Was AI Used In Operation COVID?

One thing most people overlook with is that every ground breaking new technology since World War II has been funded by the USG, much of it by the Military, and in many cases it was developed by them before being handed off to the private sector for private use.

This is because most if not all technology is dual use so we don’t want it in the hands of adversaries militaries before we have developed military applications sufficiently. This helps ensure we stay far ahead of them.

The Internet is a prime example. It is said the military uses new technology up to 10 years before it is seen by consumers in the private sector. Some say longer.

That said, Operation COVID was so complex with so many moving parts I sometimes question if a conspiracy of this magnitude could be pulled off even by a group of very smart men . After all you would need Total Information Awareness (TIA) to monitor news and social media in real time so as to evaluate dangerous information and trends in population perceptions that could screw up the Operation and lead to revolution. This means collecting vast amounts of data and screening with AI , something Palantir does well.

With AI enhanced TIA they could adjust the messaging as needed and shutdown voices who were conveying ideas that were a problem. They did this well.

And remember, this was a Global Conspiracy so it was not just the US that needed to be considered but many different countries. The Global coordination was remarkable although different countries were allowed some room to adjust policies to fit their particular needs. That said, most adopted social distancing, masking, some degree of lockdowns and travel restrictions while restricting the use of HCQ and Ivermectin and pushing vaccination while censoring views challenging these measures

One of the most telling signs of a conspiracy was in January 2020 France restricted the sale of HCQ when it had been available OTC for over 60 years. At the time there was not a single case of COVID outside China.

Many of the mitigation measures adopted were against WHO’s own recommendations that were in place at the time and they simply turned 180 degrees on a dime. There was also an almost universal reluctance to consider that the virus was airborne and to recommend ventilation, despite Vincent Munster at RML verifying small aerosols and significant residence time in air by early 2020.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2004973

As pointed out by Toby Rogers and other’s almost every measure they adopted was detrimental

This leads me to Peter Thiel, currently hiding out in Argentina. Peter of course is a huge backer of Trump, and Palantir is a major user of AI. Trump set up the NSCAI in 2018 (National Security Commission on AI). Thiel was a huge beneficiary of Operation COVID and the NSC was responsible for the COVID policies in PanCAP adopted for COVID.

Edited excerpts from Max Chafkins book “The Contrarian”

Much of Thiel’s net worth was still tied up in Palantir, a company that was almost uniquely positioned to profit from the coronavirus and of which he held a little less than one-fifth of the equity, personally and through his investment firms.

Years earlier, [Thiel] set in motion events that made inevitable the 2014 theft of user data by Cambridge Analytica’s and Facebook’s complicity in pro-Trump misinformation during the 2016 campaign, so had he planted many of the seeds that led to the failed insurrection.

The virus was a problem for doctors, virologists, and epidemiologists to solve, but in the near term it was a data problem.

Palantir’s software, rewritten after the company’s attempt to win business in Europe, was already being used to manage some health care supply chains, but starting in early March, the company moved all its research and development employees to work on COVID-related problems, adding functions to its existing offerings that would, for instance, allow corporate clients to easily pull in government data about cases and hospitalization numbers and then incorporate that into their sales projections. For government health departments, which were all scrambling to find anything to help bolster their supply chains and modeling, the software was a natural fit and was used to distribute ventilators and personal protective equipment. The push led to more than a hundred new deals with customers in a matter of months, including dozens of public health agencies.

In early May, the Department of Health and Human Services, which had already given Palantir a contract after Thiel and Sankar had met with NIH director Francis Collins, awarded it two more contracts, worth $25 million, to design a new software system that would be used by the White House Coronavirus Task Force to track cases, hospital data, supplies of personal protective equipment, and testing sites. The deals were classified as “emergency acquisitions,” meaning they were awarded without competing bids.

Thiel had anticipated a global crisis that would bring the world economy to its knees, and he’d positioned himself to profit from that chaos, just as he’d called the financial crisis and set movement, and the social media companies’ censorship of stories linking the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter to corruption.

WHILE THE COUNTRY continued to reel, Thiel was busy cashing out. On August 25, as the country surpassed 175,000 deaths, Palantir submitted its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission—the formal document announcing its intention to go public.

The Palantir filing wasn’t just an ideological statement—it presented a portrait of a company that was capitalizing on the pandemic, and more broadly on the Trump era.

Palantir had taken in $466 million in revenue in 2016; it had generated more in just the first half of 2020. The U.S. Army accounted for $79 million of this-more than 15 percent of total revenue-and other government contracts, including the Maven deal and the company’s work with ICE and HHS services, would add tens of million more.

The S-1 showed a thicket of venture capital firms, investment vehicles, and entities connected to him in one way or another. He owned shares through multiple Rivendell funds, the name linked to his IRA, as well as through Mith-ril, Founders Fund, Clarium, PT Ventures, STS Holdings, and others.

This added up to roughly 20 percent of the company, but Thiel, who’d long been a fan of dictatorships, had arranged things to give himself far more control than even that would imply. Beyond a board of directors loyal to the founder, Palantir had created a new class of shares that would control just under 50 percent of the voting power. These shares would be held in a trust controlled by three men: Karp, Stephen Cohen, and Thiel-and at any time Thiel could choose to use some of his other shares to increase that percentage, giving him de facto control. Incredibly, they would maintain this level of control even if they sold large chunks of their stock, which Thiel was planning on doing immediately.

The stock opened at $10 a share, making Palantir worth about $20 billion. Thiel immediately began cashing out, selling shares worth more than $250 million personally, and then another $20 million or so through Founders Fund. The country might have been in crisis, and his political project was collaps-ing-but he was doing fine.

Thielverse was abuzz with anecdotes about secret uncounted votes in key swing states and about a general sense that the truth— that Joe Biden, the candidate supported by a decisive majority of Americans, had won the election—was somehow in doubt.

Eric Weinstein, a Thiel employee and Intellectual Dark Web podcaster, tweeted videos of a purported postal service whistleblower (distributed by conservative journalist and provocateur James O’Keefe, another person who had once called Thiel a patron). He warned that Trump was being “played off” by the media without due process. Blake Masters, who was preparing for another possible Senate run, with Thiel backing his campaign, tweeted darkly about the Dominion voting machines used in Arizona, picking up on a conspiracy theory alleging that the electronic voting machine manufacturer somehow changed people’s votes and claimed, offering no evidence, that dead people had voted in Milwaukee and Detroit.

These all turned out to be false.

Curtis Yarvin, the neo-reactionary intellectual and Thiel’s longtime friend, went much further. He published an essay that claimed that voters in “urban communities” had, through some mix of manipulation by organizers and actual voter fraud, stolen the election for Biden,

Yarvin suggested that Republicans execute what he called a “very legal coup” to “steal the election back” by getting Republican-controlled state legislatures to invalidate the vote, and then having Trump claim emergency powers, ignoring any interference from Congress or the judiciary and using the National Guard to enforce his orders.

Trump’s loss would cause Trumpism to thrive —as Thiel had always hoped. He predicted a restoration in 2024. “Red America’s story gets much simpler and easier to sell,” he wrote,

Amid the uncertainty and rising deaths, Palantir’s stock price started to climb thanks to a collection of new COVID-related con-tracts, including a recently announced one to help the Department of Health and Human Services track vaccines. By early January [2021], it was worth more than $40 billion.

Palantir’s market capitalization would rise as high as $68 billion.

Thiel’s ideology is not especially coherent, but to the extent there was an ideology, it was that a less democratic America, purged of its multicultural delusions and pieties, would somehow lead to economic and technological progress. A critic might call this fascistic; Thiel called it going “back to the future.”

Thiel spoke to Die Weltwoche, a Swiss newspaper whose editor Roger Köp-pel is a member of the country’s national-con-servative People’s Party. During an interview with Köppel, Thiel characterized the disease as a mental pathology rather than a physical one. “I see it as a psychological indicator that people know deep down: There is no way back to the old normal,” he said.

He continued: “COVID-19 created a shift. There used to be this feeling that the future was being held back somehow. Changes that should have taken place long ago did not come because there was resistance. Now the future is set free.”

Thiel has also contributed to a reactionary turn in our politics and society that has left the United States in a much more uncertain place than he found it in when he went into business for himself in the mid-1990s. He is a critic of big tech who has done more to increase the dominance of big tech than perhaps any living person. He is a self-proclaimed privacy advocate who founded one of the world’s largest surveillance companies. He is a champion of meritocracy and intellectual diversity who has surrounded himself with a self-proclaimed mafia of loyalists. And he is a champion of free speech who secretly killed a major U.S. media outlet. “He’s a nihilist, a really smart nihilist,” said Matt Stoller, the anti-monopoly activist and author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. “He’s entirely about power—it’s the law of the jun-gle. ‘I’m a predator and the predators win.’” That, more than anything, may be the lesson that Thiel’s followers have learned—the real meaning of “move fast and break things.”

Thiel had other contacts who were close to the Biden administration. Avril Haines, a 2020 campaign adviser and, in January, the new Director of National Intelligence, had served as a consultant for Palantir. A disclosure showed that just before joining Team Biden, she’d worked for Thiel’s defense contractor, which paid her $180,000 in fees between July 2017 and June 2020.

Thiel has surrounded himself with supporters and admirers who have protected him and enriched him. They-the PayPal Mafia, the Thielverse, and Silicon Valley itself, in all its hypocrisy and greed, and, yes, in its brilliance too-are part of his legacy.And yet it is a legacy that feels a little bit shallow.

Thiel has disseminated his reactionary ideas and made great sums of money, but he may be forever marooned in his own contrarianisman ideology that is inherently isolating, after all.

Thiel’s life has been full of important relationships, but few that seem to transcend money or power.

I cant say for sure that AI played a major role in the successful planning and execution of Operation COVID , nor can I find clear evidence that Thiel had any role in the planning of Operation COVID but its something to ponder.

End

One more thought. Perhaps AI was even used to engineer Sars-Cov-2. I was always intrigued by the idea of a consensus sequence but the problem was there were no publicly known viruses close enough to create SC2 by consensus. Ideally you would have a number of viruses 20-25% divergent from SARS (bookends) to play with. We had none (talking about entire sequence not just spike)

Between 2020-2021 we had a flurry of bookends come out, starting with RaTG13 and then the BANAL viruses from Laos. The funny thing is RaTG13 was sequenced in 2018 and perhaps leaked to Baric and the Military funded bat sampling in Laos in 2017 (Naval Medical Research Center-Asia (NMRC-A) in support of the DoD Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System (DoD-GEIS) ) . The samples came from bats located near the bat caves that the 2020 BANAL samples came from, yet they never published any coronavirus sequences. Perhaps the Military had a secret database of viruses from which to generate consensus sequences

As I pointed out in my last Baric post I found it quite interesting nobody asked Baric about the consensus sequence part of his DEFUSE proposal in the morning session. I suppose they saved this for the classified afternoon session

While people focus on Fauci they fail to consider the Military funding of Eco Health Alliance, mostly by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) dwarfed that of HHS, and CIA cutout USAID’s Predict gave them more than DoD or HHS/NIAID

Meanwhile DARPA was soliciting GOF grant requests from the top labs in the West under the name of PREEMPT. Daszak and Barics DEFUSE proposal was rejected because they did not like the idea of vaccinating bats in an uncontrolled setting (Chinese bat caves). But they did like some aspects of the proposal, no doubt Barics section which included FCS insertion and generating a consensus sequence, perhaps for a live attenuated vaccine for human soldier. This is something they could have proceeded to do w/o Baric or Daszak. Indeed one of the labs which obtained PREEMPT funding was a lab Baric worked with which you know as Rocky Mountain Labs. This is a NIAID funded lab which housed Egyptian Fruit Bats and Sars-Cov-2 infects and replicate well in these bats but don’t do as well in the Horse Shoe Bats in China that it is supposed to have come from

While there is no evidence the Military funded such research, under FASAB 56 in 2018 they can legally hide the nature of any spending due to national security concerns. This is the primary reason they have never passed an audit.

Another interesting DARPA program I have mentioned before is PROPHECY, which started up in 2009 which was the same year as USAID PREDICT, and the same year as the fake 2009 Pandemic. Callahan was a former member of DTRA and familiar with former Soviet Biolabs, including those in Ukraine. PROPHECY worked on the accelerated evolution of viruses supposedly to help create therapeutics and vaccines for viruses suspected of having pandemic potential, including those viruses that PREDICT found.

How do you accelerate the evolution of viruses?. Well, serial passaging is one way, in-vitro (lab cultures) or in-vivo (live animals including humans). Viruses that are prone to recombination events such as coronaviruses might be susceptible to accelerated evolution techniques, and perhaps AI would be useful in this regard in terms of screening many millions of recombinant sequences

Its also worth considering Fauci’s role as head of biodefense funding in conjunction with his role as head of NIAID. This job was given to him at the direction of Dick Cheney who was looking for a civilian cover for the Military’s biological weapons program which they claimed was for defensive purposes to create therapeutics and vaccines. Having Fauci as the poster boy for biodefense research helped obscure the military’s role. In return Fauci became the highest paid person in government making more than the President

Well, I am starting to ramble a bit so will end this here.