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50 years on, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ is more relevant than ever… It perfectly captures 2021’s dystopian depravity

Considered among the most controversial movies ever, Stanley Kubrick’s masterwork of sex and violence, first released in 1971, is also one of the most prescient, showcasing the performative victimhood now rife in our culture.

Fifty years ago, the Beethoven-loving Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) donned his droog uniform of all white, false eyelashes (on one eye), a bowler hat and prominent codpiece, and sang and danced into our twisted hearts with his brutally ironic – and ironically brutal – rendition of ‘Singin’ in the Rain’.

Yes, it’s been a whole five decades since ‘A Clockwork Orange’, director Stanley Kubrick’s controversial masterpiece, was unleashed upon the public, and to mark the anniversary it’s being heavily promoted again. Apparently, time flies when you’re busy doing all that old in-out in-out and ultra-violence.

Kubrick’s highly stylized, now-iconic film, which was chock full of sex, violence, and sexual violence, shocked many – even esteemed film critic Pauline Kael notoriously lambasted the film and called Kubrick a “pornographer.”

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Netflix To Launch WikiLeaks Smear Job Three Days Before Assange Court Date

Netflix will begin streaming a brazen hatchet job on Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for its American subscribers on October 24th, just three days prior to a significant court date in Assange’s fight against extradition from the UK to the United States on October 27th.

“You can stream We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks on Netflix starting Sunday, October 24, 2021, at 12 AM PT / 3 AM ET,” Netflix Schedule reports.

We Steal Secrets was a “documentary” that is now so outdated beyond its 2013 release that one of its central characters, Chelsea Manning, is referred to by a dead name throughout its entirety. Why choose this specific moment to release it?

Well it doesn’t make much sense at all, if the timing wasn’t deliberately geared toward damaging Assange’s reputation in the nation whose government is trying to extradite him for exposing its war crimes. Assange’s October court date was set way back in August and Netflix didn’t announce it had scheduled to begin streaming this film until two weeks ago.

After all, We Steal Secrets was so egregious in its spin that not only did WikiLeaks supporters like World Socialist Website and journalist Jonathan Cook pan it as a smear at the time, but WikiLeaks itself went to the trouble of publishing a line-by-line refutation of the mountains of propaganda distortion heaped on the narrative by filmmaker Alex Gibney.

“The title (‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’) is false,” WikiLeaks writes at the beginning of its response. “It directly implies that WikiLeaks steals secrets. In fact, the statement is made by former CIA/NSA director Michael Hayden in relation to the activities of US government spies, not in relation to WikiLeaks. This an irresponsible libel. Not even critics in the film say that WikiLeaks steals secrets.”

“Gibney’s latest release—We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks—is something else again,” World Socialist Website wrote in 2013. “The 130-minute feature is a political hatchet job against Julian Assange and dovetails with the media and US government campaign against the WikiLeaks web site. Whether Gibney has shifted to the right or simply revealed the fatal limitations of his liberal ‘oppositional’ views is a matter for a separate discussion. In any event, his newest work is an effort at disinformation.”

“The job of a good documentarist is to weigh the available material and then present as honest a record of what it reveals as possible. Anything less is at best polemic, if it sides with those who are silenced and weak, and at worst propaganda, if it sides with those who wield power,” critiqued Jonathan Cook at the time.

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How COVID-19 Opened the Door to a New Era in Psychedelic Medicine

From Wall Street to Hollywood, psychedelics are having a cultural moment. For those of us who grew up in the “this is your brain on drugs” era, it’s hard to let go of stigma—and the mental image of an egg sizzling on a hot pan. But as a growing number of states and cities move to decriminalize drugs, and investors flock to an emerging market for psychedelic health care, substances like psilocybin, ketamine and LSD are edging into mainstream culture—and setting the stage for a paradigm shift in modern medicine.

Within the next few years, we could see psychedelic therapies prescribed for refractory depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or used in palliative care among those facing a life-limiting illness. But first we need to more deeply understand the benefits of psychedelic treatments. Right now, we are in the perfect storm to accelerate continued study—and health care workers are on the front lines.

It’s no coincidence that psychedelics are entering the conversation at the moment we most sorely need new ideas in mental health care. The world is experiencing mass trauma from COVID-19. It’ll take years for us to truly understand the magnitude of the pandemic’s toll on our collective mental health, but on the front lines, the picture is much clearer. In a recent survey of more than 20,000 frontline medical workers, 38% reported experiencing anxiety or depression during the pandemic, and 49% suffered burnout. Another survey found nearly one-quarter of all health care workers showed signs of probable PTSD.

When the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses surveyed 6,000 of their members this year, 66% said they had considered leaving their jobs because of the pandemic. “No amount of money could convince me to stay on as a bedside ICU nurse right now,” a Seattle-area nurse wrote in a resignation note posted on Twitter. “I can’t continue to live with the toll on my body and mind. Even weekly therapy has not been enough to dilute the horrors I carry with me from this past year and a half.”

Among health care workers, the prolonged battle against COVID-19 has intensified a long smoldering problem. Facing a fragmented medical sytem with frequently misaligned incentives, health care workers have been grappling with anxiety and depression—even before COVID, the suicide rate among doctors was more than twice that of the general public. From support groups and training to apps that monitor mental health, there are a number of programs that aim to solve and treat the problems leading to clinician burnout. But most have barely scratched the surface, and the prevalence of burnout during the pandemic has led researchers to explore alternative solutions—including psychedelic therapies.

A new study at the University of Washington is evaluating the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy using psilocybin for frontline health care workers experiencing COVID-related distress. “The situations that frontline doctors and nurses are facing is unprecedented,” says Dr. Anthony Back, who’s leading the study. “The symptoms of depression, burnout and moral injury call out for research that looks at whether psychedelics can play a role in healing the healers.” The U.S. is not alone in seeking alternative therapies for the growing number of health care workers in crisis: at Vancouver Island University in Canada, the Roots to Thrive ketamine-assisted therapy program treats health care providers and first responders with PTSD, depression, anxiety and addiction.

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Transracialism: UK Teachers Union Members Allowed to Self-Identify as Black

A leading higher education trade union in Britain has drawn criticism after supporting so-called trans-racialism, in which people can self-identify as another race.

Last week, the Edinburgh branch of the University and College Union (UCU) wrote on social media to reassert its position in favour of “trans inclusion”, saying that “liberation cannot be built on exclusion”.

The post linked to a 2019 document entitled “UCU position on trans inclusion”, in which the union argued for its members to be able to self-identify as “being black, disabled, LGBT+ or women”.

A staff member at Edinburgh University, who declined to be named out of fear of drawing the ire of the union, told The Times that the issue of trans rights was being “weaponised” in order to force out academics who fail to follow the party line.

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Suspicions of a Lab-Made Virus

Most scientists think that SARS-CoV-2 underwent a natural process and evolved into a virus that could infect humans. The widely accepted theory is that, against all the odds, a bat coronavirus managed to get inside a pangolin and then get inside the exact same blood cell as a pangolin coronavirus, and then these two viruses gave rise to a brand new kind of virus that could infect humans. This is classed as zoonotic infection – this is where a virus is supposed to jump species and start being able to infect humans by acquiring specific mutations.

Over the last 20 years, there have been loads of outbreaks where a virus has jumped species and become a threat to humans – apparently, it just keeps on happening! Flu from pigs and birds…. SARS, MERS, and Ebola from bats.i But some scientists have dismissed the zoonotic theory for the origin of SARS-CoV-2; they think the bat/pangolin theory is very unlikely, for a whole bunch of reasons. These scientists are molecular biologists and geneticists who have studied the design of the virus and come to the conclusion that SARS-CoV-2 was carefully crafted in a laboratory, and that it either escaped from a lab accidentally or was released on purpose.

According to Yuri Deigin (Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research):

“If you hear anyone claim ‘we know the virus didn’t come from a lab’, don’t buy it — it may well have. Labs around the globe have been creating synthetic viruses like CoV2 for years. And no, its genome would not necessarily contain hallmarks of human manipulation: modern genetic engineering tools permit cutting and pasting genomic fragments without leaving a trace. It can be done quickly, too: it took a Swiss team less than a month to create a synthetic clone of CoV2.”

Deigin originally assumed it was bound to be a natural virus, and set out to prove the ‘conspiracy theorists’ wrong, but the more he looked, the more he started thinking they might be right, and that SARS-CoV-2 really could be a man-made virus. He says it’s “an obvious chimera” that’s based on a bat-CoV in which part of the spike (the RBM) has been replaced with the RBM from a pangolin-CoV. He also notes the unusual addition of a furin cleavage site which “significantly expands the ‘repertoire’ of the virus in terms of whose cells it can penetrate.”

This furin cleavage site is said to make the virus even more dangerous because of the way it gets processed by the body, but nobody can explain how it got there. It’s not found in similar coronaviruses so scientists can’t explain how SARS-CoV-2 came to have one. Lots of other viruses have got one, though, and the NIH came up with a solution called the pre-fusion technique, then spent several years perfecting the technique in secret tests with Moderna. In fact, all but one of the alleged outbreaks that have taken place over the last 40 years have involved a virus with a furin cleavage site. This includes HIV, influenza, MERS, Zika and Ebola; it was just SARS-CoV that didn’t have one. Moderna was secretly working with the NIH to develop vaccines for some of these viruses and this involved using viruses AND furin for testing.ii Reseachers have previously experimented with inserting a furin cleavage site into SARS-1 (e.g. in 2006 and 2008).

One of the most important reasons to study the design of the rona is that most of the changes that have aroused suspicion involve the spike protein, and it’s the spike protein that’s in the vaccines. A key feature of the spike is the RBD (receptor binding domain) because this is the bit that determines how a virus is able to infect a particular species, and the RBD of the rona is very suspicious indeed. It just doesn’t seem natural.iii It’s supposed to have evolved from a bat virus, and a pangolin virus, so it should be able to infect bats and pangolins better than it can infect humans, but in fact the SARS-CoV-2 virus is far better at infecting humans than any other species!

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