research is carried out in collaboration with philanthropic civilian organisations from abroad, the Committee find that some of these civilian organisations also have active liaison and communication at several levels with military agencies. No doubt, some of these research programmes have been shown as developmental or basic research. These projects, however, have been closely concerned with the collection of vital viral, epidemiological or ecological data, which are well capable of being used against the security of the country and that of our neighbouring countries.

The utility of some of these projects to India, especially the Genetic Control of Mosquitoes Unit project seems to be only doubtful or potential, whereas the primary data obtained from these projects are likely to be of vital importance to foreign governments interested in developing techniques of chemical, biological, bacteriological, herbicdal and anti-subversive warfare.

These revelations exposed the Ministry of Healths complicity in these projects. The Minister of Health at the time was Karan Singh.

Among the documents Raghavan sent to me was a letter from Jyotirmoy Basu (CPI(M) Member of Parliament) to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi which was an annexure to the PAC report.

Letter from PAC Chairman, Jyotirmoy Basu, to Prime Minister of India, vide para 2 above (PAC167-p225)

New Delhi, 31st January, 1975

Dear Mrs. Gandhi

The G.C.M.U. Programme has given rise to serious suspicion in my mind. I have tried to collect information from various unconnected sources and I have come to the conclusion that this programme has been financed by P.L.480 for execution through WHO and is primarily meant for the three things mentioned below:

(1) To carry on certain experiments in India which are harmful to the population and which are not allowed to be done in their own country i.e. U.S.A.

(2) They are experimenting and keeping things in readiness in case the U.S.A. Government ever wanted to wage a chemical, bacteriological or virus warfare against this country.

(3) To prepare themselves to wage a chemical, bacteriological or virus warfare against another country keeping India as base.

The agreement between P.L.480 Fund Administrator and W.H.O. has expired on 31 December 1974. In spite of that this is continuing and out of these experiments all the results and findings will be the property of U.S. Government. To make sure that this does not progress any more, I am writing this because I am very apprehensive of this programme and I am doing in the best interests of the country and the people.

I earnestly suggest that a thorough probe should be done by the most competent Intelligence Agency at your command.

Yours sincerely,

(Jyotirmoy Basu)

Mrs. Indira Gandhi

Prime Minister of India

New Delhi.

Because of the timely intervention and persistence of several journalists, including Raghavan and Jayaraman, the projects were wound up. But research in biological warfare, no doubt, continues and the threat it poses is greater today than it was in 1975.

There have been many conspiracy theories suggesting that the novel coronavirus is linked to biological warfare. There are many conspiracy theories, some even link US tech magnate Bill Gates to having an interest in the spread of the virus. A briefing prepared for the European Parliament in April 2020 alleged that Russia and China are driving parallel information campaigns, conveying the overall message that democratic state actors are failing and that European citizens cannot trust their health systems.... to undermine democratic debate.

The report comes as Hungary an EU member state faces criticism for preparing a national survey that includes a question on a coronavirus crisis proposal by investor George Soros that experts say will force nations into debt slavery.

In the national consultation due to be mailed to all Hungarian citizens, the government asks whether people should reject George Soross plan, which would in-debt our homeland for an unforeseeable long time.

According to Rasem 'Abidat, an activist of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and a columnist for the Palestinian daily, Al-Quds, based in East Jerusalem, the coronavirus is a biological weapon that the US and Israel decided to employ against China and Iran after failing to harm them by conventional means.

At this stage we do not know if any of these claims have any truth. But we do know that it is a pathogen dispersed globally though free trade and international travel. But this we do know that even if the pandemics effect on the world isnt a conventional attack on government targets or the military, its a widespread and indiscriminate attack on global citizens and the economy. This outbreak has directly impacted the lives of billions of people, making it the most effective model for future terrorist activities and a new model for circumventing the conventions of modern warfare.

Governments across the globe are using the pandemic to lower labour standards, wipe out human rights of millions of people and mobilising fear to equip themselves with powers of control and surveillance over entire population. The vaccine, when it comes, will have no way to protect us against the authoritarian measures put in place by democratic governments.

Nandita Haksaris a human rights lawyer, teacher, campaigner and writer. The views are personal.

Read the original:

The Politics of Pandemics - NewsClick

It bothers me and lots of Americans, what happened to our great country. I do not know why the current administration is not clearly telling the American people who is responsible for this pandemic.

We only hear that China did all of this.

I was wondering, when all this happened, where was our intelligence community?

The whole world is suffering and people are dying right and left, why isnt there an investigation to find who is responsible for destroying the human race?

People had no experience with this kind of suffering. It is the responsibility of all those countries who have germ warfare labs to completely destroy these machines who are killing people. All these nukes are obsolete.

Now we are entering into a new era. It is in the best interest of all the countries who are making nuclear weapons and these warfare germs to destroy them completely and spend money for the humanity of the world so people can have a better life and clean water to drink.

I am wondering if this coronavirus is a natural disaster or an economic or political game among superpowers. I guess we will never know, as up until now we do not know who killed John F. Kennedy, who did 9/11 and who is doing this corona. I guess we have to live with these conspiracy theories. If this virus is doing human to human transmission, I hope the next virus after corona will not be airborne.

All these economic disasters have to be investigated, and those people or countries responsible should be punished to the fullest extent, so we can all live a normal life.

(Dr. Mohammad Khalid is a Todt Hill resident.)

View original post here:

Whats next after coronavirus? (letter to the editor) - SILive.com

To my nonscientists eye. Similar caveats we may never have incontrovertible proof, its remotely possible, though perhaps eternally unprovable, we may never know, its at least possible, will we ever know?, let me just blurt out what I think happened, etc. infest Bakers narrative, usually preceded or followed by wild accusations (and, occasionally, by a sign of self-awareness: I lay in bed some of today reading more of this book, hating it, excited by it, embarrassed by it).

At times, the book is framed as a deliberate challenge to the intelligence community: I could be completely wrong. The only way to prove me wrong is by declassifying the entire document. But this is not how a historian proceeds. Again and again, Baker bristles with anger over actions that were seriously contemplated by the C.I.A., other intelligence agencies and the military but never undertaken. I felt trembly and disgusted at the same time, he writes of Operation Sphinx, a proposal to gas millions of Japanese from the air during World War II. Its a horrible and disillusioning thing to know that your own country was passing around a paper like Sphinx in the Pentagon. Really? To know that in a brutal war men thought brutal things?

At another point, he questions the long, interesting, confusing letter he got from Floyd ONeal, one of some 30 captured American airmen and Marines who confessed to germ-warfare bombing in Korea. ONeals confession is surprising and moving, though, whether or not its true, Baker tells us. ONeal recanted completely after he was released, and writes in his letter of sustaining torture so awful he still wont describe it to Baker more than 50 years later: What they did for the next days I dont care to discuss but I finally agreed to sign their confession. There is nothing surprising or moving about a coerced confession, save for ONeals ability to endure the price it exacted.

Baker concedes that Americans individually have done good things, a gesture followed by a banal list that includes sunglasses, topiary, no-hitters and the midcentury New Yorker. Yes, and also little baby ducks and old pickup trucks. This is another affectation of virtue, not a moral argument.

I share Bakers disgust with all the crazy, wasteful, illegal, counterproductive and murderous things the C.I.A. has done, and no doubt continues to do. Hell, I even like dogs. Bakers Olympian worldview, though, takes him to almost the same place he landed in Human Smoke, his paste-up 2008 history of the road to World War II: immobilized by purity and concluding that we should never have intervened, even to stop the Nazis. Americans are neither beasts nor angels, just human beings trying to forge our way through the murky moral choices this world poses. To pretend otherwise is perhaps the worst deception of all.

Read the original:

Did America Use Bioweapons in Korea? Nicholson Baker Tried to Find Out - The New York Times

Representational image. | Image Courtesy: Wikipedia

As the world reels under the Covid-19 pandemic, a large number of conspiracy theories have emerged across countries about how it spreads. From eating bats and secret bio-warfare research in a lab in Wuhan to the testing of 5G cellular networks and whatnot, such theories need just the right ingredients to take offand Covid-19 has become a breeding ground for them. Most of these so-called theories have now been scientifically debunked. However, there are cases where such things have actually occurred.

Strange as it may sound, in India, we have had a series of experiments carried out in the 1970s on issues that are of concern to the health of the general population. And these are not conspiracy theories by a long shot. The experiments included live research on new breeds of mosquitoes in the context of germ warfare, on import of worm-infested hop plants from Australia (not found in India then) that could severely damage crops and plants here and on migration of certain virus-carrying birds in the North-east.

The scientific community and others, including parliamentarians, had expressed serious concern over these projects, which were being carried out in India in a hush-hush manner as part of germ warfare experiments by other countries which themselves prohibit such tests.

Even more intriguing is that the experiments on mosquitoes and bird migration were funded and coordinated by the United States Army, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), among several other American organisations, and carried out in association with some Indian institutions under the auspices of the World Health Organisation (WHO).

When such research projects, which were being conducted in late 1960s and early seventies in parts of Delhi, its adjoining areas, Gujarat and Rajasthan, were exposed in the media by a qualified nuclear scientist-turned-journalist working with the Press Trust of India (PTI), the entire nation was taken aback. One of his news items, appearing on July 29, 1974 and printed in newspapers across the country, was on a United States agencies-funded research project carried out by a special unit created jointly by the WHO and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) called the Genetic Control of Mosquitoes Unit (GCMU).

Amidst a national uproar, Parliament took note of it and held a discussion on the matter on 30 July 1974. Soon, a parliamentary committee investigated the reports by PTIs special correspondent for science, Dr KS Jayaraman, and after interviewing him and others and conducting a series of deliberations, vindicated his findings.

Backed fully by the top brass of PTI, including then editor-in-chief C Raghavan, Jayaraman spent over 15 months investigating the entire gamut of the GCMU project as well as other such projects that were being executed in India with the support of United States agencies, including the Migratory Animal Pathological Service (MAPS) which in simpler language is the biological warfare research division of the United States Army, as Jayaraman wrote in his story.

His story went on to say: Some members of the scientific community ask whether the hush-hush atmosphere and the nature of data collected in various projects of doubtful relevance to India suggest that India is being used as a guinea pig or testing ground for chemicals or methods not permitted in sponsoring countries or even for some covert operations.

It said the GCMU had come under public gaze when it was revealed that it was polluting village wells with chemicals suspected to be cancer-causing and prohibited in the United States. Since then, secrecy has become tighter on the entire project. Jayaraman raised several questions, such as why the ICMR is backing the WHO study of Aedes aegypti [the mosquito that carries Yellow Fever] when GCMUs priorities ought to be Anopheles stephensi [the mosquito which is a vector of malaria] and Culex fatigans [the filarin carrier]. It meant that the study was focussed on Yellow Fever mosquitoes instead of the ones carrying the germs of malaria, a disease which was highly prevalent in India those days.

Following this and other stories, Dr Subramanian Swamy, who was then a Jan Sangh Member of Parliament, had said in the Rajya Sabha, The US army had given Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) a grant to study bird migration in north-eastern India. In his stories, Jayaraman confirmed that the WHO had shared the study results with MAPS of the US Army. The research work for the WHO-BNHS project was carried out in the North Eastern Frontier Agency (NEFA, now Arunachal Pradesh).

The 167th report of the Parliaments Public Accounts Committee said Jayaraman had brought out a very useful report in July 1974 on serious concern in sections of the scientific community in India at some research projects being carried out in the country by or under the auspices of the WHO under conditions of total secrecy. The report which appeared in Motherland of 29 July 1974 under the caption WHO works for US secret research in India? has also done a very great service.

Not only that, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which probed the PTI news item, directed the government to take immediate corrective measures. The then PAC Chairman, Jyotirmoy Basu, a veteran CPI-M leader and trade unionist, also wrote to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, saying: [This research project was] primarily meant for the three things mentioned below:

(1) To carry on certain experiments in India which are harmful to the population and which are not allowed to be done in their own country i.e. USA.

(2) They are experimenting and keeping things in readiness in case the USA government ever wanted to wage a chemical, bacteriological or virus warfare against this country.

(3) To prepare themselves to wage a chemical, bacteriological or virus warfare against another country keeping India as base.

Out of these experiments, all the results and findings will be the property of US government. To make sure that this [research project] does not progress any more, I am writing this because I am very apprehensive of this programme and I am doing in the best interests of my country and the people. I earnestly suggest that a thorough probe should be done by the most competent Intelligence Agency at your command.

Based on the news item and after questioning Jayaraman and PTIs editor-in-chief Raghavan, the PAC itself wrote the following as a background to its 167th report: A number of medical and agricultural research projects and experiments have been launched in India and are being carried out in the country by or under the auspices of international and foreign organisations such as the World Health Organisation, United States Department of Agriculture, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Smithsonian Institute, Migratory Animal Pathological Survey (MAPS) of the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, United States Department of Defence, John Hopkins University, etc.

For instance, a project for the genetic control of mosquitoes has been established in India in collaboration with the World Health Organisation. A collaboration for a study of bird migration had been entered into between the Bombay Natural History Society and the Migratory Animal Pathological Survey. Use of the Ultra Low Volume spray technique for urban malaria control is also being tried out with the assistance of the World Health Organisation. The Rockefeller Foundation has been associated with virus research with the Bombay Natural History Society and the Virus Research Centre in Poona and the Smithsonian Institute with bird migratory studies. The United States Department of Agriculture has been collaborating on a microbial pesticide project in the Pantnagar Agricultural University. The John Hopkins University had also been collaborating with Indian institutions on various research projects.

The PAC had dealt with another PTI report of July 1974 by Jayaraman and made a series of recommendations regarding the import of agricultural items, leading to changes in the laws. The story dealt with the import of worm-infested hop plants from Australia by a major liquor brewery by flouting rules. These worms, a kind of nematode, had never been recorded on Indian soil before. The report said this worm was earlier accidentally introduced and had wrecked the potato crop in the Nilgiris and has now started playing havoc in other areas of Tamil Nadu. Following the nationwide publication of this news item, the PAC deliberated on this matter too and gave several recommendations, many of which were accepted by the government of the day.

The series of stories authored by Jayaraman throughout his over three decades in PTI continued to raise hackles as most of them dealt with threats to the health of the people in general and other scientific issues that are of public and national security interest. Though he remained anonymous to the general public being a news agency journalist, Jayaraman is undoubtedly a doyen of Indian science journalism.

The special correspondent who later became PTIs first science editor was also associated with top-notch global science journals such as Nature. Born in 1936, Jayaraman graduated in Madras and landed up as a scientific assistant at the Atomic Energy Establishment (now Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai) in 1958. At AEE, he spent five years in the research group engaged in building the Apsara Reactor (now decommissioned) under the guidance of pioneers like Raja Ramanna and PK Iyengar. Thereafter, he went to the United States, joined the University of Maryland and finished his PhD in 1968. For his post-doc, he worked at Potsdam University, New York, and then at University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He returned to India in 1972 and joined as a pool officer at the Directorate of Naval Science and Technology. Later, he joined the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) as a Class-I officer.

But Jayaramans mind was set on journalism, for which he had already equipped himself with a post-graduate degree in journalism from the famed Medill School of Journalism in the United States. He joined PTI in 1973, where he was known as Doc or Dr J, says a recent book, Raising Hackles: Celebrating the Life of Science Journalist Dr KS Jayaraman. The book, a collection of articles on Jayaraman by the science journalists he mentored, has been brought out by Dinesh C Sharma, a former PTI hand who is currently a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow.

The writer was deputy executive editor of Press Trust of India. The views are personal.

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When CIA, US Army Conducted Mosquito Research in India - NewsClick

As ludicrous as that sounds to some people, we all need to get ready for it.

Were not playing football this fall.

While coaches around the area and the entire country go through the motions of preparing for a normal autumn or even a disrupted one, its time we call this off. The NCAA, state governors and college and high school administrators are all coming to the same conclusion, and its not hard to accept.

The virus isnt going away. There is no vaccine. We cant play football.

This week, in a show of bluster common among old-school football coaches, LSUs Ed Orgeron uttered something that was indeed ludicrous. He said football is the lifeblood of our country.

OK, so he was with the vice president at the time and probably trying to impress the head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force with his intellect. But the statement echoed across Louisiana, which is one of the states experiencing one of the fastest growing surges in caseloads in America.

Football is not the lifeblood of this country. We can live without it. In fact, right now, we have to.

All across the South, as clueless coaches continue to plan for their season openers, scientists, epidemiologists, doctors and COVID-19 experts insist on no physical contact of any kind.

What about this are we missing?

Does anyone in his right mind think were going to unleash our children upon each other in two-hour contests of germ warfare? Were going to let high school and college students slam into each other in a toxic cocktail of sweat, blood and spit and pretend its safe?

Stop it. Its not happening. Were better than this.

In Missouri, where parents and youth coaches have thrown their kids back onto playing fields, health officials now say a rise in coronavirus cases among youth aged 10 to 19 are the primary source of COVID-19 spreading into the community.

Colleges from Chapel Hill to Clemson to Alabama and yes, LSU, are reporting shocking numbers of positive cases among football players. And at fraternities across the South and in college bars across the country, outbreaks are being reported every day.

All this before the students even return to campus.

We seem frozen by an inability to do the right thing. In Guilford County, no one knew when or whether summer workouts would resume Monday until the dinner hour tonight, while school districts of comparable size managed to make their decisions earlier in the week.

Its time the adults started acting like adults.

The NFL seems hell-bent on its players playing the role of guinea pigs if not lemmings, willing to die if not kill, to play football. We know what thats about, and it has nothing to do with the health and welfare of the workers.

Its about money. And television. And the odd assumption that Americans are all stupid football fans longing to watch their gridiron heroes on fields of glory.

Colleges are afraid to admit that theyve totally lost their souls to the athletics departments. And now theyre going to go broke because of football.

Look, we can play this in the spring if we get through winter without destroying our way of life. We can skip this season all together if it comes down to it. Colleges can then rebuild and restructure along fiscally responsible guidelines that dont include coaches being the highest-paid employees in the entire state.

Theyre just coaches. And football is just a game.

Its time for all these people making plans and statements about getting ready for the opener to pipe down. Common sense tells us we cant play football this fall.

Its time to stop listening to the liars and listen to the scientists. Its time to admit that we cant risk the lives of our best and brightest because we want to watch State play Florida State or Grimsley play East Forsyth.

We can wait. We dont have the money to play high school football. Do you know how many buses it would take to move an entire high school football team from one county to the next and stay within state guidelines?

We dont have enough test kits to play college football and keep small college communities safe and healthy. Do you realize how many times we would need to test these poor players just to know for certain the entire team isnt infected?

We have the rest of our lives to get this right. Its time we had the guts to stop this nonsense right now.

Stay home if you can. Stay safe if you cant.

Contact Ed Hardin at 336-373-7069, and follow @Ed_Hardin on Twitter.

Link:

Ed Hardin: Football isn't happening; we're better than this - Winston-Salem Journal

What about this are we missing?

Does anyone in his right mind think were going to unleash our children upon each other in two-hour contests of germ warfare? Were going to let high school and college students slam into each other in a toxic cocktail of sweat, blood and spit and pretend its safe?

Stop it. Its not happening. Were better than this.

In Missouri, where parents and youth coaches have thrown their kids back onto playing fields, health officials now say a rise in coronavirus cases among youth aged 10 to 19 is the primary source of COVID-19 spreading into the community.

Colleges from Chapel Hill to Clemson to Alabama and yes, LSU, are reporting shocking numbers of positive cases among football players. And at fraternities across the South and in college bars across the country, outbreaks are being reported every day.

All this before the students even return to campus.

We seem frozen by an inability to do the right thing.

Its time the adults started acting like adults.

The NFL seems hell-bent on its players playing the role of guinea pigs if not lemmings, willing to die if not kill, to play football. We know what thats about, and it has nothing to do with the health and welfare of the workers.

Continued here:

Ed Hardin: Get ready to face that football isn't happening this fall - Roanoke Times

In an era of post-truth and scepticism about information, especially on social media, I have been taken aback to realise how many people believe the Bill Gates microchip conspiracy theory. Fanned by people who oppose vaccinations, the theory maintains that the coronavirus pandemic is part of a plan to implant trackable microchips in humans and that the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is behind it.

The claim was widespread enough for the BBC to do an article to debunk it. It quoted the the head of the Russian Communist party, who, without mentioning Gates, said that globalists supported a covert mass chip implantation which they may in time resort to under the pretext of a mandatory vaccination against coronavirus.

The BBC failed to ask the Russian Communist Party head on what basis he had made his outlandish claims. After all, the Cold War has not quite ended and Russian claims can be dismissed just as easily as the claims made by Soviet Union in the Cold War era.

In his book in 1995, Vasili Mitrokhin, the Soviet spy who defected to Britain with volumes of secrets, said that the greatest successes of the Soviet Unions measures in India was the impact of bogus conspiracies attributed to the Central Intelligence Agency planted by the KGB.

Among them was a story about the United States being responsible for the Aids virus. It was first published in the Patriot, a leftist daily, in early 1980s and then spread around the world.

India under Indira Gandhi was also probably the arena for more KGB-active measures than anywhere else in the world, Mitrokhin said.

But not all such conspiracy stories could be dismissed so easily. There were other stories that proved to be true and terrifying. Listening recently to videos of the controversial Indian-American figure Shiva Ayyadurai pushing the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was being spread by Americas deep state, I remember the day I heard of a strange experiment with mosquitoes being carried out by the Americans in India.

I did not know how to contact him. But to my utter amazement I suddenly received an email from him, more than 40 years since we had met. Raghavan had written to congratulate me on an article I had written. He was now over 90. On impulse I asked him whether my memory of the story about yellow fever was true. He replied promptly.

I was sitting in my fathers study sometime in 1974. My father, a bureaucrat, was secretary to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the time. The study was air-conditioned and lined with books. It was in this room that I heard many stories of covert operations. That day, a young journalist came by and told my father of a strange experiment with mosquitoes being conducted right near Palam airport, as Delhi airport was then called.

The man said it was an experiment on yellow fever. But we dont have yellow fever in India, my father had exclaimed. The journalist said that this was exactly his point. He claimed it was a part of a biological warfare experiment. We all sat in shocked silence.

The journalists name is Chakravarti Raghavan and he went on to become the head of the Press Trust of India.

During the Emergency, he opposed the measures taken by Indira Gandhi and he left India. A Google search showed that he had been living in Geneva since 1978 and was editor emeritus of the South-North Development Monitor, covering trade, finance and development issues.

Raghavan had a solid reputation. Journalist Chitra Subramaniam described him in these words: Chakravarti Raghavan is to trade and development issues what Amitabh Bachchan is to world of Indian cinema god.

We did some extensive investigations the PTI Science Correspondent KS Jayaraman and I and did an expose of several foreign-funded research activities in India, most US-funded...and with some military significance, including biological warfare, Raghavan wrote. We were denounced in Parliament by Health Minister Karan Singh, but inquiries by two Public Accounts Committees, vindicated us. I am attaching a summary of their findings.

Raghavan said that he and his colleague started digging into the story when my father was working at the Prime Ministers Office and Ashok Parthasarathy was the scientific advisor. He said that my father asked the Intelligence Bureau, the Research and Analysis Wing and Military Intelligence to meet with him and Jayaraman.

By the time Raghavan wrote the story, my father was out of the Prime Ministers Office, at the Planning Commission. ...Sanjay [Gandhi] and Gang were in control, with the US and its CIA local boss Kreisberg close to Sanjay, Raghanan wrote. We stuck to our guns; and though Indira was angry with me, she still did act, and ultimately the projects were wound up.

Raghavan said that he was now too old to keep at the story. Jayaraman was planning to put some of the past material together and get it all published, he said. But he himself, after some heart problems, has had to go slow.

He also gave me contact details of the persons concerned; perhaps thinking I would follow up the story. But I am not so young either and no longer an aspiring journalist. Despite this, I felt we, as a country needed to be reminded of it. But I needed to confirm the story from another reliable source.

A Google search revealed that the New Scientist of October 9, 1975, carried a news report with a headline: Germ War allegations force WHO out of Indian mosquito project. The report said, The PAC [Public Accounts Committee] report declares that the Genetic Control of Mosquitoes Research Unit [GCMRU] project has been ill conceived and is of no utility whatsoever to India. It does, however, have a vital and direct bearing on biological warfare or is likely that the ultimate and only beneficiary of the GLMO experiment is the US machine.

And then, quite by accident, I discovered a slim volume, Raising Hackles, edited by Dinesh C Sharma published in April 2020. The book celebrates Jayaraman as a pioneering science journalist rather than documenting his actual investigation. But it is a valuable contribution nonetheless.

The Public Accounts Committee report from 1975 is too long to reproduce but the first section in the summary brings out the extent of the involvement of scientists and scientific institutions involved in this diabolical project:

7.1.1. The examination by the Committee of some of the research projects in the country conducted in collaboration with foreign organisations raise a number of interesting questions.

The Committee find that the Genetic Control of Mosquitoes Unit Project, the bird migration and arbovirus studies at the Bombay Natural History Society, the Ultra Low Volume Spray experiments for Urban malaria control at Jodhpur, the Pantnagar Microbial Pesticides Project and some of the research projects undertaken in West Bengal and Nargwal in collaboration with the John Hopkins University establish beyond doubt a definite pattern.

This is that agencies of foreign governments, in some cases explicitly military agencies of those governments (as in the case of the collaboration between the Bombay Natural History Society and the Migratory Animal Pathological Survey MAPS of the United States Armed Forces Institute of Pathology have been conducting basic research through Indian scientists and Indian scientific organisations.

Even in cases where such research is carried out in collaboration with philanthropic civilian organisations from abroad, the Committee find that some of these civilian organisations also have active liaison and communication at several levels with military agencies. No doubt, some of these research programmes have been shown as developmental or basic research.

These projects, however, have been closely concerned with the collection of vital viral, epidemiological or ecological data, which are well capable of being used against the security of the country and that of our neighbouring countries.

The utility of some of these projects to India, especially the Genetic Control of Mosquitoes Unit project, seems to be only doubtful or potential, whereas the primary data obtained from these projects are likely to be of vital importance to foreign governments interested in developing techniques of chemical, biological, bacteriological, herbicdal and anti-subversive warfare.

There is a paragraph on the experiment being carried out in Delhi:

7.1.20. The selection of Delhi for field studies on Culex Fatigans is also shrouded in mystery. The Committee finds from the comments of the then Director, National Institute of Communicable Diseases, furnished in 1968, on the WHO proposal of the GCMU project that the Director had observed that the criteria for the selection of Delhi area are not known.

Reading about the coronavirus conspiracy theories reminded me of the mosquito experiment. At this time, those who believe in conspiracy theories turn to quacks and others become gullible victims of conmen offering ancient cures.

Many scientists and scientific institutions are compromised by politics of profits. We must continuously expose these vested interests without giving up on the gains of modern science and what it has to offer by way of cures and containment of coronavirus and indeed many other diseases.

It is a battle between politics for profits and politics for the people; not a battle between science and religion.

Original post:

Stranger than fiction: Did the CIA conduct secret mosquito experiments in India in the 1970s? - Scroll.in

1099: Godfrey of Bouillon is elected the first Defender of the Holy Sepulchre of The Kingdom of Jerusalem during the First Crusade.

1298: The English defeat the Scots at the Battle of Falkirk.

1461: Charles VII or France dies aged 58.

1484: A 500-man raiding party led by Alexander Stewart, Duke of Albany and James Douglas, 9th Earl of Douglas are defeated by Scots forces loyal to Albanys brother James III of Scotland at the Battle of Lochmaben Fair.

1515: The First Congress of Vienna settles issues between Poland and Holy Roman Empire.

1648: 10,000 Jews of Polannoe are murdered in the Chmielnick Massacre during the Khmelnytsky Uprising between Poland and Cossacks.

1676: Pope Clement X dies aged 86.

1691: The English/Dutch army beats France at Aghrim.

1739: The Ottoman Empire defeats Austria at Crocyka (Krotzka) in Serbia then successfully lays siege to Belgrade.

1793: Alexander Mackenzie reaches the Pacific Ocean, becoming the first Euro-American to complete a transcontinental crossing of Canada.

1812: The Duke of Wellington defeats the French at The Battle of Salamanca, Spain.

1832: Napoleon II of France dies from tuberculosis aged 20.

1901: Serbia resumes diplomatic relations with Montenegro.

1912: In the face of ever-increasing German naval power, the British Admiralty decides to recall British warships from the Mediterranean and base them in the North Sea. On the same day, the Summer Olympic Games in Stockholm close.

1917: The British bomb German lines at Ypres.

1923: Henri Pelissier of France wins the Tour de France.

1933: Wiley Post completes the first solo flight round the world in 7days 19hrs.

1934: Gangster John Dillinger is mortally wounded by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theatre in Chicago.

1942: 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto are sent to Treblinka Extermination Camp.

1943: US forces led by General George Patton liberate Palermo, Sicily.

1946: Militant Zionist organisation Irgun bombs the British administrative headquarters for Palestine in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people of various nationalities.

1950: King Leopold returns to Belgium after 6 years in exile.

1951: General Francisco Craveiro Lopes is appointed President of Portugal.

1959: Benjamin Brittens Missa Brevis in D premieres.

1960: Cuba nationalises all US-owned sugar factories.

1962: The first US Venus probe, Mariner 1, explodes at lift-off. On the same day, Gary Player wins the PGA Championship.

1963: Sonny Liston KOs Floyd Patterson in Round 1 for the heavyweight boxing title.

1965: Sir Alec Douglas-Home resigns as leader of the Conservative Party. On the same day, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Bill Wyman are each fined 5 at East Ham Magistrates Court after being found guilty of insulting behaviour at a Romford Road service station. The three had all urinated against a wall after the attendant had refused them the use of the toilet.

Singes chart:

1969: Singer Aretha Franklin was arrested for causing a disturbance in a Detroit parking lot. After posting $50 bail, she ran down a road sign while leaving the police station.

1971: John Lennon and Yoko Ono spent the second day filming the Imagine promotional film at their home in Tittenhurst Park Ascot. Todays footage included the morning walk on the grounds though the mist and Lennon singing in the white room on his white piano. On the same day, the Sudanese military stages a counter-coup under premier Numeiry.

1972: The Soviet Venera 8 makes a soft landing on Venus. On the same day, two Catholics are abducted, beaten and shot dead in a Loyalist area of Belfast. Also, Eddy Merckx of Belgium wins his fourth consecutive Tour de France.

1977: The Chinese Communist Party restores Deng Xiaoping to the offices of Vice Premier of the State Council, Vice-Chairman of the Central Committee, Vice-Chairman of the Military Commission and Chief of the General Staff of the Peoples Liberation Army.

1979: Bernard Hinault of France wins the Tour de France.

Album chart:

1981: Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca is sentenced in a Rome court to life imprisonment for the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in May.

1983: Dick Smith makes the first solo helicopter flight around the world. On the same day, Polish Prime Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski lifts martial law after 19 months.

1984: Seve Ballesteros wins the British Open at St Andrews.

1987: Palestinian cartoonist Naji Salim al-Ali is shot in the face and critically wounded in Chelsea. On the same day, Said Aouita of Morocco sets the 5000m record (12:58.39) in Rome.

1988: 500 US scientists pledge to boycott Pentagon germ-warfare research.

1990: Nick Faldo wins the British Open for the second time at St Andrews. On the same day, Greg LeMond of the US wins the Tour de France.

1991: Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer confesses to killing 17 men in the US in 1978. On the same day, British Prime Minister John Major launches a citizens charter to improve public services.

1992: Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar escapes prison.

1994: A military coup in Gambia President Dawda Jawara flees. On the same day, O J Simpson pleads not guilty to the murder of his ex wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman in LA.

1995: Death of England Bodyline fast bowler Harold Larwood, aged 90.

2002: Israel assassinates Salah Shahade, the Commander-in-Chief of Hamass military arm, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, along with 14 civilians.

2003: Saddam Husseins sons Uday and Qusay are killed by US troops in a gun battle in northern Iraq.

2004: French singer and guitarist Sacha Distel died aged 71 after a long battle with deteriorating health. On the same day, singer, songwriter and producer Arthur Crier of The Chimes died of heart failure.

2005: Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, is shot by police on a train at Stockwell Tube Station after he was mistakenly assumed to be a terrorist. On the same day, singer with The Chi-lites, Eugene Record died of cancer.

2007: Ja Rule and Lil Wayne were arrested separately after a concert in Manhattan on charges of carrying illegal firearms.On the same day, Irishman Pdraig Harrington beats Sergio Garca of Spain to win the British Open at Carnoustie.

2008: Death of Golden Girls actress Estelle Getty aged 84.

2011: Norway suffers twin terror attacks, the first a bomb blast targeting government buildings in central Oslo, followed by a massacre at a youth camp on the island of Utya.

2012: Pranab Mukherjee is elected President of India. On the same day, Bradley Wiggins of Britain wins the Tour de France.

2014 : The EU claims that Israel has the right to defend itself, but describes civilian casualties in Gaza as unacceptable.

2016: A man shoots and kills nine people at the Olympia shopping mall in Munich, before killing himself.

2019: French submarine Minerve is rediscovered off the coast of Toulon, France, after disappearing in 1968 with the loss of 52 crew. On the same day, singer, songwriter and keyboardist Art Neville of The Meters and The Neville Brothers died aged 81.

BIRTHDAYS: Louise Fletcher, actress, 86; Terence Stamp, actor, 82; George Clinton, singer-songwriter/producer, 79; Rick Davies, keyboardist, singer-songwriter (Supertramp) 76; Danny Glover, actor, 74; Don Henley, drummer, singer-songwriter (The Eagles) 73; Lasse Viren, Finish Olympic champion, 71; Alan Menken, Disney composer, 71; Al di Meola, jazz guitarist, 66; Willem Dafoe, actor, 65; Mick Pointer, drummer (Marillion) 64; Keith Sweat, singer-songwriter, 59; Steve Albini, recording engineer/musician, 58; Emily Sailers, singer, (The Indigo Girls) 57; William Calhoun, drummer (Living Colour) 56; Bonnie Langford, actress, 56; John Leguizamo, actor, 56; David Spade, comedian, 56; Pat Badger, bassist (Extreme) 53; Rhys Ifans (Evans), actor, 53; Charlotte Gainsbourg, actress, 49; Rufus Wainwright, singer-songwriter, 47; Dirk Kuyt, former footballer, 40; Selena Gomez, singer/actress, 28; Prince George of Cambridge, 7.

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It happened today - this day in history - July 22 - Yellow Advertiser

NO Time To Die marks the 25th James Bond film in the franchise.

We have put together the comprehensive chronological list of Bond movies so you know what order to binge-watch them in. Why not? You only live twice.

26

26

Dr. No is the first-ever Bond movie, based on the Ian Fleming book of the same name.

It introduces Sean Connery in the iconic role.

James Bondis sent toJamaicato investigate the disappearance of a fellow British agent. He finds the underground base ofDr No, who is plotting to disrupt an American space launch with a radio beam weapon.

26

Seeking revenge againstJames Bondfor defeating their agentDr. No,international criminal organisationSPECTREassigns Irish assassin Donald "Red" Grant to kill him.

The sequel had a much larger budget than Dr No, which can be seen in its array of exotic filming locations.

26

Goldfinger is arguably the most iconic Bond theme song, sung by the legend Shirley Bassey.

After destroying adrug laboratoryinLatin America,James Bond travels toMiami for a vacation. He receives instructions from Mto observe bullion dealerAuric Goldfinger and his manservant Oddball.

26

James must save the world from the one-eyed evil mastermind Emilio Largo.

The terrorist group SPECTRE hijacks two warheads from a NATO plane and threatens widespread nuclear destruction to extort 100 million pounds.

26

James Bond is sent to investigate the hijacked NASA spacecraft, Jupiter 16.

The Americans think that the Russians are involved in the hijacking, but the British believe that the Japanese are somehow behind it.

26

Bond, now played by George Lazenby, and Tracy Di Vicenzo team up to take down SPECTRE in the Swiss Alps.

Blofeld is putting together a germ warfare plot that could kill millions.

26

Sean Connery reprised his role as James Bond after refusing to star in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

James Bond infiltrates a Las Vegas diamond-smuggling ring in a bid to foil a plot to target Washington with a laser in space.

26

Roger Moore takes on the role as agent 007 for Live and Let Die.

Bond investigates the murders of three fellow agents.

James has a bounty put on him and has to fight off many trained assassins as he closes in on powerful Kananga, who is making his fortune selling heroine.

26

Bond searches for a stolen invention that can turn the sun's heat into a destructive weapon.

He crosses paths with hitman Francisco Scaramanga whose weapon of choice is (you guessed it) a golden gun.

26

Bond unites with sexy Russian agent Anya Amasova to defeat shipping magnate Karl Stromberg and his right-hand man Jaws, who are threatening to destroy New York City with nuclear weapons.

26

The eleventh Bond instalment takes the agent to Venice, Rio De Janeiro and outer space.

When Bond investigates the hijacking of an American space shuttle, he soon comes up against Hugo Drax, an industrialist who plots to destroy all human lif on earth.

26

James Bond is sent to recover a strategic communications device before it finds its way into the hands of the Russians. Roger Moore on set with Carole Bouquet

The secret device that controls Britain's Polaris submarines goes missing after the spy ship carrying it sinks.

26

James Bond is assigned to solve the murder of agent 009, killed in East Germany clutching a fake Faberg egg.

The trail leads to India, where an enigmatic woman operates a smuggling ring under the cover of a travelling circus.

26

After recovering a microchip from the body of a deceased colleague in Russia, James Bond discovers that the technology has the potential to kill.

Investigating further, Bond is led to Max Zorin, the head of Zorin Industries and his bodyguard May Day.

26

Timothy Dalton takes on the iconic role in The Living Daylights

James Bond helps KGB officer Georgi Koskov defect from Russia.

During his debriefing, Koskov reveals that a policy of assassinating defectors has been instated. As Bond explores this threat, a counterplot surfaces, involving a shady American arms dealer.

26

James Bond disobeys his orders and goes on a mission of revenge when his best friend's wife is killed by a drug baron.

A CIA pilot flies him to Sanchez's South American headquarters where disguised as a hitman, Bond is hired by the villainous drug dealer.

26

GoldenEye is Pierce Brosnan's first Bond movie.

James Bond must defeat a former ally-turned-enemy Alec Trevelyan AKA Agent 006 when a powerful satellite system falls into his hands.

26

Media mogul Elliot Carver wants his news empire to reach every country on the globe, but the Chinese government will not allow him to broadcast there.

Carver doesn't take no for an answer and plans to use his media empire to fuel flames of war between the Western world and China.

26

Bond must race to defuse an international power struggle with the world's oil supply hanging in the balance, with the help of nuclear weapons expert Dr. Christmas Jones.

He must battle Renard, who has a bullet lodged in his brain rendering him unable to feel pain.

26

James Bond is captured by North Korean agents. Once he's finally released, he is convinced that someone in his own agency betrayed him. Bond travels to Cuba, hot on the heels of Zao, the agent who put Bond behind bars.

Meanwhile, he uncovers a scheme concocted by Zao and British millionaire Graves, involving a highly destructive laser.

26

James Bond heads to Madagascar, where he uncovers a link to Le Chiffre, a man who finances terrorist organizations.

Learning that Le Chiffre plans to raise money in a high-stakes poker game, MI6 sends Bond to play against him.

26

Following the death of Vesper Lynd, James Bond makes his next mission personal. The hunt for those who blackmailed his lover leads him to ruthless businessman Dominic Greene, a key player in the organization which coerced Vesper.

Bond learns that Greene is plotting to gain total control of a vital natural resource.

26

Undercover agents around the world are exposed, and MI6 is attacked, forcing M to relocate the agency. With MI6 now compromised inside and out, M can only trust Bond, whose previous mission had gone horribly wrong.

Bond follows a trail to Silva, a man from M's past who wants to settle an old score.

26

James Bond travels to Mexico City and Rome. After infiltrating a secret meeting, 007 uncovers the existence of the sinister organisation SPECTRE.

As Bond ventures toward the heart of SPECTRE, he discovers a chilling connection between himself and his enemy.

THE BOND FILESJames Bond actors in order from Sean Connery to Daniel Craig

TOP TEN10 best Daniel Craig movies - from James Bond: Casino Royale to Knives Out

THE NAME'S BONDNew Bond film No Time To Die - UK release date, cast, trailer and plot

BOND TO BEHere's which handsome actors are tipped to be the next James Bond

LICENCE TO CHILLRelease of new Bond film No Time To Die to be delayed again due to Covid

26

No Time To Die comes out later this year.

The plot summary reads: "Recruited to rescue a kidnapped scientist, globe-trotting spy James Bond finds himself hot on the trail of a mysterious villain, who's armed with a dangerous new technology."

Read more here:

James Bond movies in order of release from Dr. No to No Time To Die - The Sun

There is something about scouring classified documents for long-hidden military secrets that attracts a certain type of obsessive. Nicholson Baker, who once wrote a 147-page essay tracking an archaic use of the word lumber through centuries of Anglophone literature, is that type. He somersaulted onto the literary scene in 1988 with The Mezzanine, a heavily footnoted novel about an office workers uneventful lunch hour. Bakers learned notes, down-the-rabbit-hole digressions, and verbal flash have invited comparisons with the virtuoso meanderings of David Foster Wallace, though Baker comes off as gentler, less tormented by his demons, and, frankly, nicer.

In the late 1990s, Bakers career took an unexpected turn when he got caught up in the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. The pair had exchanged books as gifts: The president had given his young intern Walt Whitmans Leaves of Grass, and shed given him Bakers Vox, an experimental novel in the form of a phone-sex conversation (one character reports seeing the great seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as she climaxes). Both choices were telling. Clinton offered an erotic but classroom-safeand thus technically aboveboardcollection in which one of the most famous poems is about loving a president. Lewinsky, less inhibited and less of a narcissist, tossed back a fresh bouquet of surreal horniness.

Baker has not stopped writing weird sex novels. But he has also turned to more overtly political investigations with impressive and admirable zeal. His powerfully argued Double Fold (2001) took libraries to task for needlessly throwing out books. In Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids (2016), he offered a painful account of Maines public school system, where he worked as a substitute teacher. In Human Smoke (2008), his history of World War II, writing as a pacifist, he excoriated the Allied leaders for their moral blindness.

Soon after Human Smoke, Baker turned to the Korean War, in which the United States faced persistent accusations of having used biological weapons. Baker researched the topic for nearly 10 years without reaching conclusions as firm as he would have liked. That is in large part because whenever he asked for the relevant documents from the government under the Freedom of Information Act, he received nothing. Really, nothing. Years went by, presidents came and went, and he continued to wait. Some requests were refused, others idled in bureaucratic limbo. On occasion, documents arrived but were slathered in redactionsa devils checkerboard of blackouts.

The Freedom of Information Act requires federal agencies to respond to requests within 20 business days or, if multiple agencies must be consulted, with all practicable speed. Yet there is no speed, Baker finds during his researches. There is, on the contrary, a deliberate Pleistocenian ponderousness. Baker waited seven years for one set of documents without receiving them. Five federal agencies have requests that have been pending for more than a decade, and the National Archives has one thats more than 25 years old. The issue isnt that we dont know what the government is currently doing. Its that we dont know what it has done, and we may never know.

The mists of secrecy swirl particularly thickly around potentially embarrassing topics, such as the use of biological weapons. This has made the question of germ warfare in Korea nearly impossible to answer satisfactorily. Its an intellectual briar patch in which well-intentioned scholars have lacerated and ensnared themselves for decades without reaching a consensus. Nevertheless, there are things we can see through the dark fog of redaction.

To start, we know that waging biological war was not unthinkable for the U.S. military in the years following World War II. Five days after the Korean War started, a committee charged with studying unconventional weapons issued a set of emphatic recommendations, known as the Stevenson Report. The United States must not arbitrarily deny itself the use of biological weapons or use them only in retaliation, the report stated. It should prepare to wage biological warfare offensively. This view was championed by General Jimmy Doolittle, famed for having bombed Tokyo in 1942. In my estimation, we have just one moral obligation, he told his fellow officers at an interservice symposium. And that moral obligation is for us to develop at the earliest possible moment that agent which will kill enemy personnel most quickly and most cheaply.

Not everyone agreed with him, but the Pentagon nevertheless backed a crash program, spending nearly $350 million on biological warfare development during the Korean War. Scientists were put to work weaponizing diseases, from familiar scourges like plague to epidemiological deep cuts like coccidioidomycosis, a fungal infection of the lungs. At no point while fighting in Korea did the military acquire the ability to wage all-out germ war with dedicated units of trained biological weapons handlers and mass-produced stockpiles of tested weapons. It could make small, experimental attacks, though.

Original post:

The Great Germ War Cover-Up - The New Republic

War of the Worlds, arguably the first great alien invasion novel, has spawned dozens of adaptations, including musicals, for stage, screen and TV.

Most famously, Orson Welles 1938 adaptation for the CBS radio series Mercury Theatre on the Air was so realistic, accounts at the time reported American radio listeners running into the streets.

The latest adaptation of the famous novel, an eight-part series from Fox/Canal Plus, premiered in Australia on SBS last week.

But while this tale of marauding Martians may be familiar, less well-known is the fact that the book and the radio play both have Australian antecedents.

Its a dubious honour, but HG Wells 1898 piece of pioneering science fiction was inspired by British colonial treatment of Indigenous Tasmanians.

According to biographer Michael Foot in H.G. The History of Mr Wells (1995), it started with a conversation between the socialist novelist and his brother Frank: what would an alien invasion feel like? A terrifying disaster, they concluded not unlike how Tasmanians must have felt when their island was invaded.

The island doesnt feature in the latest adaptation this series transports the drama from late Victorian London to a 21st century European-wide setting but an alien invasion that savagely and rapidly wipes out most of the worlds population is at its heart, as it was of the original novel.

Wells opening chapter spells out the parallels: dont judge the Martians too harshly he says theyre no more ruthless than our own species. Lets consider the Indigenous Tasmanians, he continues, who were swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years.

And much like in Wells original, the aggression of the alien invaders is to be judged against humankinds own inhumanity our ability to render people as other, to dominate, control and destroy them.

Any idea why they want to kill us? asks one of the TV characters, as they flee for their lives. Maybe for the same reasons we kill each other, responds his companion.

The brutalities of British colonial rule were well known in Britain, including those that occurred in Tasmania in the 1820s and 30s. The Black Line, for example, was a military and civilian offensive in 1832 aimed at driving remaining Aboriginal people onto the Tasman Peninsula in the islands southeast and confine them there. Many historians see the punitive actions of settlers as genocide.

The Australian connection with War of the Worlds albeit tangentially continued 40 years later, with Orson Welles 1938 radio adaptation. He was, probably unwittingly, following in the footsteps of a similar Australian radio prank, 11 years earlier.

On 30 June 1927, Adelaide radio station 5CL interrupted a seemingly genuine music program with the sound of bombs exploding, a singer screaming and a breathless announcement that the port of Adelaide was under attack.

Like Welless broadcast, the spoof caused urgent calls to and from the police and panic among listeners. The play, entitled The Imaginary Invasion was reported in the New York Times, which noted that many women and children became hysterical and even men were alarmed.

Its not known if Welles knew of this hoax, although he was familiar with a similar BBC radio ruse from 1926, courtesy of Catholic priest and broadcaster Ronald Knox, which interrupted a program on 18th century literature to claim that Big Ben had been toppled by trench mortars and the Savoy Hotel had been torched.

And finally, the much quoted claim that HG Wells wrote the first alien invasion sci-fi novel? In 1892, six years before War of the Worlds, an Anglican clergymen from Melbourne, Robert Potter, got there first with The Germ Growers, a tale of aliens secretly arriving on earth with the aim of destroying humanity through germ warfare. Fiction can be frighteningly realistic sometimes.

War of the Worlds is showing now on SBS On Demand

More here:

War of the Worlds: the pioneering work of science fiction inspired by Australian brutality - The Guardian

Claim

The 2005/2006 film V for Vendetta was set in the year 2020, and its premise was the use of a virus to control populations.

Reporting

On June 21 2020, the Facebook page Cosmic Enlightenment shared the following meme, which claimed that the 2005 filmV for Vendetta was about the use of a virus to control populations and that it was set in the year 2020:

Alongside a still image of a character in the film, text read:

DID YOU KNOW?

A 2005 film titled V for Vendetta is about a totalitarian dictatorship that gains its power by creating a society of fear due to an alleged virus spreading throughout the world. In the film the media pushes fear-based propaganda on the television screen of every household and on the city streets. The authoritarian dictator promises security but not freedom. The constant theme of this is for your safety is repeated throughout the film. Most importantly the film ends with society waking up and the corrupt, fascist regime is dismantled. What year is the film set? 2020

The claim aboutV for Vendettas premise and setting in the year 2020 strongly resembled another, earlier coronavirus prediction rumor that the filmAkira was also prescient about the year 2020:

Did Akira Predict a 2020 Coronavirus Outbreak?

Although the film was in limited release in December 2005,it wasnt released to the United States until March 2006.

A March 2006 review written by Roger Ebert mentions the year 2020 at the start:

It is the year 2020. A virus runs wild in the world, most Americans are dead, and Britain is ruled by a fascist dictator who promises security but not freedom. One man stands against him, the man named V, who moves through London like a wraith despite the desperate efforts of the police. He wears a mask showing the face of Guy Fawkes, who in 1605 tried to blow up the houses of Parliament. On Nov. 5, the eve of Guy Fawkes Day, British schoolchildren for centuries have started bonfires to burn Fawkes in effigy. On this eve in 2020, V saves a young TV reporter named Evey from rape at the hands of the police, forces her to join him, and makes a busy night of it by blowing up the Old Bailey courtrooms.

Of the films basis, Ebert added:

This story was first told as a graphic novel written by Alan Moore and published in 1982 and 1983. Its hero plays altogether differently now, and yet, given the nature of the regime. is he a terrorist or a freedom fighter? Britain is ruled by a man named Sutler, who gives orders to his underlings from a wall-sized TV screen and seems the personification of Big Brother.

A Google search returneddisparate answers about the films chronological setting:

Listicles about the film often didnt mention a specific year for its setting before the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, often vaguely referencinga dystopian future.

Another simple Google search returned a brief synopsis above links to other plot summaries forV for Vendetta, where the virus element isnt emphasized at all:

Following world war, London is a police state occupied by a fascist government, and a vigilante known only as V (Hugo Weaving) uses terrorist tactics to fight the oppressors of the world in which he now lives. When V saves a young woman named Evey (Natalie Portman) from the secret police, he discovers an ally in his fight against Englands oppressors.

In June 2020, Screenrant revisited the plot of the film version ofV for Vendetta, framing it in terms of all that had transpired since 2005:

When the coronavirus pandemic became a worldwide panic, audiences turned to Contagion. During the most recent Black Lives Matter protests, bookshops reported record sales of works by Black authors (while, unfortunately, Netflix noted a sudden uptick in viewer numbers for The Help). Now, as protests continue across America and worldwide in opposition to police brutality against Black citizens and the scourge of systemic racism, it shouldnt surprise us that Netflix has been hyping V For Vendetta.

[]

Part of what keeps the fascistic government of V For Vendettas 1980s Britain in power is a pandemic. A disease known as St. Marys Virus has ravaged Europe and killed over 100,000 people by the time the film starts. It is later revealed that the virus was an act of biological warfare by Creedy, the leader of the ruling Norsefire Party, which was then blamed on a terrorist group. The result of this massacre and subsequent fearmongering was an overwhelming majority in Parliament for Norsefire. Its not exactly difficult to see why a dystopian thriller featuring a pandemic would prove so enticing right now. Its partly why audiences turned in droves to Steven Soderberghs Contagion after the coronavirus became a worldwide concern.

However, that assessment drew from concerns during the timeV for Vendetta was originally written as a graphic novel in the 1980s, and again at the time the adaptation appeared (on the heels of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq):

The key difference, of course, is that Contagion takes a relatively realistic direction in showing how a devastating pandemic would likely originate and unfold worldwide, whereas V For Vendettas pandemic is an act of biological warfare. The latter taps into political concerns that were common in both the late-1980s, when the graphic novel was written, and the mid-2000s, when the movie was made. During the 80s, there was a consistent fear that the Soviet Union would utilize germ warfare against America as part of the ongoing Cold War. The Bush administrations case for invading Iraq in the 2000s rested partly on the assertion that the country had never fully dismantled their biological arsenal, despite the Iraqis own claims that they had long abandoned this project. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has, as of the writing of this piece, claimed more than 456,000 deaths worldwide, a number that greatly eclipses that of V For Vendettas virus.

Again, that analysis existed through the retrospective lens of authorship in mid-2020, during an active pandemic. By contrast, a 2018 editorial aboutV for Vendettas relevance in that year only uses the word virus once and not in a literal manner referencing the actual virus in the film:

V for Vendetta is not merely a cautionary tale for our countrys political morass or trajectory it is a retelling of events that have, in their fundamental essence, already occurred. Responding to the film a decade ago, Moore savaged the Wachowski sisters adaptation as a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. But as it turns out, the Wachowskis didnt need a CGI shot of the Lincoln Memorial exploding to make enduring commentary on the disease lurking in the heart of the American government. It has been encroaching for many decades now, festering and feeding on the worst bigotries of its citizenry, a virus of greed and inhumanity that has corrupted even the noblest intentions of our liberal democracy. Like Evey, we continue to endure each days fresh traumas, waiting in our cells for a new dawning; waiting for a time when, like Valerie, we will have our roses and apologize to no one; waiting for a day we know can only come after we decide wed rather die behind the chemical sheds than suffer one more injustice.

As is often the case in retroactive assessments of pop-culture predictions, the claim thatV for Vendetta was set in 2020 and was about a virus contained some truth, mashed up with a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking to make it look more prescient for attention and clicks. A virus was a plot element ofV for Vendetta, but the virus was not the films central focus. Moreover, a 2006 review by Roger Ebert placed the film as set in 2020, but most other pre-2020 references dont mention any year (or 2020 specifically). Although the meme wasnt completely fabricated, it was also clearly created with the benefit of hindsight which is, if youll pardon the dad joke, 2020.

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Is the 2005 Film 'V for Vendetta' About a Virus and Set in 2020? - Truth or Fiction