Remembering the Intifada and its prisoners of freedom: “Ansar III: The Camp of Slow Death”
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | December 9, 2020
The great Palestinian popular intifada (uprising) that mobilized, organized and unified the Palestinian masses – especially inside occupied Palestine, but also in the refugee camps, in exile and in diaspora – launched in December 1987. As we recall its 33rd anniversary, we note that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians – some estimates reaching up to 600,000 – were arrested, detained and imprisoned by Israeli occupation forces during the Intifada.
There, they experienced severe torture under interrogation, harsh conditions of confinement, medical neglect and abuse, collective punishment and home demolitions targeting their families, brutal beatings and mistreatment and the widespread and systematic use of administrative detention, imprisonment without charge or trial. Inside the prisons, however, despite all forms of repression, generations of Palestinian organizers developed “revolutionary schools” of politics, literature and organizing, developing powerful young activists to return to the streets embroiled in a great popular uprising.
In a failed attempt to suppress the Intifada, the Israeli occupation launched new prison camps and detention centers to hold the thousands of Palestinians detained in mass arrests throughout occupied Palestine. The following historical booklet, published in English in 1988 by ROOTS and Friends of Palestinian Prisoners, focuses on one such prison camp: Ansar III, “a barbed wire compound in the heart of the Negev desert.” At the time of the booklet’s publication, Janet Jubran of the Friends of Palestinian Prisoners noted in her introduction, “In one year, since the Intifada began, more than 25,000 Palestinians have been arrested. At this moment, nearly every family has one or more of its members in prison.”
This powerful booklet, including documentation, testimony and facts about Ansar III and its Palestinian prisoners – including many labor leaders, human rights defenders and journalists – was a part of the burgeoning organizing of Palestinian communities in exile and diaspora (in this case, in the United States) and the growing movement of international solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network is republishing this booklet today, on the 33rd anniversary of the Intifada, to bring this important historical document to new audiences, continuing to build upon this legacy of struggle, standing with the Palestinian prisoners and the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation and return.
Download the PDF here: Download PDF
Mess with Texas via mail-in ballot? States secede from presidential vote
By Ramin Mazaheri | Press TV | December 9, 2020
The United States corporate-dominated media has found that the easiest way to shape news coverage on the scores of legal challenges to the 2020 presidential election is to only report on them when the cases have lost.
After all, the more newspaper inches given to objective discussions of widespread voter fraud allegations equals the more chances an average American starts to think the election was rigged. This theory presumes that the average American is so docile and programmable that they have already completely forgotten the mainstream claims which dominated the previous four years: that the election was rigged (by Vladimir Putin).
Not reporting until a court rejects an integrity challenge also allows for a superior “I-knew-it-all-along” tone, combined with open accusations of lunacy on the part of the aggrieved party.
More than a month after the vote the party (Republicans) remain tremendously aggrieved: top pollster Gallup just reported that 83% of Republicans say that reports of Biden being the president-elect are not “accurate”. Yes, it’s an oddly-worded poll, but so many US wordsmiths have been purposely opaque since election day.
It’s always been easy to roll one’s eyes at the smug tone because such condescension will drop to the ground lack a bag of bricks with just one Supreme Court loss, after all.
Yes, the widespread US belief prior to November 3, 2020, was that their elections were poorly designed, poorly funded, poorly run, poorly counted and porous in many other ways besides, but I always thought the biggest post-election day challenge would be over the exact issue which has led to the totally unprecedented situation of states suing other states over accusations of ruining the election’s integrity:
Texas – now joined by Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas – is suing the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin over mail-in ballots.
I’ll show that the US Constitution makes it clear their case should at least be heard by the Supreme Court. The state-on-state nature already takes the case directly to the top.
The Supreme Court always had to rule on the unprecedented expansion of mail-in balloting
What’s so interesting about “democracy with US characteristics” is how the nine justices of the Supreme Court are allowed to be so very, very removed from US society. They debate in private, they grant media interviews very rarely, they don’t have to say much in court (Justice Clarence Thomas went from 2006 to 2016 without publicly asking a question), nor do they even have to give public reasons for many of the momentous decisions they make (they just rejected a key vote fraud case in Pennsylvania with one sentence, but more accurately only one word: “denied”). It’s not the Holy See of Rome, but it’s close.
But it’s not close regarding the holiness, because what this unaccountable and unelected regime of nine holds sacred is merely the 18th century US Constitution, something which is currently losing lustre worldwide by the minute.
Some, not all, of these justices are Wahhabi-like in their insistence that the document is “dead” (and perfect in its deadness), in that it must be followed both to the letter and in the spirit of the bygone (allegedly golden) age in which it was written.
Given this ideological reality doesn’t it seem clear that executive branch orders by some governors, or even just their secretaries of state, to massively and controversially flood their states with mail-in ballots violated the US Constitution – even if these actions were approved by some in the judicial branch – because they often did not get legislative branch approval? Article 1, Section 4 of the US Constitution states: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature …”
Texas’ lawsuit thus asserts: “The four states exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to justify ignoring federal and state election laws and unlawfully enacting last-minute changes, thus skewing the results of the 2020 General Election. The battleground states flooded their people with unlawful ballot applications and ballots while ignoring statutory requirements as to how they were received, evaluated and counted.” The suit claims the vote in Texas was tainted by the vote in Pennsylvania, etc.
People may notice that Article 1, Section 4 does not talk about “Elections for President”, but the US elects their president by an Electoral College, not direct vote. It is regularly inferred that this clause also applies to the presidential vote.
I wish I could find more good media reports on this case to better inform my opinion but – as I began – you just can’t find much objective journalistic discussion on the US voter fraud causes. No well-known anti-Trump media I saw ever even broached Article 1, Section 4 – even though it was named in the lawsuit – all they had was hysterical and completely nonobjective denials that the Texas lawsuit doesn’t even attempt to make a coherent argument. And yet: the Supreme Court gave the defendant states less than 48 hours to respond to Texas’ lawsuit – by 3pm on December 10.
The suit also says the expansion made the vote insecure, but forget about all the alleged vote machine tampering, the purported “smoking gun” videos, the reported 1,000 testimonies making accusations of election malfeasance – all of that either has the evidence or it doesn’t. Maybe there was a huge conspiracy of voter fraud, or maybe there wasn’t. The nation’s top intelligence official, the Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, just said that all issues of election fraud must be investigated and only then would we see “whether there is a Biden administration”. Will they all be properly investigated? This is America, so all we can say for sure is that no matter what happens America will insist that they are the spotless beacon the world should follow.
But the question of mail-in ballots – this enormous change to the US voting system which inspired seemingly thousands of complaints by Donald Trump on Twitter, as well as from many regular American citizens – this is the dispute which has the power to immediately invalidate the 2020 vote.
I say: yes, it should invalidate the vote – that is, if Americans want to follow the rules of the antiquated and fundamentally aristocratic American system.
America is not a modern democracy, nor is it accountable – don’t expect the Supreme Court to rule in favor of the outsider Trump
Yes, pro-Trumpers were wrong to wait until after the election – to see if their candidate lost – before bringing this suit, but who’s to say that elite Democrats wouldn’t have forced some of their own governors to do the same thing if Biden was the projected loser? How can judges rule on a case which was never brought before them? The bottom line is that checks and balances are what make democracy “democracy”, whether that democracy is Athenian, American, Chinese socialist or Iranian Islamic, and one person should not be able to change the fundamental nature of how elections are held, even if that person is a state governor or secretary of state, and even if a state judge says their change is OK.
Modern democracies have (at least) three branches for a reason, but it’s OK that mail-in ballots were often routed around the legislative branch?
(I often say Iranian democracy has revolutionarily created a “Supreme Leader branch”. I’d also say the massive influence of the internet/digital age gives more credence to making the unofficial “Fourth Estate” – the media – an official branch. What’s wrong with more than three branches, other than: But the bourgeois West doesn’t do it?)
The re-routing (and some state legislatures, such as Nevada, did approve a sweeping expansion to mail-in ballots) of democratic processes into the hands of one person should be seen as a continuation of what Western democracy truly is: liberal strongmanism. This process became out in the open with Dubya Bush’s phony war on Iraq and the Patriot Act, continued with the ignored anti-austerity elections in Greece, is part and parcel of Emmanuel Macron’s “rubber bullet liberalism” war on France’s Yellow Vests, and was seen in 2020 when some US governors essentially said: We want Trump out so badly that we’ll change the elections by fiat to do it.
(Corona was not a valid excuse in November, because by then 2020 had seen many nations successfully and safely hold elections.)
A coronavirus vaccine was announced just two days after Biden declared victory; after months of refusals – which have fiscally disemboweled the US lower classes – Democrats finally agreed to negotiate on their heretofore totally inflexible 2nd stimulus position as soon as the calendar turned from election November to December; Facebook, Twitter and the US mainstream media currently censor the average Republican’s election reflections as if these citizens were calling for a second Holocaust.
Those are not conspiracy theories but are listed to reveal how truly terrible and power-monging the political and cultural elite is in the United States. They overreach their power time and time again, no matter how negative the effect on their domestic public or the rest of the world.
Such persons wanted Trump out, and I’m not saying that they engaged in a massive conspiracy of election fraud to do so – I’m saying that they obviously changed the fundamental nature of the election to do so.
In the US, states decide individually how elections are run, but there should have been formal legislative debate about any huge changes to the election format and not merely a gubernatorial order reflected upon in private by a judge. It was undemocratic political overreach in a nation full of people who have been conditioned to believe that the boss/CEO/president can and should be able to fire/personally enrich/sanction at will.
There are enough “strict constructionists,” ”originalists” or (as I call them) “American Salafists” currently on the Supreme Court to see the logic of Texas’ argument. However, I do not think the Supreme Court will find in favor of Texas – the power-holders in the US system are fundamentally anti-Trump, I think 2016-2020 has proven that ad nauseam.
Trumpism was vindicated in a grassroots way – like it or not – on November 3rd, but there are no “Trumpist” judges in the top court. Who knows, maybe Trumpism will last long enough that one day there will be, but for now what all Supreme Court judges are is merely typical American conservatives. The idea that even though Supreme Court justices are the most untouchable persons in American society and yet they will bend over backwards to please Trump is, I think, a major (but common) fallacy.
It’s clear that the 2020 election was drastically changed (just look at how voter turnout suddenly was the highest in 120 years), and it’s clear that legislatures often did not fulfill their check and balance role, and it’s clear that “strict constructionism” was not something invented by Justice Anthonin Scalia but is an ideology which has been widely discussed since the very beginning of the American republic… all that will be thrown out to throw out Trump, I predict.
This article has not been pro-Trump or anti-Trump, it is reminding how very drastic the actions of anti-Trump power-holders in the US have been. They changed the nature of the 2020 vote, and they don’t want to admit that, and the Supreme Court is not likely to unconservatively OK a shocking, once-in-three-lifetimes reversal to the 2020 presidential vote – not because of the chaos and alienation it would cause among the 99%, but because American democracy is and has always been expressly designed to protect the elite, not the people/workers/lower classes.
By the way, the only presidential vote which ever mattered at all takes place in less than a week – the Electoral College votes on December 14th. I think this year’s general election on the presidential vote has provided a more interesting – yet legally meaningless – diversion than it normally does, don’t you?
*************************************************************
Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (1/2) – November 5, 2020
Results are in: Americans lose, duopoly wins, Trumpism not merely a cult (2/2) – November 6, 2020
4 years of anti-Trumpism shaping MSM vote coverage, but expect long fight – November 7, 2020
US partitioned by 2 presidents: worst-case election scenario realized – November 9, 2020
A 2nd term is his if he really wants it, but how deep is Trump’s ‘Trumpism’? – November 10, 2020
CNN’s Jake Tapper: The overseer keeping all journalists in line (1/2) – November 13, 2020
‘Bidenism’ domestically: no free press, no lawyer, one-party state? (2/2) – November 15, 2020
Where’s Donald? When 40% of voters cry ‘fraud’ you’ve got a big problem – November 17, 2020
The 4-year (neoliberal) radicalisation of US media & Bidenites’ ‘unradical radicalism’ – November 22, 2020
80% of US partisan losers think the last 2 elections were stolen – December 3, 2020
Trump declares civil war for voter integrity in breaking (or broken) USA – December 5, 2020
Ramin Mazaheri is currently covering the US elections. He is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.
Billionaires’ ‘pandemic profits’ alone could pay for $3K stimulus checks to EVERY American – report
RT | December 9, 2020
American billionaires made so much money during the Covid-19 pandemic that their profits since March are enough to give every US resident a $3,000 check without cutting into their pre-virus wealth, a new report shows.
Over the last nine months, the 651 billionaires who call the US home have increased their wealth by a whopping $1.06 trillion, according to a report published Tuesday by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies. Far from being negatively impacted by the pandemic-related economic shutdowns, the country’s super-rich seem to have thrived amid the policies that have plunged so many ordinary Americans into poverty.
The billionaires’ wealth grew so much that they could cut “every man, woman and child in the country” a $3,000 stimulus check and “still be richer than they were nine months ago,” ATF executive director Frank Clemente said in a Tuesday press release.
The report tracked the fat-cats’ profits from March 18, the approximate start date of the economic shutdowns, through December 7. The vast majority accelerated their accumulation of wealth even as ordinary Americans saw their life savings slip through their fingers, losing jobs, businesses, and loved ones to the one-two punch of the coronavirus and the political response.
After nine months of raking in the cash, the billionaires’ total wealth had soared 36 percent to over $4 trillion – nearly twice the $2.1 trillion in wealth held by the poorest 50 percent of Americans.
The monstrous cash-pile amounts to double the two-year budget gap of all state and local governments, a figure estimated to reach $500 billion thanks to the devastating effects of the economic shutdowns on tax revenues. It even approaches the massive sum the federal government spends on Medicare and Medicaid – $644 billion and $389 billion in 2019, respectively, the report claims.
While most working- and middle-class Americans received a single stimulus payment of $1,200 as part of March’s CARES Act pandemic bailout, a promised second stimulus check has failed to materialize. The expanded unemployment program that doled out $600 per week to newly-jobless Americans came to an end in July, and while President Donald Trump issued an executive order to bridge the gap with a less generous $300 weekly payment, Congress has thus far refused to pass a second Covid-19 bailout package even as the rest of the bailout programs are set to expire at the end of the year.
One of the chief beneficiaries of the fiscal explosion has been Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose personal fortune increased 63 percent since March as locked-down Americans turned to online shopping to meet their needs. The retail tycoon faced sharp criticism over his company’s alleged mistreatment of Amazon warehouse workers in the early days of the pandemic, but had he distributed his $71.4 billion windfall among Amazon’s employees, workers would have received $88,000 each while leaving their boss just as rich as he was before the coronavirus outbreak.
And Bezos, said to be the richest man in the US, wasn’t even the most blessed by Covid-19. That title goes to Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, whose wealth grew by an eye-popping 542 percent – from “just” $24.6 billion in March to $143 billion by December. Musk is about to get quite a bit richer, too, after his StarLink satellite company won a Federal Communications Commission auction to deliver bandwidth to hundreds of thousands of rural Americans.
Senate Democrats circulated a letter earlier this week demanding another $1,200 stimulus payment be part of the Covid-19 aid package currently being debated in Congress. The party has balked at a Republican-authored bailout proposal that would exclude individual payments and include a five-year liability shield for corporations – a measure Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders derisively dubbed a “get out of jail free card to corporations.”
Why the Texas Supreme Court Lawsuit Against Four Battleground States May Become an End-All Case
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 09.12.2020
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued four US battleground states at the US Supreme Court over alleged election irregularities. Political scientists and academics have discussed whether the lawsuit could change the outcome of the election and why the Supreme Court has become the ultimate authority to solve the election dilemma.
The Texas lawsuit argues that Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan violated the Electors Clause of the Constitution, as they made changes to voting rules and procedures under the pretext of the COVID pandemic either through the courts or executive orders, but not through the state legislatures, as mandated. It also alleges that there were certain differences in voting rules and procedures in different counties within the states in question, which is an abuse of the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution. And, finally, the aforementioned circumstances opened the door to “voting irregularities” in these states, according to the Texas attorney general. Thus, Texas, which approached the Supreme Court under Article III, asked the federal judiciary body to order states to allow their legislatures to appoint their electors.
Praising Texas’ move, President Donald Trump vowed to “intervene” in the case, calling it “the big one”. At least seven other states, including Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, and South Dakota, may join the Texas lawsuit, some reports say.
Does the Texas Case Have Merit?
“It is unlikely that this lawsuit will move forward and change the results of the election, to President Trump’s favour”, believes Anthony Robert Pahnke, Professor of international relations at San Francisco State University. “So, it is true that rules were changed this year. It has yet to be proven that those changes resulted in discrimination against some group. Trump’s intervention will most likely go no further than this tweet.”Attorney General Ken Paxton’s case won’t get very far, insists Joe Siracusa, a professor at Australian Curtin University, arguing that it “it has little or no merit”.
The Texas lawsuit “has little to do with actually attempting to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential vote”, but is an attempt curry favour with Trump and fend off a challenge in the 2022 Texas Republican Party primary, suggests Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
However, Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, offers a different take, emphasising that the Texas suit does have a case.
“According to the US Constitution, presidents are elected by individual states rather than the country as a whole and election rules must be set by each state’s legislature”, he elaborates. “If one state arbitrarily alters its electoral process and particularly if that alteration is not made by that state’s legislature, it has the effect of disenfranchising the other US states. This is clearly what happened in several battleground states, which effectively instituted universal mail-in ballots, often without participation of state legislatures.”
The think tank director highlights that while “the Covid crisis was given as the rationale for altering election processes” and for the sake of “making it easier” for people to vote, “the effect was to in many cases remove the safeguards against vote fraud”.
This issue was earlier addressed by Fox News’ Mark Levine and Hans von Spakovsky, an American attorney and former member of the Federal Election Commission, in a 7 November interview. Von Spakovsky drew attention to the fact that the Democrats and their surrogates filed hundreds of lawsuits in different states, seeking to get rid of security protocols and measures aimed at preventing fraud in the use of absentee and mail-in ballots. The former member of the Federal Election Commission recalled that the Dems tried to pass these measures at a federal level through H.R.1 For the People Act of 2019, which was eventually blocked by the Republican-controlled Senate.
“In lawsuits between states, the US Supreme Court is the court of first resort and that is what is happening in this case”, says McAdams. “Texas officials and the relevant officials of other US states have an obligation to their citizens to defend the vote in their own states and across the United States.”
‘Large Proportion of Americans Have No Faith in the System’
Judging from nationwide polls, a considerable number of voters do not believe that the election was conducted in a fair and accurate way, the think tank director emphasises, warning that “this has created a situation where a large proportion of Americans have no faith in the system”.
“There must be a remedy for what appears to tens of millions of American voters who believe their vote has been stolen from them”, he says.
Forty-seven percent of American voters said it’s likely that Democrats stole the election in several states to ensure that Joe Biden would win, according to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey.
There is no unanimity on who won the election in the US Congress either: just 27 of all congressional Republicans believe that Joe Biden is the winner of the 2020 race. Furthermore, on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Sen. Roy Blunt and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy blocked an inaugural resolution recognizing Biden’s victory, as Trump’s litigations over the alleged voter fraud are still pending.
The case brought forward by the Texas attorney general before the Supreme Court is the “end-all case to really determine the outcome of this election”, Jordan Sekulow, a member of President Trump’s legal team, told Newsmax on 8 December.
“That’s different than most court cases at the Supreme Court, because this is a case of original jurisdiction … because it is state versus state”, he stated.
Tenants, Landlords Face Imminent Crisis As Pandemic Lifelines Expire
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 12/08/2020
January is going to be a mess. America’s small-time landlords, along with their tenants, are in trouble as safety nets are set to expire. Tenants haven’t paid rent in months, with a looming eviction moratorium expiring at the end of December. According to Reuters, the lack of rental income for landlords has also been troublesome, with many skipping mortgage payments, potentially resulting in a firesale of properties in the year ahead.
For 12 million Americans and their families – this Christmas will be their worst – as the extended unemployment benefits that have kept many of them afloat are set to expire later this month. Then on New Year’s Day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium expires, which could result in a massive wave of evictions in the first half of 2021.
At the moment, $70 billion in unpaid back rent and utilities are set to come due, according to a new report via Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi.
Last month, Maryland utility companies began to terminate customers with overdue bills, many of which were unable to pay because of job loss due to the coronavirus downturn.
New research from the Aspen Institute warns 40 million people could be threatened with eviction over the coming months as the real economic crisis is only beginning.
According to Stacey Johnson-Cosby, president of the Kansas City Regional Housing Alliance, landlords are also in deep turmoil. She said more than 40% of the landlords surveyed in her coalition said they will have to sell their units because of the lack of rental income.
“They are sheltering our citizens free of charge, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Johnson-Cosby. “This is their retirement income.”
She said small landlords are frightened to speak out about non-paying tenants because social justice warriors and their “Cancel Rent” groups have attacked landlords.
“What they don’t realize is that if they run us out and we fail, it will be private equity and Wall Street firms that buy up all our properties, just like they did with houses after the last foreclosure crash.”
Reuters interviewed Clarence Hamer, who may have to sell his house in the coming months because his “downstairs tenant owes him nearly $50,000.” He owns a duplex in Brownsville, Brooklyn – and without those rental payments, Hamer has been unable to pay his mortgage.
“I don’t have any corporate backing or any other type of insurance,” said Hamer, a 46-year-old landlord who works for the city of New York. “All I have is my home, and it seems apparent that I’m going to lose it.”
Hamer is not alone – millions of Americans are headed for a “dark winter” as they could be evicted or lose their homes in the coming months as government safety nets are set to expire.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, stimulus talks quickly faded after it was reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell touted his own plan rather than a bipartisan compromise for a deal.
John Pollock, a Public Justice Center attorney and coordinator of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, recently said January could bring a surge of eviction and homelessness,” unlike anything we have ever seen” before.
Canadian Health Ministry Exploring “Immunity Passports,” Vaccine “Tracking And Surveillance”
By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 9, 2020
The Health Minister of Ontario in Canada has stoked controversy by suggesting that people who do not take the coronavirus vaccine will face restrictions on where they can travel and spend time.
When asked by reporters about how the government intends to go about convincing people to get the vaccine, Health Minister Christine Elliott warned that those who refuse it will face difficulties reintegrating into society.
“That’s their choice, this is not going to be a mandatory campaign. It will be voluntary,” Elliot said, but adding that “There may be some restrictions that may be placed on people that don’t have vaccines for travel purposes, to be able to go to theatres and other places.”
When another reporter asked if the government would be introducing ‘immunity passports’, or proof of vaccination cards, Elliot said “Yes, because that’s going to be really important for people to have for travel purposes, perhaps for work purposes, for going to theatres or cinemas or any other places where people will be in closer physical contact.”
Following up on Elliot’s comments, The Toronto Sun spoke to her press secretary, who confirmed that the government is exploring several options for vaccine “tracking and surveillance.”
“This includes exploring developing tech-based solutions while also providing for alternative options to ensure equitable access to any potential ‘immunity passport,’” Alexandra Hilkene said.
Sun reporter Brian Lilley notes “That phrase will set off alarm bells and it should, not just for anti-vaxxers, but for anyone who is concerned about Charter rights and governments running roughshod over them.”
Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams has also said that a COVID-19 vaccine may be required for “freedom to move around”.
“What we can do is to say sometimes for access, or ease, in getting into certain settings, if you don’t have vaccination then you’re not allowed into that setting without other protection materials,” Williams said.
The comments of these Canadian officials add to the litany of other government and travel industry figures in both the US, Britain and beyond who have suggested that ‘COVID passports’ are coming, in order for ‘life to get back to normal’
In an essay in The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Tom Frieden noted that he expects the so called ‘immunity passports’ will come into widespread use despite any ethical, legal or operational challenges, and despite the fact that it hasn’t at all been determined whether the vaccine equates to immunity.
Everyone is already wearing a mask. They just don’t work.
By Jordan Schachtel | December 7, 2020
One of the most common pro-mask arguments I’ve heard over the course of the past year, both from “public health experts” and your average citizen, sounds similar to the following statement:
“If only everyone would just wear a mask, we would be able to crush the virus and end the pandemic.”
This line of reasoning is frequently espoused by lockdown governors and “public health experts.” You see, the problem isn’t them, it’s you, the citizen, we’re told. Wear a mask, peasant. You’re the problem! You’re the reason why the pandemic is still a problem in this country.
Deaths up? Why aren’t you wearing a mask. Cases up? Wear a mask. Hospitals crowded? The problem is that not enough people are wearing masks, they claim.
The idea that not enough Americans are wearing masks is detached from reality. And we have the data to prove it.
The Delphi group at Carnegie Mellon University has developed a very informative, consistently updated mask compliance tracker. It shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans across the nation are wearing masks. And in virtually every major population center in the United States, especially in areas where COVID-19 cases are rising, mask compliance levels are off the charts high, with most major metro areas registering well over 90 percent compliance.
Early on in the pandemic, when the “new science” told us that masks could stop the virus in its tracks (after the science of early 2020, espoused by the likes of Fauci and many others, rightly pointed to the reality that masks are useless outside of a controlled setting), the CDC and other “public health agencies” claimed that we could essentially eliminate transmission if a large percentage of the population adopted universal masking.
When lockdowns failed to “stop the spread,” masking up at over 80% was hyped as a way to “do more to reduce COVID-19 spread than a strict lockdown.”
“Universal masking at 80 [percent] adoption flattens the curve significantly more than maintaining a strict lockdown,” a much-hyped, highly publicized study, which was treated by many in the scientific community as the gospel, proclaimed.
“We will not only be able to flatten the curve, we will be able to significantly reduce the spread of the virus and return to life as normal sooner rather than later,” De Kai, a research scholar at Berkeley who helped develop the COVID-19 universal masking model, proclaimed.
With the help of the CMU mask compliance tracker, let’s take a look at the current COVID-19 hotspots in the United States and the level of mask compliance within these areas.
San Francisco metro area: 97% mask compliance
New York City metro area: 97% mask compliance
DC metro: 97%
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington: 94%
Philly area: 96%
Chicago: 95%
Miami-Ft Lauderdale: 96%
Seattle: 96%
The data demonstrates very clearly that Americans have overwhelmingly exceeded the masking compliance percentages needed to supposedly “flatten the curve” and reduce transmission of the virus. The problem, of course, is that the models have not matched reality. Americans are wearing masks, but the hypothesis behind universal masking has not worked to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Americans have adopted the recommendations of the “public health experts,” but the “public health experts” have failed to follow the science, which now shows that masks are useless when it comes to stopping the spread of COVID-19. Now we’re left with an overwhelming majority of Americans wearing masks for no science-based reason whatsoever.
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Jussie Smollett and Jewish Hoaxes
By Israel Shamir • Unz Review • February 22, 2019
The Jussie Smollett hoax and its debunking may yet change the trend of baseless accusations. God knows, the hoaxers went too far, and it’s high time for correction. The concise list of hoaxes would be too long for this essay, but here is a small list of very recent ones. They were met by public outrage and media indignation, for very little reason, and now we may expect a downward market correction, due to overpriced stock.
Some unlikely persons already attempt to capitalise on the expected reaction in order to channel it to the preferred direction – in a very unlikely medium. Mr Noah Rothman, an editor of Commentary magazine, condemned in The New York Times the imprudent haste of media falling for the hoax. Come on, really! The NY Times is a leading propagator of similar hoaxes. Whenever there is a story of a suffering diversity person, The New York Times usually takes it and plays it to its full extent. And when the hoax is revealed, usually the newspaper mentions it on page 46, at the bottom. So why is this night different, as the Jews ask on Passover night?
Mr Rothman is all against hoaxes by coloured and gay persons, that’s why. He mentions a few of them and adds his complaint: “There have been no similar national paroxysms amid a sharp uptick in violence targeting New York City’s Jewish population… The real tragedy … that hate crimes are, in fact, on the rise in the Trump era, particularly against Jews”. He does not mind hoaxes, he minds blacks arousing paroxysms of anguish at the expense of the Jews. The Americans and Europeans should feel sorry for Jews and anger for their adversaries, and every cry and tear for a black is a waste of a good cry and tear.
Among hoaxes he mentions, there is not a single one by a Jew, yet Jews are the leading perpetrators of hoaxes. … continue
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