WAKE UP, LIBERALS! American Voters Are Smarter Than You Are
By Michael Lesher | OffGuardian | November 10, 2020
Ever since Election Day, the self-righteous hate parade has been marching its way across liberal media.
Too much support for Donald Trump!
Even amid general declarations of a Biden victory, liberal angst – and snobbish posturing – darken nearly every op-ed, “news analysis,” social media post and Twitter storm in which the Right Thinkers pontificate about the election returns.
And their message is always pretty much the same: too many Americans just don’t get it. Even after months of patient lectures from Right Thinkers, assuring us all that Donald Trump is personally responsible for every American evil from slavery to the latest respiratory virus, tens of millions of the dumb clucks actually voted for him! Whatever is the world coming to?
Well, trust the liberals to have an answer ready. If substantial majorities in dozens of states across the nation still prefer The Donald to Jolly Joe, it can only mean one thing: Americans are no good.
“[T]he outsize support Trump has continued to receive exposes America’s ‘soul’ for what it is,” lamented Andre M. Perry for the Brookings Institution the morning after the election. Brittney Cooper, a professor at Rutgers University, intoned on the same day – before many of the ballots had even been counted! – that “Donald Trump is the fault of white people. His rise is a direct result of white people’s collective rejection of the progress that the Obama era signaled.” In an equally vindictive temper, the Boston Globe cited “Black voters” who found widespread support for Trump to be proof of “the country’s failure to decisively reject racist policy,” a phenomenon they found “disappointing but not surprising.”
And so it went.
Now, if you yourself are one of those liberals who celebrated the Biden campaign as a “battle for the nation’s soul” (to borrow the old plagiarist’s own saccharine phrase), and if you’ve stumbled onto this column on your way to the more flattering and insular world of the New York Times editorial page, please allow me just a few words before you go.
No, I did not vote for Donald Trump. But I did expect him to poll even more successfully than he actually did this time around. And my reasons had precious little to do with liberal virtue-signaling.
Because the real secret of Trump’s popularity isn’t any of the things liberals are moaning about from their agenda-setting cenacles. What drives the Trump phenomenon is the hypocritical refusal of those same liberals to recognize, let alone to confess, the extent of their betrayal of American working people – and their inability to hear the public’s fury even when it’s shouted at them by millions of voices at a time.
Shall I prove it?
Do you claim to revile Trump’s racism, Mr. Liberal? Then why did you insist on nominating, as the antidote to him, a man whose first great political project was to fight racial desegregation, who went out of his way to praise Strom Thurmond – Mr. “Massive Resistance” himself – for sending lots of black people to prison, and who consistently supported a program of mass incarceration aimed primarily at minorities?
Did you find Trump “divisive”? Then why did you cheer from the sidelines as your counterparts in Great Britain smeared and demonized the most stubbornly non-discriminatory politician in recent history (Jeremy Corbyn), and nod approvingly when liberal pundits applied the “racist” label to supporters of Bernie Sanders here in the U.S., simply because he happens to be a white male?
You say you hate Trump for attacking the “free press”? Well, where has the vaunted liberal establishment been throughout the persecution of Julian Assange – the worst attack on press freedom in decades? Where was that establishment’s respect for honest journalism while, for three years, it screamed its support for Russiagate, probably the silliest conspiracy theory in recent Washington history, and vilified skeptics as everything from agents of the Kremlin to closet Trumpists?
Yes, you say there are questions of “character” at stake. And you claim to be horrified at the allegations of sexual harassment Trump has collected over the years. But do you remember what happened when Tara Reade publicized similar accusations against Joe Biden? The liberal media had a field day excoriating her, questioning her motives, impugning her character; and Biden walked away unscathed, even nabbing the “proud and excited” endorsement of the feckless National Organization for Women. So much for “character.”
Trump, you add, is “authoritarian”? Maybe so. But what do you call the police state tactics unleashed by more than forty state governors – and celebrated by the Democratic Party leadership – that have included suspending legislatures, quashing civil liberties, ruling by “emergency” decrees and confining huge numbers of people in what amounts to house arrest? What have liberals done to oppose this massive attack on democracy? They’ve done nothing.
Yes, they did speak up when protesters objected to the theft of their rights: they called them right-wing lunatics and enemies of science. Why wasn’t such contempt for political dissent an example of “authoritarianism”? Could it be because Trump didn’t say it?
And wasn’t it those same liberals who proved their attachment to democracy by sabotaging the Bernie Sanders campaign – once it began to look as though he might actually emerge from the primaries as the front-runner? Did any liberals protest when Democratic Party leaders bullied each of the contenders to drop out of the race to ensure that the notably unpopular Biden would be the only available alternative to Trump? Isn’t it an “authoritarian” political structure that dictates to the voters what their choices are, instead of letting the public decide for itself?
Ah, but Trump professed too close a relationship to Russia to be fully trusted – is that it? Yet Joe Biden has boasted of his fealty to Israel – a state whose meddling in American politics makes other countries look like amateurs by comparison. And not a single establishment liberal or mainstream media outlet that I can think of accused him of disloyalty for taking such a stand.
I know, I know. In good liberal circles, one doesn’t mention such things. Joe Biden is the Democratic Party establishment’s chosen messiah to save the world from the Orange-Haired Menace. So we mustn’t even notice his incorrigible lying, his rotten political history, his obvious disdain for political dissent, his equally obvious mental decline – not even his choice of an unprincipled civil rights buster and police-violence enabler as a “progressive” running mate.
But while liberals may manage not to see the obvious, they haven’t succeeded in blinding the entire American electorate. And so, unsurprisingly, the voters are behaving more sensibly than the pundits who sanctimoniously chastise them. They have looked at the real Joe Biden, and they have had the inevitable, natural reaction.
You liberals would have done the same – if you’d been half as honest.
“Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds,” wrote Julien Benda in The Treason of the Intellectuals barely a century ago. Just as Republicans have used the 2020 campaign to smear all opponents as dangerous subversives, the Democrats have made a Trumpless White House an end that justifies any means – including media censorship, economic blackmail, and a full-throttle assault on civil liberties under the pretext of protecting the nation’s “health” – while simultaneously rejecting their own voters’ demands for Medicare for All.
And all this has been spiced with hypocrisy rank enough to have embarrassed Tartuffe himself – as the Democrats pose as the enemies of “hate” while execrating every voter who can’t swallow their bilge as either a racist, an idiot, a Nazi sympathizer or a potential mass murderer.
“I feel like leaving this country,” wrote one liberal I know on Facebook, deploring an America in which so many people could still cast ballots for The Donald.
And I want to tell him: you are mistaken, my friend. You and your fellow liberals aren’t just on the brink of leaving the country. You turned your back on its people a long time ago.
And if you don’t know that, they do.
Better awaken – and soon. Otherwise, by the time you finally start caring about the people you never bothered to think of as your equals, they may not be in any mood to listen to you.
“It Defies Logic”: Scientist Finds Telltale Signs Of Election Fraud After Analyzing Mail-In Ballot Data
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 11/09/2020
A most interesting thread popped up on Twitter Sunday from a data scientist who wishes to remain anonymous, regarding mail-in ballot data which strongly suggests fraud occurred in the wee hours of election night, when several swing states inexplicably stopped reporting vote counts while President Trump maintained a healthy lead over Joe Biden.
Using time series data ‘scraped’ from the New York Times website, the data – comparing several states (swing and non-swing) – clearly illustrates what fraud does and does not look like, and how several anomalies in swing states left ‘fingerprints of fraud’ as Biden pulled ahead of President Trump.
Presented below via @APhilosophae:
The following information is provided via an anonymous data scientist and another anonymous individual who wrote a script to scrape the national ballot counting time series data of off the @nytimes website.
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) November 9, 2020
Continued…
This is based on their proprietary “Edison” data source which would ordinarily be impossible to access for people outside the press. The CSV is available here. And the script to generate it is here. I suggest that everyone back up both of these files, bc this is an extremely important data source, and we cant risk anyone taking it down.
What we are looking at will be time series analysis and you will see that it is extremely difficult to create convincing synthetic times series data. By looking at the times series logs of the ballot counting process for the entire country, we can very easily spot fraud.
One of the first things noticed while exploring the dataset is that there seems to be an obvious pattern in the ratio of new #Biden ballots to new #Trump ballots.
As we can see on this log-log plot, for many of the counting progress updates, we see an almost constant ratio of #Biden to #Trump. It’s such a regular pattern that we can actually fit a linear regression model to it with near-perfect accuracy, barring some outliers. How could this be possible? Is this a telltale sign of fraud? Surprisingly, as it will be shown, the answer is no! This is actually expected behavior. Also, we can use this weird pattern in the ballot counting to spot fraud!
Here is the same pattern for Florida. We see this linear pattern again.
And again (Texas)
And again (South Dakota)
And again all over the country. What appears to be happening is that points on the straight line are actually mail in votes. The reason they’re so homogeneous across with respect to the ratio of #Biden vs #Trump votes is that they get randomly shuffled in the mail like a deck of cards. Since the ballots are randomly mixed together during transport, spanning areas occupied by multiple voting demographics, we can expect the ratio of mail-in #Biden ballots to mail-in #Trump ballots will remain relatively constant over time and across different reporting updates.
Lets dig a little deeper into this:
Here is a plot of the same Florida voting data, but this time it’s the ratio of #Biden to #Trump ballots, versus time. What we see is that the initial ballot reportings are very noisy and “random”.
The initial reporting represents in-person voting. These vote reports have such large variation bc in-person voting happens across different geographic areas that have different political alignments. We can see this same pattern of noisy in-person voting, followed by homogeneous mail-in reporting in almost all cases. What we see in almost all examples across the country is that the ratio of mail-in Dem to Rep ballots is very consistent across time, but with the notable drift from Dem to slightly more Rep.
This slight drift from D to R mail-ins occurs again and again, and is likely due to outlying rural areas having more R votes. These outlying areas take longer to ship their ballots to the polling centers.
Now we’re getting into the really good stuff. When we see mail-in ballot counting where there isn’t relatively stable ratios of D and R ballots that slightly drift R, we have an anomaly! Anomalies themselves are not necessarily fraud, but they can help us spot fraud more easily.
Now let’s look at some anomalies:
This is the Wisconsin vote counting history log. Again, on the Y axis we have the ratio of D to R ballots in reporting batch, and on the X axis we have reporting time. Around 4am there, there is a marked shift in the ratio of D to R mail-in ballots. Based on other posts in this thread, this should not happen. This is an anomaly, and while anomalies are not always fraud, often they may point to fraud.
Around 3am Wisconsin time, a fresh batch of 169k new absentee ballots arrived. They were supposed to stop accepting new ballots, but eh, whatever I guess.
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) November 9, 2020
By 4am the D to R ratio was all thrown out of whack. That is because these ballots were not sampled from the real Wisconsin voter population, and they were not randomized in the mail sorting system with the other ballots. They inherently have a different D to R signature than the rest of the ballots quite possibly bc additional ballots were added to the batch, either through backdating or ballot manufacturing or software tampering. This of this being kind of analogous to carbon-14 dating, but for ballot batch authenticity.
Lets look at another anomaly (Pennsylvania):
Here is Pennsylvania’s vote counting history. For the first part of the vote counting process, we see the same pattern for mail-in ballots that we’ve seen in every other state in the country, which is relatively stable D to R ratio that gradually drifts R as more ballots. But then as counting continues, the D to R ratio in mail-in ballots inexplicably begin “increasing”. Again, this should not happen, and it is observed almost nowhere else in the country, because all of the ballots are randomly shuffled in the mail system and should be homogeneous during counting. The only exceptions to this are other suspect states that also have anomalies.
Again, this is evidence of ballot backdating, manufacturing of software tampering.
Lets look at another anomaly:
In Georgia we see pretty much the same story as Pennsylvania: increasing fractions of mail-in D ballots over time even though it defies logic and we see this pattern no where else in the country.
In Michigan, we see a combination of Wisconsin strangeness, together with the GA/PA weirdness. We see both signs of contaminated ballot dumping, and ballot ratios drifting toward dems when they should not be.
Virginia:
Now in fairness, VA is the only state out of the 50 that has anomalies but has not had accusations of voter fraud, yet. I think this is the exception that proves the rule. Yet to figure out what causes this anomalous shift, but here it is so no one accuses me of holding it back.
Lets wrap this up: It appears Dems shot themselves in the foot bc making everyone do mail-in ballots actually makes it easier to catch mail-in ballot fraud. Bc all of the ballots go through the postal system, they get shuffled like a deck of cards, so we expect reported ballot return to be extremely UNIFORM in terms of D vs R ratio, but to drift slightly towards R over time bc some of those ballots travel farther. This pattern proves fraud and is a verifiable timestamp of when each fraudulent action occurred.
How the Democrats Weaponized a Pandemic to Beat Donald Trump
By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | November 9, 2020
The one question that continues to haunt political observers is ‘How was Joe Biden, 77, able to get away with such a low-energy, low-carb campaign, in what has been described as the most consequential election in U.S. history?’ Let’s be so bold as to peek into the brain of this political genius who was somehow able to upset the 5D chess grandmaster of our times, Donald J. Trump.
As the Republican incumbent was flying non-stop to multiple rallies around the country in the days leading up to Nov. 3, Biden preferred to remain hunkered down in his basement, leaving for the occasional ice cream cone, or photo-op at some airfield where he waved to imaginary crowds on a deserted runway. Judging by such lackadaisical behavior, it almost seemed that Biden knew he had nothing to worry about. And perhaps he didn’t.
Trust the pandemic
The one notable factor that has distinguished the 2020 election season from those in the past was the outbreak of coronavirus in January of this year. Now that’s not to suggest, of course, that Biden was such an evil genius that he placed an order for a biblical scourge to visit America precisely when it did. After all, only a sociopath or maybe a billionaire software developer with no medical degree would ever fantasize about the outbreak of a plague. Yet it remains doubtful that some individuals, particularly craven campaign managers and surgical mask salesmen, failed to see the short-term advantage of Covid-19 reaching America’s shores when it did. To quote the modern Machiavellian Democrat, Rahm Emanuel, one must “never let a good crisis go to waste.” And it must be said that the Democrats have played this pandemic for everything it’s worth.
Lock it down
When the coronavirus began tearing through the Heartland, Democrats, as well as Republicans, began to introduce tough measures lest a single person get infected by said virus. Few political leaders, after all, wanted to stand accused of ‘killing grandma.’ But whereas the Republican states began to ease up on their restrictions over time, giving their people some breathing room, the Democrats double-downed on the lockdowns. Keeping their economies in a straitjacket, they allowed thousands of businesses to die a slow, agonizing death, while banning or severely curtailing any and all social activities, including weddings, funerals, school attendance and church services. With breathtaking cynicism, however, exceptions were made for Black Lives Matter ‘peaceful protests,’ which had a vivious tendency for applying the final coup de grace on those very businesses that were languishing.
Here is the Wall Street Journal describing the slaughter: “Nearly two-thirds of leisure and hospitality jobs in New York and New Jersey and about half in California and Illinois disappeared between February and April compared to 43% in Florida, which was among the last states to lock down and first to reopen. Florida [Republican] Gov. Ron DeSantis also provided exemptions for lower-risk businesses including contractors, manufacturers and some retailers. Four percent of construction workers in Florida lost their jobs compared to 41% in New York, 27% in New Jersey, 17% in California and 11% in Illinois.”
Meanwhile, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan – major Democratic strongholds – inexplicably required nursing homes to admit seniors who had acquired COVID-19. On March 25, 2020, the state of New York ordered: “No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to [a nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.”
That was a very strange decision especially when there was no shortage of hospital beds – even at the peak of Covid cases. That much became clear in March when Trump dispatched the naval hospital ship USNS Comfort to New York City as part of the government’s response to the ongoing pandemic. Instead of sending the sick and elderly into nursing homes, New York Governor Cuomo now had the option to let these people recover aboard the vessel, where they would not have subjected hundreds of vulnerable residents to the disease. Instead, Cuomo told Trump in April that the medical ship was no longer needed.
So who got the heat when the U.S. death rates from Covid began to climb, predominantly from deaths among the elderly? Not Governors Cuomo, Murphy, Whitmer and Wolf, that’s for sure.
Aside from their murderous consequences, the measures put forward by the Democratic states had, and continue to have, the ‘negative’ effect of destroying much of the economic gains made during the four-year reign of the odious ‘Orange man’, thus seriously hindering his chances of reelection.
No failing with the mail-in?
But by far the greatest gift that Covid could have given to the Democratic Party was the excuse to begin mail-in voting, and just in time for the Trump-Biden clash. Here is where the Biden campaign found it indispensable to have the mainstream media and Big Tech firmly in its corner. The major social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook, assumed the responsibility (which was not, it is important to emphasize, given to them under Section 230 of the Communications Act) of flagging any person, including the President of the United States, who dared to suggest that mail-in voting was loaded with a number of pitfalls and trap doors. Even the White House has provided a list of examples.
Was it just a coincidence that the exact scenario that Trump had been warning would happen – reported mass examples of fraud connected to mail-in ballots – eventually came to light? On election night, Trump was enjoying a comfortable lead in the critical swing states of Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Then, something that has never happened before in an American election happened: those states suddenly stopped counting their votes, saying they would continue the process the next day. So what happened in the interim? Nothing good, it appears. First, there have been multiple reports of votes being delivered to counting stations throughout the night.
In one particular case, Connie Johnson, a poll watcher from Detroit, Michigan, provided her personal account over Facebook as to how she discovered that over 130,000 ballots had reportedly arrived at the city’s ballot-counting facility at 4 a.m. in the morning. According to Johnson, every single one of those ballots was cast for Joe Biden, which would seem to be a mathematical impossibility. Moreover, Republican poll watchers were denied access to the count because, as they were told, the permitted “capacity” inside of the hall been reached. Once again, Covid was to blame.
Across the country, in Philadelphia, Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Guliani held a press conference where several poll watchers revealed how they were not permitted to observe the mail-in ballots that had arrived. According to Giuliani, a similar scenario played out in all of the swing states.
Behind these possible shenanigans, it goes without saying that Joe Biden would require the full support of the mainstream media and Big Tech to pull off the greatest election heist of the century. Naturally, he got it, as the media not only refused to consider the possibility that the nationwide mail-in ballot scheme could result in making the United States resemble some Banana Republic, it quickly announced him president even before everything had been declared official.
Someday in the future, assuming Biden is lifted into the Oval Office, I suspect we will hear the same tired public confessionals from media hacks as they ask themselves on air and in print – much as they did in the disastrous aftermath of the Iraq war – how they could have failed to ask more questions not only about Biden’s questionable mental state, but about the use of mail-in ballots in the most consequential U.S. presidential election of all time.
UK Intelligence to Fight Anti-Vaccine Propaganda Spread by State Actors, British Media Reports
Anti-vaccine demonstrators in Edinburgh © Sputnik / Jason Dunn
By Tim Korso – Sputnik – 09.11.2020
A UK intelligence unit, known as the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has been authorised to conduct cyber operations to tackle the spread of anti-vaccine propaganda online, The Times reported citing an anonymous government source. According to the newspaper, the government increasingly views anti-vaxxers as a new priority because of the upcoming registration of domestically-developed vaccines against the coronavirus.
Apart from GCHQ, a secretive UK Army unit within the 77th Brigade specialising in information warfare will be taking part in the efforts “to quash rumours about misinformation” related to the COVID-19 vaccines, General Sir Nick Carter confirmed to The Times.
The newspaper’s source claims that GCHQ will be using the same toolkit it utilised to combat Daesh and its propaganda and recruitment efforts. The toolkit includes ways of taking down undesired content and conducting cyber attacks against the cyberactors behind it, for example by encrypting the perpetrators’ computer data, The Times added.
“GCHQ has been told to take out anti-vaxxers online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda”, the anonymous source claimed.
However, GCHQ will not be able to use its tools against everyone online because its authority only extends to dealing with [alleged] state cyber actors and the content created by them, the newspaper reported citing another anonymous government source.
Russia as Main target for UK Intelligence Cyber Operations?
The British newspaper claims Russia will be the GCHQ’s prime target, citing its own investigation into the country’s alleged ties to the surge of internet memes questioning the safety of the vaccine developed by Oxford University in concert with AstraZeneca. The said investigation was based on a trove of documents and images provided by an anonymous source, who claimed to be part of an alleged propaganda effort purportedly seeking to hurt the image of the British vaccine. The Times, however, admitted in its article that it could not directly link the alleged social media campaign, targeting only the UK vaccine, with the Kremlin.
According to the newspaper, the alleged campaign against the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine started after the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) that developed Sputnik V, Kirill Dmitriev, called the UK-developed medicine a “monkey vaccine” on several occasions. Dmitriev referred to the vaccine’s usage of a monkey virus as a vector to deliver the COVID-19 material needed to form immunity. He did not directly call the drug dangerous or ineffective, but noted that the use of human adenoviruses was more reliable, as their influence on the human body is better understood.
Dmitriev’s use of the term “monkey vaccine” prompted the emergence of numerous internet memes, baselessly alleging that the British drug would be turning recipients into monkey-like creatures or otherwise negatively affecting patients’ health. The head of RDIF later denounced the use of his words to besmirch the UK-developed vaccine, but defended his concerns over the possibility of its long-term side effects.
Media “Fact Checking”: President Trump “Censored” by CNBC
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, Vanessa Beeley, Max Parry, and BlackCatte | Global Research | November 08, 2020
I am not a fan of Donald Trump. But this concerted action on behalf of the corporate media to prevent the President from speaking on election results is tantamount to a de facto “Color Revolution” Made in America.
Trump is not an online “conspiracy theorist” subject to media censorship. He is the sitting president of the US.
We must understand, however, that this election is not between Trump and Biden.
Biden is a groomed politician, a trusted proxy, serving the interests of the financial establishment.
The Smoking Gun is Covid-19. Biden is committed to closing down the US economy as well as the global economy as a means to “combating the killer virus”.
The closing down of the global economy is a “crime against humanity”.
Biden is the presidential candidate of the upper echelons of the financial establishment.
Trump has not endorsed the dominant Covid narrative. He favors the reopening of the US economy. And that’s why he is now being “sidetracked” by the “Deep State”. Of course, this “sidetracking” goes back to November 2016. (It is not limited to Trump’s stance on Covid-19).
According to The Atlantic in a timely article published on November 2, 2020:
“President Donald Trump has repeatedly lied about the coronavirus pandemic and the country’s preparation for this once-in-a-generation crisis”.
Here, a collection of the biggest lies he’s told as the nation endures a public-health and economic calamity.
Below are pointed comments by three prominent authors, who present an independent viewpoint: Max Parry, Vanessa Bealey, and Catte Black
(They are not supporters of Donald Trump)
Max Parry
I am going to be crucified by many of my fellow “leftists” for saying this, but something smells incredibly fishy about these election results. How in the world can the Democrats lose several house seats, gain no ground in the senate, but manage to win the presidency?
How did Trump win Ohio again (which previously went to Obama twice) by 8 points just like he did in 2016, but lose all these other key swing states at the 11th hour? Am I really supposed to believe a candidate as poor as Biden got more votes than even Obama in his 2008 landslide?
The projection polls were again way off and Trump was massively exceeding expectations getting several million more votes than last time, but he still ends up losing? Did the media cut away in the middle of Bush’s speeches when he was stealing the 2000 election?
None of this adds up and you have partisan blinders on if you can’t see it.
Not to say the GOP doesn’t engage in voter suppression, but there is no way in a million years you will ever convince me there isn’t a coup d’etat under way right now.
Vanessa Beeley
“The world has really gone insane. Trump is still President of the US and he just got fact checked live on air.
I am not pro Trump but if you can’t see the madness heading our way, please try to inform yourself beyond a binary argument of Trump vs Biden.
Both are largely irrelevant compared to the gathering predator class storm on the horizon.
They are both part of the same theatre that is designed to plunge humanity into chaos for the foreseeable future while the powers behind the throne roll out the Great Reset road map.
#Covid_19 is a gateway to hell.”
Catte Black
Thought I was shockproof but this really shocked me – and should shock anyone with any sense of what this actually means.
Like him or hate him this man is the elected and sworn-in president of the United States – and he’s being silenced in front of our eyes by the paid and unelected employees of a privately owned propaganda outlet.
Also see the full press conference:
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, November 8, 2020
Selected Articles: Examining the Anti-Trump Protest Movement
Israel Arrests Journalist, Raids West Bank Library
Palestine Information Center – November 9, 2020
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM – Israeli occupation forces (IOF) launched a raid and arrest campaign on Sunday night and at dawn Monday in various areas of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Several Palestinians were arrested including a journalist.
In Nablus, IOF arrested the journalist and former prisoner Bushra Jamal Al-Tawil at Tiar checkpoint on the Yitzhar road on Sunday night. Tawil was taken to the Hawara camp, south of Nablus.
IOF released Tawil at the end of July 2020 after spending 8 months in the occupation prisons.
Tawil was arrested for the first time in 2011, and she was sentenced to 16 months. She spent six months because she was released in the Wafa Al-Ahrar prisoner exchange agreement in December 2011. Then, she was re-arrested again in July 2014, and she was sentenced to ten months in prison, which is the continuation of her previous detention before the prisoner exchange agreement.
The third arrest was in November 2017, and the Israeli authorities ordered her administrative detention for eight months. The last arrest was on December 10, 2019.
Tawil’s family suffered from the occupation’s targeting of them through successive arrests. Her parents were arrested several times in the past, and her father spent a total of 14 years in the occupation’s prisons. Her mother was also arrested on 08/02/2010, and was released on 01/02/2011.
In another development, IOF patrols stormed Jaffa street and the area surrounding Al-Ain refugee camp, west of Nablus.
Eyewitnesses reported that Israeli soldiers stormed a store and confiscated items from inside the store in the presence of the owner and he was detained.
In Qalqilya, the IOF soldiers fired stun grenades and teargas canisters in the area near the separation wall in Jayyus, northeast of Qalqilya.
In Tulkarem, IOF arrested Imad Fahmi Ammar, 38 years, after raiding his house in Qaffin town, north of Tulkarem, and seized his personal phone and amount of money.
IOF broke into a library in the Al-Ashqar complex in the middle of the Martyr Thabet Thabet Square in Tulkarem and searched it. Confrontations erupted between the Palestinian youths and the IOF soldiers who fired tear gas canisters, without any injuries reported.
The areas of Jalazun refugee camp and Dura al-Qara town, north of Ramallah, witnessed an incursion by IOF, which coincided with the launch of a drone over the camp and the town.
In al-Khalil, the IOF soldiers arrested the two brothers Musab and Salah Al-Zughayer after they raided their houses.
IOF arrested the ex-prisoner Muhammad Shaheen and Muayad Walid Amr from Dura, southwest of al-Khalil, after they raided and searched their homes.
Local sources stated that IOF arrested two Palestinians from Beit Ta’amer, east of Bethlehem, and seized a vehicle of one of them.
Three brothers were also arrested after IOF raided their relatives’ house in the village and searched it.
The sources pointed out that IOF arrested a young man after storming his relatives’ house in Aida camp, north of Bethlehem.
In Jerusalem, the Israeli occupation intelligence stormed the house of Silwan Club’s president, Marwan Al-Ghoul, and served him a summons for investigation on Tuesday, in Room 4 in the Al-Maskobiya center, west of the occupied city.
U.S. to be Subject to UN “Climate Conciliation Commission” if Re-Joins Paris Climate Pact
By Chris Horner | Government Accountability and Oversight
Paris Climate ‘Accord’ FOIA Case: State Dept. Releases, Withholds Parts of Memo to Sec. John Kerry Requesting Authority to Sign Paris Agreement
It appears possible that, come January, the United States will rejoin the 2015 Paris climate agreement, committing to adopt the “Green New Deal” agenda (now rebranded for political purposes as “Net Zero”). This will not be accomplished by Senate ratification, but by the ‘pen and a phone’ approach first used by President Obama to claim U.S. “ratification” of what is on its face and by its history a treaty, requiring approval instead by a two-thirds Senate vote.
A document released last week by the State Department, in Freedom of Information Act litigation by the transparency group Energy Policy Advocates, includes a reminder of one consequence of this for America, should it occur: claiming to “re-join” the Paris climate treaty will immediately subject U.S. energy policy — and thereby economic and to some extent trade policy — to a UN “climate conciliation commission”.
Already, as the United Kingdom has shown, developed nations’ courts can be expected to cite the Paris climate treaty in blocking infrastructure development. The UK’s Court of Appeal ruled earlier this year that Heathrow Airport cannot be expanded because that would violate the UK’s ‘net zero’ commitment under Paris.
Then, Canada offered a reminder how progressive politicians will raise taxes in the name of complying with Paris: In Ottawa, “The parliamentary budget officer says the federal carbon tax would have to rise over the coming years if the country is to meet emission-reduction targets under the Paris climate accord.”
Now we are reminded that the U.S. can also expect a forum for antagonistic nations to bring their complaints about U.S. policy and claims of non-compliance with Paris’s required “Net Zero” agenda for resolution.
This might be one of the reasons that avoiding a Senate vote on Paris was a key objective of the Obama administration, which stated in August 2015 before there ever was even Paris text, that it would not be a “treaty”. This was the lesson learned from the U.S. Senate’s refusal to consider the 1997 Kyoto treaty: If the Senate votes on it, its details would be debated, and defeated.
That objective of an end-run around the U.S. Constitution’s process was shared by European nations: the French climate change ambassador to the U.N. and President of the Paris COP, Laurence Tubiana and Laurent Fabius, respectively, both openly admitted.
Yet, those same countries treated Paris as a treaty for their own ratification purposes. This cavalier approach to the Constitution in the Obama years makes it easy to forget the U.S. supposedly has the more stringent system for joining international entanglements.
Instead, the Obama team showed what one Senate Foreign Relations Committee lawyer decried as a “disturbing contempt for the Senate’s constitutional rights and responsibilities” by circumventing its constitutional treaty role on Paris. Unfortunately, the institution shrunk from a constitutional fight, and all parties spoke as if calling Paris an “accord” instead carried weight — though the the Kyoto Protocol was alternately called the “Kyoto Accord” and, yes, was still a treaty.
This brings us to the newly released (in part) memo — “Request for Authority to Sign and Join the Paris Agreement, Adopted under the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change” [UNFCCC] — reaffirming that Paris is the result of “a 2011 negotiating mandate (the “Durban Platform”)”. The Durban “mandate” was to “adopt…a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force at the twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties and for it to come into effect and be implemented from 2020”.
That of course is Paris, the crushing provisions of which are found in Article 4, emission reduction promises. Art. 4.3 requires that the U.S. revisit and tighten its reduction promises every five years. That would cleverly make this the climate treaty…sorry, “accord”… to end all climate treaties. It commits the U.S. to ever greater “climate” policy restrictions, every five years, in perpetuity.
Pull this off and there will never be the threat again of facing the tyranny of the Constitution’s requirement of popular approval.
Political rhetoric aside, nothing in Paris’s terms says this provision is legally binding, but no that one over there isn’t. Instead, Paris was merely sold to and promoted by much of the press with the claim that Paris contains “a mix of legally binding and not legally binding provisions”.
As we have seen already in the UK/Heathrow Airport case, that did not last, as it was not intended to. Lawyers and courts have already begun to see to something of which Americans should be reminded, including that you can have promises of massive infrastructure spending, or you can have the Paris climate pact, but you can’t have them both.
And it won’t just be courts. Recall, first, that the Paris agreement as originally circulated contained a climate tribunal, or court. This was dropped after being noticed outside of polite circles. Nonetheless, the recently released if still heavily redacted memo reminds us that U.S. compliance with the legally binding here but maybe not over there Paris obligations is subject to the terms of that 1992 agreement, ratified by the U.S. Senate on the condition that it was and remained non-binding (again, stated nowhere in its terms).
UNFCCC declares, in Art. 14, “Settlement of Dispute”, that:
“5. … if after twelve months following notification by one Party to another that a dispute exists between them, the Parties concerned have not been able to settle their dispute through the means mentioned in paragraph 1 above, the dispute shall be submitted, at the request of any of the parties to the dispute, to conciliation.
6. A conciliation commission shall be created upon the request of one of the parties to the
dispute. The commission shall be composed of an equal number of members appointed by each party concerned and a chairman chosen jointly by the members appointed by each party. The commission shall render a recommendatory award, which the parties shall consider in good faith.”
This language governs U.S. compliance with the Paris climate “accord”. It is not open to dispute that any U.S. president who claims to “re-join” the Paris climate treaty will subject US energy policy — and thereby the U.S. economy — to a UN climate “conciliation commission”.
Paris requires, and mandates the U.S. revisit and tighten “Green New Deal”-style policies every five years. This is among the many reasons why the Paris climate agreement is a treaty, and also why it never would have been ratified. However, very soon, Americans may nonetheless be subject to its long-envisioned climate court.
Joe Biden is no empty sheet, may well return US to warmaking – former OSCE vice-president
RT | November 8, 2020
There’s a ‘good chance’ that the US will return to the policy of foreign wars under Joe Biden, which will make its reconciliation with the EU impossible, Willy Wimmer, former vice-president of the OSCE, warned.
The main reasons why the Americans voted for Donald Trump four years ago were their tiredness of constant wars waged by their country and collapsing economy and infrastructure in the US, Wimmer told RT.
Trump has kept his promise and didn’t start any new foreign conflict, but that may well change if a member of the Democratic Party is in the White House, former Vice President of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Parliamentary Assembly said.
“Joe Biden isn’t an empty white sheet – he represents the Democratic Party, who in the 1990s destroyed the Charter of the UN.”
The German political veteran recalled the US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia under Democratic President, Bill Clinton, in 1999. He also pointed out that “in the presidency of [Barack] Obama, Biden was Vice President and he was in absolute accordance with Obama’s drone wars and the wars in the Middle East, therefore there’s a good chance that Joe Biden continues in the same way as the Democratic Party did it in the 1990s and under Obama” before 2016.
“And going back to before 2016 means going back to war” for the US, Wimmer argued.
Relations between Washington and Brussels have deteriorated under Trump over his demands for the EU nations to make larger financial contributions to NATO as well as political and economic pressure on the block to stop dealing with Russia and China.
Hopes that things would improve under Biden will be dashed, “as long as the US and NATO don’t return to the Charter of the UN,” the 77-year-old, who also served as State Secretary to Germany’s Defense Minister, said.
However, he pointed out that it remains a question if the current US economy, which was heavily hit by the coronavirus, would even allow Biden to return to the aggressive policy, which the Democrats used to pursue.
Unlike German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who already congratulated Biden over beating incumbent Trump in the US presidential election, Wimmer believes that others “should be very-very careful with congratulations.”
The Democratic candidate declared himself the winner on Saturday after several major television networks projected that he was on a path to take more than 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency after four days of tense vote counts in several battleground states.
“It’s quite unusual… that the result of an election is announced by a news agency or a news channel. We’re used… in all our countries, which belong to the OSCE, that we have Election Committees, who announce results. And this hasn’t been done yet in the US,” he pointed out, describing the events surrounding the American election as “unbelievable.”
Why it is right to question the orthodox Covid-19 narrative
The authors of ‘Welcome to Covidworld’ defend their stance
By Matthew Ratcliffe and Ian James Kidd | The Critic | November 6, 2020
In a reply to our piece “Welcome to Covidworld”, Ben Bramble engages in precisely the sort of thinking that we raised concerns about. He suggests that we are mistaken in comparing harms done by lockdowns and other measures to harms caused by the virus. Instead, we ought to have weighed up the costs of lockdowns against what would have happened without them.
Bramble’s case hinges on a counterfactual claim: in the absence of lockdowns, the virus would have inflicted much more harm than it has done. The cost of not locking down would, he says, have been “mind-bogglingly great”.
What could be wrong with Bramble’s claim? First of all, his use of the term “lockdown” is insufficiently discerning. Lockdown is not a simple, straightforward policy measure that took the same form in every country. There are, for instance, important differences between early and late lockdowns. Australia and New Zealand both locked down early and suppressed the virus.
Setting aside the issue of whether or not the actions taken by these countries are morally justifiable, it remains to be seen whether or not this is a success story. If a highly effective vaccine is not forthcoming, both countries will face the painful options of cutting themselves off from the rest of the world indefinitely, having strict lockdowns whenever the virus reappears, or eventually succumbing to the virus, none of which amount to success.
However, the current UK situation is very different. Given where we are now, nobody is claiming that this second lockdown or any future UK lockdowns will be able to suppress the virus here. It is too well established for that. Rather, the stated aims have been to buy us some time until a vaccine arrives and, most recently, to ensure that the NHS is not overwhelmed. In evaluating the effectiveness and appropriateness of such policy measures, it will not do to make sweeping claims about the effectiveness of lockdowns in general. When considering interventions so extreme and destructive, we need to proceed more carefully.
Bramble simply accepts that lockdowns in general work. He does not specify exactly what it would be for a late lockdown to work, when the goal is no longer complete suppression. Presumably, the relevant criteria will include reducing hospitalizations and deaths due to Covid-19, during the lockdown and in the longer term as well. But where is the evidence that lockdowns generally have this effect? Bramble doesn’t provide any. Maybe he thinks it’s just obvious that they achieve this, but it really isn’t.
A strict lockdown in Peru is associated with one of the highest Covid-19 death tolls in the world (currently recorded as 1,047 people per 1 million of the population). Other countries that have resorted to exceptionally long and strict lockdowns, such as Argentina, have also fared badly. One could, of course, run Bramble’s counterfactual here: it would have been even worse for these countries had they not locked down. But where is the evidence for that? Indeed, what would even count as evidence?
It would be intellectually and morally unacceptable to make the pro-lockdown position unfalsifiable by always insisting on the following: (1) where cases drop after a lockdown was introduced, it must be the lockdown that achieved this; (2) where cases rise after a lockdown was introduced, it would certainly have been even worse without the lockdown; (3) if other countries, such as Sweden, adopt less extreme approaches than us and fare better or at least no worse, this must be due to other differences between the two countries – the Swedish strategy would never have worked here.
So, how do we go about evaluating the effectiveness of lockdowns? Where is the evidence that the virus ultimately causes far more deaths in the absence of extreme social restrictions? Where are those countries that followed a different course from countries like the UK (which locked down, but did not suppress the virus) and now have higher death tolls than us? By simply assuming that his counterfactual claim is true, Bramble illustrates our worry that lockdowns risk becoming an unfalsifiable article of faith. In fact, he even asserts that “the science on this is beyond question”. Is it really? If so, all the disease modelers who have made dire predictions concerning the current UK situation will be delighted to hear that their work will be forever immune from critique, even if it turns out that their models have little bearing on reality. And, in any case, none of them would endorse Bramble’s exaggerated claim that, without a lockdown, there would have been “many millions of deaths” in countries such as the UK.
In fact, much about the behaviour of this virus remains unclear, including how the infection rate is influenced by growing immunity within a population. There is no single, homogeneous entity called “the science”. Rather, there are many different and often conflicting perspectives, theories, and claims. Furthermore, this is a complicated, fast-changing situation that impacts on all aspects of human society. Relevant expertise thus encompasses a wide range of academic disciplines and areas of practice. Philosophers should not simply defer to “the experts”; they also have plenty of relevant expertise themselves.
What we do know is that lockdowns are immensely damaging in so many ways. This second UK lockdown will further disrupt the social and emotional development of our children, cause a substantial rise in severe mental health problems, force many elderly people to live out the final weeks and perhaps months of their lives in loneliness and misery, exacerbate and prolong the pain of bereavement by depriving people of interpersonal and social interactions that shape and regulate grief, destroy livelihoods and risk mass unemployment, increase regional social and economic inequalities, reduce the life-opportunities of young people while saddling them with an ever-growing mountain of debt to pay off, suspend much of what gives our lives meaning, deprive people of countless precious, irreplaceable life-moments, and cause deaths due to the numerous resulting impacts on people’s health.
However, the true extent of certain harms, such as the long-term effects of sustained lockdown measures on children’s development, may not become fully clear for some time.
Others have similarly warned that policy makers are paying insufficient attention to these growing costs. For instance, an open letter by psychologists, which appeared on 1 November, spells out the widespread and damaging psychological effects of continuing restrictions, including the harms done to children. Similarly, an article published in the British Medical Journal on 2 November raises the concern that the “collateral damage” caused by public health interventions has “yet to be considered systematically”. Others have drawn attention to the global costs of national lockdowns. For instance, the charity Oxfam has stated that, by the end of this year, over 12,000 people could be starving to death every day due the global impact of national-level responses to Covid-19.
Bramble observes that the orthodox view has in fact been subjected to critical scrutiny. But the problem is that – in the UK, at least – alternative perspectives have had little influence on the processes of recommending, making, and implementing policy decisions. And we worry that this may be partly because of blinkered and inflexible attitudes that are widely held. People are often very quick to dismiss or express moral disapproval of dissenting voices. However, those who confidently endorse lockdowns with an air of moral authority also need to acknowledge the full extent of the harms these measures have caused, are causing, and are likely to cause. Furthermore, explicit and sufficiently specific criteria should be supplied for determining the effectiveness of any proposed lockdown, accompanied by convincing evidence to show that it is very likely to achieve its intended effects.
Instead of pursuing such a path, Bramble speculates that our own concerns originate in cognitive impairments caused by our distressing experiences of lockdown. This is the kind of response that motivated our earlier account of “Covidworld”, a simplified, virus-centric reality where various norms of reason, scientific enquiry, and moral conduct have ceased to apply.
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By Thomas S. Harrington | CounterPunch | August 19, 2016
… What will almost never be talked about are the many very good reasons a person from the vast region stretching from Morrocco in the west, to Pakistan in the east, have to be very angry at, and to feel highly vengeful toward, the US, its strategic puppeteer Israel, and their slavishly loyal European compadres like France, Germany and Great Britain. … Read full article
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