0:00 A 20-year-old lab technician in Siberia is dead and close to 200 people under quarantine after she reportedly broke a test tube of live plague bacteria. Her name is Daria Shipilova. She worked at the Anti-Plague Institute, a facility with a documented Soviet-era bioweapon lineage. She was hospitalized on September 29 and put on a ventilator and died between October 1 and October 2. President Trump was asked about this directly because we're all wondering the same thing. I hate to see them having it. It's a rough disease. You know, that's a disease we used to be able to control, but somehow those microbes have gotten stronger and smarter. They're like an army. Is this the next plague coming from some facility somewhere over the sea, somewhere in some other country? Russia's own health watchdog will not even confirm the plague. They are calling it, quote, a pneumonia of unknown etiology.
0:56 Dr. Ashish, a former White House... White House COVID response coordinator, told CNN that the story does not hold together. The early reporting from the local newspapers is that this was a file that broke, pneumonic plague, and the young person died. There are a lot of red flags here. One is she should have probably been vaccinated against it and should have started antibiotics right away, and there's no evidence that that happened or that it responded. Second, 200 people under quarantine, that is not what you would expect from a simple lab. That's not what you would expect from a simple lab. Last point that I would make that's really important here is Russia has a very extensive biological weapons program, and we don't know if this lab was involved in that program, but it is concerning given the lack of information coming from the Russian authorities.
1:45 And it is a real lack. Now, why this is interesting to me is because Christ warned his disciples that pestilence would be one of the signs marking the last days of Earth's history. Great earthquakes shall be... in diverse places, and famines, and pestilence, and fearful sights, and great signs shall there be from the heaven. This institute was part of a Soviet network built to weaponize disease, not just study it. This is according to the news, according to what's happening right now. It was also part of the feeder network for biopreparat, which was the massive biowarfare system that the old Soviet Union had. And they had routinely picked up... picked up many different strains of Yersinia pestis bacterium looking for the ones that were most likely to cause worse disease. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is choosing his words carefully. As panic mounts, Secretary of State Marco Rubio reassured Americans that there was no cause for alarm.
2:47 There's very limited travel between the U.S. and Russia, obviously. But like anything else, something like that gets out, it could quickly spread. So we're watching and monitoring it closely. I don't think it's cause for alarm, but it is cause for alarm. It's a cause for focus and a cause to just keep an eye on it, and we're doing that. Infectious disease analyst Amish told CNN that this doesn't look like a simple accident either. It's something that really lacks transparency, so it's really hard to know exactly what's going on there. I can tell you from the very first hearing that I heard about this, when people were talking about plague, the Russian response seemed very incongruent for plague. Plague is something that is easily treatable in the modern era, and this is someone who presumably would have known she was exposed to plague. But an unknown pneumonia or an unknown viral illness or an unknown illness, that can be a lot of different things, and what we need to know is clinical details. What did they test for? What tested negative? What tested positive? What is their hypothesis? Because you don't usually see countries act this way in terms of 200 people having anti-epidemic measures applied to them unless there's some reason to believe something is communicable.
3:51 And I think the Russians really need to be transparent about what's going on. This is not the first time a secretive government lab, has been at the center of the global health scare, and started with an official denial. COVID-19 was the first reported out of Wuhan, a province in China, and in late 2019, it escalated all over the world, and was told for months that there was nothing to worry about. A former British army officer who worked in the chemical and biological weapons put it plainly. We shouldn't panic, but we should be concerned because it could either be a perfectly innocent, an accident in a laboratory, or it could be something more sinister. We know that this laboratory in Siberia was part of the Bioprepare Act program, which was Russia's biological weapons program in the Cold War, and there's credible evidence that they have continued to work on biological weapons. We know Russia is using chemical weapons in Ukraine and threatens us with nuclear weapons. So I think we should be aware. The thing I think that concerns people like me is the story, if you like, about how, this lady succumbed, died in the laboratory.
5:01 Because one would assume, because it is a plague, anti-plague laboratory, that she would have been vaccinated against plague. And we know that medical countermeasures like antibiotics work very well against plague, but she died. Author Annie Jacobson, who wrote an entire book modeling the pneumonia, raised a possibility that should concern anyone watching this. The idea that this worker broke a test tube, and suddenly contracted pneumonic plague, which is inhalation plague, that does not entirely add up for somebody like me. What I would be most concerned about is that they're kind of, one idea is that they could be milling the pathogen, making it aerosolized. That gets you right into the world of biological weapons engineering. Scripture told us that nations would reach this point. Now here's the part where almost nobody is connecting to Siberia. While the world was watching, a Russian lab, companies everywhere kept cutting human staff for artificial intelligence.
6:02 And the layoffs have been hitting two ministries I personally worked for. And yes, you can see the fingerprints of artificial intelligence. Now this is coming to us from outplacement firm Challenger Gray and Christmas, and they're reporting that US-based employers, they announced about 97,000 layoffs last month. That is a 16% increase from April. The New York Times has been tracking this same curve. If companies start cutting jobs, because of AI, are we ready for the fallout? This is a chart of layoffs in the information sector, which includes a lot of tech. It also includes Hollywood and a lot of media. It's now at its highest level ever outside of the pandemic. And it may look pretty alarming, but the full story is a bit more complicated. Microsoft alone cut 4,800 jobs this year, more than 2% of its entire workforce.
6:55 Microsoft is cutting more than 2% of its entire workforce. More than 2% of its workforce, or roughly 4,800 jobs, joining other tech titans in a wave of layoffs as they shift investments to AI infrastructure. In a memo to employees, Microsoft's chief people officer said the roles being eliminated won't be replaced by AI, but are part of a broader effort to realign resources as AI changes how the company works. Graphic design, programming, writing have already been gutted. Seriously, it's almost there. Computer systems administration or other computer-related jobs that require a physical presence are not as close to being ejected, but portions of what they do already is. An economist named Jerry studied exactly why these companies keep doing this even when it hurts their own customer base. It's a warning about a possible future where AI is good enough to do a lot of our jobs. Companies would start replacing workers to cut costs, but those workers are also customers who spend money at businesses.
8:02 If every company fires a lot of people, eventually hardly anyone is left with enough money to buy anything and keep the economy going. It goes back to, yeah, that's a great question. It goes back to this idea that when you're looking at the math, when each individual CEO is looking at the cost-benefit analysis, the cost side of the equation is almost zero at this point because, for example, from your perspective, I'm laying off workers, but they weren't really spending much with me anyway. So from my perspective, individually, it makes sense to do that. And if I hold back and I don't, all the other companies are going to automate, and now I'm going to go bankrupt. I'm going to lose my workers anyway. So no matter what you do, no matter what the other companies are doing, your best strategy is to adopt as much of this technology as possible, and that's called a dominating strategy in economics. CNBC found the same pattern, is wiping out how young workers get trained at all. How in the world are young people going to get trained up to come in at a level three if they haven't done level one and level two? This is a really existential challenge for employers because they might be excited to save on labor costs today.
9:12 So why am I going to invest in training up? If the billable hours aren't there with the young lawyers, why am I going to take on extra first-year associates that I don't need in the same leanest model? Why would my competitor not just poach those young people? We need to expect that the economy is not investing to keep this expert-novice relationship alive in the world. A young channel named Edwards Economics put the danger in one sentence. The real danger is a hiring freeze on entry-level jobs, white-collar jobs. AI automates the grunt work, which means companies are shrinking their teams and cutting off the bottom rung of the corporate landscape. This is the next generation of workers. Businesses are not fully switching over, though. Remember how fast our jobs moved from working at the workplace to Zoom the moment the pandemic hit? Remember how people lost their work in those same months? Now imagine a company realizing its human staff gets sick, quarantined, or locked down, and its AI workforce can't.
10:12 It doesn't need a day of rest. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall not do any work. God built one day in seven in order to think about creation, think about Him and honor Him. A machine was never commanded to rest, and so a boardroom chasing profit will not give that day back to you on its own, especially if it can replace you with something that can make it more money. Another pandemic, real or staged, would hand those business days the jurisdiction that they are already looking for. Hey, if you believe discernment matters for things like this, we'd appreciate it if you'd help us out in continuing this mission by joining patreon.com slash strangenormal or going to orionmedia.tv slash donate. Even the smallest donation helps. Now Russia still has not told the world about what really is in the test tube.
11:06 Scripture already told us that pestilence, war, and deception would come before Christ returns. Keep your eyes on the word and keep your trust in Jesus' name. And keep watching. We'll have more for you as time moves on, I hope. Thanks for watching.