Since I began my medical studies, I read everything I could read about my profession, but also about related topics. I still do that, if only because I really enjoy reading, and to this day I haven't finished learning and reading. Along the way, to my surprise at first, I learned that many of my colleagues don't, and limit themselves to compulsory training and (sometimes) guidelines. There are several reasons for this that I will not mention here.

However, it's also difficult to keep up with the medical literature, given the sheer number of articles that appear on a daily basis. It's a considerable task to separate the wheat from the chaff of this medical literature. Reading the reports of scientific research itself - compared to reading reviews and case reports - is quite a large task, as it takes a lot of time and effort to form at least an overall assessment of the methodology and statistics used, and to be able to assess whether the research was carried out properly.

And yet that's what I'll try to do here, again. This concerns, of course, data on the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which was published online on December 10th on the website of the New England Journal of Medicine.

2020 ended with some amazing Earth Changes events, including a huge bolide that detonated above western China in late December. The largest meteor fireball event of the year, there hasn't been as spectacular an atmospheric event (caught on camera anyway) since the Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013. Additionally, there were many other meteor fireball sightings globally last month, including two seen from the US state of Idaho.

Deluges across Southeast Asia last month included nonstop downpours in Vietnam that resulted in severe flooding and killed some 280 people, with dozens more reported missing. Central Philipines is another area that has been hit by nonstop rain, and since October. Meanwhile, floodwaters in western Indonesia reached as high as 5 meters, causing widespread damage. Heavy rains and extreme flooding also hit Brazil for the second month in a row. Authorities there confirmed that at least 700 died just in Rio de Janeiro - and within one week.

Elsewhere a mammoth 700 meter-wide "quick clay slide" in Ask, Norway destroyed 30 houses, injured at least 10 people, and left 21 missing. At least 1,000 residents were evacuated from the area. This was the second such event reported this year in Norway and the largest in the area so far. The first one took place in June and ran more than 600 meters along the shore and 150 meters inland.

All this and more in our SOTT Earth Changes Summary for December 2020:

I wrote First, Do No Harm: If Primary Healthcare Remains Shut Down, Toll on Elderly Will be Worse Than COVID-19 back in March 2020. My prediction turned out to be correct. During this time, the COVID-19 pseudo-reality has made Primary Health Care almost unrecognizable.

I became determined over the last year of my practice to prioritize anything life-threatening or related to Primary Health Care, leaving bureaucracy or follow-ups related to the 'pandemic' (which is really one of people with NO symptoms, at all) as my last priority (and got a hard time from administration for doing that). It made me realize not only the damage done to our society, but also the absurdity of everything today.

Now the vaccination campaign has begun in earnest, and so has the winter flu season. After a summer and autumn of no typical COVID-19 cases, doctors are starting to see some action again. Some are coming to me with symptoms of the COVID-19 pneumonia we saw back in springtime (and earlier). I suspect that the thousands of people who have already received the experimental vaccines - approved against common sense and precautions - have something to do with this uptick. Thus, I feel compelled to write again, out of concern for the millions who are considering getting vaccinated - either because they believe the COVID-19 vaccines will protect them, or because they feel they have no choice other than to take them.

Well, we've made it to Christmas.

We don't need to tell you what a portentous year 2020 has been. After two decades tracking 'the news' and warning people that we would all one day wake up to global totalitarianism, this past year has confirmed our analyses of trends in spectacular fashion. World War 3 hysteria following Trump's assassination of a top Iranian official gave way to global panic over a tame 'novel' coronavirus and tyrannical 'lockdowns', and wrapped up at year's end with a flagrantly rigged US presidential election. Interspersed with these momentous events, the 'Powers That Be' sponsored a 'Cultural Revolution' eradicating historical and cultural monuments and symbols, then effectively sanctioned an outbreak of mass rioting in US cities over the phantasm of 'systemic racism'.

Radical Islamic Terrorism, meanwhile, was 'put back on the shelf' throughout the madness, only to be briefly reintroduced through a spate of attacks in France and Austria in October, just as curfews and a second 'lockdown' were introduced simultaneously across the West. Apparently terror of 'The Covid' was wearing off, so a 'booster shot' was administered to optimize compliance and 'immunize' the masses against critical thinking.

All of the above, in the final analysis, amounts to little more than crass weapons of mass distraction, deployed for the purpose of deflecting our attention from the near-Earth objects pinging the planet on an increasingly regular basis, the increasingly extreme weather and seismic phenomena (and likely drivers of future waves of 'climate migration'), and the 'drip-drip-disclosure' all year long about serious US government interest in the UFO phenomenon - tantamount to quasi-official acknowledgment that higher intelligence(s) are indeed meddling in human affairs 'from above and beyond'.

This time last year, we explained that the reason 'Signs of the Times' (SOTT.net) exists is because those who work in media and the information sphere generally don't notice the momentous changes that are taking place to people and planet - and to the extent that they do grok the gravitas of one or another facet of these changes, they don't realize their full significance and why it's important to reflect back to their audiences reality as it is, not as they would wish it to be.

Iran is commemorating the American (and, no doubt, Israeli-inspired) assassinations of IRGC commander General Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Popular Mobilization Committee commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis outside Baghdad Airport on January 2nd 2020. As part of their coverage, Iran's PressTV invited Sott.net editor Joe Quinn to share his thoughts on the bloody event.


As readers can infer from what Joe was saying when the discussion was ended, it seems likely to us that the 'diplomatic channel' that was open at the time between the US and Iranian governments didn't just produce agreement on the extent of Iranian 'vengeance' after the drone strike on Baghdad Airport (specifically, the Iranian missile barrage against the largest US airbase in Iraq) - the Trump administration may also have arranged with Iranian leadership before the drone strike to 'take out' Soleimani.

Such 'conspiring with the enemy', understandably, is not something that ordinary Iranians or supporters of Iranian policy in the Middle East would readily accept. But if what Joe is saying is correct - that Soleimani's enthusiasm in 'gunning for Israel' was alarming not just Israel but Iranian leaders who know what Israel is capable of - then it can be understood that motivation indeed existed within Iranian leadership for removing the general.

Perhaps, in being 'too successful for his own good', Soleimani was viewed as a domestic political threat. He was, by all accounts, de facto the second most powerful man in that country - behind Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. History is replete with stories of rising, popular military leaders becoming victims of palace intrigues as 'the status quo' seeks to maintain its position and head off 'threats to the throne'.

But short of accusing Iranian leadership of what would effectively amount to fratricide, a clue to what was probably the main motivating factor was ironically provided by Donald Trump, who stated simply at the time that he ordered the hit "to stop a war, not start one."

The day after two US drones fired missiles that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, President Trump gave a press conference where he explained his action by saying: "We took action last night to stop a war. We do not take action to start a war."

To what war was Trump referring?

Once it became clear to the Western elite that their subjects would readily accept draconian anti-Covid measures, it encouraged them to usher in a code-red lifestyle where there will be no 'return to normal' in the foreseeable future and, possibly, never.

If nothing else, nobody can say we were not warned about the madness that would descend upon leap year 2020, making it one of the worst 366 days ever recorded on the Gregorian calendar.

On October 18, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, together with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted the incredibly visionary Event 201, an exercise that simulated the outbreak of a pandemic "transmitted from bats to people that eventually becomes... transmissible from person to person."

The simulation proved to be so uncannily similar to the real thing that started just three months later - from imagining a dramatic drop in air travel and business, to breaks in the global supply chain - that Johns Hopkins eventually felt compelled to release a statement saying their exercise was not intended to be a prophecy of future events.

Many of the greatest horrors of the history of humanity owe their occurrence solely to the establishment and social enforcement of a false reality. With gratitude to the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper and his important 1970 essay "Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power" for the term and idea, we can refer to these alternative realities as ideological pseudo-realities.

Pseudo-realities, being false and unreal, will always generate tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach of their grip on power — which is their chief interest — whether social, cultural, economic, political, or (particularly) a combination of several or all of these. So important to the development and tragedies of societies are these pseudo-realities when they arise and take root that it is worth outlining their basic properties and structure so that they can be identified and properly resisted before they result in sociopolitical calamities — up to and including war, genocide, and even civilizational collapse, all of which can take many millions of lives and can ruin many millions more in the vain pursuit of a fiction whose believers are, or are made, sufficiently intolerant.

The Nature of Pseudo-realities

Pseudo-realities are, simply put, false constructions of reality. It is hopefully obvious that among the features of pseudo-realities is that they must present a plausible but deliberately wrong understanding of reality. They are cult "realities" in the sense that they are the way that members of cults experience and interpret the world — both social and material — around them. We should immediately recognize that these deliberately incorrect interpretations of reality serve two related functions. First, they are meant to mold the world to accommodate small proportions of people who suffer pathological limitations on their abilities to cope with reality as it is. Second, they are designed to replace all other analyses and motivations with power, which these essentially or functionally psychopathic individuals will contort and deform to their permanent advantage so long as their pseudo-real regime can last.

Science. Politics. Religion. Interpersonal relationships. There is no sphere of human study, thinking, belief or behavior that isn't affected in some way shape or form by what we believe to be true or false. That's what it all boils down to. And yet doing the work to understand ourselves and the world in which we live is no small task - as we are constantly being presented with policies, ideas and perspectives that present this challenge to us in increasingly, significant and meaningful ways. And made all the more important for their intensity and wide-spread ramifications.

Join us this week on MindMatters as we examine the ever-present struggle that each of us faces in mapping reality, finding the truth of things to the best of our ability, and then living and acting from that understanding. If humanity is collectively more than the sum of its parts, it is only through such a shared process that the best of all possible outcomes can be achieved. And yet this is exactly what each of us chooses to either take on, as a portion of beings residing on God's Good Earth, or not.


Running Time: 01:18:40

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The tiny country of Sweden, with a population less than half of New Delhi, is turning out to be the most important benchmark in 2020 to help us understand the true magnitude of the coronavirus pandemic and the magnitude of deaths caused by lockdowns.

Although many policy makers across the world refuse to admit it, lockdowns kill. Professors Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya summarized this in the Newsweek on 30 October 2020, that "Lockdown strategies have led to many avoidable deaths among those at high risk from COVID-19 infections, while creating enormous collateral non-COVID health damage on everyone else".

That lockdowns kill more people than COVID was also acknowledged in a 15 July 2020 report by the UK Department of Health and Social Care, Office for National Statistics, Government Actuary's Department and Home Office which noted that "when morbidity is taken into account, the estimates for the health impacts from a lockdown and lockdown induced recession are greater in terms of QALYs than the direct COVID-19 deaths".